KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Operation Rising Lion (13 June 2025) is not an isolated event but the third in a long-term strategic trilogy, following Israel’s strikes on Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007).
- These actions share a core logic: neutralising perceived existential threats before adversaries achieve nuclear capabilities.
- Unlike past operations, Israel now faces direct retaliation, with Iran launching Operations True Promise I & II in 2024, a significant shift from proxy to direct confrontation.
- The 2025 strike differs by carrying real costs for Israel—military, political, and reputational—whereas earlier attacks were largely cost-free.
- Iran’s growing regional power stems in part from the collapse of Arab state rivals: Iraq (post-2003) and Syria (post-2011).
- Israel’s ability to project military force across the region has increased due to weakened Arab states and the erosion of their airspace sovereignty.
- Ideological framings (e.g. “Islamist threat”) often obscure geopolitical realities and strive to legitimise aggressive “pre-emptive” warfare.
- Israel’s adversaries are different in ideology—secular Ba’athists, nationalist Palestinians, Islamic republics—but are equally demonised on the basis of their opposition to Israeli regional dominance despite their profound differences.
- Israel’s regional strategy prioritises nuclear monopoly, not ideological enmity.
- The June 2025 attack is structurally consistent with past policy, despite the heightened risks.
The Israeli operation on 13 June 2025, known as Operation Rising Lion, represents neither an isolated military event nor a radical departure from precedent. Rather, it forms the latest chapter in a series of strategic actions—rooted in long-term regional calculations—that include the destruction of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and Syria’s Al-Kibar reactor in 2007. While the ideological rhetoric surrounding each target has varied—from Ba’athist dictatorships to Islamist republics—the regional logic, structure of power, and strategic objectives behind these actions reveal striking continuities.
Strategic elimination of perceived threats: A three-act play
Irrespective of whether this will—or will not—evolve into a wider and catastrophic regional war, Israel’s strike on Iran in June 2025 must be understood as Act Three in a trilogy of pre-emptive military actions aimed at neutralising perceived existential threats. On 7 June 1981, Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak (Operation Opera), effectively halting Saddam Hussein’s presumed ambitions of acquiring nuclear weapons. Over two decades later, on 6 September 2007, Israeli jets destroyed Syria’s Al-Kibar facility (Operation Orchard), allegedly built with North Korean assistance. And now, on 13 June 2025, Israel has struck over 100 nuclear and military sites across Iran, claiming to have significantly damaged its nuclear programme and eliminated key IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and scientific figures.
Unlike the earlier two cases, where Israel emerged unscathed, Operation Rising Lion has not been without costs. The 2025 operation came in the wake of two Iranian retaliatory attacks on Israeli territory—Operation True Promise I on 13 April and Operation True Promise II on 1 October 2024. These strikes, involving ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones launched directly from Iranian soil, marked a historic escalation. To refresh the reader’s memory: Operation True Promise I was Iran’s direct retaliation for Israel’s 1 April 2024 airstrike on the Iranian consulate annex in Damascus, which killed senior IRGC commanders, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. Directly attacking the consulate of another state is, in many ways, almost akin to directly attacking its sovereign territory—hence the rationale behind the retaliation. Operation True Promise II followed a series of covert Israeli strikes inside Iran, including attacks near Isfahan, prompting Iran to retaliate again with projectiles targeting Israeli military infrastructure. Both operations marked an unprecedented shift from proxy to direct confrontation.
Iran had never before responded so overtly and directly to Israeli actions. In contrast, Israel’s attacks on Iraq and Syria occurred without any effective military reprisal from either state, nor did they impose any significant material or human cost on Israel.
The most crucial difference, however, lies in the nature of the regional balance. In the 1980s and early 2000s, Iraq and Syria were powerful but weakening Arab rivals to Israel. Their conventional capabilities—armoured divisions, air forces, and hardened regimes—posed threats, but these were ultimately susceptible to swift, decisive strikes. Today, it is Iran that occupies the position of Israel’s primary adversary. The Islamic Republic, though ideologically and geographically distinct from its Arab predecessors, has gained strategic depth through regional alliances, proxy networks, and long-range missile capabilities. This has changed both the form and cost of confrontation.
The collapse of the Arab security belt
The destruction of the Iraqi and Syrian military infrastructures has, perhaps paradoxically, cleared the way for Iran’s regional ascent. The collapse of Saddam’s Iraq in 2003 and the degradation of Syria’s state capacity—accelerated by the civil war and foreign interventions—effectively removed two of the principal Arab counterweights to Iranian influence. Once these two states were “liquidated,” in both military and institutional terms, Tehran emerged as the new “axis of resistance” to Israeli and Western interests in the region.
This is not to say that Iran’s rise was inevitable. But with Baghdad and Damascus effectively neutralised, and with Hezbollah already well entrenched in Lebanon, Iran was afforded greater strategic bandwidth to consolidate influence in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The Israel–Iran confrontation is thus the logical outcome of a series of earlier transformations in the regional order—transformations in which Israel was not merely a passive observer but often an active participant.
Were it not for the destruction of the Iraqi and Syrian armies, the regime changes in Baghdad and Damascus, and the ensuing erosion of their state monopolies on violence and airspace, the Israeli strike on Iran in 2025 would have been logistically and politically more complicated. The absence of strong Arab state structures around Iran has enabled Israel to project force across the region with unprecedented depth.
De-ideologising the narrative
Much of the discourse surrounding these conflicts is steeped in ideology: Islamist threats, the clash of civilisations, rogue regimes, terrorism. But this ideological framing often serves to obscure more than it reveals. In the 1990s, it was Saddam Hussein who was likened to Hitler by Israel and the West, accused of harbouring (inexistent) weapons of mass destruction and waging wars of aggression. The ideological character of his Ba’athist regime—ostensibly secular and nationalist—did not prevent his demonisation in Western and Israeli narratives.
Two decades later, the same pattern emerges with Iran. The clerical regime is portrayed as irrational, apocalyptic, and undeterrable. The language of “Islamo-fascism,” “mullahs,” the insistence on moral binaries, and the invocation of religious fanaticism are all part of a broader discursive effort to justify pre-emptive strikes and regime change agendas. Yet history shows that ideological labels are fluid. Before Hamas was deemed the embodiment of Islamist terrorism, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)—decidedly secular—was the principal object of Israeli and American hostility.
This points to a more structural truth: that ideological narratives often function as instruments of political legitimacy and mobilisation, rather than as accurate descriptors of adversarial behaviour. The consistency lies not in the ideologies of Israel’s opponents—Ba’athist, Islamist, or nationalist—but in the fact that these actors have posed military or geopolitical challenges to Israeli power, security, or even potential claims to regional hegemony. We should be wary of moralising narratives that obscure the underlying dynamics of power: without de-ideologising the narrative first, there is no wisdom to be reaped from observing international affairs and global security.
Realpolitik in the Middle East
Rather than succumbing to ideological abstraction, it is more instructive to view these events through the lens of power relations. Israel’s actions—past and present—have aimed at preserving its regional superiority, particularly in the nuclear domain. Its military doctrine does not tolerate the emergence of a rival nuclear capability in the region, be it Arab or Persian, secular or Islamist. Any antagonist must fall—whether this is a realistic strategy or a potential pathway to destruction is a wholly different discussion.
The success of this doctrine is clear in operational terms: Iraq’s programme was halted, Syria’s covert reactor was destroyed, and now Iran’s facilities form the ostensible target. But the political costs are rising. Unlike 1981 and 2007, the 2025 strike has provoked significant blowback. Iranian missiles have reached deep into Israeli airspace. The regional environment is more complex, with Türkiye, Russia, and even Gulf states playing unpredictable roles—and the desired full involvement of the United States not being an absolute given. International opinion, once more pliable (and once more Western), is increasingly sceptical of unilateral pre-emptive actions.
Yet despite these differences, one cannot help but notice the continuity. On a narrow, regional level, the events of 13 June 2025 are a logical continuation of 6 September 2007 and 7 June 1981. The names have changed. The ideologies have shifted. But the structural imperatives remain. Yet Iran is neither Saddam’s Iraq nor Assad’s Syria.
* Dimitris B. Peponis holds an MA in Governance and Public Policies from the University of the Peloponnese’s Department of Political Science and International Relations and is the author of “The End of the Great Deviation: From Ukraine and the Pandemic to the Shaping of the New Global Order” (Topos books, in Greek).