Three days into the United States and Israel’s military campaign against Iran, the implications are becoming clearer, and they are deeply troubling. Despite the assassination of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior figures in the opening strikes, the regime in Tehran appears to retain sufficient coherence to direct a sustained military response.
Iran has adopted a markedly different strategy on this occasion than it did during the previous American-Israeli attack, when it launched waves of missiles against Israel that largely failed to breach that country’s defence system.
This time, Iranian drones and missiles have struck targets across the Persian Gulf, from Bahrain and Qatar to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Hizbullah has mounted attacks from Lebanon, and reports of incidents elsewhere suggest a deliberate effort to stretch the theatre of conflict as widely as possible.
The Iranian calculation appears to be that maximising economic disruption, driving up fuel prices and threatening the stability of Gulf states that have become critical transport and business hubs will test the Trump administration’s limited appetite for a prolonged engagement. That calculation may not be wrong. A striking feature of this entire enterprise is how little effort the White House made to prepare American voters for what lay ahead, or to offer any coherent rationale for the attack, leaving itself politically vulnerable if things go wrong. The same anxiety grips America’s erstwhile allies in Europe and the Middle East, who now face new threats to their citizens both abroad and, if warnings of terrorist reprisals prove justified, at home.
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Inside Iran, there is little sign as yet of the popular uprising that Donald Trump has repeatedly and explicitly called for. Most Iranians would welcome the end of a brutal, despotic and economically ruinous regime that has impoverished them for decades. But it should surprise no one that, barely weeks after the thousands of protesters were massacred in the streets, the public remains cautious. That may change but how it unfolds is impossible to predict. Iran’s neighbours will be anxious at the prospect of collapse or civil war driving waves of refugees across their borders.
History offers a consistent lesson: efforts at political decapitation are rarely as clean or as swift as those who undertake them hoped, and they frequently produce outcomes far worse than anticipated. The doctrine of regime change by aerial bombardment has a poor record, although nothing said by Trump or his officials suggests any awareness of that.
Their public statements oscillate between urging the Iranian people to revolt and hinting at some accommodation with the current leadership. Such incoherence is likely to render both outcomes less, not more, probable.
