Duel in the Desert

On June 12th Israel unleashed a series of meticulously-planned strikes that damaged Iranian nuclear facilities and missile sites, destroyed gas depots, and, critically, eliminate scores of top regime officials. While Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei remains alive, his most important deputies—including Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of the armed forces, and Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are dead. Moreover, the message from Tel Aviv is grim and unmistakable: anyone who succeeds them, automatically gets moved to the top of the hit list.

A few years ago, the sudden, near-simultaneous killing of Bagheri, Salami, and a host of other senior leaders would have been well-nigh unthinkable. Over three decades, the hard-liners who control Iran’s regime had built up what seemed like a formidable system of deterrence, stockpiling ballistic missiles, developing and advancing a thinly veiled nuclear enrichment program. Most importantly, they established a network of foreign proxies that could routinely harass Israeli and U.S. forces, not to mention threaten critical supply chain routes which sustain the global economy.

But America’s enemies have always evidenced a tendency to overplay their hand, and Iran’s hard-liners proved no exception. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the regime’s leaders opted for a campaign of maximum aggression. Rather than letting Hamas and Israel battle, they unleashed their proxies at Israeli targets. Israel, in turn, seized upon the opportunity to expand its offensive beyond Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu, besieged legally and lagging in the polls, saw an opportunity both to enhance his political position and more importantly, deliver a decisive blow against his country’s foes. In its devastating strikes, Israel succeeded in severely degrading Hezbollah, the most powerful of Tehran’s proxy groups, and eviscerating Iranian positions in Syria—indirectly contributing to the collapse of the Assad regime. Iran responded to this aggression by unleashing the two largest ballistic missile attacks ever launched against Israel. But Israel, backed by the U.S. military and other partners, repelled those attacks and incurred little strategic damage.

Having stripped away Iran’s proxies Israel then went for the jugular. With that, the foundation of Iran’s deterrence strategy crumbled. Its ruling regime became more vulnerable and exposed than at any point since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. And Israel, which has dreamed of striking Iran for decades, had an opportunity it decided it could not pass up.

Not one to miss an opportunity, the degradation of Iranian capabilities likely contributed to Donald's Trump's calculations to subsequently strike at its nuclear facilities on June 21st/22nd, an act which may signal a wider scope of conflict to come but one with no easy options for the Teheran regime.

A Case of Overreach

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, leaders in Tehran have cultivated a veritable spiders’ web of proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq—and developed ties with the Assad regime in Syria. These regional alliances, paired with Tehran’s Chinese and North Korean-supplied robust ballistic missile program, allowed Iran to threaten adversaries directly and from afar, giving hard-liners core sources of power.

The country’s leadership wasn’t immune to pressure: it pursued nuclear negotiations with the United States in 2015, for example, to help alleviate the economic pain created by sanctions, but even these talks facilitated Iran’s rise as a regional power. The resulting Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action provided Tehran with extensive sanctions relief without limits on its defense, other than temporary guardrails on enrichment. In 2018, under Trump 1.0, the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions. But Iran’s consequent nuclear provocations served as a lightning rod to absorb outside pressure and insulate the regime’s other malign ventures.

October 2023 was the highwater mark of the Islamic Republic’s influence. It exerted heavy suzerainty over a wide swath of land, from Iraq to the Mediterranean. It had bullied neighboring Arab rivals, namely Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, compelling them to expend financial resources on western arms. And Iranian proxies, armed with rockets, missiles, and drones, were keeping constant pressure on Israel.

The October 7th attacks seemed, at first, to only further empower Iran. After all, Tehran’s primary regional adversary was suddenly enmeshed in a raging all-consuming conflict, and one which seemed to catch it on the back foot with as much veracity as the 1073 Yim Kippur war. Iran thus encouraged its proxies to join the fight against Israel, creating a united, regionwide front under Tehran’s leadership, secure in the belief that the Iranian homeland itself as a sovereign state, would never be directly attacked so long as it hid behind the thin veneer of “movements.” Hezbollah’s persistent rocket fire into northern Israel forced civilians there to flee the towns near the border with Lebanon. In Yemen, the Houthis expanded their attacks to commercial shipping in the Red Sea, putting a severe strain on global commerce and compelling the U.S. to concentrate significant naval power and resources on countering their aggression. By mid-2024, Iran and its proxies were seriously testing the U.S.-led regional order.

Yet within a few short months, Iran’s regional framework has all but collapsed. Israeli military offensives eviscerated Hamas in Gaza and devastated Hezbollah in Lebanon—key nodes in Iran’s decades-long pressure campaign against Israel. Then came the surprising fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, in December. Syria had been vital to Iran’s larger deterrence architecture not only because it presented another front against Israel but also because Syrian territory—which shares a long border with Lebanon and northern Israel—contained the main route through which Iran supplied weapons to Hezbollah and to Palestinian militants in the West Bank.

In the face of these setbacks, Iran could have opted to regroup and laid low. Instead, it escalated the conflict with Israel by directly striking the country in April and October of 2024. By taking such action, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had hoped to showcase its military might and reestablish deterrence. Instead, the IRGC exposed the limitations of its missile capabilities to its foes. Even though the April and October strikes were the largest-ever ballistic missile attacks against Israel, Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome air defenses, combined with those of the Americans and its regional partners, intercepted almost all of Iran’s drones and missiles. The small handful that did strike Israeli territory either missed their targets or did insignificant damage.

The attacks exposed Iran as weaker than anticipated. They also prompted Israel to hit back against Iran directly, using its superior airpower to destroy key Iranian air defense batteries and military facilities in October, shattering the final barrier that had previously prevented Tehran’s adversaries from using military force against its territory. Moreover, these Iranian efforts afforded Israel and the US military industrial complex the opportunity to field test their weaponry. Iranian deterrence collapsed.

The Times They Are A ‘Changin.'

Despite the setbacks the Iranian regime had suffered, its leadership and military commanders were far from admitting defeat at the beginning of 2025. Their leaders rejected the idea that Iran had lost its competitive edge, touting the Islamic Republic’s very survival as proof of the effectiveness of its grand strategy. The regime, after all, had been at war not with small powers but with large ones that had steadily acquired the most advanced weapons, equipment, and militaries.

Now, of course, many of those who held that viewpoint are gone, and it is harder than ever for Iran to claim even to the most zealous of its audiences that it has won its engagements. In just a few days, Israel has done significant damage to Tehran’s military and nuclear program. Although the true scale of the destruction is known only to Iranian leaders, it is unlikely that the country will easily rebound from this situation, and they would do well not to bait Donald Trump into joining Netanyahu in widening the conflict. The president, while reluctant to contradict his oft-repeated declarations not to involve the U.S. in a major war, is notoriously mercurial and does not respond well to rhetorical bluster and goading.

Perhaps most significantly, Iran lost nearly all of its ability to defend its skies from adversaries. Its once vaunted air defenses have been neutralized (destroyed or rendered inoperative) across most of the country. Its missile stockpiles have been depleted, many of its mobile launchers have been destroyed, and the facilities it used to manufacture missiles and process their fuel lie mostly in smoldering ruins. Finally, as stated earlier, much of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has been damaged or destroyed. Iran may still possess a stockpile of highly enriched uranium and some underground cascades of centrifuges, but in the near term, nuclear enrichment no longer provides deterrent value.

Added to this is the loss of the defense establishment’s brain trust. The assassinations of numerous veteran commanders and military officials, including General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force and the architect of its missile strategy, will leave a gaping hole in the regime and erase knowledge built on decades of experience. The regime has already replaced these commanders, but what cannot be duplicated so quickly is the trust that their predecessors had earned from Khamenei, the commander in chief, and the influence that they held over the regime’s grand strategy.

Faced with such a defeat, the regime could choose to accept defeat, cut its losses, and seek compromise with Israel and the U.S. under the veneer of peaceful negotiation and a desire for an end to more bloodshed. That path, at the very least, would require the regime to abandon its dreams of nuclear enrichment, give up its missile program, end support to its proxies, and renounce its goal of destroying Israel. But as much as the Iranian people themselves would prefer this outcome, for the regime it would be tantamount to agreeing to terms approximating Trump’s “unconditional surrender” demand, which would portend the inevitable collapse of Iran’s ruling theocracy.

Khamenei could also elect to keep the fight going. That might include the actual opposite action from what Israel and the U.S. want: Iran going all-out for nuclear weapons a la the North Korean precedent. Assuming Iran still possesses some of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and retains the know-how (which could be augmented by Russian, Chinese or North Korean advisors), the regime could still try to test a nuclear device, hoping that actually becoming a nuclear state will restore a measure of its lost deterrence and prevent regime change. After all Trump seems willing to accept Kim Jong Un’s de facto nuclear weaponry so the mullahs might conclude he might not want to waste American lives in a protracted conflict a large chunk of his MAGA supporters would not favor. Indeed, it may have been this possibility which also played a role in convincing Trump to give the go ahead for Operation 'Midnight Hammer' and by doing so, fatally damage Iran's ability to crash dive pursuit of nukes.

Tehran could also elect to pursue a drawn-out conflict, aimed at either exhausting Israel’s will to fight or increasing support for the regime among the Iranian people through sympathy gleaned by Israeli (and potentially American) attacks. believing that if more Iranian civilians are killed, Iranian society will become more sympathetic toward the country’s only defenders: the regime. That “rally around the flag” effect is, at this point, is probably the regime’s last remaining hope to get at least a sizable chunk of the population on its side.

But increased aggression is a very dicey bet and could leave the regime even more isolated and without funds. The longer the war continues, the greater the economic and physical destruction the nation will face, which would reduce the regime’s capacity to operate on a daily basis. If there is no rally around the flag effect, the Islamic Republic’s citizens could ultimately turn on the regime.

And Iran's erstwhile allies, China and Russia, are essentially helpless to intervene. The latter is still bogged down in its Ukrainian meatgrinder whilst China, dependent on Iranian oil to supplement its strategic reserves has found that while possessing rare earths is important in a global trade war increasingly reliant on semiconductor technology, that advantage is somewhat neutralized by its inability to project military power to where it counts the most, the Middle East. And the world's sole hyperpower, the U.S. still dominates all routes into, and out of, the Persian Gulf.

Moreover, there is another reality. Donald Trump (barring a constitutional change) is term limited and no longer bound by the need to face voters again. As he is proving, Trump unchained can take very large risks and while he has always been protective of his base, the movement that swept him to power twice, the president has on more than one occasion simply disregarded any opinion save his own. As one who sees himself in heroic terms, he just might want to be the man who ended the Iranian nuclear threat forever, one way or another. In that sense. Netanyahu just might know him better than Khamenei.

Whatever lies ahead, the Iranian regime has lost the strategic and tactical advantage in its long-running battle with Israel. It will either have to give up its foundational political ideology and seek integration with the rest of the region through diplomatic and economic engagement, or it will need to double down on its beliefs, drawing further into itself, all the while clinging to its Chinese, Russian and North Korean allies. The regional status quo that has been established is gone and will be very hard, if not impossible, to reestablish.

What Has He Unleashed?