Nicole Grajewski writes:

For decades, Tehran calibrated its enrichment activities as a form of what strategists call “coercive ambiguity,” maintaining a threshold position that was threatening enough to matter politically without being unambiguous enough to justify an overwhelming response from adversaries. The logic was straightforward: Stay below the red line, use the program as leverage in negotiations, and extract concessions from a West that preferred a deal to a war. This approach worked, up to a point. The JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was its highest expression, a formal acknowledgment that Iran’s nuclear capability was real enough to negotiate with.

But Iran’s strategy rested on the critical and ultimately fatal assumptions that the other side shared an interest in managed competition, that the rationality of deterrence was mutual, and that staying below certain thresholds would reliably provide protection. Clearly, Tehran miscalculated on all three counts. It underestimated the degree to which Israel, unconstrained by the diplomatic equities that had historically checked US action, would be willing to strike preemptively regardless of where Iran sat on the escalation ladder. It overestimated the deterrent value of a program it was unwilling to complete. And it fundamentally misread the Trump administration’s tolerance for the kind of prolonged ambiguity that the Obama and Biden years had, however reluctantly, accepted.

The result is a tragedy of Iran’s own making. A nuclear program that was almost certainly intended, at least at the level of ambition and design, to produce a weapons capability, but was never taken to the final step of operationalization, ended up providing the perfect justification for military strikes that went far beyond the nuclear program itself. The enriched uranium stockpile, the centrifuges, the scientists: All of it was real enough to alarm, visible enough to target, and advanced enough to justify action, but never complete enough to deter attack. Iran had built the appearance of a deterrent without the substance of one. When the moment came, the signal proved hollow, and Iran is now paying the price for a weapon it was never willing to actually build.