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The major constraints on Israel’s pursuit of its wish to destroy Iran’s nuclear program have lifted – Iran’s future now depends on the extent to which America is willing to get involved. By Jonathan Pearlman.
‘The Islamic Republic as we have known it is finished’
In 1992, shortly after he was re-elected, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told an academic workshop in Tel Aviv that he believed the country’s greatest threat was the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.
This meeting, only reported years later, marked the start of a growing focus on Iran’s nuclear facilities and eventually prompted Israel to devise plans to try to destroy them – a move that Israel had taken against Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and later against a suspected Syrian reactor in 2007.
For more than two decades, two things held Israel back.
The first was a fear that the attack would not be supported by Washington and could jeopardise Israel’s alliance with the world’s most powerful country.
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak articulated this fear in a formula that he outlined after he left office.
The only way to prevent Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, he said, was for the Americans to attack or for them “not to hinder Israel from doing so”.
The United States has committed to preventing Iran developing nuclear weapons, but successive presidents have rejected Israeli calls for the US to conduct or join a strike. George W. Bush was focused on the invasion of Iraq and its calamitous aftermath; Barack Obama and Joe Biden sought diplomatic deals – though Obama did have the air force use a 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb to destroy a mock-up of Iran’s underground Fordo facility in a desert in south-west America.
Donald Trump, with his isolationist streak, did not want to start a war, though he reportedly came close to ordering a missile strike during his feverish final days in office after losing the 2020 election.
Aside from their reluctance to again become embroiled in a war in the Middle East, American leaders have been concerned about Iran or its regional allies attacking the US’s 40,000 troops stationed in the region. Indeed, one of the signs that the White House was notified of Israel’s attack last Friday morning was that, 36 hours earlier, the US pulled non-essential staff out of its embassies in Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait.
But there was another reason that Israel never carried through with its threats to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel feared that the consequences would be catastrophic.
Iran does not share a border with Israel – the two countries are 1700 kilometres apart – but Israel believed a conflict would prompt massive retaliation from Iran’s armed partners across the region: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. In its war with Israel in 2006, Hezbollah, the strongest of these groups, was believed to be armed with up to 150,000 rockets, including guided missiles. That conflict ended in a stalemate. Israel’s assessment was that it could face 1200 rockets a day from Hezbollah, which is based in neighbouring Lebanon, and that the country would be paralysed.
That is why Israel’s decision to attack last week is so monumental: it was the result of drastic changes unfolding across the Middle East and beyond, which had lifted decades of constraints on Israel. Old certainties governing the region have collapsed and what replaces them will now depend on the outcome of an all-out war between two of the region’s most powerful nations.
The first significant development enabling the attack was that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was finally unhindered by a US president.
In a phone conversation on the Monday before the attack, Trump apparently tried to persuade Netanyahu to allow time for Washington and Tehran to make a deal, especially as further negotiations were due to be held in Oman last Sunday. When the pair spoke again on Thursday, however, Netanyahu confirmed that he would attack, and Trump, who describes himself as the most pro-Israel American president in history, did not try to stop him.
“We knew everything,” Trump told Reuters this week.
“I tried to save Iran humiliation and death. I tried to save them very hard because I would have loved to have seen a deal worked out.”
Netanyahu, a wily operator who has dealt with four US presidents and who was endorsed by Trump – then star of reality television show The Apprentice – during the 2013 Israeli elections, may have sensed that the war, once under way, would nudge the president to tacit endorsement.
In a televised address immediately after the attack, the Israeli leader, echoing the formula of Ehud Barak, stated: “American support – or at least America not opposing – is something we very much want.”
The other pivotal development was that Netanyahu, contemplating a war with Iran, faced a Middle East that had rapidly changed, largely in his favour. Israel’s ferocious war against Hamas since October 7, 2023, and its subsequent war against Hezbollah last September, weakened both groups, killing their top leaders and their replacements. Then, last December, the fall of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad left Iran without a key regional ally and cut off the supply route that enabled Iran to deliver weapons to Hezbollah. Meanwhile Iran’s close partner, Russia, was already contending with its war in Ukraine and had its regional foothold weakened by the collapse of the Assad regime.
In the end, the Houthis were the only group to join the fray. Last Sunday, the group claimed to have fired two missiles at Jaffa in coordination with Iran; the Israeli military said it was not aware of any rockets fired from Yemen.
Asked about the condition of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance”, Andreas Krieg, a military analyst at King’s College London, told Associated Press this week: “It is not really an axis anymore as (much as) a loose network where everyone largely is occupied with its own survival.”
And so, about 3am last Friday, Israel launched a surprise attack deploying 200 aircraft, which bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, air defences and missile bases as well as its military leaders and nuclear scientists. Those killed included the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and the chief of the armed forces.
Announcing his decision, Netanyahu said Iran had enough enriched uranium to build nine bombs, possibly within months.
He has sounded such warnings before. In 2012, he held up a picture of a cartoonish bomb with a lit fuse at the United Nations General Assembly and warned that Iran could develop a weapon within a year; in 2015, he told the US congress that a bomb could be weeks away. Israel is believed to have nuclear weapons but has never confirmed it.
Weapons experts believe Iran has been advancing towards a nuclear weapon and is a “threshold state” that has the capacity to develop a weapon if it chooses.
In May, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran had acquired more than 409 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity, up from 275 kilograms in February – a level of enrichment closer to the 90 per cent required for a bomb. Civilian reactors typically use uranium enriched at levels of 3 to 5 per cent.
“The fact that Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon State in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60% remains a matter of serious concern,” the IAEA said in a report released last week.
Miles Pomper, a nuclear non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said Iran could develop enough weapons-grade uranium for several bombs within days or weeks. But converting that material into a weapon, he said, would take “probably more than a month, less than a year”.
“Iran is clearly wanting to have an option to develop a nuclear weapon and to make that option feasible,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “Has it made a decision or was it close to making a decision before the attack? ... All these things are guesses. The question is what risk you are willing to put up with.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the US intelligence director, told congress in March that Iran was not believed to be building a nuclear weapon. Asked about these comments on Tuesday, Trump said: “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having a weapon.”
Netanyahu said this week that Iran has taken unprecedented steps to weaponise its uranium. He presented no public evidence of these steps. In any case, though, his calculation had changed: even if the risks from Iran’s program had not suddenly increased, the costs of trying to destroy it had significantly lowered.
Hours after the first Israeli air assault last Friday, Iran responded with a drone attack and regular barrages of ballistic missiles, mostly targeting the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, who has ruled since 1989, declared that Israel would face “severe punishment” and he would open the “gates of hell”.
In the ensuing days, Israel escalated its attacks, hitting a range of nuclear sites as well as missile facilities, gas refineries, the state broadcaster and Iran’s replacement army chief, four days after his appointment. As Israel hit government buildings and officials in residential neighbourhoods in Tehran, people began to flee the capital, which has a population of roughly 10 million and no public bomb shelters.
Iran’s foreign affairs ministry said last Sunday that at least 220 people had died and more than 1000 were injured, but provided no further updates. A US-based rights group estimated on Wednesday that 639 people had died in Iran and 1329 were wounded. Domestic authorities said on Wednesday that 24 people in Israel had died and about 800 were injured.
By Monday, Israel claimed to have effective control of Iranian skies – allowing it to use older jets, fly closer to targets and conduct attacks at all hours – and to have destroyed more than a third of its surface-to-surface missile launchers.
As Israel’s dominance became clear, Netanyahu contemplated pushing for regime change in Iran. He told America’s ABC News that killing Khamenei would “end the war” and appeared on an Iranian opposition television program called Regime Change in Iran, saying that nobody had predicted the fall of the Soviet Union or of Assad in Syria. Trump said he knew where Khamenei was located but would not kill him, “at least for now”.
Whether or not Khamenei is targeted, speculation is growing that the war could cause the regime to collapse.
Ali Ansari, professor of Iranian history at the University of St Andrews, said he did not believe that Iran’s regime would survive the aftermath of the war. He said the regime was deeply unpopular due to corruption and mismanagement and had now delivered a “national humiliation”.
“The Islamic Republic as we have known it is finished,” he tells The Saturday Paper.
“The leadership has gone into hiding – some are fleeing. Once this is over, there will be a reckoning. The people will add the regime’s failure to defend itself against Israel to all the other failures of governance.”
He added, “The era in which Iran was seen as a serious regional power is over.”
The extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear program is unclear.
Israel has destroyed several buildings at Iran’s main nuclear site at Natanz. Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the BBC on Monday that an Israeli strike had cut power to the site and that its 15,000 centrifuges had likely been damaged or destroyed. Also damaged is a site at Isfahan that converts uranium into the gas fed into centrifuges for enrichment.
But Iran – having learnt from the bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981 – has placed much of its critical nuclear infrastructure underground. This includes an enrichment site at Fordo, which was built about 80 to 90 metres beneath a mountain.
Most analysts believe Fordo can only be destroyed using a series of bunker-busting massive bombs. Only the US is believed to have such bombs, and Israel’s air force does not have heavy bombers such as B-2s that can carry such hefty payloads.
Though Israel could try to destroy these sites using ground forces or repeated bombings by combat jets, most experts believe that the only realistic prospect is to involve the US in the war.
So Trump this week faced one of the most significant decisions of his presidency: whether to deploy American bombers to try to destroy Fordo. Such a move could, as hawkish Republican Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “finish the job”. But it would risk entangling the US in another Middle Eastern war – a result that Trump has always railed against.
As Israel’s military supremacy became clear this week, Trump switched from ambivalence to increasingly full-throated support for Netanyahu’s decision to attack. On Monday, he returned early from the G7 summit in Canada, telling reporters on Air Force One he wanted a “real end” to the war. He later called for Iran’s unconditional surrender.
Israel had estimated that the war would take two weeks, but a US entry would change the equation. This would become Trump’s war. The US could face Iranian attacks on its Middle East bases, which would prompt massive retaliation. A swift and decisive end to the war could leave a battered regime in Tehran only more intent on developing nuclear weapons, or it could add to the pressure on Khamenei, causing public and political upheaval.
If Trump’s decision is the product of sweeping changes across the region, his choice will determine how much more it changes.
“I may do it, I may not do it,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "‘The Islamic Republic as we have known it is finished’".
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