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.

In comparison with what Benjamin Netanyahu has taken to euphemistically calling his “war” in Gaza, the Israel-Iran twelve-day-war was both technically more complicated and unpredictable than the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Over one thousand miles away, Iran’s ability to bypass Israel’s Arrow 2 and 3 air defense systems has only developed over the past ten years. Iran is now able to bypass Israeli air defenses and hit Israeli strategic infrastructure using ballistic missiles that move over five times the speed of sound.

New Iranian missiles incorporate technology for high-speed evasive maneuvers and electro-optical targeting systems that can strike without the aid of GPS. In the twelve-day conflict that Israel started on June 13, Iran took out Haifa’s oil refinery, hit Tel Aviv’s financial district, and destroyed several military and intelligence buildings. A month before the Israeli attack, Iran had unveiled on television a missile named Qassem Basir, “the Seer Qassem,” named after Qasem Soleimani, the expeditionary paramilitary commander whose assassination on the orders of Donald Trump in 2020 prompted Iran’s first publicly acknowledged direct strike against the United States in its history, hitting bases in Iraq and causing severe brain injuries to 109 US troops. Theodore Postol, an American professor emeritus of science, technology, and international security at MIT, assesses that the most recent Iranian designs have been developed in collaboration with Russia and China.

It cost Israel an estimated $287 million a night to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, which are orders of magnitude cheaper than the Qassem Basir missile. Some reports suggest Tel Aviv was running out of Arrows as it agreed to a cease-fire. The Iranian war has inflicted a deep financial crisis and created waves of Israeli refugees fleeing overseas: according to some figures, 90,000 Israelis are internally displaced while a further 50,000 are stranded in nearby countries like Cyprus because Iranian and Hezbollah attacks have forced planes to reroute.

In the long run, even with US cash, weapons, intelligence and logistical support, it is a difficult war for Israel to win without recourse to nuclear weapons. Iran is seventy-five times bigger than Israel with over ten times the population; Tehran province, one of the smallest in the country, is about the same size as Israel. The technological asymmetry is mirrored by an opposite geographical asymmetry.

The End of Strategic Patience

In Tehran, strategic thinking operates between two poles. One side is deliberative and espouses the virtue of strategic patience, fighting attritional wars to try and force the enemy into error. Violence is calibrated at a tempo to avoid radical escalation from Iran’s powerful enemies while retaining the capacity to shock and deter. This modus operandi was adopted by Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it dramatically failed because Israel was willing to exert unthinkable violence on Hezbollah and changed the rules of the game. It seems to have taken out much of Hezbollah’s vaulted precision missiles and decapitated its top leadership (and killed hundreds of civilians) by dropping eighty “bunker-busting bombs” on four high-rise buildings in Beirut, three to four times more ordnance than the United States dropped during its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Incidents such as these have startled Iranian strategic planners because they tear up generations of assumed military protocol, actively or tacitly, negotiated between Shia Iran’s regional allies and Israel and the United States. In the wake of these attacks, the other pole of Iranian strategic thinking has become more vocal. They are dubbed the “Zaydis” in Iranian foreign policy circles, after Yemen’s “fiver” Shias, who follow Zayd as the fifth imam who was martyred and crucified for his attempt to fight the Umayyad dynasty in 740 CE, instead of his more patient older brother Baqir, who is followed by the “twelver” Iranian Shia.

The Zaydis in Iran believe the way to respond to Israel’s ceaseless attacks (strikes, sabotage, lobbying) and attempts to topple the Iranian government is by responding with greater and more spontaneous violence, like Yemen — and for that matter Israel — does. The Iranian Zaydis also point out that the US preparedness to evacuate Gulf-stationed troops means that Iran’s deterrence against the superpower has been eroded. “We must be more aggressive and spontaneous against Israel and America,” one Iranian MP of the principlist camp, which historically opposes diplomacy with the West, told me on condition of anonymity. “Iran must build a bomb, and the next time it is hit it must act like the Israelis and take command of rewriting the rules of the war.”

A journalist on the other, “reformist” side of the political spectrum joked that Israel must have a team devoted to preserving the life of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as he makes such a good enemy: “entirely predictable, cautious, and stubborn against the need to change tactics.”

Nuclear diplomacy now appears dead. It is difficult to imagine how a deal could be struck now that the public messaging from both Trump and Netanyahu claims that Iran’s nuclear capacity has been obliterated. The true status of the nuclear program is obscured by propaganda. Iran claims it is “badly damaged,” but paradoxically it may be talking up the damage if it has decided to pursue an undeclared route to the bomb. Leaked (but highly politicized) US intelligence claims it remains functional while the Pentagon disagrees.

The efficacy of the 30,000 pound GBU-57 to hit facilities reported to be deeper than its sixty-meter penetration capacity is a matter of debate among experts. Iran’s enrichment facilities are reportedly eighty meters underground and defended by matrices of some of the toughest concrete in the world and steel designed to deflect munitions dropped from the air. European Union officials told the Financial Times that Iran’s 400 kilograms of 60-percent-enriched uranium is intact, hidden somewhere underground. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — which Iran has broken ties with, accusing its director, Rafael Mariano Grossi, of collaborating with Israel — said, “We do not have information of the whereabouts of this material,” and the United Nations nuclear watchdog does not have access to all of Iran’s centrifuges, which could turn the 60-percent-enriched uranium into the 90-percent necessary for a bomb.

Iran’s program is now dark, and while there is an extant fatwa against nuclear weaponization by Khamenei due to prohibitions in Islamic jurisprudence against mass killing of civilians, the incentives are now growing for a nuclear weapon. “[The United States’] unprecedented strike has shown the Islamic regime, for the second time, that nuclear diplomacy is reversible, fragile, and vulnerable to changes in leadership in Washington,” said Spanish diplomat Enrique Mora, the European Union envoy coordinating talks with Iran, in an op-ed for Amwaj, a news service focused on Iran based in London. “There will not be a third time.”

Trump may wish to end the war with Iran, but Israel does not show signs of reversing its long-standing position of regime change and opposition to nuclear diplomacy. “[Israel] does not want a scenario where Iran is accepted as part of the Middle East system by the US, has relations with the US, and is able to have more breathing room to retain its position in the region,” Vali Nasr of John Hopkins said in a recent interview. “Israel is not after solving its nuclear dilemma with Iran. It is after solving its Iran dilemma, which is that this state is too big, it’s too powerful, it’s too influential, it’s too capable.”

Contrary to the popular opinion of the neocons in Trump’s ear calling for regime change, Iran’s political spectrum is strongly nationalistic. Recent events have brought all parties into closer alignment with the state. Ali Ahmadnia, the PR man for the government, remarked that in a recent statement Khamenei made over a dozen references each to “Iran” and “the nation” whereas he usually more frequently refers to the “Islamic nation.” As people rally around the flag, the Islamist government appears to be rallying around the people, even the large proportion that notionally oppose it.

There are no powerful pretenders to power in Iran, so if the regime falls, Iranians eye Syria’s fifteen-year-long civil war or the ongoing civil war in Libya as the grim models for the future. The choice is increasingly seen as one between maintaining the status quo or the Balkanization of the country, a “managed chaos” acceptable to the United States and Israel where the nation becomes warring factions of Iranians sponsored by the international intelligence services to kill other Iranians.