The mirage of weakness

 Why the West misread Iran’s ‘strategic patience’ until the 'great explosion' of 2026

From Abdolreza Alami

The smoke from the conflicts of 2026 has not yet fully cleared, but the post-mortem of intelligence failures has already begun.

When the first wave of Iranian ballistic missiles struck targets across the Persian Gulf, hitting not only Israel but also key American allies in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, Washington’s reaction was nothing short of absolute shock.

Donald Trump’s blunt admission – “We were shocked; they weren’t supposed to go after that many other countries” – was more than a mere slip of the tongue; it was a profound confession.

This sentence pulled back the curtain on a decade-long cognitive bias that had blinded the West, Israel, and regional powers to the reality of Iran’s intentions.

The central question now echoing through the corridors of the Department of State and the Pentagon is simple: Why, until the moment the missiles were launched, did no one believe Iran would actually do it?

To find the answer, one must look beyond military hardware and examine a “triple crisis” in deterrence theory, strategic doctrine, and political psychology.

1. The credibility crisis: when deterrence fails the ‘believability’ test

In international relations, deterrence is as much a psychological construct as it is a physical one. It is often expressed as a simple equation: Deterrence = Capability × Will × Credibility. If any of these variables are perceived as “zero” by the opposing side, the entire structure collapses.

For two decades, Iran possessed the capability (a massive missile and drone arsenal) and emphasised its will in rhetoric. However, the credibility variable was systematically hollowed out, not by the enemy, but by Iran’s own doctrine of “strategic patience.”

Between 2020 and early 2026, Tehran’s behaviour followed a repetitive and predictable pattern. Faced with high-level provocations – the assassination of senior generals, sabotage of nuclear facilities, or the killing of guests on its own soil – Iran reacted with what analysts called “calculated restraint”. These responses were often delayed, symbolic, or designed to avoid human casualties (such as the 2020 Ain al-Asad attack).

To the West, this was not seen as “patience” but as “incapacity”. This interpretation created a dangerous feedback loop: the more Iran patiently endured, the more the West believed Iran’s “red lines” were merely verbal suggestions.

By 2026, the West had effectively “normalised” Iranian restraint, reaching the fatal assumption that Iran feared an all-out war more than it feared national humiliation.

2. The ‘carpet weaving’ metaphor vs Westphalian pragmatism

Strategic analysts in the Middle East have long likened Iranian foreign policy to weaving a Persian carpet: a slow, meticulous process, painfully focused on a long-term pattern. In this view, every tactical retreat or “restrained” response was merely a knot tied for a larger design.

However, Western political psychology, rooted in Westphalian pragmatism and the short-term “win-loss” cycles of democratic elections, lacks the tools to comprehend this timeline. For a Western politician, if you do not respond immediately and more forcefully, you have lost.

This gap in perception led to what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error”. The West attributed Iran’s restraint to internal weakness, fear of regime collapse, or the effectiveness of sanctions. In reality, Iran likely saw itself as buying time, waiting for the precise geopolitical moment where its strike would have the maximum regional impact.

While the West was playing “Tic-Tac-Toe” for the next move, Tehran was advancing a long-term chess game for regional hegemony.

3. The road to 2026: a chronology of misleading signals

To understand the shock of 2026, one must look at the six pillars of Western cognitive error – events that convinced Trump and his generals that Iran was a “paper tiger”:

• The Soleimani precedent (2020): After the assassination of Iran’s most iconic military figure, the “hard revenge” manifested as a pre-announced missile strike on an empty base. For the US intelligence community, this was the “original sin” of miscalculation, creating the mindset that Iran would always choose an honorable exit over real escalation.
• The Damascus consulate (April 2024): When Israel attacked a diplomatic site, Iran’s response was large-scale but heavily neutralised by a Western-Arab coalition. Israel’s subsequent strike on Isfahan went virtually unanswered. The West’s conclusion? Iranian offensive and defensive capabilities were “manageable”.
• The Haniyeh assassination (summer 2024): The killing of Ismail Haniyeh in the heart of Tehran was a massive intelligence failure. When weeks turned into months with no response other than “diplomatic pleas”, the West concluded that Iranian deterrence was dead.
• The fall of Damascus (December 2024): The collapse of the Assad regime, which Iran had spent billions to maintain, was met with relative silence. The closing of the “Golden Corridor” was seen as the end of the “axis of resistance”.
• The elimination of Hezbollah leadership (autumn 2025): The removal of Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s central cadre – Iran’s most prized regional asset – led only to five days of public mourning. This was the peak of Western overconfidence; they believed Iran would not even fight for its own “child”.
• The 12-day nuclear war (June 2025): When Israel and the US finally directly attacked nuclear facilities, Iran’s response was a strike on Al-Udeid base in Qatar – again, with prior warning! This was the final nail in the coffin of the credibility of Iranian threats.

4. The psychological gap: ‘devaluation’ vs the win-win trap

Harold Rhode, a veteran Pentagon adviser, once pointed to a critical cultural difference. In the Western mind, a “win-win” scenario is the ultimate goal. But in the Iranian political tradition, “compromise” is often synonymous with “Tanzil” (devaluation and humiliation).

Paradoxically, however, the West viewed Iran’s strategic patience as a form of compromise. They misread a cultural refusal to be humiliated as a pragmatic surrender to reality. They failed to realise that for Tehran, strategic patience was not a substitute for war, but a preparation for it.

5. 2026: the day the mirage collapsed

When the flames of the 2026 war finally ignited, that “calculable” Iran disappeared. In its place emerged a regional power acting on a scale no think tank had predicted:

• The hammer of Hormuz: By immediately closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran did what the West considered a “suicidal” move. Oil prices did not just rise; they paralysed the global economy.
• The 700-mssile barrage: The volume of fire – over 700 ballistic missiles -saturated the defence systems the West had been so proud of.
• The end of ‘warnings’: This time, there were no calls to Baghdad or Doha. The 18 fatalities among US and Israeli forces in the first 48 hours proved that the era of “performative strikes” was over.

6. Conclusion: a new architecture of deterrence

The 2026 war taught us a bitter truth: deterrence is a living, fragile entity. If you allow an enemy to believe for too long that you are weak, you eventually invite the very war you were trying to avoid.

For observers in the region, including us in the Malay world and Asean, these lessons are profound. Peace, as we have learned, is not the absence of war; it is the presence of a threat that the enemy truly believes in.

Trump’s shock in 2026 was the price of 20 years of hubris – the hubris of believing we could read the mind of an adversary we never bothered to truly understand. - FMT

 Abdolreza Alami is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM).

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.