The final hours of the Israeli-Iranian conflict would be almost comical if a regional war in the Middle East were not at stake. On Monday evening, President Trump announced the best and biggest peace deal ever made. Overnight, supporters of the intervention poured scorn on “Panicans”, the 2025 equivalent of the Iraq War’s “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.
The following day, the Israelis were poised to attack Iran again, and a visibly frustrated Trump told reporters of the two countries, “they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”, reserving most of his ire for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and publicly berating the Jewish state as no president has before. Then, by noon, the attack was off and the ceasefire was on. And it has held.
As the dust settles, the smart money in Western capitals is saying that Israel scored a big win. Launching a swift, surprise assault, Netanyahu short-circuited diplomacy, took out a layer of Iran’s military and scientific leadership, degraded the country’s armed forces and civilian infrastructure, and damaged its nuclear program (that last with US help). And this, at a relatively low cost to Israeli society.
All this is true enough. And yet there are good reasons to doubt the certainty. This becomes apparent when we examine the conflict’s key dimensions from the Iranian perspective: nuclear continuity, regime survival, and domestic reconsolidation. Meanwhile, it is too easy to underestimate the psychological and political price paid by Israel in the bargain of maximalism.
Start with the Iranian side of the ledger, and the nuclear programme. Trump claimed that US bombs “totally obliterated” Fordow, a key nuclear facility buried deep under a mountain. Yet American security sources briefing the media later conceded that US bunker-busters had merely “damaged” Fordow. Iranian state media, meanwhile, reported earlier that most of the enriched material had been removed from the site — all too plausible and predictable.
This prompted DC hawks to call for the “last step” of removing “the nuclear material from the sites”, as Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies put it. As Matt Duss and I warned in the hours before Trump’s decision, an attack on Fordow was bound to necessitate cleanup. Now that the deed is done and a ceasefire is in place, there is little chance of such an operation taking place; the fissile material has most probably been spirited away to locations unknown.
“At the end of the day there are some really important things that haven’t been hit,” the nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis told NPR. “If this ends here, it’s a really incomplete strike.” Of course, it did end there. Which means that, by interrupting the diplomatic process, Netanyahu drove Iran’s nuclear programme underground and might well have rendered future inspection and enforcement that much harder. Perhaps impossible.
On Tuesday evening, CNN and The New York Times reported on a leaked report from the Defense Intelligence Agency warning that the American bombing raid had only set back the Iranian programme by a few months. Trump pooh-poohed it as fake news, and some experts, most notably David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, pointed out that the report probably expressed the worst-case scenario and suggested more analysis is needed. Yet it is fair to say that many analysts believe, bottom line, that Iran retains enrichment knowhow and capacity.
The second dimension, regime survival, is more crucial to Iran. In the early days, many observers — myself included — fretted about rapid state collapse and chaos. This was understandable, given the pathetic, deer-in-headlights state of Iran’s security forces. Israeli authorities at various points hinted that regime change was their ultimate goal. Western hawks mused about naming Tehran streets after Bibi. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah, readied himself for the pomp befitting the Shahanshah, the king of kings.
But Pahlavi will now most probably return to his suburban throne on the Beltway, to contend with less lofty problems. The regime held, after all, proving sturdier than even its leaders perhaps expected. After wreaking havoc for several days, the Mossad infiltration was mitigated. Iran’s social fabric and territorial boundaries remained stable. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei walked away with his life.
This might seem like a low bar to clear. But for the Islamic Republic — a regime that has long felt, and often earned, a sense of insecurity — endurance is just about everything. The regime can justly claim that it withstood an assault from two nuclear powers, the regional hegemon and a global power, notwithstanding the enormous technological differential between the warring parties.
Then, too, while the Jewish state benefited from the material support of the Western powers, the Islamic Republic stood virtually alone, with its major allies, Russia and China, offering kind words but minimal material assistance. That’s the kind of narrative upon which Iran’s ruling class thrives: a replay of the eight-year war against Iraq, during which Saddam Hussein served as a proxy for a collective West bent on strangling the then-nascent Khomeinist regime.
“Younger cohorts of security professionals, Republican and Democratic, have had more than enough.”
Which brings us to the third dimension: domestic reconsolidation. The rally-around-the-flag effect unfolded as critics of hawkish strategies had warned. No anti-regime uprisings erupted. Ali Daei, arguably the greatest living Iranian footballer, posted on Instagram that he would sooner burn than side with foreign enemies. Other athletes, artists, and celebrities likewise declared for national unity and resolve. Even some exiled regime critics began to rail against IDF violence.
It’s possible that, as external hostilities cool down, the people’s discontent will return to the fore, now magnified by anger at the government’s intelligence and defence failures. The Milosevic regime in Serbia collapsed a year after the Nato intervention that forced it out of Kosovo. The tyrant’s military humiliation at Western hands gave breathing space to a democratic opposition, and the rest was history.
But liberal regime change of the kind long envisioned by hawks — a velvet revolution under the aegis of Western warplanes — seems to be off the table for Iran. If anything, the regime transition might involve a takeover by younger security apparatchiks who are more ferociously nationalistic, and who revile the aging mullahs for being insufficiently confrontational.
Now turn to the Israeli side of the ledger, where we find unquestionable gains. For a while, Israeli aircraft maintained a corridor of near-absolute operational freedom from western Iran to the capital. As usual, the Israelis used spycraft brilliantly to sow death and paranoia. The methods included, according to The Washington Post, telephoned threats to murder the wives and children of senior Iranian officers unless the officers filmed videos of themselves defecting from the regime. (Not a single officer apparently complied, a testament to the regime resilience.)
As for the Israeli bombing raids, the full extent of the damage still isn’t clear (and it may never be fully disclosed). But it’s fair to say that lots of Iranian assets went kaboom. Moreover, it is likely that Israel has attained a Lebanon-style ceasefire arrangement, under which it can violate Iranian airspace at will to target Iranian forces and materiel.
Yet through it all, the Iranians kept lobbing ballistic missiles of increasing accuracy at targets across the Jewish state. While these proved far less lethal to Israeli civilians than did IDF operations in Iran, the psychological impact of the Iranian barrages is bound to be lasting and significant. No one in the region will soon forget the sight of Iranian hypersonic systems tearing through the night sky, weaving past air defences before making explosive impact.
It will be remembered, too, that Israel couldn’t defend itself from Iranian rocketry without foreign assistance. Nor that the Jewish state was forced to ration defences, meaning the government allowed a share of Iranian missiles to make impact to preserve interceptors for more pressing targets.
Osama bin Laden famously said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” For much of the conflict, Israel was indeed the strong horse. But not always. At crucial points, it appeared brittle — and dependent on a much stronger horse across the Atlantic.
In America, too, it didn’t go without notice that the Israelis, having initially demanded mere permission to attack, formally requested US involvement on the second day of the operation. In doing so, they swiftly put to rest an argument, floated even by some realists and restrainers, that Trump’s encouraging the attack was hunky-dory, since allies like Israel would now do their own thing in their respective neighbourhoods, without bothering Uncle Sam for help.
When it came, the request for help sealed the impression of a client that drags America into its conflicts. It worked this time — and very likely for the last time. According to YouGov polling, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans supports a military intervention in the Israeli-Iranian conflict. Similarly, a Brookings Institution poll last month found that solid majorities prefer diplomacy to war for addressing the Iranian nuclear problem.
Trump defied such public sentiments — and overcame ferocious, sustained opposition from some of some of MAGA’s biggest stars — to directly intervene in favour of Israel. Why he did so will be debated for years to come. My own reporting, including conversations with administration insiders and congressional staffers of both parties, suggests that it was less a concerted scheme hatched jointly with Bibi than a typically Trumpian “gut” decision.
When confronted in early June with intelligence that the Israelis were about to invade, Trump had a call with Bibi in which the American president tried to discourage the move, lest it blow up his diplomacy. This, even as Trump also reportedly told Bibi, “Maybe you can do it.” The Israeli premier took these contradictory signals for a green light and proceeded.
At first, according to my sources, Trump was prepared to disown the operation if it curdled — hence, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s initial statement disavowing the attack. But as the strike appeared successful, Trump resolved to “own” it. Glued to Fox News — whose frothy talking heads opened a time warp back to 2003 — Trump ditched aversion to new wars and his vow to “prevent World War III,” as last year’s GOP platform had it.
Put another way, it wasn’t true that Washington and Jerusalem had planned all along to lull Iran with a deceptive diplomatic outreach. But Trump liked the impression anyway, and leaned into it. The Fox News bubble, and the urgings of hawkish advisers like CENTCOM commander Gen. Michael Kurilla, similarly prompted Trump to bomb Fordow and two other facilities.
A few days before the Saturday bombing, senior administration officials began calling in MAGA sceptics to “message” the operation, and to provide reassurance that it would be strictly limited in scope.
The MAGA restrainers, then, lost the insider battle, and their media access and prowess was dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch’s. Yet science proceeds one funeral at a time. The voters who watch Fox and lend unquestioning support to Israeli maximalism are old and getting older. Meanwhile, Republicans between the ages of 18 and 49 have registered the sharpest rise in “unfavorable views” toward Israel, jumping to 50% earlier this year, up from 35% in 2019, according to RealClear polling.
On the Left, meanwhile, it is hard to say that the future lies with aging centrists for whom rock-solid support for Israel is an absolute given. All the energy and enthusiasm are with younger Israel-sceptical activist and politicians, like Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Shia Muslim who won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary without apologising for his strong support of the Palestinian cause or walking back his embrace of the slogan “globalize the intifada”.
Maybe American support isn’t all that necessary anymore to Israel. Maybe Trump’s permanent ceasefire will hold. Maybe Washington and Tehran will make a deal that will satisfy hard-liners in Washington and Jerusalem. Then again, it’s telling that American hawks are already complaining about the ceasefire and insisting that nothing short of regime change will do.
But younger cohorts of security professionals, Republican and Democratic, have had more than enough. Their dissatisfaction is likely to crystallise into a hard determination to avert a repeat of the 12-Day War gambit. None of Israel’s spectacular battlefield and intelligence victories, I suspect, can compensate for this generational political loss.
