What is Israel's Endgame with Iran?
By Robin Wright- June 16, 2025
After
the first cycle of attacks between Israel and Iran, on Friday, the
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a direct appeal to
Iranians to rise up against theocratic rule. Operation Rising Lion—the
code name for Israel’s sweeping assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities and
military leaders—was “clearing the path” for them, he said, in a video
released by his administration. “The time has come,” he said, “to unite
around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your
freedom from an evil and oppressive regime.” That regime, he added, has
“never been weaker.” Then, in Farsi, with Israel’s flag behind him,
Netanyahu invoked the rallying cry that mobilized tens of thousands of
Iranians during the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022.
“Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” he said. On Saturday, he claimed, in another
video, that senior Iranian leaders were already “packing their bags” and
preparing to flee.
Israel’s campaign, militarily and
rhetorically, has quickly evolved beyond its initial targets. Over the
weekend, it hit Iran’s energy facilities, including a gas depot and an
oil refinery, triggering huge fires and spewing smoke across the
sprawling capital of about ten million people. “Tehran is burning,” the
Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, boasted on X. Energy resources
were struck in other cities, too, sabotaging Iran’s main sources of
revenue. Israeli officials also began telling local and foreign media
outlets that assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader
since 1989, was “not off limits.” (President Donald Trump reportedly
vetoed the idea, but the fact that Israeli leaders even discussed it
with their counterparts in Washington reflects how far they’re willing
to go.)
Israel has long had military superiority over Iran. In
the past two years, it has conducted brazen air strikes and novel covert
operations against the Islamic Republic’s allies across the Middle
East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Popular
Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. It has
assassinated senior political leaders and killed thousands of fighters.
Israel has even more momentum now. But achieving conclusive results will
be tough—whether that’s obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying
its sophisticated arsenal of missiles, crippling its economy, or
spurring a counter-revolution.
“The initial attack was so
spectacularly successful that it’s hard not to raise your goals,”
General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., who led U.S. Central Command from
2019 to 2022, told me. But, he cautioned, “You’ve got to know what’s
feasible.” Israel can “significantly” degrade Iran’s nuclear program,
“but I don’t think it’s possible to completely eliminate it.” In 2020,
McKenzie carried out President Trump’s order to kill General Qassem
Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, who
masterminded dozens of attacks on U.S. targets. The Quds Force has
continued to orchestrate attacks on U.S. personnel in the region,
however.
Ehud Barak, a former Israeli Prime Minister and a
retired general, estimated that Israel could delay Iran’s nuclear
program only by several weeks. “Even the U.S. cannot delay them by more
than a few months,” Barak said, on Friday, on CNN. Iran has dispersed
its nuclear program—which Tehran claims is only for peaceful energy
production—among different parts of the country. One of its primary
facilities is at Fordow, which is buried more than two hundred feet
under the Zagros Mountains, near the holy city of Qom.
Israel and
the international community have long worried that Iran’s program could
be expanded to build a bomb. In Washington, the Arms Control
Association, a nonpartisan group led by nuclear experts and former U.S.
officials, warned that Operation Rising Lion could backfire by
“strengthening Tehran’s resolve to advance its sensitive nuclear
activities and possibly proceed to weaponization, a step it has not
taken up to this point.”
Israel’s elimination of Iran’s military
brass may be a setback, “but it is not a strategy for ending Iran’s
program,” Wendy Sherman, who led the U.S. team that negotiated the
nuclear deal signed by Iran and the world’s six major powers, in 2015,
told me. (Trump unilaterally withdrew from that deal, which placed
limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for economic-sanctions
relief, in 2018.) In just two days, Israel assassinated the chief of
staff of the Iranian armed forces, the top commander of the
Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the head of the country’s
aerospace-and-missile program. “The Supreme Leader will just replace
them with their deputies, and then their deputies, and their deputies
after that,” Sherman said.
The odds of Israeli-inspired regime
change also seem small right now. On X, Danny Citrinowicz, the former
head of Iran analysis for Israeli military intelligence, warned that
Netanyahu’s government has embarked on a war based on the “illusion”
that it can suck in the U.S. for the “hidden goal” of overthrowing the
Islamic Republic. “The bigger problem,” he wrote, is “how exactly . . .
Israel intend[s] to end the war and preserve its achievements without
entering a war of attrition” that becomes open-ended, like its war in
Gaza, with no clear exit strategy.
In 2003, President George W.
Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to destroy Baghdad’s nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons. The implicit goal was also to topple
then President Saddam Hussein. However, Iraq turned out not to have any
weapons of mass destruction—and the U.S. was stuck there for eight
turbulent years, an occupation that generated the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria, which was led by prisoners detained by American forces.
Israel’s opening salvos in the current conflict are “reminiscent of our
shock and awe going into Iraq, when everyone thought we were so
powerful,” Sherman noted. “And then shock and awe became mired down.” In
any country under attack, people tend to rally around the flag. Persian
nationalism dates back some five thousand years, when tribes united to
create the world’s first major empire. “I don’t think that dies easily,”
Sherman said. “And you don’t know what you’re creating when you try to
destroy.”
For more than three decades, I’ve had a running
dialogue with Nasser Hadian, a U.S.-educated political scientist who has
taught at both Columbia and the University of Tehran. We spoke again—I
in Washington, he in Tehran—this weekend, via WhatsApp. About eighty per
cent of Iran’s ninety-two million people oppose the country’s hard-line
leadership, he said, but only a “very small number” would embrace
Netanyahu’s call for regime change. Israel’s onslaught makes any
“attempt to replace the government” less likely, at least for now. Even
with possible unrest among minorities on the geographic and political
periphery of Iran, such as the Baloch and the Kurds, the Iranian state
still “has enough support to survive,” he said.
Jonathan
Panikoff, a former career U.S. intelligence officer, recently wrote that
many Israelis once thought political change in Iran would “prompt a new
and better day,” because “nothing could be worse than the current
theocratic regime.” But, he cautioned, history proves the alternatives
can “always be worse”; the more likely outcome, Panikoff argued, in a
piece for the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington,
is not a democracy but a “Revolutionary Guard Corps–istan” that is even
more radical. “In such a case, Israel might find itself in a perpetual,
ongoing, and far more intense war that is no longer in the shadows, as
it has been for years.” Or, other experts are warning, Iran could
devolve into a failing state bogged down in internal chaos, as happened
in Iraq, with unintended consequences that rippled throughout the
region.
There is, as yet, no organized or disciplined opposition
group—either in Iran or in exile—capable of marching into Tehran and
seizing power, Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International
Crisis Group, told me. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, who was
overthrown in the 1979 Revolution, has lived outside Washington, D.C.,
for more than four decades. I once asked him at a Washington dinner
party what language he dreamed in. “English or French,” he replied. He
couldn’t remember dreaming in Farsi.
Now under siege, Tehran has
few options. Its only “good strategy” is not to appear willing to back
down, Vaez said. Its vast energy resources and geostrategic position in
the Persian Gulf do provide some leverage, and oil prices have surged
since hostilities erupted. The price of U.S. crude jumped seven per cent
in the first twenty-four hours. Iran has the world’s third-largest oil
reserves; it also controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a
fifth of global energy supplies pass each day. If the war spills beyond
the Middle East, Vaez said, Tehran may be hoping that international
energy markets become even more rattled and that “Trump would blink
first and get Israel to stop.”
There appears to be no off-ramp
yet, as the destruction and death toll mount in both countries. In Iran,
more than two hundred people have been killed, and thousands more
injured. Israel, in turn, has been deeply shaken by retaliatory missile
attacks, which have killed at least twenty and injured hundreds. On
Saturday, Iran pulled out of nuclear negotiations that had been
scheduled to take place in Oman the next day. The Trump Administration
is insisting that diplomacy is not dead, however. On Sunday, the
President said, “Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a
deal.” Many calls and meetings were happening behind the scenes, he
claimed, on Truth Social. “I do a lot, and never get credit for
anything, but that’s OK, the PEOPLE understand. MAKE THE MIDDLE EAST
GREAT AGAIN!”
On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi,
charged that Israel is undermining attempts at diplomacy on nuclear
issues. Tehran has been willing to limit its controversial program, but
also does not want to lose its right to enrich uranium at low levels for
peaceful applications, he told foreign diplomats. (As a signatory to
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to produce
civilian nuclear energy.) Iran needs nuclear energy to meet the demands
of its growing population; sporadic blackouts are already commonplace.
In
April, the Trump Administration set a sixty-day limit on negotiations
for a new nuclear deal. (The 2015 pact took two years of tortured
diplomacy and ended up as a hundred-and-fifty-nine-page document, plus
annexes.) Israel’s attack on Friday happened on day sixty-one, Trump
noted. Hadian, the political scientist, told me that many Iranians now
believe that the U.S. engaged in “coördinated deception” with Israel.
Just getting back to the table will be hard. Reaching a new deal will
almost certainly be even harder, despite Iran’s losses. Revolutionary
regimes are inherently paranoid. Like Trump’s efforts to end Russia’s
war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza, the President is unlikely to be able
to end the new hostilities—in an enduring way—quickly.