“Battles are the principal milestones in secular history,” Winston Churchill observed in his magisterial biography of the Duke of Marlborough in 1936. “Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth … But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.” So it was then, and so it is today.
Iran’s war with Israel is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s inveterate hostility to the Jewish state. It has consisted of multiple campaigns, including terror attacks against Jewish communities abroad (Argentina in 1994, for example) and missile salvos aimed at Israel (including from Lebanon and Iran itself last year). But three great events—the smashing of Hezbollah, the Syrian revolution that overthrew the Iranian-aligned regime, and now a climactic battle waged by long-range strikes and Mossad hit teams in Tehran—are changing the Middle East. We are living through the kind of moment that Churchill described.
Israel’s current campaign is built around two realities often missed by so-called realists: first, that the Iranian government is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and cannot be deterred, bought off, or persuaded to do otherwise, and second, that Israel reasonably believes itself to be facing an existential threat.
When I served as counselor of the State Department during the second Bush administration, I had, among other keepsakes on my desk, an Iranian banknote picked up in Dubai. When I held it up to the light, I could see the sign of an atom superimposed over a map of Iran, with its nucleus roughly over Natanz, site of the major Iranian centrifuge hall. The banknote was a symbol of the determination that successive American governments chose to ignore, preferring to negotiate with a regime whose bad faith and malevolence were plain for those willing to see. The Iranian regime was happy to delay and temporize, but its destination was clearly visible in the expanding overt and covert programs to enrich uranium, design warheads, and develop delivery systems.
Equally visible was Tehran’s desire to destroy Israel. It takes a particular kind of idiocy or bad faith to disregard the speeches, propaganda, and shouts of “death to Israel.” The Israeli lesson learned from the previous century—and, indeed, the Jewish one learned over a much longer span of time—is that if someone says they want to exterminate you, they mean it. And so Israel has acted in ways that have had three dramatic consequences.
The first is the emergence of a distinct mode of warfare, already apparent in some of Ukraine’s operations in Russia, that combines special operations with precision long-range strikes. Special operations are nothing new—the British secret services of the time played a role in a nearly successful bomb plot against Napoleon. But the innovation is combining large-scale and systematic use of assassinations and sabotage with nearly simultaneously precision strikes. Similar techniques helped decapitate Hezbollah’s leadership and devastate its middle ranks while smashing its arsenals, but Israel’s campaign against Iran is on an altogether different scale.
This mode of warfare will not work everywhere, but in this case Israeli special operations helped neuter Iran’s defenses and kill many of its senior leaders and nuclear scientists. The sobering lesson for the United States is that others can, at some point, do this to us more easily than we might be able to use these methods against a country like China. It is, in any event, part of the new face of war.
The second is the way that the wars that began with Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, have reshaped the Middle East. Iran’s position had been drastically weakened through the loss of its proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria, and now this current round of attacks has the potential to jeopardize the Iranian regime itself.
The Iranian regime has delivered only misery and repression to its people. In return it was once offered religious and revolutionary zeal, which has been largely replaced by cynicism and hatred of the leadership. It had, and has now lost, imperial reach throughout the Middle East and beyond. The very last thing it offered was the prestige of its pursuit of nuclear weapons—weapons that Westerners may view with horror, but that others in the world (think India and Pakistan, for example) value quite differently. After losing all of these achievements to its own brutality and incompetence, as well as Israeli hit squads and fighter-bombers, all that the regime has left are its mechanisms of repression. Ultimately, those will not suffice to sustain it.
Israel (and for that matter the United States) does not overtly aim at overthrowing the regime; neither has the intention of invading the country in the manner of Iraq in 2003. But a form of regime change may come—possibly through public upheaval, or just as likely through the rise of some strongman, probably from the military or security services, who will take Iran in a different direction. Perhaps such a strongman will lead Iran to some dark new place. But he could also proceed along the lines of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, denouncing and disposing of some of the current elite on charges of treachery, incompetence, and corruption to consolidate his power, and then acting as a dictatorial modernizer. That would be the first step on a much better path for Iran and the rest of the world.
The Western world has reason, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said, to be grateful to Israel for doing the “dirty work” of smashing Iran’s nuclear program, because a nuclear-armed Iran would be a menace not just to Israel but to the wider Middle East and to the West. Which brings us to the third great shift in moods and atmospheres, the characteristically over-the-top, bellicose rhetoric of Donald Trump.
At first the American government hastened to distance itself from the Israeli attacks, in a swift and now rather embarrassing statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But over time the president, communicating through explosive statements on Truth Social, began using the first-person plural in talking about the Israeli attacks, celebrating the American military hardware used in the attack, threatening worse to come, musing about killing the supreme leader of Iran, and clearly contemplating finishing the job of destroying the Iranian nuclear complex by sending B-2 bombers to deliver 15-ton GBU-57 penetrating bombs on the deeply subterranean Fordow facility.
This has aroused consternation among some of his core supporters, such as Tucker Carlson (dismissed by the president as “kooky”) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and required the dispatch of Vice President J. D. Vance to quiet the protests of the isolationist, and in some cases borderline anti-Semitic, wing of the MAGA movement.
Trump’s turnaround is less surprising when one considers his political gifts, among them a feral instinct for weakness. He is a politician who is willing to kick opponents when they are down, and enjoys doing just that. He senses, far better than most of his advisers and experts, just how weak Iran is. No doubt as well, he delights in the opportunity to punish the regime that plotted to assassinate him in 2024.
And he has aspirations to be not a warlord, much though he delights in military bluster and show, but a kind of peacemaker. He understands that a different kind of Iran—if not a democratic one, then a tamed dictatorship—would be open for deals, and he would gladly make them. He has engaged more with the Persian Gulf in recent years than with any other part of the world, and sees opportunities there. He believes that the price would be low, and although the Israelis have done the heavy lifting, he will get the credit from them and others for the finishing touches.
Trump has undoubtedly already authorized various forms of support to Israel’s campaign. He may or may not order the dropping of GBU-57s on Fordow. But he has, in any case, supported actions that are doing far more than those of any of his predecessors to eliminate a threat that has already killed American soldiers and civilians as well as many others, and that would be infinitely worse if left unchecked. Much as it may pain his critics to admit it, in this matter he is acting, if not conventionally, then like a statesman of a distinctively Trumpian stamp.
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