On Sunday, Israel — and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — were on top of the world.
For the first time, the US had actively taken part in offensive operations in support of an Israeli military campaign.
Israel was emerging as the undisputed power in the region, with the US as the patron that Middle Eastern rulers would hurry to placate. Next on Israel’s agenda, now that the US was hammering Iran, was the pivot back to normalization efforts with Arab states, including Saudi Arabia.
After US bombs struck Iran’s three key nuclear sites, US President Donald Trump heaped praise on Netanyahu and the IDF: “I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before, and we’ve gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel. I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they’ve done.”
Iran, it seemed, was in a corner. It could accept Trump’s demands and give up the nuclear program it has called its national right, showing profound weakness that could also encourage opponents of the regime to make their move. Or it could continue to defy and threaten Trump, inviting expanded strikes, which could start to destabilize the regime.
Then, on Monday evening, it appeared that Tehran had signed its own death warrant. With Trump seemingly still on a high after witnessing his military punish an adversary that had defied his demands for months, Iran fired missiles at a US base in Qatar.
To make matters worse, Iran boasted about its “mighty and successful response” to “America’s aggression.”
The ayatollahs, it seemed, were about to face the wrath of Donald Trump, a man who famously does not like to be defied.
Instead, he announced a ceasefire.
When he congratulated both countries in his ceasefire statement for their “Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence,” it was hard to tell that one side was America’s closest ally in the Middle East, and the other a sworn enemy.
Events moved in an even more bizarre direction after the ceasefire ostensibly went into effect.
It started with the final attacks by both sides before the truce came into force.
In the early morning hours, well before Trump’s declared 7 a.m. start to the ceasefire, Israeli Air Force fighter jets hit dozens of Iranian military targets in Tehran.
In response, Iran fired some 20 ballistic missiles in six salvos, killing four people in Beersheba and leaving 22 more injured.
Iran fired again at 10:30 a.m. local time, well into the ceasefire. And Israeli leaders promised a forceful response to that blatant violation.
With Israeli jets in the air, Trump stepped in front of the microphones on the White House lawn at 7 a.m. Washington time.
He was livid.
“Now I hear that Israel just went out because they felt [the deal] was violated by one rocket that didn’t land anywhere,” he fumed. “That’s not what we want, I’ll tell you. And I’m telling you, I’m not happy about that, Israel, either.”
He also posted a series of warnings to Israel on his Truth Social platform.
“ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran,” he wrote.
“All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump blamed both countries for violating the ceasefire: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing.”
The Israeli Air Force ended up carrying out a small strike against an Iranian radar north of Tehran around the time Trump was talking to reporters, Israeli officials confirmed.
In the matter of hours, Israel had gone from the region’s swaggering top dog to a misbehaving child being publicly berated — denounced, that is, more bitterly than the would-be nuclear regime in Tehran.
Perhaps it was to be expected. Israel’s position post-war is strongest when it defeats its adversaries on its own, as it did in 1967. When it finds itself leaning on the US for support, as it did in the 1973 Yom Kippur War with the crucial American resupply airlift, it has to bow to Washington’s demands on how the wars end and what comes next.
Despite the awkward end to the operation, Israel accomplished much in its air campaign.
It significantly set back both the nuclear and ballistic programs. Iran’s top nuclear scientists are dead, and its three main sites are badly damaged at worst, and perhaps totally destroyed.
Israel also settled the account with Iran that had been open since October 7, 2023, when its Gaza-governing proxy Hamas invaded and massacred some 1,200 people in southern Israel and abducted 251 hostages.
“Israel humiliated Iran with its extremely successful military campaign, killing senior military leaders, nuclear scientists, IRGC and Basij,” said Michael Makovsky, CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “No Iranian proxy or ally came to its defense, and it could only respond by mostly attacking Israeli cities.”
It also broke the taboo against hitting Iran’s facilities and commanders directly, protractedly and hard. “If you hit the regime, it won’t start a regional or world war,” concluded Raz Zimmt, Director of the Iran and the Shiite Axis research program at the Institute for National Security Studies. At the same time, said Zimmt, “there are a lot of unknowns.”
Iran constructed its nuclear program around surviving a bombing campaign. It is too early to tell what exactly survived, and how much enriched uranium and centrifuges it has spread around the country.
“This is very likely true even if the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan complexes were obliterated with everything still inside – and that’s still up for debate,” said Jonathan Ruhe, Foreign Policy Director at JINSA Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy. “But even assuming Iran has all these building blocks in some form, it’d probably take a while, perhaps several months or more, to assemble a testable device.”
Iran’s 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium was mostly stored in tunnels near the Isfahan facility, according to Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
“Despite extensive Israeli and US attacks on the facility, there does not seem to have been any effort to destroy these tunnels or the material that was in them,” Lewis wrote.
Three sources told CNN that early assessments from US Central Command indicate that the strikes only set Iran’s program back a few months.
That account is disputed by the White House. But regardless of how far back the program was set, the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons still exists, and will as long as the regime remains in power.
A likely scenario is that the US and Iran return to the negotiating table, with Tehran in a much weaker position than it was two weeks ago.
Israel is banking on its ability to detect and carry out strikes on Iran if it detects new activities by the regime aimed at rebuilding its nuclear or ballistic missile program. Israel has shown that its intelligence penetrates deep into all levels of Iran’s security establishment, and that it can reach sensitive sites across the country.
There is a serious drawback, however. Iran will likely launch missile barrages at Israel in response to any strikes, causing repeated and extended cancellations by airlines and ongoing economic disruption.
And with Trump determined to see the ceasefire last, Israel won’t be able to respond overwhelmingly to Iranian missiles.
The results of this operation, then, will depend in large part on Donald J. Trump. He has pledged throughout his campaign and presidency that Iran will not achieve a nuclear weapon on his watch, and he has acted, directly, to honor that promise.
Trump being Trump, it won’t all be smooth sailing from here. He will continue to be unpredictable, occasionally adversarial, and always a force to be reckoned with.
What’s more — as the Iranians are well aware — by 2029, a new president will start their term in the White House, and Israel could find itself facing decisions over Iran’s nuclear program all over again.
Originally published in the Times of Israel.