Iran’s supreme leader and government are facing what many regard as an existential moment as they try to decide how to respond to Israel’s ongoing attacks on its military hierarchy, air defenses and nuclear program.
Iran has a range of potential options, each with their own peril. Limiting or giving up its nuclear program would look like surrender, which could further weaken support for the government. But responding aggressively, including potentially taking aim at U.S. targets, would almost certainly escalate the conflict at a time when Iran’s capabilities are badly degraded.
Israel’s sweeping attacks only highlighted that Iran is in its worst position in decades. It looks defenseless against Israeli strikes; its proxy forces, like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which were supposed to provide protection, have been decimated; its economy is in distress; its top military leaders have been killed in their beds; it faces an uncertain succession to its aging supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; and Israel turned a significant amount of Iran’s huge investment in its nuclear program into rubble.
President Trump, who has pushed for months for Iran to agree to limit its nuclear program, cast the Israeli strikes as a warning and as an incentive for Iran “to make a deal, before there is nothing left.” Now, he said on Friday, “they have, perhaps, a second chance!”
But given the breadth of Israel’s assault, Iran is likely to see this attack “as a direct attempt to destabilize the regime rather than merely to curtail its nuclear ambitions,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. “As such, the regime may interpret it as an existential threat — one that compels a forceful and potentially volatile response.”
Even if Iran chooses to be careful now and not hit American targets and allies in the region, there is little doubt in the minds of its leaders that the United States is complicit in the Israeli attacks, said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. But attacking American targets now would be the surest way of not only escalating the war but also providing Mr. Trump a reason to openly join Israel in attacking Iran.
American and Israeli officials have demanded that Iran give up entirely its enrichment of uranium, one of two paths to building a nuclear weapon. Iran officially denies that it seeks to build a bomb and says its enrichment is solely for civilian use.
“They won’t give up enrichment, not this easily,” said Mr. Nasr. “They’re not going to surrender.”
Iran said on Friday on state television that it would not attend a previously scheduled sixth round of talks with the Americans in Oman on Sunday on a possible nuclear deal, one that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has sharply criticized and seems to be trying to derail with these attacks.
From Iran’s point of view, Mr. Netanyahu is trying not simply to degrade and damage the Islamic Republic militarily and symbolically, but “trying to provoke an internal crisis in Iran,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House. But as in the past, she expected “the system, albeit weaker, to rally around the flag.”
The regime may be at risk at some point. “But from which direction?” Mr. Nasr asked. What replaces the Islamic Republic may not be a democracy but “could bring more hard-liners to the fore,” he said.
Iran’s weakness is sure to accelerate the debate already going on inside the leadership about whether to finally build a nuclear weapon, despite its promises not to do so, as the best deterrent against an Israel that can bomb Iran now at will and to help ensure its security more broadly.
“A lot of people in Iran will see their backs to the wall, that regional deterrence has failed, the negotiations have gone nowhere and Israel is unleashed, and that the only real safeguard would be a nuclear weapon,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Iran may choose to enhance enrichment, disperse its stocks of highly enriched uranium to secret places, expel international inspectors and decide to leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty altogether. (Israel is not a signatory to the treaty and has a policy of neither admitting nor denying such a program.) But such moves might also bring the United States more directly into the war.
Iran is being careful for now not to attack American allies or the Gulf States or their energy infrastructure, trying not to widen the war. The country’s leaders are surely in contact with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which have access to President Trump and leverage with him, to try to find a way to save face and “put a lid on things,” especially once they have retaliated in force against Israel, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran scholar at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
But Ayatollah Khamenei has never trusted the United States or Mr. Trump, especially since the president during his first term unilaterally pulled out of the carefully crafted 2015 nuclear deal that restricted Iran’s enrichment in return for the lifting of economic and other sanctions, and then imposed even more sanctions.
If Ayatollah Khamenei thought that negotiations with the Americans protected Iran from Israeli strikes, he will now wonder if even a deal with Mr. Trump would prevent Israel from attacking Iran, Ms. Geranmayeh said.
“This is a very bad place for Khamenei to be in now,” she said. “Iran might end up with a bigger war and then a very bad peace deal.” But he will be under increasing pressure from the military and hard-liners to use Iran’s best assets now against Israel, she said.
Tehran always has options, said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. It could not only launch missiles but also cyberattacks, deploy its proxy militant groups or even escalate its nuclear program, bringing it closer to a rush to a bomb.
“But all the options have consequences that could put the regime in greater jeopardy,” she said. And given the deep penetration of Israeli intelligence into Iran, she added, “they have to wonder what is still in store.”
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.
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