As US and Israeli strikes pound the Islamic Republic for a third week, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are digging in and the world’s oil supply hangs in the balance. While the signals from Washington on the war are mixed — with sometimes US President Donald Trump feeling certain that war will end when he decides and sometimes urging allies to join it — inside Tehran, no one seems to be listening.
In bunkers dug deep beneath Iranian soil, commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are calibrating a different kind of calculation. According to a report from British daily Financial Times, these calculations are not about presidential instincts but about institutional survival, revolutionary ideology and how long they could hold the Strait of Hormuz before the world’s economy cracks.
“Everybody is fixated on the vacillations of Trump but it’s completely missing the fact there’s a massive country with its own agency,” FT quoted an anonymous western official as saying.
What that country is doing, in the third week of the most intense US-Iran confrontation in history, is preparing for a long war.
Iran’s raison d’être
Since the US and Israel launched their coordinated air campaign on February 28, the tone from Iranian leadership has been one of consolidation.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament and a figure closely tied to the Revolutionary Guards, told state television this week, “The US doesn’t know how to start or to finish a war in this region. We are not going to sit here and let the Zionist regime and the US establish a new order.”
On his conditions for stopping the war, he said, “There must be no threat of war anymore. This is our clear and definite demand. We don’t accept a ceasefire and then go back to war in five months’ time.”
The Western official told FT, “What is at play is pretty much the whole raison d’être of the regime — which is to survive and resist.”
Underground sites to build missiles and drones
On the military front, the IRGC has adapted quickly. Rather than holding fixed bases — which US and Israeli precision munitions have turned into craters — the Guards have scattered, operating in decentralised cells and using underground launch sites to continue their missile and drone campaigns.
The tactics are deliberate, drawn from Iran’s long study of asymmetric warfare. “You cannot defeat partisans with air strikes,” an Iranian source close to the regime told Financial Times.
According to official statements from the US and Israel, the volume of Iran’s fire has dropped significantly by 90% or more from the opening of the conflict. But the strikes have not stopped. Tehran is husbanding its arsenal deliberately, calibrating its rate of fire to sustain a “long war” without burning through stockpiles it cannot yet replace.
Weaponsing Strait of Hormuz
The most consequential front in this war is not in any Iranian city. It is a narrow strip of water — roughly 33 kilometres wide at its tightest point — through which approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally flows.
For years, Iranian officials threatened to “close” the Strait of Hormuz in the event of war. The threat was always taken seriously but never tested. Now it has been and its effect has rattled energy markets and sent insurance premiums for Gulf shipping through the roof.
“They never knew they could do it until they tried it. Now they know and it’s pretty effective,” the Western official said.
What Tehran actually wants
Iran’s conditions for stopping the war are specific and politically toxic for Washington to accept.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on March 12 said Tehran wants two things above all: legally binding guarantees that the US and Israel will not resume military operations once the guns go quiet and meaningful sanctions relief to rebuild an economy that has been under siege for years.
“If they don’t get sanctions relief and guarantees that attacks will never happen again, they’re not going to stop. These are both very hard outcomes,” Sanam Vakil of British think tank Chatham House told FT.
Rob Malley, the former Biden-era U.S. envoy to Iran, said that on one hand, Iran wants the war to end because the damage to its infrastructure, military and internal security is immense. On the other, “it wants to make sure the US and the world economy pay a sufficient price so they will think twice about resuming the war”.