The US is building a new pressure architecture against Iran

Published 10 July 2026 · world

Was Trump’s presence at the NATO summit in Turkiye, amid escalating anti-Iranian rhetoric and orders to attack Iran, simply participation in a diplomatic meeting on

Was Trump’s presence at the NATO summit in Turkiye, amid escalating anti-Iranian rhetoric and orders to attack Iran, simply participation in a diplomatic meeting on European security? This question is of paramount importance because recent developments cannot be understood at the surface level alone. At a deeper level, Trump’s presence signals a recalibration of the United States’s strategic calculations regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran and the “axis of resistance”. This recalibration is based on the premise that direct military, political and economic pressure, despite imposing costs, has failed to produce the desired shift in Iran’s behaviour, power configuration or strategic orientation. Accordingly, Washington is gradually moving from a paradigm of direct pressure to a hybrid and multilayered model, in which domestic pressure, the transformation of Iran’s peripheral environment, extra-regional coalition-building and the simultaneous reorganisation of regional dossiers form part of a single strategic architecture. The logic underpinning this strategic shift is that Iran should be pressured not through a single decisive blow, but through simultaneous trajectories of attrition across multiple levels. The objective is not merely to increase the external costs imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran, but to create conditions in which the country’s decision-making apparatus is compelled to devote a greater share of its capacity to managing overlapping domestic, border and regional pressures. In other words, the new US strategy is based on generating simultaneous pressure within Iran, across its geopolitical periphery and throughout its network of regional connections. At the domestic level, this strategy relies on intensifying social pressure and gradually eroding public resilience. The intent is not merely to provoke periodic discontent or acute crises, but to raise the cost of governance by disrupting critical infrastructure and targeting the basic systems that sustain daily life, including energy, water, transportation and other sensitive public-service and economic centres. Combined with security and regional constraints, this pressure can divert some of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s decision-making capacity away from broader strategic priorities and towards the attritional management of domestic crises. This dimension of the strategy, however, cannot become fully effective without transforming Iran’s peripheral environment. From this perspective, the US and Israel seek to recalibrate the regional theatre in a way that simultaneously engages Tehran on several peripheral fronts. Recent experience has shown that, despite extensive military, security and intelligence operations, Hezbollah has not been eliminated from the broader power equation, nor has the Palestinian resistance been contained. Ansar Allah (the Houthi movement) has not relinquished its regional standing, and forces aligned with the resistance in Iraq have not been removed from the political and security arena.