Just when it looked as though the Americans and Iranians had reached an agreement — one that deferred the most important issue, the nuclear file, and failed to address the other one, the missile question — everything appears to be back on the table.

A nerve-wracking tug of war, a back-and-forth in which the 2 protagonists square off in the cognitive sphere, where words stand for perceptions, and perceptions mark the blurred line between victory and defeat. Because the real question is no longer the nuclear programme or the missiles, but who can genuinely be perceived as the winner.

Iran has held its ground and weathered the Israeli-American steamroller, played the Hormuz card to maximum effect, and put its strategic "resilience" on the table. The United States has destroyed much of the military-industrial power that Tehran had built up over the last 25 years, but it has not forced a surrender: the regime is still standing, and today it is that very same regime sitting at the negotiating table, setting conditions, leaning in and pulling back, buoyed by its own staying power.

Anyone who believed that 50 days of air and missile strikes would be enough to break Tehran was mistaken. Iran is not a banana republic. And then there is Israel, which threw all its technological and military superiority into the contest — along with its "creativity" — yet, faced with a country as large and formidable as Iran, revealed its structural limits: in manpower, in strategic depth, in sheer "mass", and so on. For Tel Aviv, all the big questions remain unresolved. The nuclear programme, the missiles, and a regime that is still standing and deeply hostile — while in Lebanon, Hezbollah has spectacularly raised its head once again.

In short, this crisis seems to have no end in sight, tangled up in apparently insoluble questions, where the stakes are not tangible outcomes but something far more elusive: credibility and reputation.

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