Iran-Israel: The question now is who can take more pain?
Israeli missiles may struggle to hit Tehran’s nuclear bunkers, so diplomacy could still be the only solution – if a humiliated rival will talk.
Israel and Iran are now locked in a struggle that will examine their tolerance for pain and their willingness to escalate.
So far, Israel has the advantage. But as this war develops, its staying power – and that of its American ally – will be tested.
During the second night’s strikes, dozens of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) fighter jets were in action over Tehran, a dramatic demonstration of air superiority and of Iranian powerlessness. This followed a first night in which 220 aircraft attacked surface-to-air missile batteries, nuclear sites and leadership targets.
Meanwhile, Mossad teams in Iran launched drones at the long-range missiles that would be used to hit back at Israel.
Iran’s response, dubbed “retaliation without limits”, during the first 48 hours included launching a wave of drones, all of which were shot down, followed by salvos of about 150 ballistic missiles.
Israel reported two people killed and 60 wounded, while Iranian media reported dozens of deaths.
Responding to the overnight strikes, the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, warned: “If [the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah] Khamenei continues to fire missiles at the Israeli home front, Tehran will burn.”
Escalation dominance
The question is: who has more options to raise the pain?
As the early exchanges showed, it has capacity to do great damage to Iran – and it could do a lot more by targeting key infrastructure such as oil terminals or, ultimately, by brandishing its nuclear arsenal.
Iran, by contrast, can offer more of the same: missile strikes, though the accuracy of these is poorer than Israel’s weaponry and many of its key targets are “hardened” with underground shelters.
If Iran escalates to hit Israeli economic infrastructure, such as power stations or oil refineries, it will simply be inviting heavier blows upon its own in response.
If Iran hits American targets in the Gulf, as its leaders have threatened to do, the calculus also looks poor for Tehran, since provoking the United States to join Israeli strikes would unlock additional capabilities such as B-2 bombers armed with “bunker buster” bombs.
As this goes on, however, the effect of Israeli strikes may diminish.
As the targets they spent months preparing are ticked off, Iranian forces are regrouping after the initial blows and the picture is becoming more dynamic. Western countries learned in the 1991 and 2003 conflicts with Iraq that elusive mobile missile launchers can be hard to deal with.
Doubts remain about how effectively Israel can hit the Iranian nuclear program, much of which is buried underground.
Initial strikes against the main uranium enrichment site, Natanz, were hailed as a success.
But Iran also keeps fissile material in a complex under a mountain in Fordow and in vaults at Esfahan.
If Israel has an ingenious way of disabling these facilities, we have not seen it.
Both sides have limited stocks of key weapons.
Once these are exhausted the fight will be about who can absorb the pain for longer, which is where a regime like Iran’s has some advantages.
If missiles occasionally get through to key Israeli targets, this will sustain Iranian spirits. Similarly, since Israeli aircraft are now regularly in Iranian skies, the capture of an Israeli pilot would be a propaganda boon for them.
Why now?
Assessments of Iran’s progress towards a nuclear weapon had started to change.
The received wisdom in intelligence circles had long been that even though Iran recently stepped up production of the necessary highly enriched uranium, work on turning this into atomic bombs had not been going on since 2003.
However, last week the International Atomic Energy Authority declared Iran in breach of its obligations noting: “The rapid accumulation of highly enriched uranium … is of serious concern.”
The watchdog said Iran had started to commission a further, concealed enrichment site and that the Islamic Republic was refusing to answer questions about uranium traces found in three undeclared facilities associated with its earlier weapons program.
Did this constitute evidence of a restarted atomic bomb project? Many academic and policy observers were not convinced.
Then midweek, Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, asked about Iran’s efforts by a Senate committee, told them: “There are plenty of indications that they have been moving their way towards something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.” Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, suggested a bomb could be delivered “within a few months - less than a year”.
Inevitably, given memories of Iraq and its fabled “weapons of mass destruction”, many will be sceptical, sensing this was a pretext. Conversely, recent events speak to a remarkable level of intelligence penetration of Iran’s regime, as well as a long-term strategy to undermine it strategically. So it is possible Israel may indeed have got wind of an Iranian move to make the bomb.
Window of opportunity
Before October 7, 2023, Israel would have known that any assault on Iranian nuclear facilities could be met by a wide-ranging response, including thousands of rockets being fired by its “axis of resistance” allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza.
And that is before Iran answered back with its own extensive arsenal of ballistic missiles.
But Netanyahu’s government has changed the calculus.
Palestinian military units have been crushed during the brutal Gaza campaign and Hezbollah broken during an offensive that started in September with the exploding pager operation targeting its leadership.
Iran’s launch of hundreds of missiles and drones the next month did limited damage to Israel but prompted it to retaliate with strikes that did serious damage to the Islamic Republic’s air defence system.
To round off a dismal year for the axis, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a key regional ally, was toppled in Syria.
By the end of last year, then, a window of opportunity had opened for Israel. Iran’s network of proxies had been pummelled and its defences weakened, but both could be rebuilt. Netanyahu knew the clock was ticking. Similarly, the passage of months would allow the accumulation of an ever-larger stockpile of highly enriched uranium and progress towards a nuclear weapon.
The Trump factor
The inauguration of President Trump brought a new element into play, for it quickly became apparent that he would seek a diplomatic route to bind Iran back into a restricted nuclear program – having torn up just such a deal a decade ago.
Over the past months the brinkmanship has played out on three different planes; Trump coercing the Iranians into a negotiation, while he simultaneously pressed Netanyahu not to strike, and Iran judging that it could play Trump for time while refusing to give up its uranium enrichment.
The dangers of this high-stakes poker game have been exacerbated by mixed messages from the Trump team.
His envoy Steve Witkoff at one point suggested Iran could keep enriching uranium so long as it did not weaponise it, then walked that idea back.
And when the Israeli hammer fell on Friday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, quickly distanced the US from it, only to be followed hours later by his president posting on social media: “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal … Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left.”
This sense that Trump was using the strikes to force an adversary back to the negotiating table was reinforced by Israeli officials.
Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, acknowledged on Friday: “Iran’s nuclear program cannot be completely destroyed by means of a military campaign.” Evidently an agreement will be necessary.
Whether Trump really encouraged this or has been bounced into it by Netanyahu, the Iranians regard the Americans as complicit.
Those promised retaliatory attacks on US bases are now one of the primary ways that this could escalate.
In April the US boosted its strike forces in the Middle East before winding them down. Now, the Pentagon is ordering them back into the region.
Witkoff was meant to have met an Iranian delegation in Oman this weekend for talks but they were called off.
Iran finds itself isolated.
Hezbollah, once its staunchest and most feared regional ally, has indicated that it will not join in rocketing Israel. It is under pressure from the Lebanese government and its fighters cannot forget that Iran’s support in its own hour of need last year was limited.
Time for diplomacy
The Russian foreign ministry, meanwhile, issued a statement with a boilerplate condemnation of Israel’s strikes, ending with an apparent nudge to Iran: “We remind you of the readiness of the United States to hold another round of negotiations with Iran on the Iranian nuclear program in Oman.”
China is likely to stay on the sidelines, urging talks.
Diplomatic logic thus favours a return to the negotiating table.
So does Israel’s recognition that it cannot achieve a pure military solution. But damaged national pride adds an element of unpredictability.
Iran’s leadership, smarting from the humiliations and losses of the past days, is in no mood to concede the sort of deal that Trump and the Israelis want.
In their attempt to deliver a face-saving blow of their own against the enemy lies the potential for a catastrophic miscalculation.
The Times
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