The Big Questions in the Growing Israel-Iran War
The outcome hinges on Iran's nuclear capacities and the specter of regime change
The war between Israel and Iran over Iran’s nuclear program is rapidly evolving and could reshape geopolitics in the Middle East. In the week since Israel first pre-emptively attacked Iran in order to eliminate its nuclear capabilities, it has decimated Iran’s air force, taken out its top military command, and struck Iran’s nuclear sites as well as critical infrastructure and civilian buildings. Iran has fired back with volleys of ballistic missiles and drones. Numerous missiles have landed in Israel, causing destruction and death and setting off air raid sirens daily.
Meanwhile, the United States is contemplating whether to join Israel’s campaign. President Trump has dismissed his own administration’s skeptical intelligence about Iran’s intentions to build a bomb and has instead declared that’s precisely what they’re up to. He has strongly backed Israel’s operations and when asked whether or not the US will join its bombing campaign, responded “I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” The shadows of the Iraq War are beginning to loom large.
Why the War Is Happening Now
The Israeli campaign to try to take out Iran’s nuclear program has been a long time coming. It has toyed with the idea for decades and has previously been very close to attacking the country only to pull back. The US has likewise been concerned about Iran’s intentions to obtain a nuclear bomb, which is what spurred President Obama’s nuclear deal with the country in 2015. Unlike Iraq in the 2000s, over which intelligence was divided about possible nuclear capabilities, Iran has a clear and well-established nuclear program, one that has long been the subject of international oversight and negotiations.
So why now? The strategic situation in the Middle East and the balance of power has changed radically since Hamas’s grievous terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Israel unleashed a brutal war campaign in Gaza that has killed over 50,000 Palestinians (see my prior post here). It then made quick work of its longtime foe and Iran ally Hezbollah, revealing it to be a paper tiger. The crippling of Hamas and Hezbollah suddenly made Iran appear much weaker than it had been and deprived it of its proxies on the doorstep of Israel.
That presented a generational opportunity for Israel to try to pre-emptively strike Iran when it was down. One hitch was that President Trump all of a sudden appeared eager to try to work out a new nuclear deal with Iran. But when the International Atomic Energy Agency passed a resolution last week declaring that Iran wasn’t complying with its commitments at nuclear non-proliferation, it gave Israel greater justification for a strike.
Will Israel Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Capacities and Deter it From Building a Bomb?
There are two big questions now in the ongoing war. The first is whether Israel can actually destroy Iran’s nuclear capacities. Although it has already targeted and damaged some sites, including facilities at Natanz and Arak, Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear site – Fordo – is deep underground in a mountain. Fordo is believed to hold Iran’s most sophisticated centrifuges for enriching the uranium needed for a nuclear bomb, and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors discovered uranium at the site that was close to the enrichment threshold for a bomb in March 2023.
The problem is that Israel doesn’t have the weapons capacity to breach and destroy Fordo. The only weapon with a chance is a US-owned 30,000 lb. hulk of a bomb known as a bunker-buster. And only the US has an airplane equipped to deliver it. That’s the main reason why there has been so much speculation swirling about whether the US would get involved in Israel’s bombing campaign.
If Israel’s attack on Iran can’t set the country’s nuclear program back by many years, then it will have been a failure. What’s more, it is even harder to destroy the technical knowledge of how to build a bomb. Iran is a large country with plenty of advanced technology and scientists as well as alliances with other major global powers. If Iran still has the know-how and access to resources to build a bomb in 5 or 10, then Israel’s efforts will be seen as merely delaying a nuclear bomb.
In many ways, ironically, the current campaign could reinforce Iran’s resolve to ultimately obtain a nuclear weapon. Iran over the years has slowed its program, entered into a negotiated agreement with the US and other international partners, had that agreement torn up, and then been attacked by Israel. My graduate school training in International Relations at Stanford – and my discussions with my colleagues in IR – make hard not to think that some of Iran’s leaders are asking whether they would have been better off racing toward a nuclear weapon with the goal of deterring Israel.
All of this means that ultimately, from Israel’s perspective (and one could argue from the perspective of the US and even other nuclear powers), there has to be a more sustainable path toward preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
That could mean a return to negotiations after their capabilities have been heavily degraded in the current war. Or it could mean something else, which has been hinted at in recent days and which must be a central question at the highest levels of military and strategic planning in both Israel and the US: whether to pursue regime change in Iran.
Will Israel and the US Pursue Regime Change in Iran?
Ever since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, both Israel and the US have viewed Iran as an inflexible and radical ideological and military rival. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged Iranians over the last several days to rise up against their government and overthrow it. Donald Trump also threatened to possibly kill Iran’s Supreme Leader in a post on Truth Social.
There is a long history of rivalry here. Iran’s revolution created a dramatic hostage crisis in the US Embassy that helped bring down President Jimmy Carter. Iran has long sought to destroy Israel and has used proxy forces for years to infiltrate and attack it. Iran made President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” list in 2002 along with Iraq and North Korea. The US has since battled with Iranian proxies on numerous fronts, from Shiite militias in its war in Iraq to the Houthi rebels in Yemen and more. The list goes on and on.
But while both the US and Israel would welcome the fall of the Iranian regime, the question of what would come next is a complicated and vexed one. Here the parallels to the Iraq War start to build. Neither the US nor Israel are in the position to, or have the desire to, launch a ground war in Iran. And time and again, whether in Iraq or Libya or Syria, history shows that regime change is often associated with political instability and may not yield a “better” outcome (certainly not necessarily a more democratic one). And a politically unstable and fractious Iran, especially one left with nuclear remnants and with aspiring factions or leaders seeking to gain legitimacy, is a recipe for chaos.
Even so, the possibility of regime collapse in Iran is now real in ways that it hasn’t been for decades. The leadership has suffered a series of stinging and embarrassing defeats since 2023 and now appears weaker than ever. The Supreme Leader is also aging. To think that there aren’t machinations within the various military forces and ranks would be naïve. That would turn the current conflict into an inflection point in Middle Eastern history that could potentially rewire alliances and power relationships within the region and beyond in unforeseen ways.
Leading image is of a bombing in Tehran before dawn on June 13, 2025 (CC 4.0 license).