Some foreign policy experts say Iranian leaders believe they must inflict severe suffering on their enemy before they can begin negotiations to end the war.
Aftermath of US and Israeli ground air strikes on Iran
The United States and Israel have launched more than 1,000 attacks against Iran. This is what the damage to the ground looks like.
Iran doesn’t want to talk. It doesn’t want to negotiate. And that doesn’t mean sitting down with President Donald Trump.
Even as Iran endures devastating airstrikes, the country’s surviving leaders are determined that “some serious blood needs to be shed” before they can negotiate an end to the ongoing war with the United States and Israel, Trita Parsi, deputy director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible States and Strategy, said in an interview.
The impasse comes as President Trump and military leaders predict a rise in U.S. military deaths, wealthy allies in the Persian Gulf push for a quick end to the war, and oil prices soar.
Amid punitive blows from the United States and Israel that have killed hundreds of people, including the country’s longtime all-powerful leader, Iranian leaders believe they need to inflict severe pain before they can begin negotiations to end the war, experts say.
“Regardless of the cost”
“They don’t need to win the war,” Parsi, an expert with ties to the Iranian government and security services, told USA TODAY. “Before they lose, they have to make sure Trump’s presidency is on the brink of destruction, when they believe Trump will walk away because of costs.”
This was not the outcome President Trump had hoped for.
On Sunday, March 1, as the war entered its second day, President Trump told The Atlantic that the Iranians “want dialogue, and I agreed to dialogue, so I’m going to have dialogue with them.”
However, Iran’s top security official Ali Larijani denied this suggestion. “We will not negotiate with the United States,” he said in a series of social media posts. “Trump has thrown the region into chaos with his ‘paranoid fantasies’ and now fears even more U.S. military casualties.”
Larijani said Iran will continue to fight, “regardless of the cost, we will make our enemies regret their miscalculations.”
Experts say Iran’s leadership determined it must inflict severe political and economic pain on the United States and Israel before agreeing to a cease-fire, despite a significant imbalance in military power.
According to this view of Iran’s clerical government and security apparatus, they believe that only if President Trump suffers the political cost of American deaths and rising prices will the US government negotiate in good faith and bring about a lasting end to hostilities and the survival of the Islamist regime.
But so far, that strategic desire seems illusory. Even though the United States destroyed much of Iran’s military capabilities and sank most of its navy, the U.S. death toll from the war remains at six military personnel.
“Failure of deterrence”
Experts said Iran’s reluctance to negotiate despite inflicting heavy casualties on military and civilians was based on hard lessons learned.
Kelly Gryco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think tank, said Iran suffered a “deterrence failure” by acting with relative restraint and avoiding attacks on U.S. and Gulf targets during previous military conflicts with Israel.
Iran financed Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and saw Iran’s influence in the region decline after Israel killed as many as 20,000 Hamas fighters in a war that claimed the lives of 70,000 Palestinians and assassinated the longtime leader of Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah militia.
On April 13, 2024, the Iranian government fired 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles at Israeli targets after an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killed a senior member of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The U.S.-led coalition joined Israel’s defense and blew nearly all the projectiles out of the sky, leaving Israel with only minor damage.
Less than six months later, on October 1, 2024, Iran attacked again. This time it was revenge for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, an important ally, and the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles, which also caused only minor damage.
In neither case did Iran turn its guns on the shining towers or valuable oil and gas facilities of Washington’s wealthy Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Even when Israel launched a surprise attack in June 2025, killing numerous top Iranian generals and nuclear scientists, with the death toll reported to exceed 1,000, the Iranian government refrained from escalating hostilities.
How did the US attack on Iran come together?
Tensions between the United States and Iran escalated after the attack, raising questions about U.S. military risk as the conflict spreads across the Middle East.
Iran launched more than 1,000 drones and more than 550 ballistic missiles at Israel during the 12-day war, killing 32 civilians. After U.S. bombers destroyed three Iranian nuclear facilities, a small attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, seen by experts as a spurious Iranian retaliation, caused minor damage.
“If you’re sitting in Tehran watching this war, the bottom line is that the restraint you showed was a failure as a deterrent,” Grieco, a former professor at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College, told USA TODAY.
He said Iranian leaders would feel the need to “raise the cost of the conflict.”
Now, the Iranian government wants President Trump and the Israelis to feel the pain and really need a ceasefire before returning to negotiations. Analysts say that’s the only way to stick to the deal and keep Iran’s brutal regime alive.
Mohammad Bazzi, director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, said after the new ceasefire agreement, “Iran does not want to be exposed to Israeli airstrikes at will.” “This means we will pay a very high price from Israel and Trump in this war.”
Iranian aggression in the region has already strained US allies and could soon impact the US economy.
The conflict has closed the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow seaway that accounts for 20% of global oil exports. Global supplier Qatar has suspended liquefied natural gas production following Iranian airstrikes, and oil giant Saudi Aramco’s 550,000 barrel-per-day Ras Tanura refinery was targeted by two Iranian drone attacks.
Iran has also attacked targets in Europe, attacking a British air base in Cyprus in the Mediterranean and a French base in the United Arab Emirates, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense alliance said it had shot down a missile that entered Turkish airspace.
Then, on March 2, Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel, provoking retaliatory attacks that killed scores and forced tens of thousands of residents to flee southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Oil prices rose to their highest level since 2024 on Tuesday.
Missile and drone attacks are “causing economic damage,” Bazzi said. After the first volley of the war on February 28, “it is no coincidence that Hezbollah got involved just when the oil and stock markets were open.”
What is the end game?
President Trump is now warning Americans to expect more weeks of conflict.
President Trump is pondering various endgames. He has called on Iran to give up its nuclear weapons, and although Iran has already given up its nuclear weapons, he is widely viewed with skepticism.
He also called on unarmed Iranians to overthrow the brutal 47-year-old clerical regime and seize power for themselves — in some way, with the help of the very security forces that shot and killed thousands of Iranians during protests just six weeks ago.
And he has proposed a resolution similar to the one he achieved in Venezuela, in which the United States would reach an agreement with Iranian leaders without seeking complete regime change.
But President Trump said on March 3 that “most of the people we had in mind are dead.” “Now we have another group, and reports say they may be dying too. So there will be a third wave. Soon we won’t know anyone.”
Trump was concerned about installing a new leader “as bad as his predecessor.”
So far, Iranian leaders have not sought approval from the US president.
“President Trump wanted a short and simple war, but Iran is taking the war to a new dimension of organized global chaos,” veteran Persian Gulf journalist and columnist Ali Hashem told USA TODAY. “Iranians knew they had to face their fate, but President Trump was obsessed with wishful thinking.”
deadly missile race
Now the question is which side can hold out before casualties mount and ammunition stocks dwindle.
Gen. Dan Kaine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on March 4 that Iran has launched more than 2,000 drones and more than 500 ballistic missiles at U.S., Israeli, and regional targets. Grieco said prewar estimates estimated Iran had 2,500 ballistic missiles.
The difference in military power between Iran and the United States is “very large and difficult to explain,” while Israel and other US allies have reduced their supply of anti-missile missiles, which has so far avoided serious bloodshed on both sides, despite the deaths of more than 700 Iranians, Bazi said.
Similarly, air defense forces kept the number of U.S. military casualties to six.
“This is really a competition between Iranian ballistic missiles and drones and interceptors from Israel, the United States and the Gulf states,” Grieco said. “It’s clear that the Israelis and Americans are targeting those missile facilities.”
Bloomberg News reported on March 2, citing sources and documents, that Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are urging their allies to urge President Trump to bring the war to an early end.
Bloomberg reports that the UAE is asking allies to help strengthen its air defenses, but Qatar only has a four-day supply of Patriot missiles left.
President Trump said on social media that the United States has enough weapons to keep fighting “forever.” However, he did not touch on the issue of air defense.
As interceptor weapons begin to run out, Grieco said, “At the intersection of supplies and lives, we have to make difficult choices about what to protect.”
