The standard critique of the war does not ask who requires Iran to remain an enemy rather than a problem to be managed
4-MIN READ4-MIN ListenAsad UllahPublished: 8:30pm, 14 Apr 2026The conventional indictment runs like this: blinded by ideology and captured by special interests, the US and Israel have blundered into a region they never understood, sowing instability they neither anticipated nor desired. It is a damning argument. It also happens to be, in one important respect, too generous.The more unsettling possibility, supported by two decades of observable behaviour, is that these policies produce not disorder as a side effect but something far more useful: a conflict frozen just below the threshold of resolution, managed at precisely the temperature required to justify continued intervention without ever forcing a conclusion.
If American and Israeli policy were simply reckless, the remedy would be competence. But if permanent tension is the intended product, recklessness is not the diagnosis. It is the alibi. What Washington think tanks, Pentagon procurement offices, Israeli coalition governments and Gulf royal courts share is not a plan. It is an interest. And sufficiently aligned interests produce outcomes that look, from the outside, very much like coordination.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was not naive capitulation on Iran’s part. It was a painstaking multilateral agreement, verified by international inspectors and endorsed by every permanent UN Security Council member plus Germany. More than a nuclear deal, it was a framework for Iran’s gradual reintegration into the regional order. Iranian moderates staked their political credibility on it. Then-president Hassan Rowhani’s entire governing argument rested on the premise that engagement with the West could yield material gains for ordinary Iranians.
The proponents of withdrawal never explained what pressure it was intended to produce. Regime change, which no serious analyst considered plausible? A better deal, which Iran had no incentive to negotiate from renewed isolation? The argument was always about process, never destination, because the destination did not survive scrutiny.
