The Iranian Calculus: Escalation, Sovereignty, and the Limits of Coercion
(By Khalid Masood) I. Introduction: A Crisis No Longer Contained “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks — we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong.”— President Donald Trump, Prime-Time Address, April 2026 When the White House deployed rhetoric of civilisational erasure, it…