If Washington’s participation in Israel’s June 2025 war with Iran elevated U.S. military force to a perfectly viable instrument of the United States’ Iran policy, the success of current talks would signal the formal undoing of that logic. But should the failure of talks pave the way for another full-scale war, the United States and Israel will be fighting an Iran vastly different from June. For the Iran of today appears to have made its peace with the grim conclusion that while a decisive slog with Israel and the United States is sure to be agonizing, it is preferable to the recurring attrition of repeated wars and a chronic strategic vulnerability that only emboldens adversaries to target Iran and its regional allies.
I don’t think Russia can meaningfully escalate without just resorting to nuclear bombs, but I think that would be a red line for China if it was just done arbitrarily as an escalation.
In every other respect Russia is near complete exhaustion militarily and any additional actions they take have to be done with elements triaged from other military efforts at the front… and as we are seeing Ukraine does not simply let Russia quietly remove intensity from its offensive without immediately punishing them in devastating localized counterattacks.
What Russia is doing here is trying to project limitless strength at the point they are at near exhaustion, they can’t really meaningfully tip the scales either way with Iran in my opinion, at least not to the degree the world seems to by default assume they can because they are a “military superpower”. Russia needs hostilities to pause in the Ukraine war soon or the problems at the frontline for them will begin to accelerate non-linearly. They also need to be given all of the defensive lines that Ukraine built in a shitty diplomatic deal because they don’t even remotely have the strength and vigor to power through them in the years long battle it would take to do so.