That decision is actually up to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, and his now-smaller inner ring of advisers, some of whom probably remain agents of Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service.
It is a useful skill to be able to put yourself in an adversary’s shoes. Lawyers try to do it on a daily basis. Political campaigns are all about the anticipation of attacks and the imagination of counterattacks. Militaries spend a great deal of time considering operational plans and counterplans. It’s the oldest game in the world: What will your opponent do?
And Khamenei has no specific idea what President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will do if the ayatollah begins to rebuild his nuclear weapons program. Or, indeed, if he launches a terrorist attack on Israel or the United States, or their citizens anywhere in the world. He’s only got a good idea that the reprisals would be swift and devastating.
Trump’s decision to bomb parts of the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons assembly line mattered, of course, because it disrupted the mullahs’ dash for a nuclear weapon. It also shattered Khamenei’s wrongly assumed immunity from U.S. attacks at home. Trump’s move also reestablished a level of U.S. deterrence badly damaged by four years of former President Joe Biden’s infirmity and fecklessness.
When Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, the first assumption, that Israel could never launch this operation on its own, was shattered. When Trump dispatched the bombers, a second, far more significant threshold was breached: U.S. presidents have long talked and talked about “every option being on the table” when it came to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but you couldn’t blame the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for not believing it.
The regime had, with the exception of two incidents, been largely unmolested by the U.S. for its 46-year history.
On April 18, 1988, President Ronald Reagan ordered Operation Praying Mantis in response to Iran’s mining of the Strait of Hormuz. American warplanes destroyed, damaged, or sank two Iranian oil platforms, three warships of the Islamic Republic, a variety of Iranian armed boats, and two fighter jets.
More than 30 years passed before another kinetic action between the U.S. and Iran. On Jan. 3, 2020, Trump ordered a drone strike on mastermind terrorist Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the long-serving leader of the IRGC Quds Force, Iran’s preeminent apparatus for terrorist attacks abroad.
Still, Iran’s nuclear weapons program has long been declared a “red line” for both the U.S. and Israel. What Iran suspected, especially after former President Barack Obama erased his own declared red line in Syria and after Biden’s feckless scamper from Afghanistan, is that the U.S. would never regain the sort of resolve that Reagan displayed or much more than the one-off body blow to a key regime figure such as the one Trump delivered in early 2020.
Iran did not expect, and could not stop, America’s B-2s. Indeed, for 12 days, all of Iran was defenseless beneath the pummeling delivered by the Israeli Air Force from the skies and the havoc dealt out by Israel’s Mossad on the ground.
The world has now witnessed that the emperors of Iran have only the clothes of terrorism left. Their vaunted proxies have been defeated in every theater, the regime’s closest ally, Syria’s Bashar Assad, has been toppled into an ignominious exile in Moscow, and the Israeli and U.S. militaries can resume on a moment’s notice the military strikes with very little to fear from the Iranian air defenses.
Now 86, Khamenei, a shocked and desperate cleric, must decide how to end his time on this earth: Resigned to being exposed as an impotent fanatic or blindly striking out via the remnants of his terrorist network only to trigger more shock and awe raining down on him?
If Khamenei chooses the latter course, Trump and Netanyahu will very likely respond with even more devastating force. The energy infrastructure of Iran was left largely intact through the recent 12-day conflict, but would almost certainly be the next up on a target list if Iran dares to strike American or Israeli citizens. This must surely make Khamenei ponder whether standing down is an embarrassing but preferable alternative to lying down, permanently.
Now that the U.S. has reached out and touched Iran in its most sensitive facilities, notice has been served. Could Iran restart its nuclear assembly line? Of course. Could it try to recapitalize and rearm Hamas and Hezbollah? Of course. Will it?
NEPA IS BROKEN BUT THE STATES CAN FIX IT
There have got to be at least a few senior military officers and clerics who are wondering whether it’s time for Khamenei to simply go the way of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964, when the then-leader of the Soviet Union suddenly found himself retired by his colleagues for leading it recklessly.
Khamenei probably doesn’t sit with his back to any door these days. And the generals and scientists who are left? Perhaps they’d like to enjoy retirement and not wait for the next Israeli surprise. You can bet that the Mossad will be reveling in this new opportunity to use regime friction and fear to recruit even more valuable sources.