February 19, 2026
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Introduction: The “Unprecedented Escalation”
When Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stepped before reporters on Thursday to describe the situation around Iran as “unprecedented escalation,” he was not engaging in rhetorical excess. In the waters surrounding the Islamic Republic, the United States has assembled one of the most formidable concentrations of naval and air power deployed to the Middle East in a generation — a force whose sheer scale announces that Washington is preparing for something more consequential than coercive signalling alone.
Two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are now either in or en route to the region: the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), which has been positioned roughly 700 kilometres from the Iranian coast since late January, and the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), the most advanced carrier in the American fleet, reportedly due to arrive as early as this weekend. Together with their strike groups — comprising Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, cruisers, Littoral Combat Ships, and at least one nuclear-powered submarine — the United States has assembled approximately twelve surface combatants in or near the Middle East. The air component is no less formidable: F-22 Raptors have been flown to RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom; F-35 stealth fighters have been repositioned to Morón Air Base in Spain; F-15E Strike Eagles are massed at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan alongside A-10C ground-attack aircraft; and dozens of F-16s have been observed transiting from bases in Germany, Italy, and the continental United States. KC-135 aerial tankers — the logistical enablers of sustained strike operations — are operating throughout the region. By mid-week, CNN and CBS reported that the US military would be ready to launch strikes against Iranian targets “as early as this weekend,” pending a final presidential decision that, as of this writing, has not been made.
This article situates these developments within their broader strategic context: the diplomacy now fracturing in Geneva, the domestic crisis consuming the Islamic Republic, the architecture of the US–Iran nuclear impasse, the Russia–Iran partnership and its structural limitations, and the geopolitical calculus that makes the coming weeks among the most dangerous in the modern history of the Persian Gulf.
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I. The Road to This Moment: Maximum Pressure, Nuclear Thresholds, and the June 2025 Strikes
The current crisis did not emerge from a vacuum. Its proximate origins lie in the Trump administration’s return to — and intensification of — its “maximum pressure” strategy against Tehran. Shortly after taking office for a second time, President Trump reimposed sweeping sanctions targeting Iranian political and financial figures, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly declaring that senior Iranian leaders were moving tens of millions of dollars out of the country — a claim he characterised as evidence that the regime was “abandoning ship.” The administration simultaneously threatened military intervention should Iran continue its crackdown on a mass protest movement that had erupted across the country, driven initially by economic grievances and subsequently transformed into a broader movement against the Islamic Republic’s governing structure.
The crisis acquired a more acute military dimension in June 2025, when Israel launched a sustained campaign of airstrikes against Iran — strikes that the United States joined directly, targeting the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Nuclear Facility, and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center in what became known as Operation Midnight Hammer. The operation involved B-2A Spirit stealth bombers, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and F-22 fighter support, and resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people according to subsequent reporting. The strikes succeeded in damaging Iran’s nuclear infrastructure but did not destroy its programme outright. Iran’s response was to suspend cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a move formally enacted into law by the Iranian parliament in July 2025, and to accelerate elements of its surviving nuclear activities. Iranian uranium enriched to 60% — close to the 90% weapons-grade threshold — remained in stockpile. The nuclear clock, far from being stopped, had begun ticking faster.
The current round of diplomacy is therefore not a first attempt at resolution but a second, far more fraught one — conducted in the shadow of a military campaign that demonstrated both Washington’s willingness to use force and the limits of what airstrikes alone can achieve against a determined proliferator.
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II. The Geneva Talks: Guiding Principles Without Foundations
Against this backdrop, the United States and Iran held two rounds of indirect talks — the first in Oman on February 6, the second in Geneva on February 17. The diplomatic architecture of these negotiations is significant: they have been conducted indirectly, mediated by third parties, reflecting the depth of mistrust between the two governments. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reported afterward that the sides had agreed on “guiding principles” for a potential deal — a formulation deliberately vague enough to sustain the appearance of progress without committing either party to substance. US Vice President JD Vance offered a notably cooler assessment, stating that Tehran had yet to acknowledge all of Washington’s “red lines.”
Those red lines illuminate the fundamental gap between the two parties. The Trump administration is demanding that Iran forgo uranium enrichment entirely on its own soil — a maximalist demand that goes substantially beyond the enrichment limits established under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Washington has also sought to expand the negotiations beyond the nuclear file to encompass Iran’s ballistic missile programme — both the size of its stockpile and the range of its missiles — and its support for regional proxy forces including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. Iran has categorically rejected this framing. Tehran maintains that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, insists it will negotiate only on nuclear matters, and has declared its missile capabilities non-negotiable. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressing these demands directly in a speech on Tuesday, was characteristically blunt: “If that’s the case, there is no room for negotiation; but if negotiations are truly to take place, determining the outcome of the negotiations in advance is a wrong and foolish act.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered her own assessment with equal directness: “Iran would be very wise to make a deal.” She added, pointedly, that “there are many reasons and arguments that one could make for a strike against Iran.” The talks in Geneva lasted only a couple of hours, prompting the Stimson Center’s Barbara Slavin to observe that she saw “no basis for an agreement yet.” Reuters reported that Iran agreed during the Geneva session to submit a written proposal addressing US concerns — a procedural step that, while potentially constructive, falls far short of the substantive convergence that a durable agreement would require.
Iran has reportedly agreed to a further round of talks in Oman next week, and sources indicate another meeting may take place in Switzerland thereafter. The diplomatic channel, however frail, remains open. Yet the military context within which it operates — 12 warships, two carrier strike groups, hundreds of aircraft, a presidential order for full force positioning by mid-March — signals that Washington is simultaneously preparing for the alternative.
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III. Russia’s Strategic Ambiguity: Partnership Without Alliance
It is within this context that Peskov’s statement on Thursday acquires its full complexity. Russia is not, in any meaningful sense, a neutral party in the current crisis. The January 2025 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty between Moscow and Tehran — a 47-article, 20-year framework covering defence, counterterrorism, energy, cybersecurity, peaceful nuclear cooperation, and regional security — formalized what had become, over the preceding decade, a relationship of substantial strategic depth. Since 2022, Iran has supplied Russia with an estimated 6,000 Shahed drones (rebranded as Geran in Russian service) for use in Ukraine, along with guided aerial bombs, artillery ammunition, and close-range ballistic missiles. Russia, in turn, has provided Iran with unprecedented levels of defence cooperation including assistance on missiles, electronics, and air-defence systems. Their bilateral trade grew by 15.5% in the year before the treaty was signed, reaching $3.77 billion.
The Russia–Iran relationship has, moreover, acquired a trilateral dimension. This week, under the “Maritime Security Belt 2026” framework, Russia, China, and Iran deployed naval vessels for joint exercises in the Strait of Hormuz region. The Russian Steregushchiy-class corvette Stoikiy docked at Iran’s strategic naval base in Bandar Abbas on Wednesday morning. These exercises — conducted simultaneously with US–Iran nuclear talks in Geneva — constitute a pointed demonstration of alignment, even if their operational significance is limited.
Yet the partnership’s limits are as analytically important as its depth. The January 2025 treaty conspicuously omits a mutual defence clause — a structural choice that distinguishes it from Russia’s agreement with North Korea and reflects Moscow’s deliberate unwillingness to commit to direct military confrontation with the United States or Israel. Russia has refrained from supplying Iran with its most advanced weapons systems, in part to avoid provoking Israeli retaliation and in part because its own military production is strained by the war in Ukraine. In this structural sense, the Russia–Iran alignment represents what scholars have termed “strategic transactionalism” — a relationship of genuine convergence around shared interests (countering US hegemony, evading Western sanctions, mutual economic support) that falls well short of the mutual security commitments characteristic of a true alliance.
Peskov’s Thursday statement embodies this ambiguity with precision. Russia calls on “our Iranian friends and all parties in the region to exercise restraint and caution” — a formulation that avoids explicitly criticising US military deployments, preserves Moscow’s diplomatic room for manoeuvre, and signals concern about escalation without committing Russia to any particular course of action should events deteriorate. The concurrent naval exercises with Iran’s navy signal solidarity; the diplomatic language signals that Russia’s solidarity has limits.
The structural logic is not difficult to discern. Russia cannot afford, at this moment, a second major conflict in which it is, even indirectly, implicated. Its resources are committed in Ukraine. A large-scale US military campaign against Iran would disrupt global energy markets, potentially benefitting Russia as an alternative supplier to European customers — but it would also demonstrate American willingness and capacity to use overwhelming force against a Russian treaty partner, a precedent with obvious implications for Moscow’s own security calculus. The Kremlin’s interest is therefore neither a war nor a capitulation, but a negotiated outcome that preserves Iranian statehood and regional influence while avoiding the escalatory spiral that could draw in major powers.
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IV. The Strait of Hormuz: The Strategic Stakes of a Potential Conflict
Any serious assessment of the current crisis must reckon with the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow waterway, roughly 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman between Iran and Oman, is among the most consequential geographic chokepoints in the global economy. Approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas transits through it daily, including the bulk of crude exports from the Persian Gulf states. Any military conflict in the region would carry catastrophic risks for global energy markets — not merely through deliberate Iranian interdiction, but through the structural disruption of commerce, insurance, and navigation that armed conflict invariably produces.
Iran has demonstrated, this week, that it understands the strategic leverage this geography confers. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) conducted large-scale naval exercises in the Strait on February 16, the day before the Geneva talks resumed. Iran’s military has issued Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) indicating active airspace hazards, with reports of 22 gunfire zones, drone activity near Tehran, and tests of advanced anti-ship ballistic missiles. On February 3, six IRGC gunboats attempted to stop and seize a US tanker in the Strait. Khamenei himself, in his Tuesday speech, referenced these capabilities with deliberate menace: “A warship is certainly a dangerous weapon, but even more dangerous is the weapon capable of sinking it.” He offered no specifics — a calibrated ambiguity that served its deterrent purpose without committing Iran to a specific red line.
The Wall Street Journal reported that senior Pentagon officials have presented the White House with a range of strike options, from limited, targeted attacks on Iranian nuclear and missile facilities to broader operations designed to degrade Tehran’s regional military capabilities. The scale of the current force deployment — which analysts describe as the largest since the 2025 operations — suggests that the administration is at minimum seriously planning for the more expansive end of this spectrum.
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V. Iran’s Internal Crisis: The Domestic Dimension
The military and diplomatic dimensions of this crisis cannot be understood in isolation from Iran’s internal situation. The protest movement that erupted in late 2025 and intensified in early 2026 has confronted the Islamic Republic with its most severe domestic challenge since the 2009 Green Movement. Driven initially by economic grievances — inflation, unemployment, currency collapse — the movement evolved into a broader challenge to the regime’s legitimacy, with mass demonstrations demanding political change. Trump’s explicit encouragements to Iranian protesters — including statements that “help is on the way” — have deepened the domestic dimension of the crisis and complicated the regime’s ability to portray external pressure as purely a matter of nuclear policy.
The Iranian government’s response — including a wave of executions that Trump claimed to have temporarily interrupted through diplomatic pressure — has further polarised the international community and provided the Trump administration with additional justifications, beyond the nuclear file, for its confrontational posture. The US Treasury’s designation of Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni and businessman Babak Zanjani under sanctions related to the crackdown on protesters in January 2026 signals Washington’s intent to link the nuclear and human rights tracks of its Iran policy.
The regime’s survival calculus in this environment is deeply constrained. A nuclear deal on Trump’s terms would require Tehran to abandon the very instruments — uranium enrichment, missile capabilities, proxy networks — that the Islamic Republic has historically regarded as its principal deterrents against external attack and internal subversion. Accepting such a deal in the context of mass domestic protest and military encirclement risks projecting weakness at precisely the moment when projecting strength is existentially important. Rejecting it risks a military campaign whose consequences, as the June 2025 strikes demonstrated, the regime cannot fully control or absorb.
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VI. The Regional Calculus: Neighbours in the Balance
The responses of Iran’s neighbours reveal the extraordinary diplomatic pressures that a potential conflict would generate. Saudi Arabia has called for a peaceful, diplomatic resolution. The United Arab Emirates has explicitly stated it will not permit military operations from its territory or airspace. Jordan has publicly insisted its territory would not be used as a base to attack Iran — a statement that sits in some tension with independent reporting about the scale of US air assets positioned at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. Turkey has opposed American military action and offered to mediate. Qatar has engaged in regional diplomacy to de-escalate tensions. Iraq has warned that further escalation would threaten regional stability. Pakistan has urged restraint. Even Israel, whose strikes on Iran set much of this in motion, is reportedly preparing for the possibility of US-authorised operations against Iran’s ballistic missile system.
The near-unanimity of regional calls for restraint reflects a shared understanding that a large-scale conflict would be extraordinarily difficult to contain. Iran’s network of proxy forces — degraded by previous strikes but not destroyed — retains the capacity to strike US bases, Gulf energy infrastructure, and Israeli population centres. The possibility of Iranian mine-laying in the Strait of Hormuz, even as a last resort, introduces energy market disruption risks that would propagate through the global economy far beyond the immediate theatre of operations.
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VII. Structural Analysis: Why This Moment Is Different
Several analysts contacted by major media outlets have argued that the current moment is qualitatively different from previous rounds of US–Iran tension. Former Pentagon official Jasmine El-Gamal, speaking to Drop Site News, captured this assessment with characteristic directness: “This is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. This is not the negotiations of last year or the year before. They’re backed into a corner. There’s no off ramp.”
Several structural factors support this assessment. First, the precedent set by Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 has fundamentally changed the risk calculus on both sides: the United States has demonstrated it will act; Iran has survived and absorbed a strike without capitulating, which arguably hardens its negotiating position. Second, Iran’s nuclear programme, despite the June 2025 strikes, remains active, and intelligence assessments reportedly warn that Tehran may be approaching key nuclear thresholds — the possession of sufficient enriched material for a weapon, or the capability to produce one within a compressed timeframe. Third, the Trump administration’s diplomatic demands — zero enrichment on Iranian soil, missile programme limitations, cessation of proxy support — are structurally incompatible with what any Iranian government can accept domestically, particularly one facing mass protest and existential pressure. Fourth, the scale of the current military buildup — two carrier strike groups, F-22s forward deployed, refuelling infrastructure in place — is not consistent with a bluff.
Against these factors must be weighed the enduring rationality of all principal actors in avoiding a war whose consequences are genuinely uncertain and potentially catastrophic. The fact of diplomatic engagement in Geneva, and the apparent agreement to continue talking, suggests that neither Washington nor Tehran has entirely foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated outcome. Russia’s intervention — however limited in practical effect — adds a voice, however cautious, for the diplomatic track.
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Conclusion: The Coming Weeks
What happens next will depend, in the short term, on whether Iran submits a written proposal that provides Washington with sufficient grounds to forestall military action, on whether Trump makes the decision to authorise strikes before diplomatic alternatives are exhausted, and on whether the regional and international architecture can generate sufficient pressure for a negotiated pause. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 28 to discuss Iran — a meeting whose outcome may signal whether the US–Israel axis is moving toward or away from military action. The Pentagon reports that full US force positioning in the region will be complete by mid-March.
The stakes cannot be overstated. A US military campaign against Iran — even a limited one targeting nuclear and missile facilities — would almost certainly trigger Iranian retaliation against US bases and Gulf energy infrastructure, risk wider regional escalation involving Israeli and Hezbollah forces, disrupt global energy markets, further inflame Iran’s domestic crisis in unpredictable directions, and deepen the rift between the Western-led order and the Russia–China–Iran alignment. It would not, as the June 2025 experience demonstrated, permanently resolve the nuclear question.
Russia’s call for restraint is, in this context, more than diplomatic formality. It is a recognition that the world is closer to a genuinely destabilising conflict than it has been in many years — one that no major power, including Russia, would emerge from unchanged. Whether that recognition translates into effective diplomatic action, or whether it remains an aspiration expressed in press statements while events on the ground follow their own logic, is the defining question of this moment.