העימות בין איראן לארה"ב | פרשנות

Joining us now to discuss the conflict in the Middle East is Marty Yusufiani, former senior strategic counsel to the crown prince of Iran and currently the director of the Iran Freedom Project at the Middle East Forum. Marty, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Iran officially withdrew on Friday from the memorandum of understanding it signed with the United States last month. Does that effectively close the door to a peaceful resolution to this conflict? Well, it's an off on again, off again approach, as we have seen with both sides posturing. This is certainly uncharted territory, which I can best describe as punitive containment, a very dangerous window, which with each side flexing its muscle short of full scale war, a grinding war of attrition, which has the potential, the dangerous potential of flaring up to full scale at any time. Yeah, and we saw that kind of war of attrition, so to speak, the sort of dragged out conflict between Israel and Hamas. And, you know, Iran is significantly, dramatically more powerful than Hamas was at that time. So, you know, God forbid that kind of thing from happening. But so Saturday marks the eighth straight night of US attacks on Iran. Notably, Israel is not participating in nor have they been struck by Iran. How else do these recent strikes compared to those we saw earlier this year? Well, I think it's a it's an approach of imposing strategic pain from both sides, minimizing escalation of regional engagement and bringing in of Israel. On one front, we have Iran, which has a limited set of cards in hand. One is its perceived capacity to influence the energy markets through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, keep in mind, there is a limited window in how much yield that kind of a threat offers, because we see alternative routes, we see that the energy world energy markets have not really reacted as one expected dramatically. But the danger that Iran wants to impose here is that the pain will be much higher, especially targeting US assets throughout the region, as well as the various Gulf countries. On the other hand, we have the US, which has its superior military position there, its ability to cordon off and shut down anything and everything going into the ports in Iran. And of course, we see that there is pretty much a no fly zone imposed across Iran. And the US has been able to execute upon will. But the whole point here is how long can this be dragged out without the other side blinking?