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| Missiles launched from Iran are intercepted, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, on Sunday. (Amir Cohen/Reuters) |
| A month ago, President Donald Trump went to the Saudi capital and spoke grandiosely of peace. Before a gathering of Arab leaders, he heralded the “dawn of a bright new day for the great people of the Middle East.” Fractious conflicts would end, broken fences would mend. Trump decried the past generation of failed U.S. interventions and nation-building projects in the region. He offered “a new path” to the theocratic regime in Tehran and said he would be “happy” to forge a deal with Iran to make “the world a safer place.” With his penchant for ahistorical superlatives, Trump declared that, “for the first time in a thousand years, the world will look at this region not as a place of turmoil and strife, and war and death, but as a land of opportunity and hope.” But the events of recent days portend more turmoil and strife. The exchange of deadly strikes and missile barrages between Israel and Iran has led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, and has tipped the Middle East back into crisis. The countries’ neighbors are calling for de-escalation, and Trump has appealed, somewhat limply, for an end to hostilities and a diplomatic deal. Talks that had been scheduled in Oman between the United States and Iranian interlocutors were called off. The conflict flared early Friday when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its intent to target Iran’s nuclear and ballistic weapons programs. The resulting attacks hit numerous Iranian facilities and military installations, as well as neighborhoods populated with civilians. Iranian retaliation followed, and Israel’s robust air defense systems were not able to thwart all the bombardments. Waves of strikes and reprisals continued through the weekend.
There’s no immediate end in sight. Netanyahu has spent many years inveighing against the threat of Iran and appears to be following through on a long-standing desire to defang its regime. He narrowly survived a vote in Israel’s parliament last week that could have collapsed his government, but now has galvanized broad public support for a new war. “We are here because we are in the midst of an existential struggle that all Israeli citizens understand,” Netanyahu said Sunday afternoon in the central Israeli city of Bat Yam, where Iranian missiles had struck residential structures and killed 10 people. In an interview on Fox News, the Israeli leader suggested that the ongoing Israeli military campaign could result in the toppling of the Islamic republic “because the regime in Iran is very weak.” As my colleagues reported, Netanyahu, a wily strategist, appears to have shed his inhibitions and is pressing Israel’s perceived advantage. In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel by Hamas, the Israeli war machine has delivered hammer blows to a range of Iranian regional allies and proxies — including Hamas in war-ravaged Gaza, Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah, as well as targets in Syria, whose Iran-friendly regime collapsed last year. The post-Oct. 7 developments “changed the thinking in Israel in terms of its capability and taking risks,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence official, said to my colleagues. “When you don’t have Syria, when Hamas is nonexistent, and without Hezbollah, you can do almost whatever you want.” But, Citrinowicz warned, there doesn’t appear to be that much strategic thinking about what comes next. “So we expand [attacks] into [Iran’s] energy sector, so we fight a war of attrition that never ends,” he said. “And then what?” | ||||||||||||||
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| Smoke rises from a fire after an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot in Tehran on Sunday. (Getty Images) |
| Trump and his allies have said that the United States was not involved in Israel’s unilateral act. According to the Wall Street Journal, in a phone call last Monday, Trump explicitly told Netanyahu to refrain from striking Iran. But the United States’ removal of myriad personnel in the region ahead of the attacks indicated a degree of coordination regarding the strikes, while Netanyahu is receiving vociferous support from Republican hawks in Washington. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said that, if diplomacy fails, the United States should “go all in to make sure that when this operation is over, there’s nothing left standing in Iran regarding their nuclear program.” Graham backed the United States directly entering the war. “If that means providing bombs … if it means flying with Israel, fly with Israel,” he said. The fraught moment has split opinion within the American right, with influential conservative voices like broadcaster Tucker Carlson denouncing Washington “warmongers.” Trump, no matter his social media posts championing peace and diplomacy, has not done much to set the table for meaningful peace in the region. The war in Gaza smolders on, and polling shows that a majority of Jewish Israelis support the forced transfer of its Palestinian population. There’s little likelihood of the necessary political conditions emerging in Israel that could be the prelude to a grand diplomatic deal that would normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and usher in Trump’s promised “bright new day.” Instead, an expanding war is in the offing. Netanyahu is wielding Israel’s military preeminence in the Middle East and calling the bluff of an increasingly weak and battered regime in Tehran. Israel’s ability to wipe out a whole cadre of Iran’s top military officials showed how far its spy agencies have penetrated the country. With its proxies enfeebled and sensitive military and nuclear facilities under bombardment, Tehran’s options are narrowing. | ||||||
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| A demonstrator holds a placard with an image depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a protest in Brussels on Sunday. (Yves Herman/Reuters) |
| But backing Iran’s regime into a corner raises the stakes even more. Iran may decide to strike out at other targets on its borders or attempt to shut down shipping in the Persian Gulf, an escalation that would probably draw in the United States. Western diplomats should “be clear eyed that this was a major attack initiated by Israel, designed to up the ante against Tehran and drag the region into confrontation,” noted Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, in an email. It’s not clear how much of Iran’s nuclear capacity remains intact, but it may decide now is the moment to rush toward the production of a weapon. “Iran has limited options to respond directly,” wrote Kenneth Pollack, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute and a former top U.S. national security official. “The danger, however, is that Israel has opened a Pandora’s box: the worst Iranian response might also be the most likely—a decision to withdraw from its arms control commitments and build nuclear weapons in earnest.” Writing on X, Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East and international studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, reacted to footage depicting a residential area in Tehran struck by Israel: “The more of this sort of attacks on civilian targets and neighborhoods, the more Israel will be making the case with the Iranian public that the country should get nuclear weapons.” Abbas Amanat, a professor emeritus of history at Yale University and an Iran scholar, argued that the war is thinning the grounds for talks. “If Iran wants to negotiate with the Americans, they have to have something to negotiate about,” he told me. Amanat said that neither Israeli nor U.S. officials appear to be reckoning with the profound uncertainty that would follow a collapse of the regime. “If you’re engaging in a campaign of this scale, what is the future of Iran?” he asked. Does Israel imagine “a country subordinated” to its interests — a scenario that’s highly unlikely. Or, Amanat asked, do they seek the disintegration of the Iranian state, akin to what unfolded in Libya in the wake of NATO’s intervention in its 2011 civil war. That would lead, Amanat said, to “total chaos” and “a wasteland” — a wasteland, as an ancient Roman once put it, that even Trump would struggle to call peace. |