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Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/after-ayatollah-trump-deal-iran
After the Ayatollah
(Tablet) Jason Greenblatt - The military balance between the U.S. and Iran has shifted dramatically. Iran's air defense shield, the infrastructure that for years effectively concealed and protected its nuclear program, has been destroyed. Its proxies are severely degraded. Its economy is under sanctions and an unprecedented naval blockade. Its nuclear sites have been damaged. The strategic landscape today bears almost no resemblance to 2015, when the last deal was struck. When the Obama administration concluded its Iran deal, Iran's regional power was intact. Hizbullah was the most formidable non-state military force in the Middle East. Hamas governed Gaza with operational freedom. Iran's air defenses, built over decades with Russian and Chinese assistance, provided real protection for nuclear infrastructure deep inside Iranian territory. The pressure on Tehran was not existential. That is not true today. The S-300 batteries and radar infrastructure that once raised the cost of strikes on Iranian territory are gone. What remains of Iran's conventional military capacity is a fraction of what existed before. That is a fundamental change. Hizbullah suffered shattering losses in the 2024 campaign, its command structure broken, its missile stockpiles depleted, its grip on southern Lebanon fractured. Hamas still exists, but it no longer projects power as it did before Oct. 7. What has changed is that the entire architecture Iran built over decades to extend its deterrence outward, at enormous cost, is under simultaneous pressure. The economic damage is severe. By Tehran's own count, airstrikes hit more than 23,000 factories and firms, costing over 1 million jobs directly. The Iranian publication Etemad Online has estimated another million pushed out of work by the spillover. The Obama-era deal left the underlying infrastructure intact. That is why Iran was able to surge toward weapons-grade enrichment so quickly after the agreement collapsed. Trump is seeking something different: physical removal of enriched uranium stockpiles, a genuine rollback of centrifuge capacity, verification with real teeth, and a permanent prohibition on nuclear weapons, no sunsets. The leverage to demand it has never been stronger. But coercive leverage is useful only if there is someone on the other side capable of accepting its terms and making them stick. On the Iranian side, the question of who can deliver on a commitment is emphatically open. The writer was the White House Middle East envoy in the first Trump administration.