'The word belongs to the battlefield': Why Iran, US are drifting back to conflict

The fragile understanding that pulled Washington and Tehran back from the brink after April is steadily coming apart. Military strikes are expanding, diplomacy is losing momentum and regional flashpoints from the Strait of Hormuz to Yemen are once again reinforcing one another.

The question is no longer whether the previous understanding can be revived, but whether either side still believes it reflects the strategic reality created by the war.

Hormuz, again

President Donald Trump’s latest statement on Monday leaves little doubt about Washington’s direction. “The Strait of Hormuz is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran,” he wrote on Truth Social, announcing the reinstatement of an “Iranian Blockade” targeting Iranian ships and their customers while allowing other nations to continue using the waterway. He added that the United States would become “the Guardian of the Strait,” a role for which it expected payment, demanding a 20% fee on cargo transiting the passage, substantially higher than the fees previously imposed by Iran.

Previously, Trump had hinted in a Fox interview at the possibility that the new supreme leader in Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, was killed. “Their leaders have all been killed. The best leaders have been killed. They're gone. Khamenei is gone. The son is 90% gone,” he said.

The rhetoric is increasingly being matched by military action.

What began as strikes on dozens of targets has evolved into a much broader campaign. According to CENTCOM, roughly 140 Iranian sites were struck on July 11 alone, including missile and drone depots, naval assets, radar installations and air-defense batteries. Across three consecutive nights, the campaign expanded to more than 300 targets.

The strikes have also reached deeper into Iran’s interior, extending well beyond the initial theater of operations.

Tehran itself has so far escaped direct attack. Elsewhere, however, areas from Hormozgan’s coastline to the Strait of Hormuz have once again entered the line of fire.

Iran has launched attacks on Gulf states including Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Jordan was also attacked. The pattern resembles a war resuming in stages rather than ending.

On July 11, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' naval forces struck the Cyprus-flagged GFS Galaxy with an anti-ship cruise missile. A day later, it claimed responsibility for attacking another commercial vessel.

Assistant professor of political sciences at the University of Tehran Hasan Ahmadian believes that Washington has fundamentally misunderstood the consequences of the war. He told Al-Monitor, “Treating the aftermath as though the war never happened, as though no commander was killed and no child bled and no plant was flattened, is the posture of the ignorant or the willfully blind. The war’s imposed reality, built outside international law, guarantees the world after looks fundamentally different from the world before.”

His argument goes beyond Hormuz. From Tehran’s perspective, the strait has changed because the strategic environment has changed. The memorandum collapsed because Washington interpreted the ceasefire as a return to the previous Hormuz order. Tehran does not share that view.

An Iranian Foreign Ministry official offered an even starker assessment to Al-Monitor. Despite renewed attempts to revive the understanding, he said, “The word now belongs to the battlefield.”

Tehran no longer negotiating past

Behind Tehran’s recent moves lies a strategic conclusion that appears to have taken shape after Khamenei’s funeral. Within the Iranian leadership, the six-day funeral held across Iran and Iraq was widely interpreted as more than a farewell to the country’s longest-serving leader. Officials saw the scale of the ceremonies as evidence that the Islamic Republic had absorbed its greatest political and military shock without losing either domestic cohesion or the regional legitimacy on which its influence rests.

Whether that assessment reflects reality matters less than the fact that it increasingly appears to guide Tehran’s decision-making.

Iran no longer seems interested in negotiating a return to the prewar status quo. It believes the war fundamentally altered the regional balance and that any future understanding must begin with those new realities rather than seek to restore the old ones.

That also explains why diplomacy is increasingly viewed in Tehran as another front in the conflict rather than an alternative to it.

Iranian officials believe Washington is pursuing a slow war of attrition, combining sanctions, military pressure and negotiations to extract concessions while preventing Tehran from translating what it sees as its wartime resilience into political gains. In that reading, talks become another instrument through which the United States attempts to reshape the strategic environment without changing its own assumptions.

Iran’s answer is to reverse that equation. The battlefield, in Tehran’s view, must shape the negotiations, not the other way around.

That is the context in which the senior Iranian Foreign Ministry official told Al-Monitor, “The word now belongs to the battlefield.” It was not a dismissal of diplomacy. It was a statement about leverage. Iranian officials increasingly believe that negotiations have value only if they acknowledge the balance created after the war rather than seek to restore the one that existed before it.

The leadership appears determined to engage Washington in a battle of wills, convincing the United States that time will not weaken Iran’s position but gradually strengthen its bargaining power. Whoever blinks first loses. That also explains Tehran’s careful calibration. It is seeking to operate on the edge of the abyss, creating enough military, political and economic pressure to redefine the negotiating environment while avoiding the one step that would trigger a regional war neither side can fully control.

Yemen reopens as second front

The same pattern is unfolding in Yemen. What began as a dispute over a single Iranian flight carrying a Houthi delegation returning from Khamenei’s funeral rapidly evolved into a broader confrontation over sovereignty, airspace and control of Yemen’s only functioning international airport.

The internationally recognized government struck Sanaa's airport in an attempt to prevent the aircraft from landing. The Houthis maintain that it landed in Hodeidah despite the attempt to stop it. The result is that Yemen’s civilian aviation network has once again become part of the conflict.

A long-negotiated prisoner exchange has effectively stalled after disagreements over implementation. Fighting around Jabal Dabbas in Hodeidah has left dozens dead on both sides. At the same time, Tehran’s ambassador to the Houthi movement, Ali Mohammad Rezaei — a figure rarely seen in public — has reemerged, reportedly coordinating what regional sources describe as an integrated escalation mechanism directed from IRGC operational headquarters.

The broader regional war has also reduced Riyadh and Washington’s ability to manage Yemen separately from the wider confrontation.

As Iran loses leverage elsewhere, Yemen becomes one of the few remaining arenas through which it can still project strategic pressure, especially if it decides to activate a repeated threat to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

Mohammad Basha, who closely follows the Houthi file, told Al-Monitor he does not believe that the point of no return has yet been reached. The Saudi-led coalition’s decision to permit a Mahan Air flight to land in Hodeidah suggests that back-channel diplomacy remains active and that regional actors are still attempting to contain the crisis, he argued. 

The next move, Basha said, is likely to involve calibrated Houthi drone and missile attacks targeting Saudi Arabia.

The real threshold remains Aramco. Strike Saudi oil infrastructure, Basha said, and the conflict enters an entirely different phase.

Diplomacy running in place

Military escalation has accelerated even as diplomatic contacts continue. Qatari negotiators recently traveled to Tehran in an effort to restore the previous understanding. Iran’s president has also spoken with Pakistan’s prime minister, reopening the channel that produced the earlier Islamabad framework, which was widely seen as the last serious attempt by pragmatic voices inside Tehran to contain the crisis.

Washington interpreted these contacts as signs of an Iranian interest in returning to negotiations. Iran’s Foreign Ministry publicly rejected that interpretation, instead warning of “reciprocal action” if US military strikes continue. Diplomacy has therefore not stopped; it is simply no longer setting the pace.

Instead, negotiations increasingly follow developments on the battlefield rather than shaping them.

Washington’s decision not to launch a broader military campaign may itself be intended as a strategic signal. Despite increasingly assertive rhetoric, sanctions, blockades, military strikes and repeated threats have so far stopped short of the sustained commitment that a prolonged regional war would demand.

That leaves another important variable. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated throughout this conflict that it is willing to move faster and further than Washington, whether against Hezbollah, Iranian nuclear infrastructure or the Houthis. If the United States seeks to manage escalation without fully owning it, Israel remains the actor most capable of testing those limits.

Yet Israel also confronts an unresolved challenge in Lebanon. Hezbollah has been weakened but not disarmed, leaving open the possibility that the Lebanese front could once again become part of the regional equation.

Narrowing window

The region is once again approaching a crossroads. One path leads toward a new transactional understanding, an American security role in Hormuz, paid passage through the Strait and a revised set of regional red lines extending into Yemen.

The other leads back toward the wider regional war that every actor publicly says it wants to avoid, even as its actions steadily move in that direction.

The indicators worth watching remain clear: Commercial shipping through Hormuz, military activity around Bab el-Mandeb, the durability of the Doha and Islamabad mediation channels, and the willingness of Gulf states to continue acting as intermediaries after Iranian attacks on Doha and other Gulf cities.

The architecture that prevented a wider regional war has not disappeared, but it is weakening.

Washington still believes sustained military pressure can improve its negotiating position. Tehran believes only sustained pressure can prevent negotiations from becoming another form of strategic defeat.

As long as both sides continue to view escalation as leverage rather than failure, the battlefield will shape diplomacy far more than diplomacy shapes the battlefield. Neither side may be interested in war, but given the context described above, war may be interested in both of them.