Iran’s Desperate, High-Risk Survival Strategy
Israel and the United States also do not seem very interested in the rules of the game. They are launching bombings over a large part of Iranian territory, which have killed at least 1,230 people, according to the Iranian Red Crescent. This includes dozens of schoolgirls from the coastal town of Minab, who were killed in an apparent bombing of their school, located near a Revolutionary Guard naval base. Israel has already dropped more than five thousand bombs on Iran since the start of the conflict. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth welcomed the punitive campaign, saying Operation Epic Fury – as the administration called it – had unleashed twice as much air power on Iran as the “shock and awe” phase of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Defense Department recently released video showing an Iranian frigate torpedoed off the coast of Sri Lanka by a US submarine – the first torpedo launched in combat by a US submarine since World War II. The sinking, which appears to have killed at least half of the roughly 180 Iranian sailors on board, is legally dubious and raises delicate diplomatic questions for India, which had hosted the Iranian ship as part of a broader set of maritime exercises to which the United States was also invited. For Hegseth, this is all part of the magic of what he likes to call America’s “war.” The United States and Israel have eviscerated Iran’s navy and air force and are gradually degrading Iran’s command structure and military assets, including a network of underground missile “cities” housing Iran’s arsenal. On Wednesday, analysts Journal of the Long War said there had been a decline in Iranian ballistic missile launches, likely due to the effectiveness of U.S.-Israeli strikes. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight,” Hegseth said in a briefing that day. “We hit them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
The sympathy that there may have been among its neighbors for a cornered and bruised Iranian regime has faded in the face of the escalation in Tehran. A Gulf official, who spoke to me anonymously, said the Iranian strategy was “counterproductive,” given recent attempts at rapprochement by some Arab monarchies and their support for Tehran’s diplomatic path with Washington. Now, whenever this conflict ends, these monarchies will instead focus on protecting themselves against future Iranian threats and deepening their military partnerships with outside powers – take, for example, the recent defense agreements signed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and between the United Arab Emirates and India. “What happened in the Gulf will have long-term consequences in terms of security realignment and relations with Iran,” the official said.
“Iran has killed any chance of reconciliation with the Gulf,” Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s former foreign minister and deputy prime minister, told me. Before the war, some Arab interlocutors had quietly lobbied the White House against such action, in part out of fear that direct war against Iran would result in an even more unstable and chaotic status quo in Tehran. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t know, it was thought. “But now they know the devil and they know that this devil has no red lines,” Ali Shihabi, a prominent Saudi commentator, told me, suggesting that the Iranian regime “had placed a sword of Damocles on the Gulf.” The barrage of Iranian drones and missiles, Shihabi added, has “emboldened the voices of those in the Gulf who say this regime should be degraded as much as possible.”
This deterioration continues apace amid the US-Israeli campaign, although much remains unclear about the end goal and the most plausible way out of the conflict. Although some Trump officials say they are not engaged in a war for regime change, Trump told reporters Thursday that he had to “be involved” in appointing Khamenei’s successor, which sounds an awful lot like regime change. Israel, for its part, seems content to continue hitting the Islamic Republic, whatever the consequences, while launching a new offensive in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. Thanks to the United States, Israel now dominates the Middle East as the supreme hegemon: its military toolkit and reach are unmatched, its status as the region’s only nuclear power is unquestioned, and its ability to strike with impunity against perceived threats far from its borders goes unchecked. Midweek, Israeli officials briefed journalists on their plans to potentially balkanize Iran by boosting support for anti-regime Iranian Kurdish factions operating across the country’s western border with Iraq.
