For two decades, Israel’s position on Iran’s nuclear program could be fairly summarized as follows: “We’d prefer the Americans eliminate it, but we’ll do it ourselves if we have to.” The current Israeli strategy seeks to have the best of both worlds by unilaterally burning through as much of that program as possible, then presenting the United States with the prospect of delivering the coup de grace: a knockout blow to the Fordow uranium enrichment plant, which is buried half a mile inside a mountain in Qom province. Only 15-ton Massive Ordinance Penetrators fired from American B-2 bombers can collapse Fordow from above. From below, Plan B is an Israeli special forces raid, which would be far more daring and complex than that which Israeli commandos pulled off last September when they destroyed an Iranian missile base constructed just a few hundred feet beneath another mountain in western Syria.
The Israeli military has spent the last five days creating amenable conditions for either contingency. On June 16, it destroyed upward of 70 Iranian air defense platforms and mobile missile launchers. To date, it has claimed to have taken out 120 launchers, a third of Iran’s capability, which accounts for the shrinking size of the salvos Iran has unleashed in retaliation: Since this campaign started, Iran has fired 370 missiles, whereas it fired more than half that number in a single night on Oct. 1, 2024, during the last direct confrontation with Israel. While it’s certainly the case that Israel is expending its own air defenses, particularly its Arrow interceptors, to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, it still has ongoing U.S. help on land and at sea in the Mediterranean. So far, even Iranian strikes on apartment buildings and now a major hospital have not swayed Israeli public opinion against a campaign long in the making.
The largest casualty is conventional wisdom. No assessments produced on the feasibility of attacking Iran in years past envisaged Mossad operatives constructing a three-story drone warehouse in southern Tehran, right under the noses of one of the most formidable intelligence services in the Middle East. Israel probably has hundreds, if not thousands, of assets still in play on the ground scattered across Iran, providing targeting data to Israeli jets and directly sabotaging Iran’s defense and command-and-control systems. Even Iranian officials acknowledge the extent of their enemy’s infiltration, with one suggesting kamikaze drones installed on local rooftops and activated remotely.
Also unforeseen by even the most imaginative military analysts is that in less than a week, Israel managed to achieve in Iran what Vladimir Putin has failed to do in three-and-a-half years in Ukraine: establish total air supremacy. U.S. aircraft would now enjoy operational freedom in any hypothetical intervention, without their own suppression of enemy air defenses, which would have lengthened any such intervention and eaten into the American arsenal.
No doubt this is a tantalizing prospect for Trump. The New York Times reports that he is awestruck by Israel’s achievements after watching them unfold in real time on Fox News and is increasingly desperate to claim some of the credit. And though his MAGA coalition is being torn in half by the will-he-or-won’t-he debate now raging, and though he badly wants a Nobel Peace Prize he stands little chance of acquiring, Trump may well calculate that his legacy could now involve doing at low cost what four successive administrations (including his first one) could not: terminating the most prolonged national security preoccupation of the post-Cold War era.
So far, Israel’s coercive messaging to the White House, that nothing succeeds quite like success, appears to be working. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” Trump posted on social media, either out of hubris or in a nod to as-yet-undeclared U.S. intelligence and logistical support for Operation Rising Lion, as Israel’s war is known. In a further sign that he may be leaning toward the kinetic option, Trump told reporters that his demand of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom he has vaguely threatened to assassinate, is “very simple – unconditional surrender. That means I’ve had it. I’ve had it. I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there. They had bad intentions. You know, for 40 years they’ve been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn’t like. They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies, and now they’re not bullies anymore.”
It is certainly true that Iran’s power projection project is no longer what it once was. The regime’s senior military command and regional proxy apparatus have been hollowed out in the two years following the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s multinational response to that atrocity. Among those killed on June 13 were Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces; Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC); and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the IRGC Aerospace Forces, which is in charge of Iran’s missile program.
Hezbollah, formerly Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ greatest deterrent in the Levant, has been strategically neutered following the assassination of its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, and the maiming of its middle cadres in Israel’s exploding pagers operation. The Party of God’s hold on Lebanese state institutions is shaky for the first time in decades, and it isn’t shy about proclaiming itself an idle spectator to the current war, if for nothing else than a sense of schadenfreude given the mullahs’ failure to come to its rescue last year.
Iraq’s Shiite militias face their own quandary. Preemptively attacking U.S. installations such as al-Asad airbase in Anbar province or the al-Tanf facility in southern Syria would only invite American participation, the very thing Tehran is keen to avoid. U.S. intelligence suggesting an imminent attack on American forces in the region by Iranian proxies is what led Trump to assassinate Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. (Israel killed Soleimani’s successor, Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani, on June 13, compounding a lack of leadership for those proxy forces.)
Moreover, Quds Force-controlled militias in Iraq have their own future to worry about, and for the first time they must consider a version of that future without foreign state sponsorship. Other groups within the Popular Mobilization Forces, the umbrella group for Shiite paramilitaries in Iraq, are beholden to domestic cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani or nationalist warlord Muqtada al-Sadr, both of whom oppose Iranian hegemony in Iraq and stand to gain if it is vitiated as a direct consequence of the current crisis. All of which puts Tehran in a bind.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump “told senior aides late Tuesday that he approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program.” (Trump replied on social media that the newspaper “has No idea what my thoughts are concerning Iran!”) Khamenei will likely have to voluntarily agree to end all enrichment efforts as part of any last-ditch diplomatic agreement, forswearing the one insurance policy his regime has sought for most of its existence, or risk having enrichment efforts ended by external actors.
As Iran expert Afshon Ostovar notes, Khamenei could attempt a nuclear breakout now or bet that continued war will prompt the Iranian population to rally round the flag and defend the nation from foreign invasion. So far, the damage wrought by Israel, including strikes on the Natanz facility and the Isfahan enriched uranium metal production line, as well as the assassination of hard-to-replace nuclear scientists, may have complicated the first option. Nor have six straight days of targeted bombing yet galvanized the second. It remains to be seen if a regime hated as much from within as it is from without will inspire personal sacrifice on the part of Iranians to save 2,700 buried centrifuges.
Israel has lit a match that it won’t extinguish. Ending this operation with Iran’s nuclear program still largely intact or salvageable would be taken as a Pyrrhic victory by the Israeli military and Netanyahu government and seen as an unworthy sacrifice by an Israeli public forced to cower in shelters. Telegraphing that Rising Lion would take “weeks, not days” was an early indication Israel has no intention of quitting until its objectives are met, with or without a helping hand from its ally.
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