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Iran's Conflict Is a Battle Over Identity — Not Just Weapons
Behind every demand, every sanction, and every threat over the Strait of Hormuz lies a deeper question: who decides what Iran is allowed to be?
The conflict between Iran and the United States, now reaching a volatile new chapter after the February 2026 war, is often framed around weapons, sanctions, and oil routes. But to understand why decades of diplomacy repeatedly collapse at the final moment, one must look beneath the technical demands to something more fundamental: the Iranian people's insistence on defining their own national identity — and America's equal insistence that certain expressions of that identity pose an unacceptable threat to global order.
The Roots of a Revolution: Why Identity Matters
Iran and the United States were close allies until 1979, when the Islamic Revolution swept away the U.S.-backed Shah and replaced him with an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. What followed was not simply a change of government — it was the assertion of a new Iranian identity, one that rejected Western influence as inherently colonial. The first U.S. sanctions came that same year, after the Tehran embassy hostage crisis, and the two countries have been locked in mutual distrust ever since.
For ordinary Iranians, the tension is felt in everyday life: in restricted incomes, disrupted oil revenues, and an aviation sector hamstrung by sanctions. Yet polls and protests alike consistently show that Iranian national feeling — the sense of a proud, ancient civilisation with the right to chart its own course — remains resilient across political lines. The argument over nuclear enrichment is, in this light, not merely technical. It is about whether Iran has the sovereign right to develop technology that dozens of other nations possess freely.
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| Photo:Reuters |
What America Wants: The 15-Point U.S. Proposal
The Trump administration's stated objectives have been consistent: prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon, limit its ballistic missile programme, and end Iranian support for regional proxy groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthi forces. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it plainly — Iran "can never have nuclear weapons." The U.S. has backed this position with a 15-point proposal, the full details of which have not been made entirely public, alongside a "maximum pressure" campaign that seeks to drive Iranian oil exports to zero.
The U.S. demands, as reported, include the full dismantlement of Iran's enrichment facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow; the permanent handover of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to the IAEA; a commitment to allow comprehensive IAEA monitoring; limits on missile range and quantity; an end to support for regional armed groups; and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. In exchange, Washington offers to lift nuclear-related sanctions, support Iran's civilian nuclear programme at Bushehr, and normalise diplomatic relations.
Iran's Counter: The 10-Point Plan
Iran's publicly circulated 10-point response to the U.S. is a mirror image in ambition. Where the U.S. demands that Iran give up enrichment entirely, Iran insists on an explicit acceptance of its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Where the U.S. wants to keep military forces stationed in the region, Iran demands a full withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces from regional bases. Where the U.S. seeks to remove Iran's leverage, Iran demands full control over transit through the Strait of Hormuz — including the right to collect tolls from passing vessels as compensation for war damages.
The plan also calls for the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions, the release of frozen Iranian assets abroad, an end to all IAEA and UN Security Council resolutions against Iran, and a binding UNSC resolution enshrining the entire agreement. In exchange, Iran offers a commitment not to build nuclear weapons and a willingness to enter peace agreements with its regional neighbours.
President Trump, in comments to AFP and Sky News, suggested that "most" of the points in the Iranian plan had already been "fully negotiated," and that Iran's published version reflected "maximalist demands" rather than the document under actual discussion. Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei, however, rejected the American demand for complete dismantlement as "excessive and outrageous," accusing Trump of lying about seeking peace.
Why Iran's Nuclear Programme Alarms Washington
The concern is grounded in hard data. By May 2025, the IAEA confirmed that Iran held over 400 kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity — a level that is nearly weapons-grade, which is defined as 90% enrichment. According to analysts at Iran Watch, as of mid-2024, Iran possessed enough material to produce the fissile core for one nuclear bomb in under a week, and enough for five weapons in roughly three weeks. Advanced centrifuges continue to expand that capacity.
The strategic concern for the United States goes beyond Iran itself. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it would be the first state to do so since North Korea in 2006 — and could trigger a regional cascade, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt potentially pursuing their own programmes. Countries possessing nuclear weapons are, practically speaking, far harder to confront militarily. As the Britannica analysis of the conflict notes, nuclear possession "might make it impossible to face down a regime that leads vitriolic chants" of opposition to both the U.S. and Israel.
Iran insists its programme is entirely peaceful, pointing to its sole commercial nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Yet the IAEA has repeatedly noted an inability to resolve questions about undeclared past nuclear activities due to Iran's limited cooperation — a verification gap that has proven, diplomatically, almost as destabilising as the enrichment itself.
The Strait of Hormuz: Geography as Power
Perhaps no single piece of geography better illustrates how identity and power intersect than the Strait of Hormuz. The narrow waterway — at its tightest, only 33 kilometres wide — is the only maritime exit from the Persian Gulf. Before the 2026 war, roughly 25% of the world's seaborne oil trade and 20% of global liquefied natural gas passed through it daily. Some 15 million barrels of oil per day moved through the strait, with Japan and South Korea sourcing approximately 95% and 75% of their crude oil needs from the Gulf region respectively.
When the U.S. and Israel launched their military campaign on February 28, 2026, and Iran's Supreme Leader was killed on the first day, Iran's Revolutionary Guards immediately declared the strait closed. Oil prices briefly surged toward $100 per barrel. In the weeks that followed, Iran selectively allowed vessels from certain countries — Pakistan, India, China, Russia, Turkey, Malaysia — to pass, while denying others. Iran's foreign minister declared that all vessels seeking transit must coordinate directly with Iranian armed forces. The message was deliberate: Iran controls the valve on the world's energy supply.
One legal analysis, published in Just Security, drew an uncomfortable conclusion: "Iran has established the capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps indefinitely. Overwhelming military force alone is unlikely to change that reality." Iran's ability to deploy low-cost drones from underground facilities and mobile launchers across its territory meant that suppressing its maritime threat required a scale of sustained bombardment that the U.S. found difficult to justify politically. The U.S. National Security Strategy explicitly listed "the Strait of Hormuz remain open" as a core American interest — yet achieving that interest through force was proving far more costly than anticipated.
Iran's 10-point plan, notably, demands not just the reopening of the strait on its own terms but compensation for war damages paid through tolls levied on passing ships. The U.S. flatly rejected the idea of Iranian toll collection, with UN Ambassador Mike Waltz stating that "no country gets to hold the world hostage for leverage just because they happen to sit next to a strait." Iran's response, implicit in its actions, was essentially: watch us.
The Iraq Comparison: A Cautionary Parallel
History offers a relevant precedent. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the stated justification was the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction — weapons that were never found. The conflict, which stretched across more than a decade in various forms, ultimately resolved not through military dominance alone but through negotiated political transitions, the eventual withdrawal of U.S. combat forces, and the slow construction of Iraqi state institutions. Even then, the aftermath left deep instabilities. The 2013–2017 Iraq War, referenced in the U.S. Congress's 2025 debate over limiting presidential war powers, was directly cited as a lesson about "misplaced objectives in the Middle East."
The Iraq experience is instructive for Iran in several ways. First, military action can degrade a country's capabilities but cannot alone resolve the underlying political dispute — and may harden public sentiment against compliance. Second, a negotiated outcome ultimately required both sides to acknowledge each other's core interests, however grudgingly. Third, verification of any agreement requires on-the-ground cooperation that cannot be compelled purely by force. These lessons apply directly to the Iranian nuclear file, where U.S. strikes in June 2025 (Operation Midnight Hammer) damaged but did not eliminate Iran's enrichment capacity — and may, in fact, have strengthened the domestic Iranian argument for acquiring a deterrent weapon as insurance against further strikes.
The Lines That Cannot Be Crossed — On Either Side
Negotiations in Islamabad, mediated by Pakistan, represent the current diplomatic frontier. But the fundamental incompatibilities remain. The U.S. insists that Iran "can never" enrich uranium — a position that Iran's leadership has called a red line whose crossing would "collapse the negotiations." Iran insists on the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from regional bases — a demand the U.S. has called a non-starter. Iran demands full control of the Strait of Hormuz as a sovereign right; the U.S. regards that control as a fundamental violation of international maritime law and a direct threat to global energy security.
Beneath these technical demands lie identity claims. Iran sees its nuclear programme as proof of scientific capability and sovereign independence — the right of a civilisation that invented algebra and built empires to master modern technology on its own terms. The U.S. sees Iran's nuclear ambitions as the most dangerous expression of a revolutionary ideology that has, since 1979, pledged to overturn a regional order that Washington built and still underwrites. Neither position is entirely irrational. Both positions are, in the current political climate on each side, very difficult to abandon publicly.
A Question of Recognition, Not Just Security
The current ceasefire, fragile and contested, offers a moment of reflection. Analysts who have studied both the JCPOA's 2015 success and its 2018 collapse note that the agreement worked, technically, for as long as it held: Iran's breakout time to a bomb was measurably extended, and IAEA inspectors had a level of access to Iranian facilities that has not been matched since. What it lacked was durability — a sense, on the Iranian side, that the international community had genuinely accepted Iran's right to exist as the country it has chosen to be.
That is ultimately what is at stake. Security arrangements can be negotiated. Enrichment levels can be capped. Missiles can be limited. But the question of whether Iran's identity — as an Islamic Republic, as a regional power, as a nation with nuclear technology — will be recognised or perpetually contested is one that no 10-point plan or 15-point counter-proposal alone can settle. The Iranian people are not simply bargaining over centrifuges. They are insisting, at enormous cost, on the right to be taken seriously. Whether the world — and Washington — is prepared to do that, without abandoning its own legitimate security interests, is the question that will define the next chapter of this conflict.
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