Why Israel struck Iran in defiance of Trump
Alarmed by an intelligence assessment that Iran will be able to produce nuclear weapons within months if not weeks, Israel has launched a massive air campaign aiming to destroy the country's nuclear program.
Israel's air strikes hit Iran's main nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz, as well as its air defences and long-range missile facilities.
Among the dead are Hossein Salami, the chief of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps; Mohammad Bagheri, the commander-in-chief of the military; and two prominent nuclear scientists.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has promised 'severe punishment' in response. Iran could potentially target Israel's own nuclear sites and US bases across the Persian Gulf. Israel claimed Iran launched 100 drones towards it just hours after the attack.
The Middle East is yet again on the precipice of a potentially devastating war with serious regional and global implications.
The Israeli operations come against the backdrop of a series of inconclusive nuclear talks between the United States and Iran. These negotiations began in mid-April at President Donald Trump's request and aimed to reach a deal within months.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposed the talks, pressing for military action instead as the best option to halt Iran's nuclear program.
The diplomatic efforts had stalled in recent weeks over Trump's demand that Iran agree to a zero-uranium enrichment posture and destroy its stockpile of some 400 kilograms of enriched uranium at a 60% purity level. This could be rapidly enriched further to weapons-grade level.
Tehran refused to oblige, calling it a 'non-negotiable.'
Netanyahu has long pledged to eliminate what he has called the Iranian 'octopus' – the regime's vast network of regional affiliates, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the regime of former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and the Houthi militants in Yemen.
Following Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel's military has considerably degraded these Iranian affiliates, one by one. Now, Netanyahu has gone for beheading the octopus.
Netanyahu has in the past urged Washington to join him in a military operation against Iran. However, successive US leaders have not found it desirable to ignite or be involved in another Middle East war, especially after the debacle in Iraq and its failed Afghanistan intervention.
Despite his strong commitment to Israel's security and regional supremacy, Trump has been keen to follow this US posture for two important reasons.
He has not forgotten Netanyahu's warm congratulations to Joe Biden when he defeated Trump in the 2020 US presidential election.
Nor has Trump been keen to be too closely aligned with Netanyahu at the expense of his lucrative relations with oil-rich Arab states. He recently visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates on a trip to the Middle East, while bypassing Israel.
Indeed, this week, Trump had warned Netanyahu not to do anything that could undermine the US nuclear talks with Iran. He has been keen to secure a deal to boost his self-declared reputation as a peace broker, despite not having done very well so far on this front.
But as the nuclear talks seemed to be reaching a dead end, Netanyahu decided now was the moment to act.
The Trump administration has distanced itself from the attack, saying it had no involvement. It remains to be seen whether the US will now get involved to defend Israel if and when Iran retaliates.
Israel has shown it has the capacity to unleash overwhelming firepower, causing serious damage to Iran's nuclear and military facilities and infrastructure. But the Iranian Islamic regime also has the capability to retaliate, with all the means at its disposal.
Despite the fact the Iranian leadership faces serious domestic issues on political, social and economic fronts, it still has the ability to target Israeli and US assets in the region with advanced missiles and drones.
It also has the capability to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20–25% of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments flow. Importantly, Iran has strategic partnerships with both Russia and China, as well.
Depending on the nature and scope of the Iranian response, the current conflict could easily develop into an uncontrollable regional war, with none of the parties emerging as victor. A major conflict could not only further destabilize what is already a volatile Middle East, but also upend the fragile global geopolitical and economic landscape.
The Middle East cannot afford another war. Trump had good reasons to restrain Netanyahu's government while the nuclear negotiations were taking place to see if he could hammer out a deal.
Whether this deal can be salvaged amid the chaos is unclear. The next round of negotiations was due to be held on Sunday in Oman, but Iran said it would not attend and all talks were off until further notice.
Iran and the US, under Barack Obama, had agreed a nuclear deal before – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Although Netanyahu branded it 'the worst deal of the century', it appeared to be holding until Trump, urged by Netanyahu, unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018.
Now, Netanyahu has taken the military approach to thwart Iran's nuclear program. And the region – and rest of the world – will have to wait and see if another war can be averted before it's too late.
Amin Saikal is emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, Australian National University, and Vice Chancellor's strategic fellow, Victoria University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Asia Times
2 hours ago
- Asia Times
When Trump and Albanese talk defense
Ahead of a prospective meeting between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and US President Donald Trump at the G7 Summit Canada, two key developments have bumped defense issues to the top of the alliance agenda. First, in a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles late last month, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth urged Australia to boost defense spending to 3.5% of gross domestic product (GDP). This elicited a stern response from Albanese that 'Australia should decide what we spend on Australia's defense.' Then, this week, news emerged that the Pentagon is conducting a review of the AUKUS deal to ensure it aligns with Trump's 'America First' agenda. Speculation is rife as to the reasons for the review. Some contend it's a classic Trump 'shakedown' to force Australia to pay more for its submarines, while others say it's a normal move for any new US administration. The reality is somewhere in between. Trump may well see an opportunity to 'own' the AUKUS deal negotiated by his predecessor, Joe Biden, by seeking to extract a 'better deal' from Australia. But while support for AUKUS across the US system is strong, the review also reflects long-standing and bipartisan concerns in the US over the deal. These include, among other things, Australia's functional and fiscal capacity to take charge of its own nuclear-powered submarines once they are built. So, why have these issues come up now, just before Albanese's first face-to-face meeting with Trump? To understand this, it's important to place both issues in a wider context. We need to consider the Trump administration's overall approach to alliances, as well as whether Australia's defense budget matches our strategy. Senior Pentagon figures noted months ago that defense spending was their 'main concern' with Australia in an otherwise 'excellent' relationship. But such concerns are not exclusive to Australia. Rather, they speak to Trump's broader approach to alliances worldwide – he wants US allies in Europe and Asia to share more of the burden, as well. Trump's team sees defense spending (calculated as a percentage of GDP) as a basic indicator of an ally's seriousness about both their own national defense and collective security with Washington. As Hegseth noted in testimony before Congress this week, 'we can't want [our allies'] security more than they do.' US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, right, welcomes Australian Deputy Prime Minister and DefenSe Minister Richard Marles, left, before the start of their meeting at the Pentagon in February 2025. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP via The Conversation Initially, the Trump administration's burden-sharing grievances with NATO received the most attention. The government demanded European allies boost spending to 5% of GDP in the interests of what prominent MAGA figures have called 'burden-owning.' Several analysts interpreted these demands as indicative of what will be asked of Asian partners, including Australia. In reality, what Washington wants from European and Indo-Pacific allies differs in small but important ways. In Europe, the Trump administration wants allies to assume near-total responsibility for their own defense to enable the US to focus on bigger strategic priorities. These include border security at home and, importantly, Chinese military power in the Indo-Pacific. By contrast, Trump's early moves on defense policy in Asia have emphasized a degree of cooperation and mutual benefit. The administration has explicitly linked its burden-sharing demands with a willingness to work with its allies – Japan, South Korea, Australia and others – in pursuit of a strategy of collective defense to deter Chinese aggression. This reflects a long-standing recognition in Washington that America needs its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. The reason: to support US forces across the vast Pacific and Indian oceans and to counter China's growing ability to disrupt US military operations across the region. In other words, the US must balance its demands of Indo-Pacific allies with the knowledge that it also needs their help to succeed in Asia. This means the Albanese government can and should engage the Trump administration with confidence on defense matters – including AUKUS. It has a lot to offer America, not just a lot to lose. But a discussion over Australia's defense spending is not simply a matter of alliance management. It also speaks to the genuine challenges Australia faces in matching its strategy with its resources. Albanese is right to say Australia will set its own defense policy based on its needs rather than an arbitrary percentage of GDP determined by Washington. But it's also true Australia's defense budget must match the aspirations and requirements set out in its 2024 National Defense Strategy. This is necessary for our defence posture to be credible. This document paints a sobering picture of the increasingly fraught strategic environment Australia finds itself in. And it outlines an ambitious capability development agenda to allow Australia to do its part to maintain the balance of power in the region, alongside the United States and other partners. But there is growing concern in the Australian policy community that our defence budget is insufficient to meet these goals. For instance, one of the lead authors of Australia's 2023 Defence Strategic Review, Sir Angus Houston, mused last year that in order for AUKUS submarines to be a 'net addition' to the nation's military capability, Australia would need to increase its defence spending to more than 3% of GDP through the 2030s. Otherwise, he warned, AUKUS would 'cannibalize' investments in Australia's surface fleet, long-range strike capabilities, air and missile defence, and other capabilities. There's evidence the Australian government understands this, too. Marles and the minister for defense industry, Pat Conroy, have both said the government is willing to 'have a conversation' about increasing spending, if required to meet Australia's strategic needs. This is all to say that an additional push from Trump on defense spending and burden-sharing – however unpleasantly delivered – would not be out of the ordinary. And it may, in fact, be beneficial for Australia's own deliberations on its defense spending needs. Thomas Corben is research fellow, foreign policy and defense, University of Sydney This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Asia Times
2 hours ago
- Asia Times
How social media divided and broke America
'Something there is that doesn't love a wall' — Robert Frost I still stick to my prediction that American society is slowly calming down from the unrest of 2014-2021. But as new rounds of protests erupt across the nation and a senator is wrestled to the ground and masked unidentified government agents rampage through workplaces and communities looking for 'illegals' to arrest, it's worth remembering that the decline of unrest can be very slow and bumpy. Thus it was in the 1970s, and thus it is today. But why is American society so unsettled in the first place? Something clearly broke in our society in the early 2010s. Watching TV or reading books from before that time feels like looking at a fresco or a mosaic of a vanished golden age — a country that had its problems and disagreements, but which basically worked. A country that almost no one seemed to doubt was a country, and should be one. What broke that healthy nation? In a post last year, I argued that a perfect storm of events — the housing crash and Great Recession, the rise of China, racial diversification, and the rise of smartphone-enabled social media — all came crashing down on America at the same time. I think that story is right, but I don't think it explains why America was especially vulnerable. Many other countries suffered from the global financial crisis, faced the rise of China, experienced tensions over immigration, and struggled with the introduction of social media. To give just one example, you can see a lot of the effects of smartphones — on attention spans and learning, depression, suicide, etc — in other countries, not just the US. And yet the US seems to have been uniquely wounded by the last decade and a half. Where other rich countries have mostly resisted the rise of authoritarian, demagogic leaders, the US is stuck with Trump. American culture wars seem particularly pernicious and intractable. And America has suffered a particularly severe decline in the degree to which people trust institutions: Source: FT In fact, Americans are just down in the dumps about their country in general, and have been so for some time: Source: Gallup (Other polls find the same.) This is especially odd in light of the fact that America's economy is doing so remarkably well compared to other rich countries. Wealth is up above where it was before the Great Recession, the middle class is economically healthy and thriving, wages are rising steadily, and America's macroeconomic performance has been very solid. The US economy is an incredibly resilient machine — if you want a reason for optimism, look at how the economy has thrown off every shock and headwind that the world could throw at it. And yet consumer sentiment is in the dumps. And if you tell people the economy is good, they'll get mad at you. I believe those low sentiment numbers, and I believe in that anger, but I don't see how it can be the real economy causing them. Instead, I suspect that Americans are projecting their anger at their institutions — and at each other — onto economic issues. The introduction of the smartphone — and especially, social media on the smartphone — seems to have something to do with it. These technologies became ubiquitous in the 2010s: Not all of the problems in American society line up nicely with the introduction of smartphone-enabled social media. Severe political polarization began earlier, probably in the 2000s as a result of the Iraq War. Satisfaction with the direction of the country fell at about the same time. But the fall in institutional trust, and the rise in mental illness and unhappiness, line up well with the rise of the smartphone. Back in 2023, Erik Hoel had an excellent post listing a bunch of things about America that got worse right around the time that everyone got Facebook and Twitter and Instagram on their phones: Many of the trends Hoel notes are tangential to the point I'm making here. But here's one worth highlighting: Source: Zach Goldberg By any objective standard, workplace sexism had been decreasing in America since 1980. But in the early 2010s — years before the MeToo movement — perceptions of sex discrimination among liberal women spiked. There's a somewhat similar trend with race relations. Perceptions of race relations had been broadly positive until around 2013, at which point they turned sharply negative: Source: Gallup Unlike many of the other trends, we know why this happened. It wasn't the election of Obama or the election of Trump — the decline happened in 2014-15. That's when a bunch of videos of police shooting Black people came out, causing nationwide protests and a general national furor over racism. The shootings were the proximate cause of the explosion of racial anger in America, but it wouldn't have been possible without social media. Police shootings and abuses happened plenty of times in America before 2014, and protesters got mad about them. But because people didn't have the ability to take smartphone videos and broadcast them all over the world at the speed of light, and because apps didn't give people a social incentive to share those videos and get mad about them, they didn't have the impact they did until 2014. Racial tensions are one example where we can easily trace the effect of smartphone-enabled social media on American social divisions. But in general I think you'll find this same pattern for almost every major cultural issue and every indicator of social division — as soon as Americans got smartphones and social media, we started trusting each other less and getting angrier at each other. Why? Part of it, certainly, is just the natural tendency of social media — particularly 'dunk apps' like Twitter and Bluesky — to elevate the worst people in society and give them a bullhorn to rile up and attack everyone else. But this doesn't explain why American society suffered worse than other countries. Perhaps our greater racial diversity created more fault lines for social media to exploit, but this doesn't explain non-racial fault lines like gender; we have the same balance of men and women as every other country. I don't think we know the answer yet. But I do have a hypothesis. I think that more than other nations, America uniquely relied on geographic sorting to deal with its diversity. In 2008, Bill Bishop wrote a book called 'The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart.' He showed that liberal and conservative Americans were moving to different cities and different states. Bishop worried that this geographic sorting would create ideological echo chambers, where liberals and conservatives each became more extreme because they only talked to each other. Perhaps that did happen, but I also suspect that geographic sorting acted as a sort of release valve for the social tensions that built up in the United States after the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Instead of constantly feuding with their conservative neighbors about abortion or gay marriage or Ronald Reagan, liberals could just move — to San Francisco or New York or L.A. if they had money, or to Oregon or Vermont or Colorado if they didn't. There, they would never have to talk to anyone who loved Reagan or thought homosexuality was a sin. Albert Hirschman wrote that everyone has three options to deal with features of their society that they don't like. You can do nothing and simply endure ('loyalty'), you can fight to change things ('voice'), or you can leave and go somewhere else ('exit'). The ructions of the 60s and 70s were a form of 'voice', but riots and protests and constant arguments about Watergate were no fun. Because Americans had cars and money, many of them could take a more attractive option: exit. In the red-blue America that emerged after the 60s, Blue Americans could move to blue states and blue cities, and Red Americans could do the opposite. Back in the 1990s and 2000s, this became a cliche. If you complained about politics in your state, people would tell you 'Go move to California, hippie!' or 'Go move to Texas, redneck!'. It was a joke, but lots of people did exactly that. It wasn't just red states and blue states, either. The sorting was along urban-rural and educational lines as well. As America converted from a manufacturing-intensive economy to one based on knowledge industries like IT, finance, pharma, and entertainment, those industries clustered in 'superstar' cities like NYC, SF, L.A., D.C., etc. And at the same time, education polarization was happening in the US — educated Americans were becoming liberals while less-educated Americans were becoming conservative. Source: The Economist This trend existed in other countries, but not to the same degree. America's hard pivot to being the world's research park paid big dividends in terms of GDP, but produced some new social divisions in the bargain. By the 2010s, if you looked at a detailed electoral map of the US, what you saw wasn't really red states and blue states — it was red countryside and blue cities. The cities were more prosperous than the countryside, which led to the GOP becoming the party of the working class and the Democrats becoming the party of the affluent. But although we worried about political bubbles, this system seemed to work just fine. A hippie in Oakland and a redneck in the suburbs of Houston both fundamentally felt that they were part of the same unified nation; that nation looked very different to people in each place. Californians thought America was California, and Texans thought America was Texas, and this generally allowed America to function. In fact, there's some research showing that bubbles actually reduce polarization. Bail et al. (2018) found that when people are forcibly exposed to opposing views, they become more polarized against those views: We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to…follow a Twitter bot for 1 month that exposed them to messages from those with opposing political ideologies (e.g., elected officials, opinion leaders, media organizations, and nonprofit groups)…We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative…Democrats exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter bot, although these effects are not statistically significant. Red America and Blue America became echo chambers that helped to contain America's rising cultural and social polarization. They helped us live with our ideological diversity, by forgetting — except during presidential elections — that the people who disagreed with us still existed. It was a big country. We could spread out, there was room for everyone. As the man says in Robert Frost's poem: 'Good fences make good neighbors.' And then that all came crashing down. In the 2010s, everyone got a smartphone, and everyone got social media on that smartphone, and everyone started checking that social media many times a day. Twitter was a dedicated universal chat app where everyone could discuss public affairs with everyone else in one big scrum; for a few years, Facebook structured its main feed so that everyone could see their friends and family posting political links and commentary. Like some kind of forcible hive mind out of science fiction, social media suddenly threw every American in one small room with every other American.1 Decades of hard work spent running away from each other and creating our ideologically fragmented patchwork of geographies went up in smoke overnight, as geography suddenly ceased to mediate the everyday discussion of politics and culture. The sudden collapse of geographic sorting in political discussion threw all Americans in the same room with each other — and like the characters in Sartre's ' No Exit', they discovered that 'Hell is other people.' Conservatives suddenly discovered that a lot of Americans despise Christianity or resent White people over the legacy of discrimination. Liberals suddenly remembered that a lot of their countrymen frown on their lifestyles. Every progressive college kid got to see every piece of right-wing fake news that their grandparents were sharing on Facebook (whereas before, these would have been quietly confined to chain emails). Every conservative in a small town got to see Twitter activists denouncing White people. And so on. This was hard on everyone, but perhaps it was hardest on educated liberals, who had used the knowledge industry clusters of superstar cities as a lifeline to escape the conservative towns they grew up in. Many liberals became intensely unhappy in the smartphone age: Source: Zach Goldberg And I think young liberal women in particular bore the brunt: Source: Pew via Jonathan Haidt Social media made exit impossible, and so Americans abruptly went back to voice. Thrown into one small room with each other, they began to complain and fight. And despite Facebook's turn away from political feeds and Twitter's fragmentation, Americans still spend much of their waking life online and get most of their political news there. No physical-world geographic sorting can solve this. People still move to Texas to escape California's progressive culture, but the people who move are all still on the same apps. Driving immigrants out of the US wouldn't even remove them from English-language conversational networks; they'd be right there yelling in conservatives' faces from other countries. America's unique strengths were always its size and its freedom; it was a great big country, and everyone could spread out and do their own thing and find their people. Social media collapsed that great big country into a small town — or a handful of small towns — full of busybodies and scolds and disreputable characters and people who disagree with each other's values. And we haven't yet learned how to deal with that. 1 And with foreigners, too. Because English is more or less a universal language, extremists and agitators from every country on the planet are now able to jump into American social media discussions. In fact, a number of prominent political influencers are openly tweeting from foreign lands. But this is dwarfed by the number of foreign people who simply tweet pseudonymously, and whom Americans probably assume are other Americans. This is a problem in and of itself, because it distorts American political discourse; Americans' idea of 'what everyone thinks' is heavily influenced by what foreigners think. That's fine for dealing with global issues, but it can heavily distort our perceptions of what our fellow countrymen want. This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
Asia Times
3 hours ago
- Asia Times
How the US fits into an Israel-Iran war
Israel's strike on Iranian nuclear and military facilities has pushed the Middle East one step closer to a far wider, more dangerous regional war. It also has implications for recent US diplomatic efforts toward a deal with Tehran over its nuclear program. Iran's immediate response – the firing of about 100 drones into Israel, many of which were shot down – appears an opening gambit; meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country's airstrikes would continue 'for as many days as it takes.' The Conversation turned to Javed Ali, an expert on Middle East affairs at the University of Michigan and a former senior official at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, to talk through why Israel chose now to strike and what the implications are for US policy on Iran. There was a combination of factors that led up to this moment. One of the more immediate reasons was that an International Atomic Energy Agency report found that Iran was making progress toward enriching uranium to a degree that, in theory at least, would allow Tehran to very quickly upgrade to a weapons-grade level. That is the thrust of what Netanyahu has said by way of reason for the attack now – that intelligence shows that Iran was getting closer to a possible breakout status for a nuclear weapon. But there is a confluence of other factors that have built up over the last year and a half, ever since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas in Israel. Iran's proxy Axis of Resistance – that is, regional groups aligned with Iran and supported militarily by Tehran, including Hamas and Hezbollah – doesn't present the same level of threat to Israel as it did in the pre-October 7 landscape. In the past, an Israeli attack of the sort we are seeing now would have invited a multidirectional response from all corners of the resistance – and we saw this in the early days after the October 7 attack. As of now, none of Iran's resistance partners have done anything in response to the latest strike – and that is, in large part, due to the fact that Israel has successfully degraded these group's capabilities through a series of campaigns and operations. The United States has also contributed to this effort to a degree with sustained operations against the Houthis in Yemen from March to May this year, including hundreds of airstrikes. Further, Israel's previous attacks on Iran in April and October 2024 managed to degrade Iran's ballistic and surface-to-air missiles and air defense radar systems. This likely played into Israel's calculations, too. Lastly, Israel knows that it has a strong supporter in the White House with President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress. Washington may not be 100% aligned with Tel Aviv on every issue, but at the moment, there is no criticism from the the White House or Republican members of Congress on Israel's attacks. The sixth round of talks was due to take place on June 15, led by White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Iran has signaled that the talks won't take place now. There may have been some dialogue between Netanyahu and the Trump administration over the timing of the Israeli strike preceding yesterday's attacks, during which Israel would have made the case that the time is right now to launch a very different type of campaign to really set back Iran's nuclear program. In recorded remarks about Israel's operations, Netanyahu stated he directed his national security team to begin planning for a large-scale campaign against Iran's nuclear program last November. Perhaps the White House did push back, saying that it wanted to see if any progress could be made in the talks. Certainly, it has been reported that Trump told Netanyahu in a phone call on June 10 that he believed a deal with Tehran could be negotiated. Regardless, Netanyahu still went ahead with the strike. Indeed, some observers have posited that collapsing the negotiations between the US and Iran may have been one of the intentions of Netanyahu, who has long opposed any deal with Tehran and has reportedly been irked by Trump's reversal on the issue. During his first administration, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of a previous nuclear deal. A newspaper shows the portraits of Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff, who were due to meet in Oman. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images / The Conversation The White House hasn't criticized Israel in its response to the strike, merely stating that it wasn't involved. In my assessment, the White House appears to be sincere in the substance of what it is saying: that there was no overt and direct US involvement with Israel during the actual strike. As for US involvement in any planning or intelligence sharing ahead of the strike, we may never know. But this is largely messaging for Iran: 'We didn't attack you. Israel attacked you.' The US is clearly worried that any response in Tehran may involve US assets in the region. In the past, parts of Iran's proxy network have hit American bases in Jordan and Iraq. Backing up this being a real concern in Washington is the fact that in advance of Israel's strike, it already made moves to protect some of its assets in the region and remove personnel. On June 11, Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasrizadeh warned that if Israel were to attack, Tehran would respond against U.S. personnel and bases in the region – but that hasn't happened yet. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and military officials must know that attacking US targets would be very risky and would lead to a significant response that would likely be even more damaging than Israel's latest attacks – including putting a potential deal over its nuclear program at risk. And the US has the capability to hit Iran even harder than Israel, both militarily and through the extension of sanctions that have already been very punishing to the Iranian economy. Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, points to a red line he drew on a graphic of a bomb while addressing the United Nations on Sept. 27, it will be Khamenei who decides Iran's response – and he remains firmly in control of Iran's national security apparatus despite his advanced age. He knows he will have to walk a fine line to avoid drawing the U.S. into a military campaign. Despite the challenges facing Iran at the moment, Iran will, I believe, have to respond in a way that goes beyond its previous attacks on Israel. Reports of drone attacks against Israel on June 13 fit within the framework of the attack Iran launched against Israel in April 2024 that included a combined salvo of almost 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones over several hours. Despite the damage Israel has inflicted against Iran through its series of operations, Iran probably still possesses thousands or tens of thousands of these types of weapons that it can use against various targets in the region. Iran could look at targets outside Israel, without necessarily hitting the US directly – for example, by attacking maritime targets in the Persian Gulf and in effect closing the Strait of Hormuz. US military planners have long been concerned about Iranian naval attacks using small boats for ramming or small arms attacks against shipping in the Persian Gulf. Another option would be for Iran to increase its involvement in terrorism activities in the region. Tehran's proxy groups may be diminished, but Iran still has its Quds Force, through which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps conducts nonstate and unconventional warfare. Will the Quds Force look toward targeted assassinations, bombings, or kidnappings as part of Iran's retaliatory options? It has employed such tactics in the past. And beyond conventional weapons, Iran also has pretty significant cyber capabilities that it has used against Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia, among others. It would appear Trump is still holding open the possibility of some kind of deal with Iran. In his statement following the Israel attack, he warned Tehran that if it didn't come back to the table and cut a deal, the next Israeli attack would be 'even more brutal.' The attack could push Iran into reengaging in talks that were seemingly stalling in recent weeks. Certainly, that seems to be the thrust of Trump's messaging. But the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists in the attack, and the apparent wounding of one of the negotiators, may convince Tehran to double down on a path toward a nuclear weapon as the only means of deterrence against Israel, especially if it suspects US involvement. Javed Ali is associate professor of practice of public policy, University of Michigan This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
