The war on Iran is not a mere battlefield contest but a test of how states behave under extreme insecurity. To be able to understand any real foreign policy situation, one must be able to clearly relate how theories, assumptions and conditions interact with each other in the given situation. I would like to unfold the combined US-Israel aggression against Iran and Iran's response to this aggression under the framework of two different theories.

In the case of US-Israel aggression, the Theory of Offensive Realism guides the action. Both states clearly demonstrate that they cannot be certain about Iranian intentions, not today and not even tomorrow. In the language of the realist school of thought, both states may be driven by the classic security dilemma instead of pure aggression. Given this demonstrated uncertainty by the two states, Iran has been pushed to believe in its own insecurity and views every US-Israel action with suspicion.

Reasoning and reading the context, Iran's current foreign policy is built on the Balance of Threat Theory, which states that any state will always balance against a threat. This theory is driven by the combination of three variables. The first variable is the aggregate capability and capacity of a state to wage war. Iran has continued to fight and continues to inflict costs for fighting this war on both the US and Israel. The second variable is geography, and Iran, by utilising and maximising the utility of its geography, appears to have strangulated the Strait of Hormuz and has........

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