KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Everything points to a forthcoming Round Two: But how did Round One really go?
- Iran’s strategic turn: After this war, and for the first time in its modern history, the Islamic Republic of Iran appears destined to actively pursue the development of a nuclear weapon, perceiving it as the only reliable guarantor of strategic deterrence. The present non-cooperation with the IAEA after the war is but the first episode of this.
- Resilience under fire: Iran demonstrated its capacity to endure sustained bombardment while rallying domestic cohesion around the regime—crucially, without recourse to foreign military support, activation of its allied regional substate actors, or the drastic measure of closing the Strait of Hormuz.
- Israel’s conventional limitations: Israel, by contrast, exposed its structural inability to prosecute a conventional interstate war turned into attrition war against a formidable adversary without American involvement.
- The shelf-life of defence: Even more critically, the war revealed the inherent limitations of Israel’s anti-ballistic shield—a high-tech system whose endurance is measured not in theoretical capacity, but in days under sustained assault.
- Everybody is taking notes: These developments are neither superficial nor ephemeral. They are being scrutinised and internalised by actors both proximate and distant—states and non-state entities alike—recalibrating their perceptions of deterrence, power projection, and strategic vulnerability in the region.
- What will the U.S. do? A Round Two without eventual, and proper, U.S. involvement on the side of Israel seems unthinkable in the Israeli strategic calculus. Yet U.S. involvement in a war that would be much more challenging than Iraq or Afghanistan is anything but a certainty.
On Friday, 13 June 2025, the State of Israel initiated an interstate war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. While the publicly declared objective was to thwart Iran’s purported ambitions for a nuclear bomb—a narrative Benjamin Netanyahu has championed since the 1990s, while Israel itself is indeed a nuclear-armed state—, the deeper strategic aim was far more ambitious: regime change and the destabilisation, if not disintegration, of the Iranian state. The operational sine qua non for such an objective was the active entry of the United States into the conflict—an expectation Israel has long held.
(There is a pattern here: Israel expects the U.S. to fight its war against Iran, elements in Greece expect Israel to fight a future war with Türkiye, elements in Europe’s leadership expect Türkiye to fight their future war against the Russian Federation, and so on and so forth. Usually, that’s not quite how this works.)
It needs to be said upfront that the “Twelve-Day War” characterisation—as christened by U.S. President Donald J. Trump—might prove slightly premature, as there was no ceasefire—which requires bilaterally or multilaterally agreed-upon terms—but a mere cessation of hostilities.
With mounting indicators—inter alia, rhetorical escalations, unresolved tensions, the JCPOA snapback mechanism calculated to lead to Iran’s exit from the NPT, military posturing, fervent re-arming of both Israel and Iran, substantial Chinese assistance to Iran—pointing towards a forthcoming Round Two of Israeli aggression against Iran and a renewed interstate war with Iran, a sober assessment of “Round One” becomes essential to anticipate the strategic contours of what may follow.
The opening salvo masterfully conformed to the classic doctrine of “Shock and Awe”—decapitation strikes killing numerous senior Iranian military leadership, coupled with the temporary paralysis of Iran’s air defence grid through covert means. The bet was on the instant, violent destabilisation of Iran’s leadership. Yet, Iran’s reconstitution of its defensive posture within a mere eight hours exposed the limitations of such tactics. The conflict swiftly morphed into a war of attrition—a format that structurally favours Iran and bleeds Israel, both militarily and psychologically.
Iran’s missile strategy—beginning with volleys of antiquated projectiles from past decades and progressively integrating newer, more advanced systems—proved not only sustainable, but scalable. With an accelerating production pipeline since March, Tehran demonstrated an ability to maintain prolonged offensive operations, undermining Israel’s missile defence saturation point. It soon became apparent that Israel’s ballistic missile interception rates were deteriorating by the day; reports from The Wall Street Journal and The Times of Israel corroborate a dramatic decline in interception efficacy and warn of impending exhaustion of Israeli air defence capabilities. This was not sustainable on Israel’s part—and it is not projected to be sustainable in future military escapades as well.
Iran did not emerge unscathed. The damage inflicted upon its infrastructure and military apparatus was real and non-trivial. Yet Tehran’s capacity to absorb such strikes, both materially and psychologically, points to a key asymmetry: its strategic depth and civil resiliency. If the Houthis in Yemen—with a fraction of Iran’s capabilities—can withstand continuous Saudi bombardment for years, Iran itself can endure and adapt. Another notable success of Israel’s initial “Shock and Awe” campaign was the Mossad’s evident intelligence penetration within Iran. However, the so-called “Twelve-Day War” ultimately served to expose, exhaust, and set in motion the dismantling of that very network. Such infiltrations, particularly when revealed through operational activation, constitute a finite resource rather than an inexhaustible reserve.
Conversely, for Israel, the cost was more existential. While much of the public discourse centred on Tel Aviv, it was Haifa—the economic and industrial hub—that bore the brunt. Prime Minister Netanyahu made no effort to conceal the truth: Israel cannot win a war of attrition. This is not mere rhetoric but a stark admission of structural vulnerability. It may be months, if not years, before we learn whether projects such as the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) remain viable—or whether they have been significantly delayed, if not consigned to the choir invisible, owing to the substantial damage inflicted on Haifa’s infrastructure.
Escalation dominance and strategic options
Which side proved to hold escalation dominance? Strategically, Israel’s escalation ladder appeared to be only able to culminate in a chilling final rung: the nuclear option. This pathway, while theoretically available, is tethered to an apocalyptic cost and would constitute a departure into strategic irrationality. Yet that was virtually the only available next step in escalation. Iran, by contrast, retained and retains multiple intermediate options. It could intensify its counterstrikes with more and specifically hypersonic missiles (defined by their ability to travel at speeds and manoeuvre in ways that render them effectively non-interceptable by current defence systems), mobilise regional proxy networks, or—the ultimate pressure valve—truly threaten the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Crucially, none of these has been employed.
Tehran’s restraint was calculated, not coincidental. A fully unleashed Iranian response would have been likely reserved for the eventuality of direct American military engagement—a scenario it has thus far cautiously sought to avoid. And the carefully choreographed U.S. bombing of nuclear infrastructure sites, reciprocated with advance notice at Qatar’s U.S. Al Udeid Air Base, consisted precisely in the avoidance of such a direct and full American intervention rather than its opposite. After all, as the Pentagon itself noted in a 2014 assessment, “Iran’s military doctrine is defensive. It is designed to deter an attack, survive an initial strike, retaliate against an aggressor, and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities while avoiding any concessions that challenge its core interests”. That doctrine has never appeared more intact.
The American equation: Intervention or choreography?
The linchpin of Israel’s strategy—U.S. military intervention—failed to materialise in the expected form. While the “American cavalry” did make an appearance, it did so with conspicuous theatricality rather than genuine force. Strikes on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility and Qatar’s Al-Udeid base seemed choreographed, their symbolic nature reinforced by the absence of casualties, documented prior notice, no radioactive leakage according to the IAEA, and limited physical damage. Iranian restraint—such as the non-engagement of incoming American assets—raises pressing questions. Are we witnessing a quiet backchannel accord, brokered perhaps days prior in Muscat?
The Trump administration found itself between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis. The internal schism within the MAGA coalition—exemplified in the public feud, or interview, between Tucker Carlson and Senator Ted Cruz—underscored the tension between nationalist isolationism and imperial entanglement, between “America First” and “Make Israel Great Again.” In the end, Washington blinked. Trump declared peace, sterling success, “total obliteration” questioned by everybody apart from Trump, and disengagement. But this was not the Israeli vision of intervention. No regime change, no destabilisation, no cessation of the Iranian nuclear programme, or rather its opposite: a possible and imminent “Iranexit” from IAEA and the NPT.
The nuclear pendulum swings
The evidence is now irrefutable: Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon before the “Twelve-Day War.” Yet in the medium term, the war’s most profound strategic consequence may be this: for the first time, Iran appears to have concluded that the acquisition of nuclear weaponry is not merely desirable but essential. The cautious hedging strategy it once employed—maintaining proximity to breakout capability without actual weaponisation—has now been rendered obsolete. That doctrine, as described by Kenneth Waltz in Foreign Affairs in 2012, was intended to strike a balance: satisfying internal hardliners by staying close to nuclear capability, while avoiding the international ostracism that open proliferation would bring. As Waltz had noted back then, this “might not work as intended,” i.e. as a deterrent sans a nuclear bomb. And indeed it did not.
But the events of 2025 appear to have shattered that illusion. Compliance with the JCPOA in 2015, even when scrupulously observed by Tehran, offered no lasting security—particularly after its unilateral dismantling by President Trump in 2018. What Iran is now likely to pursue is not a diplomatic balancing act, but the firm establishment of a nuclear deterrent—a paradigm shift that echoes Waltz’s once controversial proposition.
Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear monopoly stretches across an immense and strategic geography: “from Pakistan to France on an East–West axis and from Russia to South Africa on a North-South axis”—a vast expanse over which this monopoly no longer appears tenable. In this context, a nuclear Iran ceases to be an outlier and begins to resemble a regional inevitability, promising not instability but a precarious form of balance, since general de-nuclearisation does not seem to be on the table. Waltz had argued in Foreign Affairs that this would not necessarily lead to further regional nuclear proliferation, yet one would be wise to be prudent with that assessment in particular.
The illusion of “ceasefire” and the logic of escalation
Can a ceasefire hold when none of Israel’s strategic objectives—either declared or latent—has been achieved, even if a sterling victory has been declared? Under its current leadership, Israel resembles a cyclist who must keep pedalling or fall: escalation is baked into its doctrine, irrespective of actual power projection capacity. The optics of defence versus aggression, of provocation versus retaliation, remain pliable in the international information space, but strategic realities are less malleable.
The spectre of an eventual leadership decapitation of a UN member state’s leader—the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader—cannot be entirely dismissed. Leadership decapitation is a practice Israel excels at, despite its by now documented abject strategic futility, even if it’s “good television,” to quote President Trump. While unprecedented even in the Second World War, such an operation is not beyond the publicly declared realm of Israeli planning. Iran, however, is anything but a “dictatorship of one.” Ayatollah Khamenei, at 86, is neither Saddam nor Gaddafi, and the Iranian system is not a house of cards dependent on a single pillar. A hypothetical assassination would be less about actual regime change and more about provocation—a gambit to trigger an Iranian overreaction, thereby manufacturing an existential threat that might, “at last,” compel full American military intervention.
Yet, scandalous as this might sound to the discipline’s uninitiated, recent international relations history and realist literature has proven Iran to be a singularly rational and disciplined state actor, not the volatile, trigger-happy, and irrational theocracy of Western caricature—while the woefully outdated discourse on “mullahs” fails to appreciate basic facts of life, such as the dynamics of Iran’s cabinet, for instance. The country’s strategic patience—rather than any impulse for vengeance—has consistently shaped its posture.
Furthermore, while it cannot be entirely dismissed that the United States might eventually become directly embroiled in one of Israel’s conflicts as an overt belligerent on the side of Israel, there are clear indications of substantial resistance to such involvement at present. This reluctance stems from the recognition that participation in these wars would sharply contravene the national interest of the United States, though it may align with America’s broader hegemonic ambitions—with a major raison d’être of the MAGA movement consisting in opting for the former. A cautious observer would wisely hesitate to predict the ultimate direction of U.S. policy in this context. The balance between national interests and “unipolar” hegemonic ambitions remains uncertain, as competing domestic and international pressures could tip the scales in unpredictable ways, particularly given the complex interplay of strategic priorities and political dynamics under a Trump administration. The fact that the Fordow blunder appears to have been carefully choreographed together with Iran does not entail a deficit of pernicious recklessness.
As the dust settles over a conflict that failed to fulfil its architects’ expectations, the broader lesson emerges: in international relations, wishful thinking is not strategy. Iran’s measured response, Israel’s exposed limitations, and America’s reluctant choreography all underscore the return of an ancient truth in foreign affairs—that power must be matched by prudence, and ambition tempered by realism.
Given the trajectory of Round One, Israel’s strategic calculus now seemingly rests on the expectation that the United States will fully commit to Round Two, effectively positioning America as Israel’s proxy in this conflict. Yet, amid shifting U.S. domestic priorities and global hesitations, this eventuality remains anything but certain, potentially reshaping the regional balance in unforeseen ways. A veritable crossroads moment between MAGA and MIGA is looming on the horizon.
* Sotiris Mitralexis holds a doctorate in political science and international relations; he works at University College London as a research fellow.