Yes, I think they’ve been quite naive all along, not just in the last few days. I think the Iranians have been quite reckless in the way they have prioritized the security of their own senior personnel. They should have expected something to happen. I’m especially surprised that they had individuals sleeping in their own beds at a time of heightened tensions.

Personally, I was surprised that the Israelis took that action when they did. I think it was to be expected that, in view of everything that happened over the last year, with the degradation of the Iranian air defenses, it would be very difficult to stop the Israelis from exploiting that opportunity. However, we’ve seen some progress being made in terms of coming up with a framework agreement between the US and Iran through Omani, Qatari, and Saudi mediation.

The expectation in Iran was that these strikes would not come before the scheduled talks in Oman on Sunday. Then you had Trump, who now says himself that he was deliberately trying to mislead the public by saying, “They better not do it — I told them not to do it.” Over the last two years, the Biden administration had been confronted multiple times with the Israelis saying, “We’re going to strike,” and then Biden said, “We’re not going to do it.” Every single time, we’ve seen the Israelis falling in line and submitting to American pressure or an American red light.

This time, they didn’t, and that was surprising. A lot of what happened was not necessarily in the interest of the MAGA, America First crowd in Washington, and it was a slap in the face for Trump, even though Trump is now owning it and saying, “This actually serves my negotiation strategy.”

In reality, he should be aware that what happened has at the very least delayed the negotiation process and I’m not sure that the Iranians will now come to the negotiating table being more willing to concede. There is obviously a huge risk that the Iranians will say that they will break out now and weaponize that nuclear program, even though they didn’t really have the intent before.

We also need to understand the context in general, which has fundamentally changed for the Israelis. The narratives of the last six months since Trump came in were such that [Benjamin] Netanyahu had to fear that he was losing traction and influence in Washington. We’ve seen the Trump circus going first to the Gulf, not to Israel, and getting hundreds of billions’ worth of pledges. We’ve seen the Gulf states and their agenda, which is about building relations and security through interdependence and focused on stability through prosperity rather than a military- centric approach.

With all that happening, we’ve also seen people from the MAGA crowd who say that “America First” means we need to shift away from the Middle East and focus on the Asia-Pacific region. Those people are saying, “We don’t want to get dragged into another war.” All of that suggested that Trump was not very keen on military confrontation and that the influence Netanyahu might have had under [Joe] Biden was waning.

In that context, Netanyahu realized that there was a closing window of opportunity for him to do anything about the Iranian nuclear program. The Sunday talks could have brought a framework agreement, after which it would have been impossible to stage a military escalation such as the one that we’ve seen. In addition, people like Mike Waltz, who was very much a neocon and a hawk against Iran, were purged over the last couple of months. That suggested to the Israelis that they were losing ground in Washington. This now confronts Trump with a position where he has to do something that he actually didn’t want to do.

The Iranians were also thinking that the climate had changed, with Oman now being given a mandate to mediate, while the Saudis and even the Emiratis for the first time were saying that they wanted engagement and de-escalation. The odd one out was Israel. We shouldn’t underestimate the fact that Israel is quite isolated by historic standards.

We’ve seen an unprecedented level of condemnation of its behavior in Gaza — quite late, but at least we’ve seen some condemnation from a host of European countries and other countries like Canada and Australia. All of that means Israel is isolated and has very little to lose. The Iranians were thinking that the Israelis wouldn’t be mad enough to take that sort of approach, and then they did.

Netanyahu has also fundamentally changed. If you looked at his profile as a negotiator or as a politician, he was always very risk-averse. He is someone who has always been trying to delay decisions and maintain the status quo. He is the guy who framed the “mowing the lawn” approach, where you have a threat, you “mow the lawn,” and then you fight another day a couple of years down the road.

For the first time he now says, “I don’t want to kick the can down the road — I want to change the regional order.” This has shaped Israel’s involvement in Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran as well. It’s a major game changer for Israel to be seeking to shape the region proactively rather than being reactive.

This is part of the problem strategically with Ali Khamenei and even Nasrallah as well. They’re cut from the same cloth, if you will. There was an element of echo chambering, where they were telling themselves that their deterrence regime was far more effective than it actually was. The Iranians kept on telling themselves that deterrence by punishment is more important than deterrence by denial, because they know they can’t deny Israel the ability to use its military and technological superiority. They’ve always relied on deterrence by punishment.

That deterrence regime collapsed with Hezbollah, for the same reason that Nasrallah was so comfortable in his shoes. He was very comfortable thinking that the Israelis had so many opportunities to take him out and they never took it — they wouldn’t dare to do it. With the Iranians now, everything is on the table, including even, as the Israelis have said, taking out the Supreme Leader, so there are some similarities.

The strange thing is that the Iranians haven’t learned the lessons from Hezbollah. What the Israelis do is to degrade and degrade and degrade until an opportunity arises where they can take a strategic shot and they take it. Hezbollah still exists, both as a resistance movement and a political party, but it’s not the same organization that it was with Nasrallah.

The same would be true of the Islamic Republic in Iran. The Islamic Republic is not necessarily going to collapse with the Supreme Leader being killed, but it’s going to be a different Islamic Republic, through being pushed either to reform or to use more repression, which could lead to uprisings. It’s quite surprising that they didn’t really learn the lessons from last summer.

They certainly did know by Thursday that Israel would take this action. Trump obviously didn’t do enough to stop it. By saying, “I don’t like it, it would be inappropriate,” without pulling all the levers and saying, “If you do this, you’re crossing a line — we will freeze military aid,” he was effectively showing them an orange light rather than a red light. An orange light is good enough for Netanyahu to take that action.

The Americans should certainly have known by Thursday that this was going to happen. Warnings were sent out to partners in the Gulf from the US. They knew that it was coming and not enough was done by the US to stop it. Trump is torn because he doesn’t have a worldview — he doesn’t have a philosophy of what he wants in the Middle East. He doesn’t have a strategy.

The only strategy he has is “no more wars,” and clearly that’s failing. But he’s between the MAGA crowd and the neoconservatives. The neoconservatives tend to be part of the pro-Israel networks who are advocating for more escalation, for decapitation — taking out the Iranians, taking out the Houthis, taking out Hamas, taking out Hezbollah, taking out the “Axis of Resistance.” It’s always more war, more force, more coercion, seeking to eliminate something that cannot be eliminated militarily.

On the other hand, you’ve got the other side saying, “Let’s sort this out diplomatically — let’s find a deal.” Trump is leaning more toward the deal-making side, but he also knows there are a lot of people — not necessarily in his administration, but in the wider GOP ecosystem in Washington — who are saying, “We need to give Israel the freedom to maneuver and do what they need to do.”

For Trump to put his foot down and say “no, we’re not going to have it — we’re going to do it my way” would be difficult for him. Netanyahu is no longer as popular as he once was in Washington. But while Gaza is a contentious issue now, Iran is not such a contentious issue in pro-Israel networks. This is the point where they unify: they might not like Netanyahu, but they’re saying, “At least someone is taking on Iran.”

From Netanyahu’s point of view, the only good thing that has come out of the period since October 7 is the war with Hezbollah. He was able to sell it as a victory. This is a very similar case where he can show the world, the Israeli public, and the pro-Israel networks in the US that he is a man of strength, determination, and resolve to get things done. That’s what he was hoping for.

The Israelis are very well prepared for this. They’ve been planning this kind of strike for more than twenty years. Trump is facing that. He’s actually quite risk-averse when it comes to it. There’s a lot of bravado, but when it comes to it, he’s someone who has avoided making very difficult decisions.

He’s also naive enough to think that this fits into his general pattern of negotiating, which is that you first strong-arm someone into submission, and then you sit down and talk to them. While that might have worked in the context of New York real estate, it obviously doesn’t work in the field of international relations. But he’s now owning it, because that’s the kind of guy he is — he’s a narcissist who will never admit to having made any mistakes in his life, so he can’t show weakness.

There is a massive technological gap between Israel and Iran — that was always clear. If you  look at the respective air forces, the Iranian air force is flying fourth-generation aircraft that have not been properly maintained since the late 1970s against Israel’s fifth-generation planes. The technological gap is comparable to that between a piston-engine WWII Spitfire and a fighter jet.

The Iranians knew they wouldn’t be able to bridge that gap, which is why they invested so much in ballistic missiles. In terms of air defense, Israel has the most sophisticated air-defense network of pretty much any country in the world. Considering that the country is a fairly small geographical space, it is easier to defend than Iran.

Iranian air defenses had already been taken out in the strikes of October 2024, so in many ways the Israelis had already paved the road to Tehran. They could use F-35s to fly in first to take out what was remaining, and are now able to use much older aircraft — fourth-generation fighters like F-16s, with less sophisticated technology — to go in and take out whatever they need to take out.

That gives the Israelis full control of the air — what we call air supremacy — where they can operate with impunity in Iranian airspace. The fact that Iran’s allies in Syria have been taken out and the Israelis are using Syrian airspace for refueling also means that the distance between refueling and sorties is much less than it once was.

They can deliver ordnance to targets much more precisely than the Iranians can. The Iranian missiles, first of all, have issues launching. Once they are launched, there’s the risk of being shot down. When they do hit, they don’t necessarily hit with a lot of precision.

Obviously, they can still have a devastating effect from an Israeli perspective. The Israelis, and especially this generation, are not at all used to threat and bombardment. They’ve lived in an illusion of being just another Western state, forgetting that they’re in a neighborhood where their neighbors don’t necessarily like them, and now they’re being confronted with war on the home front in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Gulf War in the early 1990s.

Even then, it wasn’t as bad as it is now. This is certainly not something we can just brush aside. I think Israeli society is much less resilient than Iranian society, so in a sense that makes up for the asymmetry between the two states.

But time is on Israel’s side rather than Iran’s. Iran will be running out of ballistic missiles over the next week or ten days if it keeps up the operational tempo, while the Israelis are able to restock. The Americans are supplying them with air defense rockets, and they’re also providing them with ordnance that they can drop.

Considering that the Israelis are now able to use two hundred of their fighter jets — they don’t have to confine themselves to using the fifth-generation ones — they have a lot more capacity that they can throw at Iran. Over time, Iran will run out of munitions, while the Israelis won’t.

This applies unless the Iranians manage to hit something significant that will completely undermine the resilience of Israel — some sort of high-caliber targets, like Ben Gurion Airport, that would be a significant blow to Israel, or critical national infrastructure like the power grid. That would be a bit of a game changer.

Even then, I still think that Israel can sustain it more easily than the Iranians, because the Israelis can keep the operational tempo going while the Iranians cannot. But that raises the question of what it is that Israel can achieve through military action. The nuclear program as such can be degraded, but it cannot be destroyed from the air.

Partially, yes. Netanyahu has been using that narrative even in Gaza, where he was saying, “We want Palestinians to rise up against Hamas.” He used it in Lebanon, telling Lebanese citizens that they should rise up and get rid of Hezbollah. Now he’s using it in Iran. It’s a bit of a narrative.

I think he might believe in it, because he’s an ideologue — he’s a neocon. He does believe in regime change. That was always his ultimate dream in Iran: he didn’t want it to be brought about by Israel, but rather by a large, Iraq-style coalition that would occupy the state and bring down the regime.

Obviously, as you say, that’s not an option. There’s no support anywhere for a war to collapse the regime and seize territory. It only leaves you with the option of promoting internal dissent. You see pro-Israeli information networks pushing that narrative whenever they can. There was footage of people in Iran cheering on the air defenses when they were trying to take down Israeli planes, but pro-Israeli networks were looking at it and saying, “Look, these are Iranians cheering on Israeli planes,” which is absolutely not the case.

I think we have to be very careful in assessing things. Yes, there is simmering dissent among the Iranian people. I would say the large majority of Iranians are unhappy with that regime. It is in power because of repression, not because of accommodation — it has very little with which to accommodate its people.

But there is another factor at play here, which is that the Iranians are a very proud people, and they feel that they’re being attacked. The more civilians Israel kills, the more personal this becomes for a lot of Iranians. That has nothing to do with where they stand toward the regime.

It all depends on how the Iranian regime is going to behave. As we’ve seen with Hezbollah, when you take on the senior leadership and basically kill one after the other, certainly it has an impact on how the regime conducts itself. There is an element of strategic paralysis. We saw  that throughout last Friday until they gathered around and appointed new people.

That can certainly be interpreted as weakness domestically. But I also think it’s not necessarily an issue right now. I don’t think Iranians would use this moment while they’re under attack by Israel to rise up against the regime. I think that’s a risk further down the line, once the Israelis are out and the war is over, and then it will depend on how the regime conducts itself.

There is also the question of who’s going to be killed. A much more problematic scenario would arise if Khamenei was assassinated by Israel, because that would create a succession crisis. The question of who succeeds Khamenei is not settled at all. Within the “deep state” establishment in Iran, there is no agreement about who’s going to take over.

That could lead to a rift within the Revolutionary Guards or within the Guardian Council of Islamic ideological advisors. This is without even talking about the Iranian Parliament or the Iranian people. If the regime from the inside doesn’t know what it wants and there is a rift taking shape, that could be the moment of weakness where you see a mobilization on the streets.

But all of that is somewhat isolated from what we’ve seen outside Iran. In the Western media, people often don’t see that there is a difference between views inside and outside the country.  The people who cheer on Pahlavi Jr, the son of the Shah who was ousted in 1979, are all people in the diaspora. They are people who were either born in Iran and left as children, or else have never lived in Iran at all. They haven’t lived through what Iranians at home have lived through.

Over the last two years, we have seen a lot of diaspora opponents of the regime cheering the Israelis on, even as they are taking on Hezbollah and Hamas and killing civilians, which is a very strange phenomenon. These are the same type of people who support Pahlavi, forgetting that his father was one of the most repressive authoritarian rulers that the region has ever seen.

There’s a gap between what Iranians on the ground want and what Iranians in the diaspora want. There isn’t a figure who could bring all of these different factions together. At the moment, it’s a leaderless revolution, and that’s why it hasn’t been successful.

If the regime implodes from inside, through the assassination of Khamenei, that could be a game changer, where there might be a person coming out of that movement to take on the regime as it is crumbling. We would probably no longer see a coordinated response to dissent. At the moment, Iranians are mostly rallying around the flag. But if there is dissent, the security sector of the regime would use any form of repression to make sure that it survives.

If the regime is imploding from inside, we might see different factions emerging there as well. Once that barrier of fear breaks, it could lead to a mobilization such as we haven’t seen before. But that’s a wild-card scenario for now.

If the confrontation stays within the parameters that we are seeing now, where destruction is confined to Iran and Israel, they will call for cessation of hostilities. They will also try to use their offices to try and bring something about. But the player that can bring an end to this is the US. Anyone who is able to mediate between the US and Iran will bring this war to an end.

That means Oman and Qatar. I don’t think the European countries have any credibility. It’s been quite despicable to see the German government especially, but also other Western governments, saying that Israel has “a right to defend itself” when it launched an unprovoked attack against another sovereign nation. There have been very great inconsistencies in terms of how the European states stand with regard to international law.

That has undermined trust in the Europeans as a broker or an intermediary for Iran. They’ve shown their true colors. While we have seen states like the UK, Canada, and Australia take positions on Gaza that are increasingly critical of Israel, Iran is a different kettle of fish. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who has been outspoken over Israel’s conduct in Gaza, has sided with Israel on this by saying that Iran is the greatest threat to regional security.

I think the Europeans will find it difficult. On the one hand, they do want a negotiated deal. But on the other hand, they seem to be saying, “OK, let’s see how far the Israelis can go to actually get rid of this one issue that we have in the region, which is the Iranian nuclear program.” Whether it’s a military program or a civilian one, they don’t like the idea that Iran has one, so giving Israel some time to do as much damage as possible is probably in their interest, and the European powers are only half-heartedly calling for an end to this conflict.

All of this would obviously change if energy infrastructure came under sustained attack. We’ve already gotten very close when Israel struck the South Pars gas field, which is shared between Iran and Qatar. On the Qatari side, there are billions of dollars invested from big American companies, and  more importantly, a lot of that gas ends up in countries like the UK, Germany, Spain, and Belgium. Should there be disruption to gas supplies, that would directly affect national security in Europe, and then this war would no longer be sustainable for those states.

The same point applies if there was to be a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, although I don’t see that happening right now. That would also impact energy supplies to the West and create a global energy crisis, so there is a massive risk of a spillover. Once that happens, I think the Europeans will get mobilized.

For the time being, however, they feel that Israel has it under control, when in reality, nobody should trust Netanyahu’s government to do anything that is in the global interest. It’s all primarily about his personal political interests and survival, and then as a secondary factor, he’s thinking about Israeli national interests.

Even there, I’m quite cynical, because he has done very little to get the hostages back from Gaza. He had a lot of potential ways through negotiations to get the hostages back, which is in Israel’s interest, and he chose not to. A protracted conflict is in Netanyahu’s interest. He knows that once the wars end, his political reign in Israel will probably end, too — he’s been indicted already, and there will be new elections, which he’s unlikely to win.

But this war could be something that he uses to galvanize people in Israel by saying, “I’m the guy who brought security for Israel,” despite the failures of October 7. There’s a very strong domestic angle for Netanyahu and the West doesn’t want to see it.

The Chinese and the Russians have an interest in making sure that energy supplies are not being disrupted. The Iranians are already halting exports because they need their own fuel, and we’ve seen a lot of the domestic energy infrastructure being hit. Again, that’s not in the Chinese or Russian interest. They look at Iran primarily as an exporter of energy, and they want to keep that going.

Beijing and Moscow also see an opportunity within the field of great power politics to say, “We’re the ones who stand with international law.” In Russia’s case, that’s obviously a cynical line, to be saying “we’re against aggression” when they were the ones who invaded Ukraine. But they will use this and say, “We stand with international law and the West doesn’t.” The same goes for the Chinese. But they have an interest to make sure that this war ends as soon as possible.

When you consider that Israel is a relatively small state, looking at how much the air force has been mobilized to attack Iran, the Israelis still seem to have capacity to continue their operations in Gaza. At the moment, nobody’s talking about Gaza or the West Bank. It has potentially given the Israelis a couple of weeks to dominate the headlines and deflect attention away from what they’re still doing in the occupied territories.

We have seen attacks over the last couple of days on civilians who were trying to get aid, and further operations in the West Bank seizing land. The formal annexation of the West Bank is ongoing. A lot of crimes against international humanitarian law are being conducted at the moment by the Israelis while going unnoticed, and that buys them time.

That’s all going to be to the detriment of the Palestinians, because Netanyahu wants to change the facts on the ground as quickly as possible before someone finally tells him to stop. He’s bought himself another couple of weeks to continue doing what he’s doing without necessarily having a clear agenda in mind.

When it comes to the West Bank, yes, annexation is something he could push through and while there would be condemnation from Western countries, nobody would stop him. In Gaza, there isn’t really an avenue for that. Ultimately, he would prefer ethnic cleansing and pushing people out. But I can’t see that happening at the moment, and the annexation of parts of Gaza is also not something he can realistically do.

So he just keeps it going because he has no strategic endgame. But I also know that the countries that are mediating at the moment between Hamas and Israel were talking about a particular plan to release hostages and agree on an eight-week truce. There might be a moment in the background, despite the shift of media coverage toward Iran, when Netanyahu can buy himself some time and get some of the hostages out.