In the months leading up to the brief but violent 12-Day War in June 2025, when U.S. and Israeli strikes targeted Iranian nuclear sites, Tehran quietly but steadily crossed critical nuclear thresholds. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that, by May 17, 2025, Iran’s stockpile had reached 408.6 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. This did not represent a marginal increase but marked a sharp and deliberate acceleration from earlier in the year, leaving the regime only a short step away from weapons-grade capability (Al Jazeera 2025). What makes this surge important is that it unfolded while diplomats attempted to continue negotiations to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions (European Parliamentary Research Service 2025).
Iran’s expanded operations and deployment of advanced centrifuges at key facilities, such as Natanz and Fordow, were significantly reducing the breakout time required to produce a nuclear weapon (Psaropoulos 2025). Yet the nuclear program formed only one dimension of a broader strategic posture. Tehran had also expanded its regional reach, pairing advances in missile technology with sustained support for partner militias in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Through these efforts, it projected influence across the Middle East with notable consistency. Decades of heavy sanctions, prolonged diplomatic isolation, and intermittent negotiations designed to curb these activities had done little to slow this trajectory prior to the 12-day war (Atlantic Council 2024).
When we look at these trends together, they point to a fundamental question in international security: why has the continuous application of coercive pressure failed to generate lasting strategic restraint within the Iranian leadership? This article proposes a theoretical refinement of how we view coercive diplomacy, contending that failure stems not from a lack of pressure, but from a persistent credibility deficit regarding the target regime’s survival. It suggests a need to integrate insights from comparative authoritarian politics into the study of nuclear decision-making. Classical frameworks tend to treat coercion as a relatively straight forward bargaining interaction between states, emphasizing credibility, signaling, and cost imposition, while rational models often assume that unitary actors will respond to external incentives. However, a growing body of scholarship suggests that foreign policy is frequently filtered through the messy reality of domestic structures and the survival instincts of the ruling elite.
Drawing on the works of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Jessica L. P. Weeks, this article argues that we cannot truly grasp coercive outcomes if we ignore the internal constraints that bind political leaders. By comparing the trajectories of Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Libya, we can see clear and recurring patterns in how regimes react to external pressure. Rather than treating these as isolated events, this article uses them to refine theory by demonstrating that regime survival assurance operates as a non-negotiable condition for effective coercion (Ameli 2026). Stripped to its essentials, the argument is that coercive diplomacy is doomed to fail the moment that a target regime views compliance as a path to its own destruction instead of a path to security.
Beyond the Four Pillars
For decades, coercive diplomacy—or the art of using “sticks” and “carrots” to change an adversary’s behavior without starting a full-scale war—has been the go-to tool for U.S. foreign policy. Classical theory says that this works when four pillars are in place: threats must be credible, demands must be clear, objectives should be limited, and the incentives must be meaningful (Jakobsen 1998, 54). But the Iranian case demonstrates that these four pillars are not enough to hold the weight of existential stakes. Even under intense pressure and substantial incentives, an authoritarian regime will almost always choose resistance if it believes that concessions could trigger elite fragmentation, a palace coup, or a popular uprising.
This represents a critical gap in how we think about coercive diplomacy. To address this gap, a fifth pillar proposes that the target state must be convinced that complying with demands will not result in the overthrow of the ruling elite. Without this assurance, coercive strategies tend to backfire, hardening resistance instead of encouraging compromise. This creates a security dilemma, where sanctions and threats intended to secure international stability instead make the target regime feel so existentially vulnerable that it views nuclearization as its only rational shield. This fifth pillar is rooted in the internal logic of authoritarian governance. Power in such systems is concentrated among a narrow coalition of political leaders, security officials, and military elites. These actors must continuously manage both external threats and internal vulnerabilities. In these highly centralized states, the perception of strength often carries as much weight as material capability. When leaders interpret sanctions and diplomatic pressure as tools designed to weaken them ahead of regime change, they will conclude that resistance offers the safer path to survival.
Comparative Lessons from Iraq, North Korea, and Libya
History provides some brutal reminders of this dynamic. Take Iraq. The 1991 Gulf War demonstrated that coercion can work when the military threat is overwhelming and the goal (getting Iraq out of Kuwait) is narrow (Alterman 2003, 277). But once the war ended, the sanctions program offered no credible guarantee that Saddam Hussein would be allowed to remain in power if he cooperated. Saddam Hussein eventually saw the nuclear inspections as a precursor to his own execution, leading him to choose strategic defiance over transparency and cooperation.
North Korea offers a similar story. The 1994 Agreed Framework briefly paused Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions in exchange for energy aid and a move toward normalization. But as the implementation grew shaky and the North Korean leadership began to doubt their long-term security, they went back to the drawing board. Every diplomatic effort since then has hit the same wall: how to offer a regime security without appearing to reward a dictator (Park 2012, 189-218).
Then there is Libya, the case that likely haunts Tehran the most. In 2003, Muammar Gaddafi agreed to scrap his Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs in exchange for getting back into the world’s good graces. At the time, it looked like a win for diplomacy because the deal was framed as a benefit to the elite (Kerr 2004). But the 2011 intervention that culminated in Gaddafi’s overthrow and death changed the narrative. For the Iranian leadership, the “Libya Model” is not a success story but a warning that giving up your nukes is a one-way ticket to vulnerability.
This fear may be further reinforced by a parallel situation in Ukraine. The Iranian leadership has likely noted that Ukraine, which relinquished its nuclear arsenal under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, eventually faced a full-scale invasion. This, in turn, has cemented the belief that only a nuclear deterrent, and not international law, guarantees sovereignty. These cases collectively suggest that successful coercive diplomacy is not based merely on effectively applied pressure. Target regimes must also perceive that compliance as strategically safe.
Iran’s Strategic Calculus and the Fragility of Nuclear Diplomacy
Iran offers a clear illustration of how political centralization and deep-seated mistrust can paralyze diplomacy. The Islamic Republic organizes political authority around the Supreme Leader and reinforces it through powerful institutions such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which holds massive sway over the economy and the military (Majidyar 2018). This structure enhances regime resilience against external shocks but creates high costs for the leadership. For the Supreme Leader, the IRGC represents a critical internal audience that views compromise as a threat to its economic and ideological interests. Giving in to Western pressure is a massive political risk that can signal weakness, trigger infighting among the elite, or give local rivals a chance to strike.
The history of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) captures both the potential and fragility of coercive diplomacy. For a time, the agreement appeared to validate the effectiveness of coercive diplomacy. Iran accepted constraints on its nuclear program in exchange for economic reintegration. But the U.S. withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 undermined the credibility of these commitments (Holmes 2025). From Tehran’s perspective, this reversal demonstrated that compliance does not guarantee either reciprocity or long-term stability. This led to a strategic pivot where Iran began cutting its ties to the agreement, ramping up enrichment, and locking out inspectors (Loft and Mills 2025). Iran also doubled down on its regional proxy strategy. While the West sees these groups as a threat to stability, the Iranian regime views them as a forward defense meant to keep a potential war away from Iranian soil (Kam 2021).
Furthermore, while classical bargaining models assume that the target state ultimately desires reintegration into the liberal international order, the emergence of a robust Russia-China-Iran axis suggests that Tehran is no longer seeking a seat at a Western-led table. Instead, it is actively building a counter-hegemonic alternative (Middle East Council 2023). When a target regime successfully pivots its trade and security dependencies toward alternative great-power patrons, the “sticks” of Western diplomacy lose their kinetic energy, and the “carrots” lose their perceived value. This structural shift indicates that the pressure intended to force a choice between regime collapse and compliance has instead catalyzed resilience and decoupling, where the regime finds security not through international law but through systemic realignment.
Beyond the immediate survival instincts of the elite, the Iranian case illustrates a process where decades of coercive pressure forge domestic structures that are fundamentally optimized for defiance. Having invested decades of capital into clandestine procurement networks, the Iranian state has developed a massive bureaucratic apparatus for the main purpose of managing external pressure. A successful diplomatic resolution, then, is not a strategic victory, but an existential threat to the regime’s institutional relevance.
A dimension that sharpens this analysis lies in the temporal credibility of coercive commitments. Much of the literature treats credibility as a function of immediate signaling; that is, whether threats will be carried out or incentives delivered. But in protracted rivalries such as that between Iran and the United States, credibility becomes inherently intertemporal. Regimes do not evaluate offers in a single bargaining moment, but instead assess the durability of commitments across electoral cycles, leadership transitions, and shifting geopolitical alignments. From Tehran’s vantage point, the collapse of the JCPOA was not simply a failed agreement but a point in a longer pattern of strategic volatility. This introduces an inconstancy in time with respect to coercion. Even if current policymakers intend to uphold assurances, target regimes discount those promises if future leaders can easily reverse them later (Fearon 1995, 401; Powell 2006, 169-203). This, in turn, reinforces the logic that irreversible concessions, such as dismantling nuclear infrastructure, are strategically irrational.
This temporal problem also interacts with a deeper structural issue, namely the asymmetry between reversible and irreversible actions in coercive diplomacy. While the United States can re-impose sanctions quickly and withdraw political commitments with relative ease, a nuclear rollback in Iran, particularly at advanced stages of technological development, would likely entail irreversible losses in capability, knowledge, and deterrent potential. This asymmetry creates an imbalance, where the coercing state retains flexibility while the target state bears the long-term risks of compliance. For authoritarian regimes, whose survival depends on maintaining both internal cohesion and external deterrence, this imbalance is especially acute. In Iran’s case, dismantling elements of its nuclear program would not merely signal cooperation, but would also materially constrain its future strategic options in an environment that it perceives as fundamentally uncertain and adversarial. Thus, even well-designed coercive strategies tend to falter when they fail to address this structural asymmetry. A durable solution would require not only credible assurances of regime survival, but mechanisms that more evenly distribute risk over time. This is an exceedingly difficult task, yet one that sits at the heart of why coercive diplomacy so often struggles in a high-stakes proliferation crisis.
Addressing Alternative Explanations
Some analysts may argue that coercive diplomacy has failed in Iran due to poor implementation rather than theoretical limitations. From this perspective, inconsistent signaling, insufficient incentives, or shifting political priorities in the United States explain the breakdown of negotiations. Others may contend that Iran’s ideological orientation makes it uniquely resistant to coercion. While these explanations capture important elements of the problem, they remain incomplete. Implementation failures and ideological factors cannot fully account for the consistent cross-case pattern observed in Iraq, North Korea, and Libya. In each case, regime behavior aligned closely with perceptions of survival risk, regardless of ideological differences or variations in policy execution. This suggests that the core issue lies not only in how coercion is applied, but in how it is perceived by regimes whose primary objective is survival.
A historical parallel in a different setting can be drawn to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The oil embargo imposed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands threatened the stability of the Japanese Empire by cutting off access to critical resources. Although Japan recognized that attacking Pearl Harbor would be a high-risk gamble, its leaders judged that failing to respond to the embargo would likely result in the empire’s collapse within a few years (Pape 2026). Thus, in a similar way to the threat of regime change in Iran, the oil embargo threatened the very survival of the regime in Japan. Withdrawing from China or French Indochina in the hope of lifting the embargo was not considered a viable option for Japan, due to the humiliation and political collapse it would likely cause.
Rethinking the Strategy
The deeper challenge to coercive diplomacy in Iran lies not only in the psychology of regime survival but also in the structure of the global system itself. As great-power competition intensifies, the credibility of U.S.-led coercion erodes when adversaries find alternative sources of political, economic, and military support. Structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz remind us that the international order conditions state behavior more profoundly than bilateral pressure does. States seek security and not merely reassurance in a self-help system (Joyner 2013). For Iran, the emergence of a multi-polar world, anchored by China’s economic leverage and Russia’s willingness to defy Western sanctions, creates a permissive environment for resistance. This underscores that coercive diplomacy today operates not in isolation but within a geopolitical marketplace where assurances and alignments offset deterrent costs.
Iran, unlike smaller authoritarian regimes, possesses enough strategic depth to balance between major powers, bargaining for survival while exploiting systemic fragmentation. This equilibrium dynamic reduces vulnerability, makes coercion less credible, and strengthens the logic of nuclear latency as a hedging strategy. From a theoretical standpoint, understanding coercive failure thus requires a dual-level model that integrates regime survival instincts (domestic level) with systemic incentives for defiance (international level). Diplomacy falters not merely because Tehran fears for its regime, but because the global structure increasingly offers it viable escape routes. Recognizing this intersection marks a crucial step toward more adaptive and theoretically grounded approaches to nonproliferation.
Against this backdrop, the Iranian case underscores the need to rethink coercive diplomacy beyond a narrow focus on pressure and incentives, sticks and carrots. While credible threats remain essential, policymakers must pair them with credible, institutionalized assurances that compliance will not jeopardize regime survival. This does not require abandoning sanctions or deterrence. Rather, it demands recalibrating strategy to align external objectives with internal political realities.
Within such a recalibrated framework, several design principles become important. First, policymakers should link sanctions to small, verifiable milestones. This approach allows both sides to realize tangible benefits while reducing the risks associated with large, irreversible concessions. Second, they must design incentives that can withstand political transitions in Western governments. Mechanisms such as multilateral agreements or institutional guarantees can help mitigate the risk of abrupt policy reversals. Third, consistency is critical. If the policy shifts every four years with the election of a new president and congress in the United States, no adversary will trust the assurance of survival. Finally, communication plays a central role. Signaling through institutional channels that the objective is behavioral change rather than regime change may reduce existential fears that drive resistance. While such assurances are inherently difficult to guarantee, their absence significantly reduces the likelihood of successful coercive diplomacy.
Closing Thoughts
Coercive diplomacy remains a central instrument of international statecraft, particularly in efforts to address nuclear proliferation. The failure to restrain Iran does not reflect a lack of pressure; it reflects a failure to account for the internal logic that governs state behavior. No regime will willingly trade away a strategic capability if it believes that doing so invites its own collapse. Introducing the concept of a fifth pillar representing regime survival assurance helps explain why years of coercion have failed to produce durable restraint. Regimes adjust their behavior when they perceive compliance as safe; they resist when they perceive it as existentially threatening. The central challenge for policymakers lies not in intensifying pressure alone, but in reconciling external security objectives with the internal survival imperatives of target regimes. Without this alignment, coercive strategies will continue to fall short, leaving underlying conflicts unresolved and increasing the likelihood of future confrontation.
These implications reach far beyond the borders of Iran. Without incorporating regime survival into coercive strategy, future nuclear crises are likely to follow similar trajectories of escalation and mistrust. For scholars, they serve as reminders that international security theory is incomplete without the nuance of comparative politics. For policymakers, they illuminate a frustrating paradox: strategies designed to compel behavioral change often convince target regimes that compliance carries greater risk than defiance. Without resolving this tension, coercive diplomacy will continue to fall short, leaving underlying conflicts unresolved and increasing the likelihood of future confrontation.
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