The US-Iran confrontation has entered a new phase of asymmetric brinkmanship. Washington is conducting what it calls "defensive" strikes on Iranian air defences and radar installations on Qeshm Island, while Tehran insists its seven demands — including lifting the US blockade on southern ports and sanctions removal — are non-negotiable preconditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides are operating on fundamentally incompatible theories of leverage. Iran's position amounts to a demand that the rewards of an agreement be delivered before the concessions that justify one. As Andreas Krieg of King's College London frames it, Tehran is trying to translate wartime leverage into a permanent regional security arrangement on its own terms. The seven demands go beyond the Islamabad memorandum of understanding signed in June between the two sides, adding new stipulations about future control of the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway through which roughly 20% of global oil transits. The military facts on the water are contested and dangerous. The IRGC claims naval mines remain in the strait and that "nobody dares enter" to remove them. Iranian state television reported 11 tankers attacked in the past 10 days, with four unable to continue transit. IRGC-affiliated media claims maritime navigation systems were targeted overnight to disrupt the US-coordinated oil shuttle system. Washington has not confirmed these specific claims but continues its characterisation of its own strikes as defensive. The nuclear dimension adds another layer of irreversibility. Tehran says it will not surrender its highly enriched uranium — believed buried under rubble from last year's US-Israeli strikes — but is open to downblending the material. International inspectors have no access to Iranian nuclear sites except the Bushehr power plant. Iran has accused the IAEA and director Rafael Grossi of exceeding their technical mandate and enabling attacks on nuclear facilities during both last year's 12-day war and the current conflict. Diplomacy is thin but not dead. Reports indicate Trump and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani will meet at the White House on Monday. But the structural obstacle is clear: the US and Iran's Arab neighbours will not accept long-term Iranian-approved shipping corridors in the strait, and Washington opposes Iran's demand for an end to hostilities across the region because it would constrain Israel's military freedom of action. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz reinforced this Sunday, saying Israel's military mission in Iran remained unfinished. Trump played down the prospect of all-out war on Sunday but revealed that the US military had marked 38 bridges as targets if full-scale conflict resumes. This is the logic of coercive signalling — demonstrating the capacity for escalation while maintaining the fiction of restraint. Tehran, meanwhile, pursues what Krieg calls "controlled escalation," making Gulf states bear the economic consequences of Washington's decisions in hopes they pressure Trump toward compromise. The core danger is a perceptual gap: Washington believes it is conducting a limited campaign of coercion, while Tehran increasingly sees an unrestricted economic war against its survival. As Krieg warns, at some point Iran may decide that the costs of continued restraint exceed the risks of escalation. Neither side has built an off-ramp, and the mediators appear to have no mechanism for bridging demands that are structurally incompatible.
