Iran’s Desperate, High-Risk Survival Strategy
Days after Israel and the United States launched a bombing campaign that decimated the upper echelons of Iran’s leadership—killing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and more than forty top officials, according to the Israeli military—the regime in Tehran has shown little sign of breaking. Instead, Iran has been launching waves of drones and missiles across the Middle East, in an escalation that has plunged the whole region into war. Iran-linked strikes hit U.S. positions in various Gulf countries, and even reached a British air base in Cyprus. NATO was pulled into the action, on Wednesday, when it shot down a ballistic missile that was headed toward Turkey.
The Iranian regime had vowed retribution after Khamenei’s death. “You have crossed our red line and must pay the price,” Iran’s speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told the U.S. and Israel, in a televised address. “We will deliver such devastating blows that you yourselves will be driven to beg.” But it’s Iran’s neighbors that have been feeling the brunt of the pain so far. The attacks have elicited a rare response from the militaries of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia: Qatar said it downed at least two Iranian fighter jets, and Emirati authorities said they have intercepted hundreds of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. Officials in these countries insist that their inventory of defense munitions can cope with the Iranian onslaught, but there are fears that as the conflict drags on, stockpiles could run low. The missile math may not be in their favor: it costs far less for Iran to launch a cheap drone than it does for the U.S. and its regional partners to shoot it out of the sky. “A war of attrition that exhausts missile defense inventories is the most beneficial outcome for Tehran,” the Soufan Center, a global intelligence consultancy, noted in a recent analysis. “Iran knows this is a war it cannot ‘win’ militarily, but the regime in Tehran may believe they can survive it.”
Disruptions in the Gulf region will be felt all over the world: Dubai is the Middle East’s most important port; a significant proportion of the world’s crude oil, methanol, and fertilizer is exported through the Strait of Hormuz; Qatar’s liquid-natural-gas exports provide a fifth of global supply (and the state’s energy company has suspended all production amid security fears, creating a spike in prices); the region’s airports connect much of South Asia and Africa to the rest of the globe. For the remnants of the Iranian regime—and, especially, the hard-line members of the Revolutionary Guard, who control much of the state’s weaponry—the strategy is clear. They hope to raise the stakes of the war so much that U.S. allies pressure President Donald Trump to change course. “We had no choice but to escalate and start a big fire so everyone would see,” an Iranian regime insider told the Financial Times. “When our red lines were crossed in violation of all international laws, we could no longer adhere to the rules of the game.”
Israel and the U.S. don’t seem that interested in the rules of the game, either. They are launching bombardments across a wide swath of Iran, which have killed at least twelve hundred and thirty people, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. That includes dozens of schoolgirls in the coastal city of Minab, who were killed in an apparent bombing of their school, which was near a Revolutionary Guard naval base. Israel has already dropped more than five thousand bombs on Iran since the start of the conflict. The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, exulted in the punishing campaign, saying that Operation Epic Fury—as the Administration has named it—had unleashed twice as much air power over Iran than the “shock and awe” phase of the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Department of Defense recently released a video of an Iranian frigate being torpedoed off the Sri Lankan coast by a U.S. submarine—the first torpedo launched in combat by a U.S. submarine since the Second World War. The sinking, which appears to have killed at least half of the roughly hundred and eighty Iranian sailors onboard, is legally dubious, and raises awkward diplomatic questions for India, which had hosted the Iranian vessel as part of a broader set of maritime exercises to which the U.S. was also invited. For Hegseth, it’s all part of the magic of what he likes to call American “warfighting.” The U.S. and Israel have eviscerated Iran’s Navy and Air Force, and are steadily degrading Iran’s command structure and military assets, including a network of subterranean missile “cities” housing Iran’s arsenal. On Wednesday, analysts at the Long War Journal said there had been a decline in Iranian ballistic-missile launches, likely owing to the efficacy of U.S.-Israeli strikes. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight,” Hegseth said, at a briefing that day. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
What sympathy there may have been for a cornered, bruised Iranian regime among its neighbors has faded in the face of Tehran’s escalation. A Gulf official, who spoke to me anonymously, said Iran’s strategy was “counterproductive,” given recent attempts at rapprochement made by some Arab monarchies, and their support for Tehran’s diplomatic track with Washington. Now, whenever this conflict ends, those monarchies will instead focus on protecting themselves against future Iranian threats, and will deepen military partnerships with outside powers—take, for example, recent defense pacts signed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and between the U.A.E. and India. “What’s happened to the Gulf will have long-term ramifications in terms of security realignment and relationships with Iran,” the official said.
“Iran has killed any chance of reconciliation with the Gulf,” Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister and deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, told me. Before the war, some Arab interlocutors had been quietly lobbying the White House against such action, in part out of fear that a direct war against Iran would yield an even more unstable and chaotic status quo in Tehran. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, the thinking went. “But now they know the devil and they know this devil has no red lines,” Ali Shihabi, a prominent Saudi commentator, told me, suggesting that the Iranian regime “had placed a Sword of Damocles over the Gulf.” The barrage of drones and missiles from Iran, Shihabi added, has “emboldened the voices of those within the Gulf who say that this regime should be degraded as much as possible.”
That degradation proceeds apace amid the U.S.-Israeli campaign, though much remains unclear about the final goal, and about the most plausible way out of the conflict. Though some Trump officials claim that they’re not engaged in a regime-change war, Trump told reporters on Thursday that he had “to be involved” in the appointment of Khamenei’s successor, which sounds an awful lot like regime change. Israel, meanwhile, appears content to keep battering the Islamic Republic, whatever the downstream consequences, while also mustering a new offensive into southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. Enabled by the U.S., Israel now bestrides the Middle East as a paramount hegemon: its military tool kit and reach is unmatched, its status as the region’s sole nuclear power is unchallenged, and its ability to strike with impunity at perceived threats far from its borders is unchecked. By midweek, Israeli officials were briefing reporters about plans to potentially balkanize Iran by boosting support to anti-regime Iranian Kurdish factions operating across the country’s western border with Iraq.
Ethnic insurgencies may present the most realistic internal threat to the Iranian regime, which has quashed civil society and pro-democracy protest movements for years. But they present no platform for actually bringing down the Islamic Republic. A popular uprising, which Trump insisted should follow the U.S.’s bombardments, is nowhere in sight. Experts also believe that the death and destruction wrought by the U.S.-Israeli campaign may galvanize domestic support for the regime, even from an Iranian populace that is fed up with its oppressive theocracy and stagnant revolutionary project. “Those who loathe the clerical establishment may still recoil at the spectacle of foreign jets in Iranian skies and the explicit declaration that their state is to be dismantled,” Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a scholar of the international politics of the Middle East, wrote in the London Review of Books. “External assault does not erase internal grievance, but it can reorder it. Anger at the regime may be temporarily subordinated to anger at the attacker.” The anonymous Gulf official said this was something that many of the Gulf states had warned the Trump Administration about: “If your goal is regime change, bombing will unite them.”
Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli defense-intelligence officer with expertise on Iran, wrote on social media on Thursday that, despite the immense regional pressure on Iran, its surviving leadership “assesses that its capacity for absorption and persistence is higher than that of its adversaries,” and that “time ultimately works in its favor.” Muasher, the former Jordanian foreign minister, argued that the strategic difficulty of defeating and replacing the Iranian regime may prove too confounding for a trigger-happy White House that seems more invested in the spectacle of victory than in the complex project of building peace. Within the U.S., there’s minimal appetite, even among Republicans, for deploying boots on the ground, or for an open-ended intervention that could continue through multiple election cycles. “Trump is not going to implement a one-year, two-year strategy,” Muasher said. “I think that Iran’s calculation is that Trump is not patient, that Trump is going to move on.” ♦