I have been obsessively studying Middle Eastern politics lately, and one relatively simple yet naive judgment that is widely overlooked by the market is: most current analysts and traders severely underestimate the sustainability of the US-Iran conflict.

The mainstream narrative is—both sides have strategic demands, and as long as some agreement is reached, a ceasefire is the only endgame. But there is a tricky blind spot here: after the short two-month Ten Days War’s disastrous defeat and ongoing struggle, the legitimacy of the Iranian regime’s rule has almost been discredited, and the fragility of the regime and military forces under Khamenei has been fully exposed.
Iranian bazaar merchants and grassroots supporters have taken to the streets in protest, which is significantly different from the internal protests of past years.
Conversely, for a regime that has written anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-imperialist sentiments into its constitution, this war has instead become a tool to re-legitimize itself and shift domestic contradictions.
Under this structure, Iran has no motivation to let the war end easily—ending the conflict is almost equivalent to accelerating the regime’s collapse or at least pushing internal contradictions into a more visible, critical stage.
Currently, Iran’s internal factions are highly divided. Under this premise of internal instability, most analysts’ expectations of a “deal/war end deadline” may just be an overly optimistic illusion.
Until Iran’s internal politics settle, they will not voluntarily cease hostilities—this is the result of multi-layered strategic games and a common choice among Iran’s factions under survival pressure.
Another more tricky dimension involves the U.S. stock market, especially AI leaders and upstream companies in the supply chain; their earnings are real, combined with the resilience of the U.S. economy.
I believe the strength of tech stocks is a reasonable trend validated by both fundamental performance and macroeconomic environment.
But at the same time, from the perspectives of macro interest rates and net liquidity, there is no clear reversal or easing in the short term—whether in interest rates or balance sheet pressures.
Therefore, my conclusion is: U.S. stocks are unlikely to crash significantly, but liquidity-sensitive assets (cryptos, certain short-term bonds) may face more prolonged, year-scale pressures.