The Israel-Iran war hinges on three big things

Vox

2 days ago

is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Last night, Israel went to war with Iran — launching a bombing raid targeting Iran's senior military leadership and top nuclear scientists. The strikes were a tactical triumph for Israel: The heads of both Iran's entire military and its Revolutionary Guards were killed in the opening hours, and Iranian air defenses took a massive hit. Israel suffered few, if any, losses and suffered no immediate major retaliation.
But on Friday afternoon, Iran launched a barrage of missiles across Israel that overwhelmed Israel's Iron Dome defenses. While the full scope of the counterattack is not yet clear, it underscores that in this war — as in any other — there's far too much we don't know in the early days to be confident about predicting how things end.
Israeli officials are saying the strikes will continue for days, if not weeks — essentially a commitment to open-ended regional war for the foreseeable future. It's nearly impossible, at this stage, to truly understand what's happening.
'We know from history the full impact of Israel's attack on Iran will take years to unfold. It could prevent an Iranian bomb or ensure one. It could destabilize the [Iranian] regime or entrench it,' writes Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
There are, I think, at least three key questions that will play a major role in determining the outcome of this conflict. They are:
Is the Israeli objective limited to demolishing Iran's nuclear program, as they've said, or is this also a regime change operation?
To what extent does Iran have the capability to hit back?
How does this affect Iran's thinking about getting a nuclear bomb?
All of these are, at this point, unanswerable. But trying to assess what we do know can help clarify what to look for when trying to figure out the implications of the past day's events.
What is Israel's objective?
For several decades, Israel has described Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat to its survival.
It was never fully clear if Iran was committed to getting a nuclear weapon or merely wanted the capability to acquire one quickly if it felt threatened. But the steps — like building centrifuges that could produce highly enriched uranium — are identical up until the very last minute, when it's arguably too late to stop by force. From the Israeli point of view, a theocratic regime that sponsors terrorist groups that kill Israelis — like Hamas and Hezbollah — simply could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. For this reason, Israel has been threatening airstrikes on Iran's nuclear program for several decades.
Last night, Israel made good on that threat. Israeli officials have described the attacks as prompted by an 'imminent' threat of Iranian nuclear development, with one such official telling the BBC that it could have built bombs 'within days.' Israel's position is that Iran's nuclear development left them no choice in the matter: that it was facing a choice between striking now or staring down a nuclear-armed Iran in the immediate future.
We don't yet know how true those claims are (and we may never). But what we do know is that there is some tension between the Israeli justification for the strikes and the actual targets they hit.
Any effort to cripple Iran's nuclear program would focus heavily on two targets: the nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. While Israel did target Iranian nuclear scientists, the physical facilities do not appear to have been taken out. Israel hit Natanz, but early expert assessments suggest only limited damage. And there is no evidence, at least publicly, that Fordow was hit in the opening round at all.
So if the true target is the nuclear program, why did Israel expend so much effort targeting Iran's ballistic missile capabilities and military leadership while doing relatively little damage to nuclear infrastructure?
There are, broadly speaking, two answers to this question.
The first is that Israel plans to hit the nuclear facilities harder as the war goes on. By killing Iran's military leadership — including nearly its entire air command — Israel has weakened Iran's ability to defend its airspace and retaliate against the Israeli homeland. These first strikes, on this theory, were laying the groundwork for later strikes more focused on nuclear facilities.
'The entire operation really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow,' Michael Leiter, Israel's ambassador to the US, said in a Friday interview on Fox News.
The second interpretation is that Israel has even bigger plans. It will heavily target the nuclear facilities, to be sure, but it will also engage in a wider campaign to undermine the very foundations of the Iranian regime. By taking out key leaders, Israel is weakening the Iranian government's ability to maintain its grip on power. The ultimate Israeli hope would be that these strikes have a similar effect in Iran as Israel's devastating strikes on Hezbollah did in Syria — damaging the government's ability to repress so severely that it creates space for domestic opponents to topple it.
'The targets that were hit made it clear that Israel's goal was broader than damaging Iran's nuclear program,' Steven Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in Foreign Policy. 'The Israelis are clearly not satisfied with doing damage to Iran's nuclear program but seem to be engaged in regime change.'
There is, in short, little doubt that Israel will heavily target the nuclear facilities in the coming days. That alone could produce significant bloodshed.
But if Israel's ambitions are wider — nuclear demolition plus regime change — then we could be in for a much longer, deadlier, and riskier campaign.
Can Iran fight back?
For many years, the conventional wisdom among Middle East analysts has been that Israel will pay a very high price for striking Iran.
Iran is a very large country — bigger in population than Germany, France, and Britain — that has invested heavily in its military. It retains a large ballistic missile arsenal and an extensive network of proxy militias around the Middle East, all of which could be turned on Israel with deadly effect.
Iran's Friday afternoon missile barrage suggests it retains at least some capability to fight back. But how much?
Since the October 7, 2023 attacks Israel has been systematically demolishing Iran's proxy network. The brutal war in Gaza has forced Hamas to basically go underground, fighting more like an insurgent group than a mini-state capable of firing major rocket barrages at Israeli cities. A series of surprise attacks on Hezbollah's leadership in September of last year devastated the Lebanese group, to the point where it has been forced to sit out the current round of fighting.
And Israel has repeatedly struck Iranian interests around the Middle East — including a major assault on its homeland air defenses in October 2024 — while paying a relatively low price. An Iranian missile-and-drone attack targeting Israel in April of last year, launched in retaliation for an attack on its embassy in Damascus, did scarcely any damage.
Once again, there are basically two possible interpretations of events.
The first is that Iran is now a paper tiger. By destroying its proxies, and exposing its own retaliatory capabilities to be vastly overstated, Israel has created a situation where it can attack Iran with relative impunity. The Iranians will certainly try and retaliate as they did on Friday, but it will be relatively weak — doing only limited damage to Israeli targets.
The second is that Iran has been holding back.
While Iran may hate Israel, it has not (under this telling of its events) seen a full-blown war as in its interests. For that reason, it has been reserving its most devastating weapons — and those of its remaining allies, like the Houthis in Yemen or Iraqi militias — in order to avoid escalation.
Now that escalation is clearly there, Iran will no longer restrain itself — and the long-anticipated devastating response will happen in the coming days. Such an attack would go beyond Israeli military targets and hit the country's cities, attempt to shut down shipping through the critical Strait of Hormuz, and potentially even kill American personnel in the region.
Once again, we cannot yet be sure which of these two scenarios is more likely. There's also a lot of possible space between the two extremes, in which Iran retaliates forcefully against Israel but not quite so aggressively against the US or transport ships as pre-war estimates feared.
But we can be certain that the scope of the conflict, including any risk that the US might be dragged in, will be determined in large part by whether Iran is truly weak or has simply seemed that way.
How does Iran think about the bomb after this?
It is, as a technical matter, impossible to permanently prevent a country from building a nuclear bomb in a single attack. Whatever gets destroyed can eventually be rebuilt if the targeted government is truly committed to acquiring a weapon.
This fact has been a centerpiece of the case against bombing Iran, an argument focusing less on whether Israel could damage Iranian infrastructure than whether doing so would accomplish anything in the long run.
Israel cannot, by force alone, remove Iran's will to build a bomb. So even if Israel does serious damage to Natanz and Fordow — a real 'if,' given Fordow's extensive fortifications — it can't stop the Iranians from repairing it without launching another strike in the future. Moreover, a successful Israeli attack would solidify Iran's interest in acquiring a nuclear deterrent, meaning that Iran would invest huge amounts of resources in a nuclear rebuild as soon as the bombs stopped falling.
On this logic, one Israeli strike commits Israel to a forever war: bombing Iran at regular intervals to prevent it from reconstituting its program.
We are now about to see a test of this argument — one with at least three possible outcomes.
The first is that it is correct. Israel does real damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, but in the process it convinces Iran that it needs to build a bomb in order to deter future Israeli aggression. This is what happened after Israel's 1981 strike on Iraq's nuclear facility at Osirak, which caused Saddam Hussein's decision to double down on nuclear development (a program only truly derailed by the 1992 Gulf War and subsequent nuclear inspections).
The second is that Israel is more effective than its critics believe. Perhaps Israel does so much damage to Iran's nuclear facilities that the Iranians calculate the risk/reward benefit of rebuilding them is simply too unfavorable. Or perhaps the regime change operation succeeds and the new Iranian government decides not to antagonize the world by recommitting to a nuclear program.
The third is that Iran's nuclear facilities suffer far less damage during the war than people anticipate — and Iran moves swiftly to build a bomb before Israel would be ready to stop them.
This may sound implausible given Israel's successes so far. But expert assessments suggest that, for all its military weakness, it's possible Iran has done a better job shielding its weapons program than it seems.
'Iran already has enough highly enriched uranium to build several nuclear weapons. This is containerized and believed to be stored at three different locations, and it is unclear whether Israel will be able to get all of it in the ongoing military strikes,' Ken Pollack, the vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute, writes in Foreign Affairs. 'Israeli and other Western intelligence services may have a very hard time finding new, secret Iranian nuclear sites. It may also have trouble destroying those sites even if they are identified, since Iran will likely harden them even beyond the level of its current facilities.'
How fast depends on the extent of the damage. But Fabian Hoffmann, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank, suggests that it could 'reach weapons-grade enrichment levels relatively quickly' so long as 'anything substantial survives.'