Israel’s strike changes everything in Iran

Until Israeli might ramped up after October 7, Iranian VIPs routinely dismissed the Israelis as the little Satan that couldn’t. Dealing with this mess won’t be easy.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials – including Hossein Salami, second right, killed by Israel – visit an IRGC aerospace exhibition in Tehran, in 2023. Picture: AFP

With Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic-missile facilities and senior officers and scientists, the age of diplomatic nonproliferation is over. It had been on life-support since North Korea went nuclear in 2006. Negotiations with Tehran tried hard to keep alive the hope that a deeply ideological regime massively invested in developing atomic arms could be dissuaded by sanctions or the allure of commerce.

We don’t know yet how successful the Israeli raids were. Getting past the blast doors and shockwave buffers at the underground Fordow enrichment site would have been no easy feat. Ensuring that the 100-yard-deep (91 metre) Pickaxe Mountain plant doesn’t come online will require continuous surveillance and perhaps further raids on quick notice. Ali Salehi, the MIT-educated nuclear engineer who was instrumental in building the nuclear-weapons program, remains alive.

Then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right, listens to head of Iran's nuclear technology organisation Ali Akbar Salehi, right, in Tehran in 2019.

It’s not unlikely, however, that Jerusalem will turn out to have paralysed, or even convulsed, the Islamic Republic for the rest of the 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s rule. Until Israeli might ramped up after October 7, Iranian VIPs routinely dismissed the Israelis as the little Satan that couldn’t. Imagining the Zionists — not the Americans — derailing their nuclear ambitions was too embarrassing to a clerical regime that sees itself as an Islamic paladin that the Jews can’t overcome.

Dealing with this mess won’t be easy, especially if Tehran fails to mount a serious, deadly counter-attack against Israel. Younger officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have seen Iran go on an unparalleled losing streak since Oct. 7. The regime, which suspects that most Iranians would welcome its demise, can’t count on nationalism working to its advantage. We haven’t yet seen Iranians rallying around the Islamic Republic’s flag.

Tehran may have a difficult time recovering from its losses. Jerusalem has exposed again a great fear: that Iran’s national security has been penetrated, if not neutralised, by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. The Israeli air force will undoubtedly pounce again if Jerusalem detects renewed nuclear and ballistic-missile activity. It seems unlikely that President Trump — who probably didn’t authorise the Israeli raid but also didn’t stop it — will object to Jerusalem’s ensuring that Tehran can’t get even. Mossad and Western intelligence services will be obliged to double down on the Iranian target. Everything is about to get a lot harder and more expensive for Tehran.

Jerusalem might have saved the Middle East from an imminent nuclear-arms race by giving nonproliferation what it’s been lacking — teeth. Beyond the bomb, Russia and China, who have been backstopping the Islamic Republic, will likely re-evaluate the utility of Iranian power in the Middle East. The axis will likely survive — anti-Americanism is a powerful binding agent — but Tehran has become even more of a supplicant and less of a partner. There is no downside to this revisionist axis weakening.

Looking back, one of the most alarming aspects about Western nuclear diplomacy with the Islamic Republic had been the extent to which intelligence collected — far greater on Tehran than on Pyongyang — fuelled engagement. As the Iranians got closer to an unstoppable breakout potential, Western resignation, always intertwined with fear of war, intensified.

Since Barack Obama’s presidency, the Israelis have worked hard to improve their intelligence capacity against Iran. The Israelis were aghast as American officials insisted on believing that Iran’s supreme leader would be satisfied to remain bombless — even as he spent vast sums and endured punishing sanctions to construct an industrial nuclear-weapons infrastructure. The Central Intelligence Agency abetted this notion by restricting its definition of nuclear “weaponisation” to the moment when the Iranians start to assemble an implosion device — the very last step in the clerical regime’s nuclear march, a step that has often eluded Western intelligence services, from the Soviet nuclear test in 1949 to North Korea’s detonation in 2006.

We don’t know whether Mossad has penetrated Tehran’s nuclear inner circle. Israeli actions could have been predicated on information that made clear it was now or never.

Jerusalem has never relied on the inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency for information on Iran’s nuclear progress. That hasn’t been the case in the U.S. and Europe, which saw the IAEA as crucial to understanding the regime’s progress. If Washington and the Europeans now want to get serious about nonproliferation, to know at least what the Israelis do, they will need to do what Mossad did — push their intelligence services to operate more effectively inside the Islamic Republic.

A big factor in slowing Iran’s nuclear advance has likely been Mr. Khamenei’s fear of Israeli and Western espionage, which would trigger military strikes. This fear remains even as hard power replaces diplomacy as the primary vehicle for permanently derailing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear quest. Even if Washington wants to avoid the Israeli-Iranian duel, it behooves the Trump administration to ensure that the CIA can at least do what Mossad can do. Think of it as an investment in nonproliferation far beyond the Middle East.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations.