By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

On October 3, 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addressed a large crowd of government officials and international visitors in Tehran. As he approached his conclusion, Khamenei’s remarks turned to Israel—the Islamic Republic’s self-proclaimed nemesis. Invoking a verse from the Koran, Khamenei insisted that the Jewish state would “die of [its] rage.” He reminded the audience that the Iranian theocracy’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, had described Israel as a cancer. He ended his speech with a prediction: “This cancer will be eradicated, God willing, at the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces throughout the region.”

Four days later, sirens sounded as rockets flew out of Gaza and into southern Israel. More than 1,000 Palestinian militants followed, breaching the border barricade on motorcycles and jeeps, swarming from boats on the sea, and paragliding in from the air. In less than 24 hours, the militants killed 1,180 Israelis and captured 251 more. The massacre committed by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters was the deadliest act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust. It precipitated a ferocious Israeli military response that has wiped out Hamas’s leadership and eliminated thousands of the group’s fighters, while also killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and devastating Gaza’s infrastructure.

Although Tehran was not directly involved in the October 7 attack, Iran’s leaders were eager to exploit its aftermath in hopes of fulfilling Khamenei’s prophecy. At first, Iran entered the war by following its well-honed playbook: posturing diplomatically against escalation while rallying its proxy militias to assault Israel. But on April 13, Iranian leaders shifted course, launching a massive barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, the first time that Iran had directly attacked Israeli territory from Iranian territory.

Israel was spectacularly successful in working with the United States and its Arab partners to blunt those strikes. It then retaliated against Iran and its proxies without prompting more attacks, containing escalation. And the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime only strengthens Israel’s upper hand over Iran. Still, history suggests that the Islamic Republic is unlikely to be chastened. Instead, the normalization of direct military conflict between Iran and Israel is a seismic shift that creates a profoundly unstable equilibrium. By lowering the threshold for direct strikes, the tit for tat has boosted the odds that the two most powerful states in the Middle East will fight a full-scale war, one that could draw in the United States and have a devastating effect on the region and the global economy. Even if such a war does not break out, a weakened Iran may seek to insulate itself by acquiring a nuclear weapon, causing a wider wave of proliferation. Preventing such a future will thus be an essential challenge for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who must leverage his penchant for chaos to forge a regional deal.

 

A Rising Power

Iran and Israel were not always mortal enemies. Under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the monarch who ruled Iran for decades until the 1979 revolution, Tehran cultivated a cooperative and mutually beneficial security and economic relationship with the Jewish state. Israeli leaders, in turn, courted Iran to ease their international isolation and counter the hostility of their Arab neighbors.

The Iranian Revolution turned that relationship on its head. Iran’s new rulers—who came from the Shiite clergy, despised Israel. Some, steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, even viewed Israel as an infidel transgressor. (The ties between the Shah and Israel were, in fact, one of the factors that helped galvanize religious opposition to his rule.) Before the revolution, in an infamous 1963 sermon that precipitated his expulsion from Iran, Khomeini inveighed against Israel as the enemy of Islam and the religious class in Iran. He continued to weave similar themes throughout his speeches after the revolution elevated him to head of state.

Under Khomeini’s leadership, the Islamic Republic fused this deep-seated ideological antipathy toward Israel with a determination to upend the regional order and assist oppressed peoples, especially the Palestinians. Tehran began this process by intervening in Lebanon, which was in the throes of its long civil war when Iran became a theocracy. After Israel’s 1982 invasion of the country, Iran offered Lebanese Shiite groups such as Hezbollah military and technical aid, developing a model for terrorizing its adversaries through suicide bombings, assassinations, and hostage-taking. Tehran also began championing the Palestinian cause as a way to win the hearts and minds of the Middle East’s many Sunni Muslims, who otherwise had little reason to side with a fundamentalist Shiite regime.

Accustomed to dealing with the shah, Israel initially sought to forge quiet connections with Iran’s revolutionary state, which it viewed as anomalous and impermanent. Israeli officials even maintained a sizable arms pipeline to Tehran after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran, in hopes of strengthening moderate Iranian leaders and prolonging the conflict against Baghdad. (The Israelis saw Iraq as a more serious threat.) But this gambit ended badly after the involvement of U.S. officials, who sought to use the sales of American weapons to Tehran, including those sold by Israel, to induce Tehran’s help in freeing U.S. hostages in the Middle East and to covertly fund Nicaragua’s contra rebels. The result was an embarrassing scandal for the Reagan administration and a further hardening of Iran’s revolutionary regime. In this way, the Iran-contra debacle helped put to rest any Israeli illusions that revolutionary Iran was ephemeral or non-threatening.

The end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, meanwhile, gave Iran the capacity to more seriously challenge Israel. The Islamic Republic may have emerged from that conflict battered and impoverished, but the fighting helped the clerical regime consolidate its grip on power. It also meant the Iranian military needed a new mission. Even as Israel and the Palestinians took hesitant steps toward conflict resolution and a two-state solution in the 1990s, Tehran expanded its investments in violent opposition to the peace process and to Israel overall. It also accelerated the revival of Iran’s pre-revolutionary nuclear program.

Events in the following decade further bolstered the Iranian regime. The U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq dethroned two of Tehran’s most proximate adversaries, the Taliban and Saddam, giving Iran more room to maneuver. Those U.S. operations also intensified paranoia in Tehran that Washington was trying to strangle the Islamic Republic, stoking the regime’s determination to drive U.S. troops out of the region. The result was an Iran both more able and more willing to arm its proxy network, including by funneling weapons to Palestinian militants.

During this same period, the full scope of Iran’s nuclear ambitions began to come into view. In 2002, an Iranian opposition group exposed previously undisclosed nuclear sites intended to produce fuels that could be used for weapons, in violation of Tehran’s obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. For Israel, Russia, the United States, and other leading powers, these revelations confirmed that the theocracy was developing the infrastructure to acquire nuclear arms and potentially transfer them to its surrogates and partners. Ultimately, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred the issue to the UN Security Council, resulting in an unprecedented suite of multinational economic sanctions on Iran.

Those restrictions hit Tehran’s pocketbook, but they did not disrupt its regional rise, which was further aided by the Arab Spring in 2010–11. At first, the spread of revolutions and civil war across the Middle East challenged the Islamic Republic, especially when the unrest threatened one of Iran’s most valuable partners—Assad. But with help from Hezbollah and Russia, Iran managed to prop up Assad for more than a decade. By improving its position in Syria, Tehran was also able to ensure that Hezbollah remained the dominant force in Lebanon, expanding the group’s arsenal of precision-guided missiles and rockets as well as the means to produce them. And Iran further seized on growing regional chaos, such as the civil war in Yemen, to expand its reach and enhance the capabilities of its partners. By the end of the 2010s, Tehran had developed the ability to project power across the Middle East and coordinate its network of militias.

 

Playing With Fire

Israel watched warily as Iran grew more capable. But for years, and despite many threats, it avoided directly attacking the country. The Obama administration succeeded in dissuading Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from launching strikes on Iran’s nuclear program in 2012. Tehran, Washington, and five other world powers later inked an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program in 2015, despite ferocious lobbying from Israeli leaders.

Instead, Israel contented itself with creative and reasonably effective alternatives to direct military action. Through clandestine operations and cyberattacks, the country sabotaged key Iranian nuclear facilities. It assassinated nuclear scientists and military officers, and it stole archival records that demonstrated the true extent of Iran’s nuclear activities, which the regime had tried to hide. Perhaps most important, Israel built a potent intelligence network that kept the Iranian regime off balance.

Israel also sought to turn up the heat on Iran by directly attacking Tehran’s allies and striking its resources outside the country. What began in 2013 as opportunistic bombings of Hezbollah supply lines within Syria had transformed by 2017 into a systematic military campaign against Iranian assets and proxies across the region. This campaign scored significant successes, including a series of strikes in the summer of 2019 on Iranian weapons depots in Iraq, missile production facilities in Lebanon, and Iranian-backed fighters in Syria. But by remaining below the threshold that would provoke Iranian retaliation, Israel fell short of achieving decisive setbacks against Hezbollah or Iran.

Israel’s escalation in Iran and Syria coincided with Trump’s first term, in which Washington assumed a much harsher stance toward the Islamic Republic. Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed what he called “maximum pressure” economic sanctions on Iran in hopes of extracting far-reaching concessions. Tehran’s response offers a case study in its cagey calculus. For the first year of those sanctions, Iranian leaders exhibited remarkable restraint, only to pivot dramatically and launch a series of counterattacks, including strikes on Persian Gulf shipping and Saudi oil facilities. This was not wanton violence: Iranian leaders hoped that confrontation might change Washington’s cost-benefit analysis and force an end to maximum pressure. They did not succeed—but from Tehran’s point of view, the maneuver did not fail, either. To Tehran, the best defense is often a good offense, and its aggressive actions signaled to the world that the regime was willing to impose real costs on countries that bucked it.

Israeli tanks returning from southern Lebanon, December 2024

Recent tit-for-tat exchanges between Iran and Israel betray a similar logic, and they have moved the war between the two states into new territory. After Israel bombed an Iranian consulate building in Syria in April, Iran launched its unprecedented direct attack, firing more than 350 ballistic and cruise missiles and drones straight at its enemy. This attack, like past ones, was calculated and clearly designed to send a message. Iran, after all, telegraphed the attack well in advance. And Israel, thanks in no small part to the help of neighboring Arab states, was able to repel Iran’s bombardment. But the coordinated volley of missiles and drones was not simply performative. “This wasn’t a small-scale or a chest-thumping show of force,” noted Major Benjamin Coffey, one of the U.S. Air Force pilots who helped thwart the Iranian barrage. “This was an attack designed to cause significant damage, to kill, to destroy.”

The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a May 2024 helicopter accident briefly distracted the theocracy and appeared to disrupt the escalatory spiral. But it was not long before the conflict flared again. In August, Israel assassinated the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh at an official Iranian guesthouse in Tehran, only hours after Haniyeh had met with Khamenei and attended the inauguration of the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Less than two months later, Israel escalated in Lebanon, laying waste to decades of Iranian investment in Hezbollah in an abrupt and humiliating fashion. Via remote control, Israel detonated tiny explosives it had secretly implanted in thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives, disrupting the group’s command and control. Israeli forces then killed nearly the entire upper echelon of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its longtime chief, Hassan Nasrallah, and destroyed much of the group’s weaponry.

This onslaught produced not just a much weaker Hezbollah but a much weaker Iran. For more than 40 years, Hezbollah had been Tehran’s ace in the hole: the country’s inaugural franchise and the nucleus in its loose network of partners and proxies. Its arsenal of missiles was intended to be the first line of defense for Iran. Crippling such a key asset, even if only temporarily, severely undercut Iran’s stature and power in the region. The loss of Nasrallah was especially devastating for Iran’s leadership. Nasrallah and Khamenei had known each other since Hezbollah’s earliest days. Nasrallah spoke Persian, had lived for a time in Iran, and was the only major figure in the region who considered Iran’s supreme leader to be his spiritual guide.

It was thus entirely predictable, and perhaps even inevitable—that Tehran would respond to his death with force, as it did with another salvo of missiles on October 1. Yet once again, U.S. and Israeli preparation and coordination prevented casualties and any serious physical damage. After some brief suspense, Israel undertook an elegant and effective set of strikes that significantly weakened Iran’s air defenses and its missile, drone, and nuclear program without provoking retaliation. This strike, together with the subsequent collapse of Assad’s brutal government, has shattered Iran’s existing regional strategy.

 

Appetite for Destruction

For now, the direct attacks between Iran and Israel have provided the latter with the upper hand. Iran’s capabilities, defensive and offensive alike—have been degraded. Israel, after the catastrophic failure of October 7, looks stronger than ever. By galvanizing Arab states to help repel Iran’s April attack, the Israelis have shown that Arab governments are willing to join the Jewish state in deterring Iran, despite the sympathy for the Palestinians among Arab populations.

Yet Iran and Israel, and the region as a whole, are facing a difficult predicament. Israel has achieved a significant victory, but both Iranian and Israeli leaders believe that the threat posed by the other remains existential and unyielding. In their public posture and rhetoric, both governments seek to portray the other as being on the ropes. After Israel’s October strike on Iran, Netanyahu boasted, “Israel has greater freedom of action in Iran today than ever before. We can reach anywhere in Iran as needed.” But for Khamenei, the setbacks of Iran’s proxies are meaningless; in his telling, Hamas and Hezbollah are victorious simply because they survived, and Israel’s destruction is only a matter of time. “The world and the region will see the day when the Zionist regime will be clearly defeated,” he said in early November.

Given Iran’s losses and its newly heightened vulnerability at home, this posture may be bravado. And if Tehran is serious, its leaders may be gravely miscalculating. Still, over the past 45 years, Iran’s leadership has navigated many significant setbacks with surprising agility. Two of the secrets to the regime’s success are its tendency to embrace aggression under pressure and its readiness to play the long game: to retrench or pivot as necessary, to creatively deploy its limited resources and relationships, and to engage in asymmetric attacks to achieve leverage over more powerful adversaries. It could do so again today.

Consider the record. In January 2020, the Trump administration assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force—the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in charge of managing relations with Iran’s allies and proxies. At first, the killing seemed like a symbolic and operational disaster for Tehran, given just how key Soleimani was to its foreign policy. Yet his death ultimately had little enduring effect on the strength, durability, or efficacy of Iran’s axis of resistance. Similarly, in 1992, when Israel killed Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, it paved the way for the ascension of Nasrallah, who proved to be a far more effective and deadly adversary. A month later, Hezbollah retaliated by orchestrating the deadly bombing of Israel’s embassy in Argentina.

The evisceration of Tehran’s most valuable assets, Hezbollah and the Assad regime, is a catastrophic blow for the Islamic Republic. But a weakened Iran is not necessarily a less dangerous Iran. Iran is “staring you in the eye” and “will fight you to the end,” Hossein Salami, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, declared to Israel in November. “We will not allow you to dominate the fate of Muslims. You will receive painful blows—keep awaiting revenge. ”This may be garden-variety Iranian bluster, but it would be a mistake and out of step with historical precedent to presume that even a massive strategic reversal will induce Iranian quiescence.

There is another sign that Iran may be upping the ante to counterbalance its new vulnerabilities. For the first time in two decades, important voices within the country are openly calling for Tehran to embrace nuclear weapons. In the past, several senior Iranian officials, including a previous foreign minister and a previous head of the country’s atomic energy agency, had hinted that they had achieved the ability to produce a weapon but had opted not to. In November 2024, however, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that influential officials in the regime view that restraint as self-defeating. Hard-liners in Iran’s parliament have publicly asked Khamenei to reconsider his religious decision that forbids the development of nuclear weapons. If the fundamental rules of the game have been transformed since October 7, then Iran’s defense doctrine may undergo a similar evolution. A truculent Trump administration that supports an unleashed Israel could, in particular, accelerate Iran’s nuclear timeline and prompt Tehran to openly embrace weaponization, something the Iranian regime has spent decades dodging.

 

Chaos Agent

Trump’s second administration will take office determined to get tough on Tehran, just as his first one did. His incoming team has promised to ratchet up economic pressure on the Islamic Republic. The president-elect himself warned the Iranians that he would “blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” if they sought to assassinate him, as multiple news outlets reported.

Meanwhile, the incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has lambasted President Joe Biden for imposing restrictions on Israel as it prosecutes its war in Gaza. Unlike the Biden administration, then, the Trump team may have little regard for the potential blowback from a sustained attempt to erode the capabilities of the Houthis in Yemen and Iraq’s Shiite militias. If so, the region could be headed for more bloodshed. Should Israel or the United States take off their gloves in Iraq and Yemen, they could destabilize Iraq and prompt the Houthis to target U.S. partners in the Middle East: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That could complicate the planned phase-down of U.S. troops in Iraq and leave a precarious power vacuum in the heart of the Arab world that Tehran and other extremists would seek to exploit. So could uncertainty regarding the future of Lebanon and Syria. Yet Trump’s policy may prove more nuanced than unwavering confrontation. For starters, the new administration will find that the tools at its disposal are less effective than when Trump deployed them during his first term. His maximum pressure sanctions, for example, succeeded in slashing Iran’s oil exports and revenues thanks to cooperation from China, which Beijing may not be willing to repeat. The smuggling networks that enable Iranian oil to reach China have become more elaborate and more difficult to counter through sanctions designations alone. Any significant new economic coercion could also face headwinds from Washington’s crucial Gulf allies, whose leaders now prefer to co-opt rather than confront Tehran.

Then there are Trump’s own views on Iran. The president-elect has suggested there is a method to his madness—and that he desires a deal. During his 2024 campaign, Trump disavowed regime change and declared that he wanted Iran “to be a very successful country.” He has recently suggested that had he won in 2020, he would have concluded an agreement with Tehran “within one week after the election.” And Trump appears to have greenlighted early engagement with Iranian officials this time around, having sent one of his closest confidants, the billionaire Elon Musk, to meet with the country’s UN ambassador in November.

A newspaper with a picture of Syrian rebel fighters, Tehran, December 2024

The new administration will surely take a permissive approach to Israeli territorial ambitions. But Trump also says he wants to end the war in Gaza and to expand the Abraham Accords by adding Saudi Arabia. He wants to avoid further U.S. military commitments while lowering energy prices, creating a more docile China, and terminating Iran’s nuclear program. These aims require difficult tradeoffs, and they will necessitate a more sophisticated strategy than merely attacking Iran and its proxies.

If past is prelude, Trump’s resulting approach will likely be highly disruptive—especially since some of his goals are mutually incompatible. That may not seem like the best recipe for stability in the Middle East. Yet this may be just the moment for the unconventional, unpredictable, and unintentional chaos that appears to be on order from a Trump presidency. A dexterous Washington, unencumbered by any fidelity to principles or predictability, might just succeed by brandishing American muscle alongside a transparent infatuation with dealmaking. Trump’s grand ambitions and his transactional approach to foreign policy are surprisingly well suited to today’s Middle East, where regime interests and opportunistic investments are the lingua franca.

To succeed, Trump will have to manage the competing views and priorities of his own administration’s staffers. But an unsentimental assessment of the regional landscape offers some sense of how Trump could proceed. He might start, as he did in his first term, in the Gulf. The Gulf states desperately want an end to the war in Gaza, which would serve their own economic and security interests as well as Israel’s. The UAE has been in discussions with Washington about helping establish a postwar Palestinian government in Gaza and obtaining security and reconstruction funding. Trump could continue these conversations and use them to help end Israel’s war. The Gulf states could also help Trump forge a new deal with Iran. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have strong channels of communication with Tehran, which Trump could tap into. The Arab world would certainly welcome an agreement that prevents a full-scale war, which would have catastrophic consequences.

This confluence of interests is useful but hardly sufficient to achieve the outcomes Trump desires. That is where the president-elect’s volatility and ruthlessness could be an unexpected asset. If Trump reinstates meaningful economic pressure on Iran and gives Israel some additional leeway for military action, he might better demonstrate U.S. capabilities and thus force Iran to reverse its current, uncompromising policy positions. A muscular U.S. approach has paid dividends in the past with an Iranian leadership whose foremost interest is in regime survival. Such an approach would likely be an improvement over that of the Biden administration, which relied almost exclusively on conciliation that Iran saw as weak and desperate. The result of the shift could be a real deal of the century: an abatement of the multipronged conflicts raging in the Middle East, a political horizon and reconstruction for the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and some nominal concessions from Tehran on its nuclear program and regional malfeasance.

Forging this deal will still be extremely difficult to achieve. During his first term, Trump’s unconventional diplomacy with another recalcitrant nuclear power, North Korea, ultimately went nowhere, and overall his administration achieved few notable breakthroughs in dealing with adversarial powers. Even if realized, a deal would not likely endure for very long. Iran’s leadership is steeped in antagonism toward both Israel and the United States, and the regime’s investment in its nuclear program and proxy network has been key to its survival strategy. Netanyahu, for his part, has found that a maximalist military approach yields spectacular strategic dividends along with domestic political benefits. And there is no shortage of other spoilers in this combustible region.

But even an ephemeral set of understandings could reduce the temperature in the Middle East. That would, in turn, enable Washington and the world to turn their attention to more daunting challenges, especially China and Russia. And any deal that stanches some of the bloodshed and reduces some of the risks, if only temporarily.

 

 

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