Israel appears to be on the verge of a major victory in Iran. The question is to what extent, and whether it can capitalize on it in the long term to transform the region.
Israeli forces have carried out more than a thousand airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, targeting various facilities and ballistic missile stockpiles, and have gone after Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military leaders and nuclear scientists.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the three goals of the war are “the elimination of the nuclear program, the elimination of ballistic missile production capability, and the elimination of the axis of terrorism,” referring to Iranian-backed militant groups in the Middle East.
Iran has carried out repeated iterations of ballistic missile fires targeting Israel, and, even with Israel’s extensive air defenses, a handful have gotten through and hit civilian areas. But Iran’s attacks have trended smaller as the war reaches its one-week mark, leading experts to believe its stockpiles and launchers could be diminishing quickly.
US involvement
Iran’s capabilities haven’t been completely destroyed yet, and there are concerns that Israel’s military doesn’t have the weaponry required to destroy Iran’s most hardened nuclear facility, Fordow, which is embedded in the base of a mountain.
President Donald Trump said on Wednesday the U.S. would be “the only ones capable of doing it, but that doesn’t mean we are going to be doing it at all.”
He is weighing whether the U.S. should intervene. In the days and hours before this very operation, the president publicly called for Israel to refrain from carrying it out, arguing that he still wanted to give diplomacy a chance to succeed.
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Trump has since downplayed his calls for diplomacy.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt relayed a message on Thursday from the president in which he said he will decide whether or not to join the war “within the next two weeks,” giving time for “a substantial chance of negotiations” to play out.
Various experts have different opinions on whether the U.S.’s most powerful “bunker-buster” bomb, known as the massive ordnance penetrator, or MOP, would be able to destroy the Fordow facility.
The 30,000-pound bomb is so heavy it can only be transported for deployment via the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. No other country has the MOP, which is specifically designed to “accomplish a difficult, complicated mission of reaching and destroying our adversaries’ weapons of mass destruction located in well-protected facilities,” according to an Air Force fact sheet.
Israel could come up with innovative ways to damage the facility without U.S. support, though it would likely require special forces being there. That type of mission comes with its own set of risks.
If the nuclear facilities are damaged but not destroyed, Iran could restart the program in the future. The regime, fearing a threat to its existence, could also feel the pressure to make a dash toward a nuclear weapon now.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers in March that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” She added, “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
If the U.S. gets directly involved, Iran could target U.S. bases in the region, which Iran’s proxies have done more than a hundred times since the outbreak of the broader conflict on Oct. 7, 2023. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that if Iran fires at U.S. bases in the region prior to the U.S.’s direct involvement, it would retaliate.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned on Wednesday that any U.S. involvement in the war would be met with “irreparable damage.”
Iran has yet to target a U.S. base, though the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem was damaged. There are roughly 40,000 U.S. troops in the region, within striking distance of Iran.
Three U.S. service members were killed and about 40 were injured in January 2024 in a militia’s drone attack on a military base in northeast Jordan, near the Syrian and Iraqi borders.
Regime change
Netanyahu did not identify the toppling of the Iranian government as a priority of Israel’s operations when they began, but Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened Khamenei on Thursday after an Iranian missile hit the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, saying he “absolutely should not continue to exist.”
“The Prime Minister and I have instructed the IDF to increase the intensity of attacks against strategic targets in Iran and against government targets in Tehran in order to remove threats to the State of Israel and undermine the ayatollahs’ regime,” Katz added.
Trump warned on Tuesday that the U.S. knew of his location and was choosing not to assassinate him. The thought of targeting Khamenei would have seemed unthinkable a mere two years ago, but Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack changed Israel’s war calculations.
“I fully acknowledge it’s uncertain what would come next, but it’s hard to imagine anything worse than the ayatollahs,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the Washington Examiner. “And certainly if the nuclear program and the ballistic missile program had been effectively destroyed, and the Israelis have already eliminated a fair number of nuclear scientists at that point, it’s much more of an internal Iranian problem than it is a strategic threat to Israel or the Gulf Arab States or the United States, or anybody else.”
If the regime is overthrown, it’s unclear who will take over governance of the country, which has a population of roughly 90 million, and whether the next leaders will also have nuclear ambitions.
Phil Gordon, who served as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser, said on the Foreign Affairs podcast this week: “But, even when you get it done, like with the Taliban or Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Gaddafi in Libya, there is often a moment of ‘It worked, mission accomplished, we got rid of the terror regime,’ and that’s when the problems begin because you create a vacuum, and I would caution in this case, for all of those who have a goal of regime change in mind or think Israel is already on its way to victory, be careful what you wish for. Because I would say in this case, as in all previous cases, the most likely result of a regime change in Iran would not be a liberal, pro-West democracy that doesn’t want nuclear weapons.”
The concerns laid out by Gordon have been articulated by a bipartisan group of lawmakers who don’t support U.S. involvement in the war.
“At best, it would be a version of the Iranian military, which would also have nationalist hard-line goals, at worst it’d be a vacuum that divides people ethnically, branches of the military, conflict pulls in neighbors, and we’ve seen that so often before, so I would say where the goal of regime change is concerned, be careful what you wish for,” he added. “There’s no guarantee that, especially if it’s gone at the hands of the Israeli military, it gets replaced by something better.”
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Even if Khamenei makes it out of the conflict alive, he will come out of it weaker than he’s ever been, and it comes on the heels of the destruction of both the Iranian nuclear program and its proxies, which the regime has poured “tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars, over several decades” into, Bolton said.
In the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, Israel has fundamentally changed the Middle East. Israeli forces have decimated Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, while Bashar Assad, an ally of Iran, had his regime toppled in Syria. The U.S. also engaged in a limited war against the Iran-backed, Yemen-based Houthis.
Iran had spent decades arming and financially supporting that network of proxies, often referred to as the “Axis of Resistance,” and had leaned on them to attack Israel so it could shield itself from an Israeli response. That is, until last week, when Israel launched its opening salvo in the first direct full-scale military confrontation between them.
Israel had always been aware of the possibility that Iran’s proxies would attack if it and Iran got into a direct conflict. However, Israel systematically defanged each of them ahead of its decision to go after Iran’s nuclear program, changing the equation.
“In the last 18 months, you’ve seen Israel attain escalation dominance, and let me define what that means. That means the ability of the Israelis to control the pace, the intensity, the focus of their military activities against their three principal adversaries: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran,” Aaron David Miller, a former longtime State Department Middle East official, told the Washington Examiner.
Turning battlefield wins into political gains
The U.S. was pursuing Israel-Saudi normalization in the fall of 2023 before Hamas’s attack derailed those negotiations. About a week before Hamas’s attack, a White House official told reporters that a “basic framework” had been “hammered out,” showing just how close all sides were to implementing a historic deal, only for its collapse.
The effort for normalization was built upon the first Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, in which Israel and four Arab countries — Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco — normalized ties.
Last month, Trump outlined his long-term vision for U.S. relations in the Middle East during his first trip to the region since getting inaugurated for his second term, and it included bringing Saudi Arabia into the accords.
“It’s my fervent hope, wish, and even my dream that Saudi Arabia — a place I have such respect for, especially over the last fairly short period of time, what you’ve been able to do — but will soon be joining the Abraham Accords,” Trump said in Riyadh. “I think it’ll be a tremendous tribute to your country, and it will be something that’s really going to be very important for the future of the Middle East.”
One of the primary hindrances to Saudi Arabia’s entrance into the accords, however, is the issue of Palestinian statehood. Its stance has only hardened during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, amid a rising death toll and growing humanitarian concerns.
In September 2023, less than a month before Hamas’s attack, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said, “We hope it will reach a place that it will ease the life of the Palestinians.” A year later, in September 2024, he gave a speech to the Shura Council, stating, “The kingdom will continue to work diligently toward the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without this condition being met.”
The Saudis’ demand for Palestinian statehood to be included in a normalization process is starkly opposed to Netanyahu’s view that statehood would amount to rewarding Hamas’s terrorist attack, the most deadly in Israel’s history.
The Israelis have not publicly articulated a clear plan for postwar Gaza, even though the war has gone on for roughly 20 months and Hamas has been severely degraded.
Trump has described Gaza as “uninhabitable,” given the level of destruction Israel’s forces inflicted on the enclave. U.S. officials have said it could take more than a decade to complete the reconstruction of Gaza.
“The question is, in the wake of this escalation, dominance, all of these conflicts, is it possible to foresee or envision political arrangements which are at most transactional, maybe partly transformational, I don’t know,” Miller added. “Saudi-Israeli normalization can’t be done without an end to the war in Gaza and a major move by the Israelis on the Palestinians. The Abraham Accords may broaden, but again, not if the war in Gaza continues, and not if there isn’t an alternative political process which gives the Arab states cover for something they’d probably like to do.”
The lack of a clear plan for Gaza limits the prospects for Israeli-Saudi relations but could be an indication of its view toward Iranian regime change.
“You’ve got Israeli escalation dominance,” Miller continued. “You’ve got America riding that escalation dominance. What you don’t have from either the Israelis or the Trump administration is how to convert military power into political gain.”