East West by Rampini | Why the war between Israel and Iran has crossed the red line (and there is the shadow of nuclear power)

Forty years of shadow war e a week of fire. At what point is the challenge between Israel and Iran now? The ideological-existential antagonism between Shia fundamentalism and Zionism it opened in 1979 with the Islamist revolution ofAyatollah Khomeini. Military-style attacks began in 1982. But for four decades the two countries have fought each other mainly through “proxy wars” of the militias pro-Iranian (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis) against Israel, to which the latter responded preferably with surgical operations (assassinations and air or missile attacks aimed at specific targets).

Last Saturday, Iran crossed a new threshold with the launch of over three hundred missiles and drones, directly from its territory to that of Israel. The response was very limited, a single hit against a military base in Isfahan, second a logic of de-escalation invoked by America. The same logic seems to have been embraced by the regime Tehran which has decided to play down tonight’s Israeli attack on Isfahan and does not predict further reprisals. What a provisional budget can we trace this week of fire, tension and fear?

I extract it in part from the analysis of an American expert on the Middle East, Robin Wright, analyst at the US Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center. On a strictly military level, the week ends on a high note a victory for Israel: both defensive and offensive. Tel Aviv’s armed forces have demonstrated that they can behead a major group of Iranian military leaders in Syria; they neutralized a massive Iranian attack from the skies; finally when they wanted to strike Isfahan in a demonstrative way their attack was successful, mocking the Iranian air defenses.

So at the end of the week of fire Israel’s military superiority over Iran is confirmed, which, moreover, no serious analyst (nor the Tehran leadership) has ever disputed. However, this superiority has limits and conditions. Saturday 13 April Iran has used only a fraction of its immense arsenal of missiles and drones. He did not want to unleash a real offensive coordinated from multiple directions against Israeli territory, that is a concentric, massive and simultaneous attack from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemenas he would be able to do.

This arc of pro-Iranian nations recalls the theme of geographical and strategic encirclement which I have already dealt with, the “pincer” of perhaps pro-Iranian forces surrounding Israel, but also Saudi Arabia. Finally, among the limitations of Israel’s victory the most obvious remains dependence on the United States: not only because the Americans contributed to shooting down Iranian drones and missiles, but also because the state-of-the-art weapons deployed by Israel (starting with the two F-35 fighter-bombers that eliminated Iranian military leaders in Syria) are almost all “made in the USA”. The Biden Administration is leveraging this dependence (although not enough, according to its left-wing opponents) to influence Netanyahu.

Robin Wright draws some conclusions, provisional of course. First: although the last few words seem to fall within a logic of de-escalation, in this fiery week a red line has been crossedin the sense that the Israel-Iran conflict has become a direct confrontation. This happens, Wright recalls, in a context in which the two countries have the most extremist governments in their history: Israel has not had such a radical government since 1948 and Iran since 1979. «And neither of the two countries is destined to change much in the short term, even if their leaders are replaced», according to the American analyst.

Each of these two governments had to take note of theinability to prevail over the opponent. Iran was confronted with its own military inferiority. Israel does not have a long-term strategy to reduce tensions and stabilize the Middle East: it is Biden who comes to its rescue, most recently with the attempt to revive an agreement with Saudi Arabia (diplomatic recognition in exchange for a Palestinian state ).
The return to the previous box – i.e. proxy wars through pro-Iranian militias on the one hand, surgical strikes on the other – means that the conflict between Israel and Iran is once again projected into the long termis not resolved with lightning wars, it rather resembles a super-marathon, or one chess game.

A future disruption could come on the Iranian front if Tehran passes the final stage in the construction of a nuclear weapon. This would give the ayatollahs’ regime the type of impunity that neither Gaddafi nor Saddam Hussein had. But Israel’s limited attack on Isfahan can also convey this message: «We know how to strike your nuclear centers and we will not hesitate to do so». Finally, in the American relaunch of the Saudi card, there is also that hypothesis of a nuclear cooperation agreement that Saudi is aiming for as an insurance policy against Iranian aggression. The theme of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East remains, on the horizon, as a potential “game changer”, a turning point that would change the rules of the game.