How could the war with Iran end?
Ata Mohamed Tabriz
Iran analyst
US president Donald Trump suggested this week that the war with Iran could end soon, but few can say with confidence how it will.
Iran analyst
US president Donald Trump suggested this week that the war with Iran could end soon, but few can say with confidence how it will.
Wars rarely end on political will alone, and this conflict is constrained by a dense web of strategic, economic and security pressures that neither side can easily escape.
What began with stated goals—containing Iran’s nuclear program, degrading its missile and regional capabilities, and “helping” the Iranian people—has hardened into a confrontation between objectives that are arguably incompatible.
As the conflict spreads into the arteries of the global economy, ending it will require more than a shift in rhetoric—or even policy. A durable ceasefire would depend on mediators capable of sequencing reciprocal steps and bridging fundamentally incompatible aims.
More likely, the war will end not through decisive victory, but at the point where continued fighting no longer improves either side’s position and the mutual threat environment begins to recede.
Incompatible endgames
For the United States and Israel, the conflict forms part of a broader attempt to reshape the Middle East’s security architecture. Since October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked a “new Middle East” in which Iran’s regional reach is sharply curtailed.
Drawing on past confrontations, including the 12-day war of June 2025, Washington and Tel Aviv appear to be seeking tangible outcomes: dismantling key military capabilities and preventing their reconstruction—an objective that may prove harder than the initial blow.
Iran’s logic is different. Tehran is pursuing what might be called coercive endurance: safeguarding regime survival while preserving deterrence by imposing high costs on its adversaries. Its demands—compensation and assurances against renewed war—serve not only strategic ends but domestic ones, helping sustain elite cohesion and legitimacy.
Regional actors, particularly Persian Gulf Arab states, and external powers with major energy interests remain cautious, oscillating between defensive positioning and watchful restraint. For now, mediation remains peripheral. The war is being shaped less in diplomatic forums than under fire.
A war of arteries
The Strait of Hormuz has evolved from a geographic chokepoint into a central strategic lever. Iran’s approach rests on the premise that disrupting this vital waterway transforms a bilateral confrontation into a global economic crisis.
Energy prices become not just an indicator but a weapon, intended to erode political will in Washington and its allies by destabilizing markets and raising costs worldwide.
Washington, in turn, has focused on Kharg Island—Iran’s primary oil export terminal and the loading point for roughly 90 percent of its crude exports. The threat to Kharg is a direct counter to Tehran’s Hormuz leverage. If Hormuz raises global costs, Kharg raises the cost of survival for Iran itself.
This duel points to a central constraint: the war will move toward closure only when both sides conclude that choking each other’s economic lifelines yields diminishing returns compared with the systemic risks to global energy markets.
Any durable settlement would therefore require a new security arrangement that guarantees safe passage through Hormuz while removing the threat to Iran’s export infrastructure.
Question of authority
The killing of senior political figures, including Ali Larijani, has raised concerns about gaps in coordination at the center of power. The question is whether an institutional structure still exists capable of accepting defeat—or even signing a ceasefire.
Yet the continuation of Iranian strikes suggests the system’s resilience does not rest on individuals alone. Tehran’s military order, shaped by a doctrine of decentralized “mosaic” defense, appears to have maintained operational coherence.
That resilience, however, raises doubts about whether a ceasefire could produce lasting stability while the machinery of war remains intact.
Inside Iran, external attacks appear to have strengthened nationalist sentiment among parts of society, yet leadership losses could also trigger fissures within the security establishment or embolden dissent. The balance between cohesion and fracture remains unclear.
For now, political and military leadership appear aligned in their belief that the situation remains manageable.
Some in Washington therefore see a more realistic objective not as immediate regime collapse but as forcing Tehran into a form of strategic accommodation—perhaps through the rise of more pragmatic figures capable of imposing restraint on military actors.
Such an outcome could allow Tehran to concede in practice while presenting the result domestically as survival or even victory.
Whether that path is viable remains uncertain. Internal purges, factional tensions and competing strategic visions continue to complicate any transition, even as some voices within Iran’s security establishment advocate widening the conflict.
Ultimately, how the war ends will depend not only on economic and regional pressures but on a deeper unknown: how much organizational capacity, military discipline and political authority remain in Tehran to accept a new strategic order.
Wars of this kind end when exhaustion converges with recognition. The decisive question is whether there remains a clear address in Tehran capable of signing—and enforcing—a ceasefire, and what form that political will ultimately takes.
That was the frame Khatib laid out in a long interview published on Ali Khamenei’s website during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. It became more than rhetoric. It became a governing logic that collapsed protest, foreign media, activism and espionage into one threat map.
Khatib’s career made him unusually suited to that task.
Born in 1961 and trained in Qom, he rose through the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence world, later ran the intelligence office in Qom, moved into the Supreme Leader’s protection orbit and then headed the judiciary’s protection and intelligence apparatus.
By the time Ebrahim Raisi made him intelligence minister in 2021, Khatib had passed through nearly every institution that mattered in the Islamic Republic’s coercive core: the Guards, the judiciary and the Supreme Leader’s household.
His retention in 2024 confirmed that his authority rested less on party politics than on trust from the system above elected government.
Under Khatib, the state increasingly treated social unrest as proof of foreign infiltration.
Protesters were not simply angry citizens. They were portrayed as nodes in an enemy network. Foreign-based Persian media were not just broadcasters. They were recast as operational arms of hostile states.
That logic also hardened into law.
Under his watch, the state broadened the definition of espionage and hostile collaboration, making it easier to turn contact, information-sharing, media work and loosely defined cooperation with enemy states or affiliated groups into national-security crimes.
The point was not only to punish spies. It was to widen the category of who could be treated like one.
The United States designated Khatib twice in September 2022, reflecting the breadth of his role across both overseas operations and domestic repression.
The Treasury first sanctioned him and the Intelligence Ministry over malicious cyber activity, including the disruption of Albanian government systems.
Later that month, it sanctioned him again, saying the ministry under his leadership had targeted human rights defenders, women’s rights activists, journalists, filmmakers and religious minorities, and had subjected detainees to torture in secret detention centers.
Years of the gallows
The intelligence ministry did not sign every death sentence. But the execution surge is still part of the meaning of Khatib’s tenure, because it formed the climate in which his security doctrine operated.
In the four full calendar years after he took office, Iran carried out at least 4,000 executions: about 580 in 2022, 830 in 2023, 975 in 2024 and 1,900 in 2025.
Those numbers belong formally to the judiciary and the prison system.
Politically, though, they sit inside the same larger story: a state that answered dissent, insecurity and social fracture with a heavier reliance on coercion, exemplary punishment and fear.
Operations beyond Iran
Khatib was also important beyond Iran’s borders. The ministry he led was accused by Western governments of directing cyber operations, targeting dissidents abroad and helping run the wider machinery of transnational repression.
His significance, though, was not that he was publicly tied to every individual plot.
It was that he sat atop a ministry that linked classic espionage, cyber activity, surveillance of exiles and operational cooperation with Iran’s other security arms.
In that sense he was less a field commander than a system manager, overseeing one part of Iran’s long war against opponents at home and abroad.
The glue
That coordinating role may be the most revealing part of his legacy.
Iran’s intelligence world is fragmented. The Intelligence Ministry, the IRGC Intelligence Organization, the judiciary and the Leader’s office all have their own stakes, rivalries and chains of command.
Khatib’s value was that he could move across those worlds.
He came from the Guards’ intelligence culture, served in the Leader’s protection orbit, worked closely with the judiciary and then ran the ministry that was supposed to give the system a more unified picture of the threat environment.
After the 2022 uprising, that became even more important.
The Islamic Republic needed its rival security organs to act less like competing fiefdoms and more like a single architecture.
Khatib helped provide that common language, one in which protest, activism, foreign media, exile politics, sabotage and espionage could all be placed on the same continuum of danger.
That is why Khatib mattered. He mattered because he helped normalize a broader idea: that almost any challenge to the Islamic Republic could be reclassified as infiltration.
In the end, that was his real achievement for the system he served. He helped make dissent legible as intelligence warfare.
Videos sent to Iran International showed crowds gathering in Tehran, Karaj, Shiraz, Mashhad and other cities, lighting fires, dancing and chanting slogans, including “Javid Shah,” in apparent response to calls by exiled prince Reza Pahlavi to mark the pre-Islamic festival despite restrictions.
In several locations, including Chitgar in western Tehran and parts of Karaj, security forces were seen attempting to disperse gatherings, with footage showing police vehicles approaching crowds.
But the celebrations persisted, with people singing patriotic songs such as “Ey Iran” and setting off fireworks in residential neighborhoods and public spaces.
Chaharshanbe Suri, traditionally held on the eve of last Wednesday of the Iranian calendar year, has long been viewed with suspicion by the Islamic Republic.
In recent years it has increasingly become a flashpoint for anti-government expression, particularly during periods of unrest.
This year’s celebrations unfolded against the backdrop of ongoing conflict and heightened security pressure, with reports of surveillance and efforts by authorities to deter gatherings.
Israeli support
“An unprecedented event took place last night, as Israeli drones targeted Basij and police patrols attempting to approach celebration sites,” an Israeli official told Iran International.
“For the first time, the people of Iran benefited from active support that paralyzed the repression apparatus and effectively provided an ‘air umbrella’ for the crowds,” the official said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier signaled support, saying in a video message that Israeli forces were targeting what he described as “terrorist operatives” to enable Iranians to celebrate.
“Our aircraft are striking terrorist elements in city squares and intersections to allow the brave people of Iran to celebrate the fire festival,” he said. “Celebrate. Happy Nowruz. We are watching from above.”