Leo Tolstoy's epic novel War and Peace is set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Tolstoy's deeper insight was that wars are rarely concluded by battlefield success alone. They end only when the political forces that created them become willing to construct a new political order. "I said when the campaign started that it wouldn't be settled by gunpowder but by those who invented this war" is what Prince Andrey Bolkonsky says while fighting against Bonaparte's army as a Russian officer. This imaginative description by Tolstoy of how any war may end not by the use of gunpowder but by those who invented the war is a binding framework that is true for any war, including the Iran War being fought today. President Trump has declared the interim MoU and the 60-day negotiating framework over. Once again, the principal actors in the conflict are back to using gunpowder to settle the conflict. This represents a significant deterioration in the diplomatic process and leads me to ask some relevant questions. Has diplomacy failed? Why has the MoU been set aside? What is the actual challenge that the principal actors in the war face now? Is war now the only preferred outcome for the belligerents?

The current impasse reflects what defensive realists describe as a security dilemma and what Balance of Threat theorists identify as reciprocal threat perception. From an academic point of view, it is prudent to analyse the Iran War under Balance of Threat, Offensive Realism, and Defensive Realism as competing theories. Iran frequently argues that its military build-up is defensive. Israel and the US interpret those same capabilities as offensive. This precisely leads to the security dilemma, as measures........

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