The West Keeps Rewarding Iran’s Patience

For more than two decades, one government in the Middle East – the Islamic Republic of Iran – has run the same ploy against a rotating cast of American presidents and other Western leaders, and it has never lost. It advances a nuclear program to the edge of a weapon, funds proxy-militias around Israel, and floods the West with propaganda – and then, whenever the pressure grows unbearable, it offers to talk. The West, exhausted and eager for calm, fearful of Muslim unrest at home and hobbled by misguided political correctness, reaches for the carrot and makes concessions. Iran pockets the concession, waits for the political winds to shift, and resumes the climb. This is not weakness disguised as strength but strategy: the disciplined use of carrot and stick, with Tehran holding the stick more often than we admit and the West mistaking each pause for Iranian bona fides.

Iran’s most powerful weapon is not enriched uranium or a ballistic missile. It is time. And the West – through two U.S. administrations that eased financial pressure on Tehran while restraining Israel and a panoply of weak and fearful European, Australian, and Canadian governments – has repeatedly given Iran exactly that. The facts below are drawn entirely from U.S. government assessments, allied intelligence, and mainstream reporting.

The Nuclear Clock: From a One-Year Buffer to a One-Week Sprint

When the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed, its central premise was time. Iran was capped at 3.67 percent enrichment and a 300-kilogram stockpile, constraints designed to keep its breakout – the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade material for one bomb – at roughly one year.¹ That buffer did not survive. Beginning in July 2019, Iran breached the enrichment cap, reaching 20 percent at the deeply buried Fordow site by January 2021 and 60 percent – a hair below weapons grade – by that April.²

The trajectory of the Iranian stockpile is told in numbers. Iran’s inventory of 60 percent material grew from under 18 kilograms in late 2021 to 182 kilograms by October 2024, to 275 by February 2025, and to roughly 441 kilograms of highly enriched uranium on the eve of the June 2025 strikes.³ By late 2024, American and independent analysts estimated that Iran’s breakout time had collapsed from about a year to roughly one week.⁴ Inspectors had already detected uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent, and Iran’s total enriched stockpile had swelled to many multiples of the JCPOA ceiling. At the same time, it curtailed the very inspections meant to reassure the world.⁵

Critics blame the collapse on Trump’s 2018 withdrawal. Still, he left because the deal was hollow: its sunset clauses let key limits expire within a decade, it ignored Iran’s missiles and proxies, and its inspections could not reliably catch cheating – even as Israel exposed a weapons archive Tehran had hidden from inspectors.

The Missile Shadow

Warheads are only half the equation. Iran fields the largest and most diverse ballistic-missile arsenal in the Middle East – U.S. Central Command put the count at “over 3,000” as early as 2022, and pre-2026 estimates ranged to 3,000-4,000.⁶ It is the only state to have built a 2,000-kilometer missile without first acquiring nuclear weapons, with systems that reach across the region and into Europe.⁷ Iran has also exported that capability, seeding Hizbullah with an estimated 14,000-plus rockets and missiles, arming the Houthis, and equipping Iraqi militias.⁸

Following the Money, Part I: What Washington Unfroze

Here, honesty strengthens the argument. The claim that the Obama administration simply “gave Iran $150 billion” is inaccurate: that figure was a high-end estimate of Iran’s own frozen overseas assets, and Treasury testimony put the usable, liquid sum at roughly $50 billion once nuclear sanctions were lifted.⁹ But the distinction is smaller than it sounds: whether a “gift” or the release of Iran’s own reserves, tens of billions flowed back to a regime that funds missiles and militias before its own people. Layered on top was a separate January 2016 settlement returning about $1.7 billion – including a $400 million tranche delivered, notoriously, in physical cash.¹⁰

Following the Money, Part II: The Enforcement Holiday

If the Obama era loosened the lid, the Biden era, critics argue, took it off. In September 2023, Washington waived sanctions to move $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil revenue from South Korea to Qatar as part of a prisoner swap.¹¹ Months earlier, it had modified a waiver to let Iraq route roughly $10 billion in owed funds into Iranian accounts in Oman.¹² The larger windfall came not from any single deal but from an enforcement holiday on Iranian oil: export revenue rose from about $16 billion in 2020 to $53-54 billion in 2022 and 2023; the U.S. Energy Information Administration tallied roughly $144 billion in petroleum sales across 2021-2023 alone.¹³ By one count, Iran earned some $175 billion over the four Biden years, with China absorbing roughly 90 percent as sanctions went largely unenforced.¹⁴

The Stick That Fell on the Wrong Target

The mirror image of financial leniency toward Tehran was pressure on Jerusalem. In May 2024, amid Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following the October 2023 massacre, the Biden administration paused some 3,500 bombs, and the President said he would withhold offensive weapons if Israel pressed into Rafah’s population centers to dismantle Hamas tunnels.¹⁵ That autumn, Washington warned Israel in writing to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or face further arms holds; the withheld 2,000-pound bombs were not released until the following administration did so in January 2025.¹⁶ Reasonable people can debate the humanitarian calculus, but the pattern is hard to miss: as Iran’s proxies pressed a multi-front war, the stick came down not on the sponsor but on the democracy defending itself.

The Proxy Payroll

None of Iran’s regional strategies is cheap, and the cost is documented. The State Department has estimated that Tehran gave Hizbullah roughly $700 million a year, with other assessments running to $1 billion.¹⁷ It has historically sent up to $100 million annually to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.¹⁸ Hundreds of millions more flowed each year to the Houthis and Iraqi militias, and the State Department reckoned Iran spent more than $16 billion propping up the Assad regime and its proxies between 2012 and 2020.¹⁹ This is the machinery the unfrozen billions helped sustain.

The War for the Western Mind

The stick is not only physical. For at least three U.S. election cycles Iran has waged an information war, and the evidence comes from American and allied institutions. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and CISA jointly concluded that Iran seeks to stoke discord and undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions by exploiting social tensions.²⁰ In 2024, the IRGC-linked group APT42 hacked a U.S. presidential campaign, and the Justice Department indicted three men over it.²¹

More revealing is the manipulation. U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran covertly backed pro-Palestinian campus protests, with operatives posing online as activists and even funding some groups, to inflame division.²² Microsoft documented Iranian networks running fake American “news” sites aimed at both sides at once: one mocked a Republican candidate to appeal to progressives, another posed as a conservative site fixated on gender controversy. Tehran plays every side at once; its goal is not to win an argument but to widen a rift.²³

In 2026, Meta disrupted an Iran-linked operation that used AI-generated personas, among them a purported women’s-rights activist, to earn Americans’ trust before injecting political messaging.²⁴ The template is old: in 2020, Iranian operatives ran a menacing “Enemies of the People” website and sent spoofed voter-intimidation emails under a far-right banner.²⁵ The through-line is the instrumentalizing of genuine Western movements, left and right alike, so that the real author of regional violence hides behind the image of Israel as sole villain.

The Reckoning – and the Ruse

Then the pattern broke. Reading intelligence that Iran was closing on a weapon, the Trump administration abandoned the accommodationist script. On June 22, 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer sent seven B-2 bombers to drop 14 bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.²⁶ U.S. officials estimated a one-to-two-year setback, real but not decisive, since much of the 60 percent stockpile was believed to have survived.²⁷ A larger campaign followed: Operation Epic Fury, from late February to early May 2026, opened by killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggered mass Iranian barrages.²⁸

Then, on cue, came the carrot, this time from Washington itself. On June 15, 2026, negotiators reached a 14-point memorandum of understanding: reopen the Strait of Hormuz, lift the naval blockade, terminate “all types” of U.S. sanctions, and open a 60-day window toward a final nuclear deal.²⁹ The centerpiece was a proposed reconstruction fund of at least $300 billion, Gulf-financed and contingent on Iranian behavior, but a staggering reward for the party that started the war.³⁰ Tellingly, the memorandum said nothing about Iran’s missiles or proxies, the threats Gulf and Israeli officials consider most immediate.³¹

What happened next is the clearest illustration of Tehran’s method. Rather than bank the deal, Iran tested it: on July 6-7, 2026, it fired on three commercial vessels near Hormuz, including a Saudi and a Qatari ship.³² Washington answered on July 8 by striking roughly 90 Iranian military targets, the President declaring the ceasefire “over” and saying he was no longer sure he wanted a deal.³³ The Treasury revoked the oil-sales waiver that had been Iran’s chief economic prize.³⁴ Iran took the carrot, probed the stick, and discovered, for now, an American president willing to swing it. That resolve is precisely the variable Tehran is built to outlast.

Turkey: The Friend Who Bills for Friendship

No account is complete without Ankara, which plays a quieter version of the game. Throughout the recent wars, President Erdogan cast Turkey as America’s indispensable friend, staying out of the fighting. The reward arrived in July 2026, when, at a NATO summit in Ankara, Trump said he would “certainly consider” selling Turkey the F-35, praising Erdogan as loyal and crediting Turkey for staying out of the Iran war ‘by request.’³⁵ (This is worth stressing, because the offer is frequently misremembered as being extended to Iran: it is Turkey, not Tehran, that stands to receive the most advanced fighter in the American inventory.) Trump also signaled he would lift the sanctions over Turkey’s Russian air-defense purchase and delist Syria as a state sponsor of terror.³⁶

Yet Turkey is, in no way, a reliable friend of Israel. Its leaders have compared Israeli conduct in Gaza to the Nazis, and Netanyahu publicly opposed the F-35 sale, warning it would erode Israel’s qualitative military edge and empower a government hostile to the Jewish state.³⁷ The lesson for Tehran: even open enmity toward Israel is no barrier to American rewards, so long as one plays the helpful broker.

The Long Game: Betting on the Clock

Iran cannot win a straight military contest with the United States and Israel, and it knows it, so it competes where it holds a structural advantage: endurance. Analysts note that the disruption of the last two wars has handed Tehran ‘significant leverage’ heading into negotiations over its nuclear program, missiles and proxies,³⁸ and Gulf officials privately call the emerging arrangement a “disastrous turning point.”³⁹

But the deepest bet is about the calendar. Authoritarian adversaries have always understood that democracies change governments on a schedule, that appetite for confrontation is finite, and that a hawkish administration can be waited out. This is not armchair speculation; it is a documented finding of U.S. intelligence. In 2024, ODNI assessed that Tehran was working to influence the American election precisely because it wanted to avoid an outcome it believed would raise tensions – in plain terms, it was rooting against the candidate most likely to confront it.⁴⁰

That is the game in miniature: Iran and its partners plan not to defeat the current American president but to outlast him, and the political map favors them. The President is term-limited and leaves office in January 2029. The early field to succeed him is led by figures of the Democratic left – former Vice President Kamala Harris, who says she is “not done,” and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tops the field among younger and progressive voters.⁴¹ Both belong to a wing whose support for Israel has measurably eroded and whose instinct on Iran runs toward the diplomacy-first posture of the Obama and Biden years, from which Tehran harvested a decade of concessions it would gladly see return.

The same clock ticks in Jerusalem. Netanyahu, the leader most committed to confronting Iran directly, faces elections in 2026 in which, some polls suggest, his coalition could lose its majority, roughly 50 seats to 60.⁴² The bloc best positioned to replace him is a broad anti-Netanyahu alliance of the kind that governed briefly in 2021, leaning on centrist, left-wing and Arab factions before collapsing within 18 months.⁴³ One need not label such a government “left-wing” – some elements plainly are not – but its defining features from Tehran’s vantage point are precisely the ones it wants: internal division, fragility, and a diminished appetite for the type of sustained, military pressure Israel has brought to bear over the past two years. A hesitant and shaky coalition in Jerusalem is worth as much to Iran as a friendly one in Washington.

Put the two clocks together and Iran’s patience becomes cold arithmetic. Under the current governments, Iran, and Turkey alongside it, has already collected the carrots: the reopened strait, the promised sanctions relief, the $300 billion pledge, the prospect of advanced American jets for Ankara. What Tehran now awaits is the stick disappearing on its own, carried off not by any battlefield victory but by the ordinary turning of the electoral calendar. If a softer administration takes power in the United States, and a weaker coalition takes power in Israel, Iran will have banked every concession of the Trump era while shedding the one thing that constrained it: two governments willing to use force. It would then do what it has done after every previous pause: rebuild the centrifuges, replenish the missiles, refill the proxy payroll, and resume the climb, far closer to a weapon and with a $300 billion cushion behind it.

This is why Tehran tells itself the current confrontation, however sharp, is not the end of the story. A regime whose declared purpose is the elimination of the Jewish state, pursued patiently for nearly half a century, is untroubled by waiting a few years more for the winds to change.

What Carrot and Stick Actually Requires

“Carrot and stick” implies a coherent sequence: reward good behavior, punish bad, and keep the trade-off credible over time. Iran has mastered that logic. The West has too often inverted it – delivering carrots to the aggressor and sticks to the ally, then treating each lull as a settlement rather than a regrouping. The corrective is simple to state, hard to sustain: keep financial pressure on the regime rather than its victims; tie every dollar of relief to verified, irreversible steps on enrichment, missiles and proxies – the very items the June 2026 memorandum left blank; treat information warfare as the front it is; and, above all, build resolve that can survive a change of government, in Washington and in Jerusalem alike. Iran’s advantage is patience, and its wager is that ours expires on election day. The only durable counter is a strategy that does not – one that outlasts the clock instead of surrendering to it, and that never mistakes a quiet season for peace.

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Notes