Israel and Iran Have Set the Stage for the Next War
Iran has long held that conflict with Israel can be managed by limiting its retaliation within clearly defined parameters. But through its preemptive attack, Israel has revealed that it is not a rational actor and upended the rules of war.
Search-and-rescue teams conduct operations in a building that was heavily damaged and partially collapsed by a missile fired from Iran as police take security measures in Beersheba, Israel, on June 24, 2025. (Mostafa Alkharouf / Anadolu via Getty Images)
On June 5, a satellite photograph captured around forty aircraft on the tarmac of a US airfield inside the regional headquarters for the US Central Command (CENTCOM), some two hundred miles from Iran. A second photograph taken of the Al Udeid airfield on June 20, a week after Israel started a war with Iran with a surprise strike against military and civilian targets, showed only three jets. These images indicate a major US evacuation of military assets from the Persian Gulf unprecedented in recent history, most likely over 2,500 miles away to Diego Garcia, the joint US-UK air base in the middle of the Indian Ocean. One likely reason for this could be the threat of Iranian retaliatory power, which has steadily increased since the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and threatens American bases and interests across the region.
Military Theater
In its retaliation against Israel, Iran demonstrated a formidable ballistic missile counterstrike force, which it has developed from scratch for over thirty years to prepare for just this moment. Its medium-range missiles are trained on Israel. But its more accurate and larger arsenal of short-range missiles have the US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in its sights. Hitting these bases without notice and when they are filled with troops is Iran’s “doomsday scenario,” which it has developed in lieu of a nuclear bomb to deter long-standing US aggression. America has been hostile to the Iranian regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and provided arms and intelligence for Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussain during his invasion of Iran in 1980.
The capacities that Iran has developed since the start of the war not only made it an enemy that neither the United States nor Israel could dismiss but turned the conflict into a dangerous form of theater. Each side telegraphed their strikes in advance and used the exact same number of missiles to inflict nonlethal damage of questionable strategic value. The US and Iran seemed to have wanted to prevent escalation whilst also satisfying the bloodlust of hawks at home. Israel, alone, was desperate for war.
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