Iran's Strategic Wins: From Conflict to Negotiation
When the United States and Israel conducted military operations that observers initially framed as escalating pressure on Tehran, the conventional wisdom held that Iran would be weakened. By late May 2026, two senior figures from opposite ends of the US-Israel security establishment have independently reached a different conclusion: Iran won.
Giora Eiland, who served as head of Israel's National Security Council, said plainly on 24 May 2026 that Iran emerged as the victor from the latest conflict involving Washington and Tel Aviv. His assessment was blunt. Both the United States and Israel had pursued a confrontational approach, he argued, and both ended up in a weaker position than the Islamic Republic. The framing from Washington and Tel Aviv had promised to push Iran toward a better deal. Instead, Eiland said, Iran had negotiated from a position its leadership considered advantageous.
The same day brought a second, parallel assessment from Mike Pompeo. The former CIA director and Secretary of State under the Trump administration had harsh words for whatever framework was taking shape between Washington and Tehran, describing it as resembling the approach taken by officials tied to the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the 2015 nuclear agreement that the Trump administration later abandoned. Pompeo's concern was not merely rhetorical. He was arguing, in effect, that the US was walking into a diplomatic trap: Iran creates or amplifies regional friction, the West interprets缓和 as opportunity, and Tehran extracts concessions it could not have obtained in calm conditions.
The Pressure Paradox
The dynamic Eiland and Pompeo identified has a name in diplomatic circles even if neither man used it: the pressure paradox. A state applies economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, or military demonstrations to compel compliance. Instead of compliance, the target uses the very existence of pressure as justification for its nuclear programme and then negotiates relief — while framing itself as the reasonable actor seeking de-escalation. Under this pattern, the party applying pressure ends up funding its own diplomatic capitulation.
Iran's approach in recent weeks has been consistent with this template. As tensions with the US and Israel rose, Tehran continued uranium enrichment activities and maintained its regional proxy posture. When diplomatic channels opened — reportedly including indirect talks facilitated by Oman and Swiss intermediaries — Iran's negotiators arrived with a credibility enhanced by the standoff itself. The regime had survived public displays of American and Israeli resolve. That survival, in domestic and regional political terms, was presented as victory.
The emerging agreement, whatever its precise contours, appears to involve some combination of sanctions relief in exchange for nuclear constraints. Whether it resembles the JCPOA structurally — as Pompeo alleged — is a factual question the available sources do not fully resolve. What is clear is that the deal's critics on the American right and the Israeli right are making the identical argument: Tehran played the escalation game and won the negotiation that followed.
What Tel Aviv and Washington Disagree On
Eiland's critique was directed partly inward. His point was that Israel, in pursuing confrontation alongside the US, had miscalculated what kind of leverage such pressure actually provided. Israel had no unilateral capacity to force Iran into a better arrangement; it could only participate in a process that Tehran understood better than its opponents.
Pompeo's critique, meanwhile, was aimed squarely at the diplomatic normalisation between the US and Iran that appears to be taking shape under the current framework. His historical comparison — to officials connected to the original nuclear deal — was a pointed suggestion that the same institutional ecosystem was reasserting itself in Washington, promoting engagement with a regime he regards as fundamentally untrustworthy.
The two critiques are not identical. Eiland's argument is primarily about Israeli strategic failure: Israel overextended, Iran outlasted it, and the result is worse than the status quo ante. Pompeo's argument is about American institutional failure: the same officials and same analytical assumptions that produced the 2015 agreement are producing a sequel, despite the original agreement's collapse. Both hinge on the same underlying claim — that Iran demonstrated greater strategic patience and better situational awareness than its adversaries — but they point in different institutional directions.
The Structural Dynamic
The pattern here is not new. Hegemonic powers applying pressure on regional states routinely find that moderate, incremental pressure produces moderate, incremental concessions, while maximal pressure produces either non-compliance or a negotiated settlement that looks, from the hegemonic perspective, suspiciously like capitulation dressed up as diplomacy. The party under pressure has an incentive to make the costs of sustained confrontation visible and to make the benefits of negotiation tangible. The party applying pressure has an incentive to claim victory from any de-escalation, even when the gains are marginal.
Iran has managed this dynamic with some consistency across multiple American administrations. Sanctions have caused genuine economic pain; that pain has been used domestically to reinforce regime legitimacy and internationally to characterise Iran as a victim of unjust pressure. When diplomatic space opens, Iran negotiates with a combination of genuine technical constraints — some of which the West can verify — and nominal commitments that leave the infrastructure intact for future leverage.
This does not mean Iran is winning cleanly or comprehensively. The nuclear programme has not been dismantled. Regional constraints remain. The economic situation inside Iran is genuinely difficult. But in the narrower game of extracting sanctions relief while preserving the core programme, Tehran is, by the assessments of two senior former security officials, ahead of where it was before the latest round of confrontation began.
What Remains Uncertain
The available sources do not provide the full text of the emerging US-Iran agreement, its precise sanctions-relief provisions, or the verification mechanisms under discussion. Eiland's characterisation and Pompeo's critique are authoritative statements from credible figures, but they represent one analytical framework applied to events whose full details remain partially obscured. Whether the framework under negotiation actually resembles the JCPOA — as Pompeo alleged — or represents a genuinely new structure is a factual question that will require the document itself to answer. The sources also do not specify what consultations, if any, have taken place between Washington and Tel Aviv regarding the terms under discussion.
What can be said with confidence is that two senior figures from the US and Israeli security establishments have looked at the same set of facts and drawn the same conclusion. Iran did not merely survive the latest confrontation. Iran used it.
DESK NOTE: Middle East Eye, sourcing both Eiland and Pompeo's assessments, gave the strategic-loss frame prominent placement. The wire services have covered the US-Iran talks more transactionally — emphasising the mechanics of negotiation over the geopolitical Optics. This piece treats the Eiland-Pompeo convergence as the news, rather than the talks themselves, because it is the framing — not the deal — that challenges the dominant narrative of pressure as leverage.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://x.com/middleeasteye/status/2058208798590849024
- https://x.com/middleeasteye/status/2058208334125240321