Israel, the US and Iran: the war has only just begun

The old neocon dream of redrawing the Middle East through a series of regime changes to the benefit of the US and Israel, shelved for over a decade, has returned to the forefront

Part 1 of a two-part article by Roberto Iannuzzi, originally published in Italian on his Substack. The second part will be published next week.

---

The sudden ceasefire “imposed” on Israel and Iran on June 24 by US President Donald Trump, in what many have dubbed the “12-day war”, most likely does not mark the end of hostilities, but rather the beginning of a broader and more dangerous confrontation for hegemony in the Middle East, with possible global ramifications.

The twelve days of conflict we witnessed represent a destabilising escalation in the confrontation between Israel and Iran, which has shifted from the “shadow war” of previous decades to a direct military clash.

In the former, Iran had troubled Israel primarily through its regional allies, especially Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel, for its part, had conducted a series of covert operations — acts of sabotage and targeted killings — on Iranian soil, often using local partners.

In the latter, the two countries directly attacked each other’s territories (albeit at a distance, as they do not share a border). The first signs of this escalation came with the “missile exchanges” between the two countries in April and October 2024.

In both the “shadow war” of past decades and the direct confrontation that ended on June 24, Israel was supported by the United States.

“Real men want to go to Tehran”

Ever since the 1979 revolution, when Iran withdrew from the American alliance system in the region, the Islamic Republic has been seen by Washington as an enemy to eliminate.

The American approach remained unchanged even after Iran’s revolutionary drive lost its initial momentum and it became clear that the revolution would not spread beyond Iran’s borders.

Starting from the early 2000s, the country was for years seen as the ultimate prize in a neoconservative plan to redesign the Middle East in order to definitively secure US-Israeli hegemony in the region.

This objective was explicitly laid out in a 1996 document drafted by a group of neocon strategists led by Richard Perle, titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

During the years of the US invasion of Iraq, a popular saying circulated in neocon circles, reportedly first uttered by a senior British official: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”.

Even in 2009, the idea of regime change in Iran was still very much alive in the corridors of the American establishment, as confirmed by a report from the Brookings Institution (one of the most influential US think tanks) titled Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran.

Chapter 5 of the report, titled “Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike”, now appears remarkably prescient.

However, after George W. Bush’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and after Israel’s defeat in the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the neocon plans for the Middle East gradually receded into the background.

After yet another failure in Syria — where Washington had attempted a fresh regime-change operation in the wake of the 2011 Arab uprisings — the Obama administration sought to implement its announced “pivot to Asia” to contain China’s rise, and supported the Maidan uprising in Kyiv in 2014 as an anti-Russian manoeuvre.

A year later, precisely with a view to gradually disengaging from the Middle East, Obama reached an agreement with Tehran — the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — to put the nuclear issue to rest and establish a fragile modus vivendi with Iran. The goal was to allow Washington to shift its focus elsewhere.

In the years that followed, American presidents would be increasingly absorbed by the confrontation with Moscow in Ukraine, the trade war with Beijing and, more broadly, the renewed “great power competition”.

In Washington, the Middle East faded into the background, leading to a cooling of relations with long-time allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and to a steadily growing Chinese economic presence in the Gulf.

New US plans in the Middle East

Realising its loss of influence in the Middle East, the Biden administration in 2023 devised a plan for an American return to the region, based on new security agreements with key US partners in the Gulf, on the revival of the Abraham Accords introduced by former President Donald Trump to normalise relations between Israel and Arab countries, and on the announcement of an economic corridor — the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) — which was meant to cement the new American security architecture in the region from a logistical and trade perspective.

The IMEC was presented as a clear (and somewhat presumptuous) alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aiming to curb Beijing’s growing influence.

The Abraham Accords were intended to create a regional Arab-Israeli-American front aimed at isolating Iran and its regional allies in the so-called “Axis of Resistance” (Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq and Ansar Allah in Yemen).

However, this framework was thrown into disarray by the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing brutal Israeli military response, which was bound to provoke reactions from Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq and Ansar Allah (also known as the “Houthis”, after their founder) in solidarity with Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza.

This new destabilisation of the Middle East called into question the entire structure of the IMEC and the Abraham Accords: an economic corridor could never take shape in a region wracked by conflict, and a normalisation of relations — particularly between Saudi Arabia and Israel — was unthinkable while the Israeli army was carrying out a massacre of Palestinians.

For this reason, the Biden administration — while never ceasing to provide logistical support and essential weapons for Israel’s military operation — repeatedly sought to discourage Israeli plans to expand the conflict on a regional scale, instead proposing a political solution for Gaza, which Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government consistently rejected.

The turning point of September 2024

The turning point that helped dispel the doubts of many American strategists and several members of the Biden administration was the stunning operation carried out by the Israeli army in Lebanon on September 27, 2024, which led to the elimination of Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, and the decapitation of the group’s entire leadership.

That operation — built upon a chilling level of intelligence penetration that allowed Israel to reconstruct with extreme precision the movements of the main leaders of the Lebanese movement, and to strike at the decisive moment with devastating results — prompted many in Washington to reassess their positions.

The prospect of dealing a mortal blow to a second link in the pro-Iranian axis — after the military weakening of Hamas in Gaza — led political figures and analysts in Washington to consider the strategy of using Israel as a “battering ram” to dismantle the Axis of Resistance and isolate Iran as a viable option.

It is worth recalling that on that very occasion Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law (then engaged in the presidential campaign), wrote in a lengthy post on X (Twitter) that Hezbollah was a gun held to Israel’s head. That gun had, until then, prevented the destruction of Iran’s nuclear installations.

Without Hezbollah, Kushner argued, Iran was significantly weaker and more exposed to a potential attack.

Such views gained further traction in Washington after the dramatic fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December 2024, and the subsequent dismantling of the remaining military apparatus in Damascus through a systematic Israeli bombing campaign, which left Syrian airspace under full Israeli control.

The old neocon dream of redrawing the Middle East through a series of regime changes to the benefit of the US and Israel — put on hold for over a decade — was now forcefully and unexpectedly resurfacing.

Assad’s collapse left Hezbollah isolated in neighboring Lebanon and severely weakened by the brutal military clash with Israel, which ended with the ceasefire of November 27 (constantly violated by Tel Aviv).

Gaza, with no support apart from limited backing by Ansar Allah from distant Yemen, was left to face its tragic fate alone.

To the east of a now entirely neutralised Syria, the US continued to exert significant influence in Iraq and to control its airspace.

There was thus a “window of opportunity”, as Israeli commentators wrote, to strike Iran’s nuclear installations given the weakened and isolated state in which Tehran found itself, and the existence of a secure corridor reaching the Iranian border through Syrian and Iraqi skies.

What is Tehran’s nuclear programme for?

At this point, it is important to clarify that Iran’s nuclear programme has served as a convenient pretext for launching a military attack against the country — but it is not the true objective behind such action.

As analyst Sina Toossi has written, Tehran’s nuclear programme should not be seen as an “ideological crusade to acquire the bomb”, but rather as a calibrated tool to achieve deterrence and bargaining power at the negotiating table.

One must not forget that, since its founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic has been under economic embargo and constant military threat, particularly from the United States (including US support for regional actors like Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988).

To escape this impasse, Tehran has relied on various tools — most notably, the creation of a regional alliance network acting as a security buffer around Iran, and the development of both a ballistic missile programme (especially to compensate for the lack of an effective air force) and its nuclear programme.

Through the latter, Tehran has become a “latent” nuclear power which, although it has so far shown no intention of building a nuclear weapon, possesses nearly all the infrastructure and scientific knowledge required to do so.

Iran’s strategy pursues multiple goals: to use elements of the nuclear programme as bargaining chips in negotiations to achieve the lifting of sanctions (which are not limited to the nuclear issue and in some cases predate it); to strengthen the tools that ensure its political, economic and scientific independence in a generally hostile environment; and, certainly, to keep open the option of building a nuclear weapon should an existential external threat arise.

In recent years, Iran’s political leadership has shown a willingness not to cross the threshold of latent nuclear capability, culminating in the 2015 agreement (the aforementioned JCPOA) with the Obama administration.

That agreement imposed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear programme and a strict monitoring regime over its nuclear facilities, in exchange for security guarantees and the promise of sanction relief.

As I mentioned in a previous article, it was Trump who, in 2018, unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear agreement (which Iran was complying with), thereby laying the groundwork for the current crisis.

Despite this, according to the latest US intelligence estimates, Iran has not reactivated its military nuclear programme (which was suspended in 2003), and would need another three years to build a nuclear weapon (including miniaturising a warhead and developing a ballistic delivery system) if it were to make a political decision to do so.

It is therefore evident that the problem Iran represents in the eyes of its adversaries is not the nuclear programme itself, but rather Iran’s refusal to submit to the US-Israeli hegemonic architecture in the Middle East — making it, by definition, a regional competitor.

It is also worth noting that the government led by reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian (in office since July 30, 2024) had included in its political platform the goal of reopening negotiations with the US to achieve a reconciliation with the West — an effort previously attempted, without success, by figures such as Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani (the latter being the signatory of the JCPOA).

The interventionist front in Israel and the US

Despite the opening of negotiations in recent months between Iran and the Trump administration to resolve the nuclear dispute peacefully, during the same period a “war party” consolidated in both Israel and the United States — one determined to take military action against Tehran.

This camp was especially strong in Israel, where an entire political class supported the prospect of an attack. On June 13 (when the military operation began), it overwhelmingly expressed its backing for Prime Minister Netanyahu — including members of the opposition.

During the 12-day war, all the controversy surrounding October 7, the hostage crisis, the management of the war in Gaza and Israel’s institutional crisis vanished from the Israeli media landscape, giving way to a political and public-opinion rally-around-the-flag effect.

Two key figures in the planning of the attack on Iran were Mossad director David Barnea and Air Force Commander Tomer Bar.

Another essential figure, National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi, played a central role in securing the approval of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Eyal Zamir.

The military’s endorsement marked a decisive break from the past. Since 2007, in fact, all of Israel’s military chiefs — from Gabi Ashkenazi to Benny Gantz to Gadi Eisenkot — had opposed the idea of a military strike on Iran.

Barnea, for his part, radically transformed the Mossad, introducing technological innovations in surveillance, tracking, monitoring and the use of artificial intelligence, which enabled the “decapitation” operations targeting Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon and Iran’s military elite, as well as the targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders from Beirut to Tehran.

Like Netanyahu, Barnea opposed the 2015 nuclear deal. He also maintained close coordination with the CIA, which played a crucial role in preparing the 12-day war.

In addition to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, General Michael “Erik” Kurilla — the head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees the Middle East — was a key ally of Israel within the Trump administration.

Multiple sources identify Kurilla as the pivotal figure within the administration who pushed for approval of the strike against Tehran.

Often described as staunchly pro-Israel, Kurilla has long viewed Iran as a threat to be eliminated. He was the architect of the failed bombing campaign against Ansar Allah in Yemen.

Kurilla’s determination to neutralise Iran stems from his conviction that Tehran is closely linked to Moscow and Beijing.

As he explained to the House Armed Services Committee in 2023, half of China’s oil and more than a third of its natural gas come from the Middle East, much of it shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. “That makes them vulnerable”, Kurilla concluded.

For him, striking Tehran also meant weakening China and Russia.

This view is shared by others in Washington, particularly among Republicans and neoconservatives. The Israeli lobby, unsurprisingly, supported the entire operation and applied pressure even on hesitant Democrats.

This broad coalition laid the groundwork for a hardening of the administration’s negotiating stance, which brought talks with Tehran to the brink of collapse — while simultaneously enabling the planning and execution of the attack.

The second part of this article will be published next week.

---

Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green