There won’t be a “final victory” for Iran or Israel

Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem still have choices to make about whether to strike again.

Emergency responders at a building where at least four people died in a missile strike on June 24, 2025 in Beersheba, Israel. Photo by Amir Levy / Getty Images

With the employment of bunker-busting bombs and cruise missiles against key Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan through the night of 21-22 June, the United States became an active combatant in the long-running (and recently much hotter) Israel-Iran conflict. US officials may have subsequently signalled a preference not to become further involved — and there are encouraging signs as of early 24 June that the protagonists have grasped the opportunity to deescalate. But Iranian, Israeli, and US interests – combined with the revisionist appetites of key decision-makers and powerful domestic lobbies – mean that the protagonists’ bitter conflict will continue (certainly at the covert level, and with a re-flaring of open warfare an enduring possibility). The strike’s benefits thus merit assessment in light of its costs.

The attacks themselves appear to have been impressively planned and executed, making use of the B-2 bomber’s range, payload and stealth capabilities to penetrate Iran’s limited (and battered) air defences. The chosen combination of GBU-57 earth-penetrating bombs and submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles also seems to have functioned as intended – although it is too early to know just how much substantive damage has been done to the Iranian nuclear programme. Outside observers are unlikely to have a definitive answer to that question any time soon, given a) that the decisive effects will have occurred underground, b) that we can’t know exactly what was still held at each site, and c) each side’s obvious incentive to report the attack’s effects differently. Indeed, mere hours after US hawks declared total victory, the US government itself indicated that key Iranian stocks of enriched uranium may have survived – and as counter-proliferation experts subsequently noted, the strikes seemingly didn’t touch several other key targets, which may leave Iran’s nuclear programme wounded but reconstitutable. Iran has already fired missiles at US bases in nearby Gulf states in apparent retaliation, although such retaliatory steps were more symbolic than catastrophic – a small missile salvo, against well-defended facilities, reportedly with pre-notification – indicating (at least for now) Tehran’s desire to avoid escalation to a wider war against overwhelming US military might. American policymakers similarly seem to have refrained from immediately hitting back against Iran’s tokenistic retaliation, with President Donald Trump announcing a ceasefire in the aftermath, suggesting a US willingness to accept setting back the Iranian nuclear programme by at least some amount – along with supporting their Israeli allies – while avoiding swift descent into a wider war.

Israel’s ongoing attack on Iranian military targets created perceived windows of both opportunity and necessity in Washington. The attack’s American advocates evidently saw an opportunity to join a campaign in which their adversary’s air defences had already been suppressed. But they also saw a necessity of US entry to make the operation a success (because Israel lacks the bunker-busting weaponry to have a meaningful chance of damaging the deeply buried uranium enrichment plant at Fordow). Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has thus achieved a long-held Israeli ambition: to “chain-gang” its superpower ally into entering a war to defang – or at least significantly retard – the capabilities of its bitterest regional foe.

The best-case outcome for the US and Israel is that the attack has simultaneously dealt a crushing blow to Iranian nuclear options and yet created no greater risk of genuinely costly Iranian retaliation – 23 June’s modest and readily intercepted missile salvo against the US base in Qatar aside – either because Tehran judges it imprudent to go any further, or because the theocratic regime falls and is somehow replaced by conciliatory doves, or simply because they have no good retaliatory options left. Unfortunately, however, neither outcome is assured.

In terms of the scale of the blow to Iranian nuclear options, this attack will have removed any remaining doubts in Tehran that a fully functioning nuclear deterrent – not just a latent programme of military-grade enrichment – is necessary for state survival. Iraq, Libya and Ukraine – all attacked while lacking a nuclear deterrent – vs North Korea’s successful proliferation already made this lesson clear, though the prospect of the US or Israel striking any Iranian “breakout” attempt had weighed against crossing the threshold. With that card now played – and especially if it wasn’t wholly successful in destroying the country’s nuclear programme – Tehran’s calculus may shift in favour of full weaponisation.

Israel could try to “mow the lawn”, targeting any efforts to repair facilities, replace equipment, develop expertise, import materials, or construct new capacity. But given a number of factors — Donald Trump’s noted impatience for sustained campaigns, be they diplomatic or military, the increased secrecy that full Iranian withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would facilitate, the waning significance of the Middle East to US interests, the rigours of sustaining an indefinite bombing campaign (such as pilot and aircraft fatigue), and the possibility of Tehran receiving outside help from existing nuclear powers with strategic reasons to counter US power or financial need of Iranian cash – such mowing would carry substantial costs for uncertain pay-offs. By bombing their interlocutors in the middle of supposed negotiations, meanwhile, Washington will have confirmed Iranian hardliners’ impression of American bad faith – and also sent a signal to watching third parties of the importance of deterrence in dealing with an apparently perfidious United States.

Of course, any campaign of capability degradation entails a trade-off between increasing an adversary’s desire to hurt you against lessening their ability to do so – consider the US drone campaign against al-Qaeda affiliates during the global war on terror, which certainly killed bombmakers and financiers but also recruited new enemies. And Israel evidently took a decision weeks ago – whether that was based on intelligence of imminent Iranian nuclear “breakout” or simply a sense that Iran was vulnerable – that increasing Iranian animosity was a small price to pay for substantially degrading its capabilities.

But nothing is forever, and a scientifically advanced country with a population of 91 million, a land area three times that of France, and abundant natural resources (including oil to trade and mountains to hide things inside) will be hard to suppress indefinitely. After all, while 2007’s Israeli strike on Syria’s nuclear programme killed it for good, its 1981 effort to do the same in Iraq merely strengthened Saddam Hussein’s resolve to acquire weapons of mass destruction while concealing their development – and contemporary Iran is bigger, richer and more scientifically advanced than either of those two comparators.

What, then, of the retaliation risk? Obviously, Tehran has good reasons not to up the ante further – limiting itself to a few tokenistic counter-strikes – knowing that a full-scale war with the US could lead to catastrophic defeat, and thus regime collapse. Indeed, that Iran’s 23 June response was a modest salvo against well-defended military installations augurs encouragingly on this front (Tehran may be trying to assuage domestic demands to hit back in a way that does not provoke an overwhelming US counter-response). It is even possible that – surveying the wreckage dispassionately – Iran’s leaders conclude the enrichment game is up and thus acquiesce to a non-proliferation deal on US-stipulated terms (although this is an area where US and Israeli preferences themselves differ).

Still, to do nothing of further retaliatory consequence would require impressive restraint, given how publics and their leaders tend to react to outside attack – and especially given that an appearance of domestic weakness can be even more fatal to autocrats’ hold on power than further outside attacks. Tellingly, Iran’s parliament already voted to close the Hormuz Strait, reflecting the strength of domestic feeling (at least among regime-aligned elites). Such a blockade would be hard to sustain, invite further large US retaliation, and antagonise Iran’s most important partners – notably energy-importing China. All of which explains why Tehran has been reticent to make such an escalatory move. But that doesn’t mean it won’t have hawkish advocates inside the Iranian government. Even short of full closure, the country could still wreak regional maritime havoc, with global economic consequences (either directly, using its submarines, mines, anti-ship missiles and drones, or via a proxy, such as the Houthis in Yemen).

Iran’s tiny Ghadir-class boats, for example, would be extremely hard to find and neutralise once deployed. Beyond such naval options, meanwhile, possibilities abound: from attempting further missile attacks on Israel (possibly with more success if their operational proficiency improves or Israeli interceptor stocks degrade), to targeted killings of US, Israeli and/or allied officials abroad, to more substantial strikes on US or allied bases in the region, to other unanticipated ways of hurting foes that resourceful people can come up with when circumstances demand. Certainly, even if Tehran limits its overt retaliation to limited symbolic strikes – as seen thus far – and then complies (at least implicitly) with the US-declared ceasefire rather than reaching for its more dramatic levers, it will be working intensively behind the scenes to impose as much covert pain as possible on Western interests (and such covert activities can spill over into the overt domain when they become consequential enough, as seen with Iran’s use of the Houthi anti-shipping campaign). Such possibilities affect the UK, too: from British dependence on imported energy, to the vulnerabilities of UK regional bases in Cyprus, Bahrain and Oman, to any use that Washington may make of Diego Garcia’s facilities. Blowback from the still-poised conflict is not just an Israeli-American concern.

Of course, any or all such measures could and likely would be met by further retaliation – but that is precisely war’s escalatory nature, as each side tries to counter and outdo the other, which can so readily turn a discrete confrontation into a sprawling conflagration. Tellingly, Nato’s 2011 Libyan intervention – also a Middle Eastern air campaign for professedly limited goals – quickly turned into a messy regime-change operation that unleashed a chaos that ultimately harmed the interveners’ interests. While the current situation is not immediately analogous to Iraq in 2003, it is not so dissimilar from Iraq in 1998 – a bombing campaign leading, five years later, to dissatisfaction that discrete air strikes weren’t getting the job done and only a full-scale war of regime change would do.

More fundamental than any speculation about just how far advanced Iran’s nuclear programme is, or whether Tehran actually sought to cross the threshold to a useable warhead is a more basic question: how much would it matter if it did? Of course, we would all generally prefer our enemies not to have catastrophically powerful weapons. But since the US nuclear monopoly ended in 1949, no state – however aggressive, revisionist or fanatical – has judged it wise to commit suicide by using an atomic weapon against another nuclear-armed state. If Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and indeed Trump’s America have all been cautiously restrained by nuclear deterrence, a compelling case would have to be made for why Ali Khamenei’s Iran would be otherwise, despite knowing that using an atomic weapon against Tel Aviv or New York would result in the instantaneous immolation of Tehran.

A more plausible concern is the aggression that Iran may be able to undertake if it felt the protection of nuclear deterrence, and was thus emboldened to strike Israeli, US and/or allied interests using other tactics or weapons. But if the key concern is not actually a bolt-from-the-blue nuclear first strike – simply a desire not to face other adverse consequences in future, such as proxy attacks or conventional aggression – that resurrects the question of whether the benefits of the US strikes merit the cost, both last weekend and if/when the question of a bigger operation to further hinder Iranian capabilities returns in future. In essence, the choice is whether it’s worth war in the present – of whatever scale, from recurrent attempts to impede Iranian weapons development to a full-scale push for regime change (and ensuing regional war) – to avoid such war in the future. If war is indeed a future certainty, then it may indeed be better to fight (again) earlier, on more favourable terms, lest the balance of power shift in Iran’s favour. But if such a war is only a possibility, which might itself be lessened by robust deterrence (both nuclear and conventional) combined with prudent restraint (i.e. not directly menacing the adversary’s own survival), then the case for striking (again) in the present becomes much weaker.

Of course, the United States has already made its choice over whether to strike in the present – or in this case, over Saturday night and Sunday morning. Likewise, Israel has made its choice over whether to strike – and whether to keep striking in the aftermath of US intervention, widening its campaign to targets underpinning the Iranian regime’s hold on power (an approach fraught with risk for dubious benefit), although it too appears to have then accepted the US-declared ceasefire. But the US and Israeli governments – plus the governments of other states that could yet get dragged in, such as the UK – now have choices to make about whether to strike again when the question of Iranian capability advancement returns in future (be that later this week or later this century). Likewise, Iran has choices to make about whether to intensify its nuclear programme and/or retaliatory campaign, or refrain from both in hope that Israel and America exercise similar restraint. As such, in considering whether to make the long-running conflict wider and bigger, Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem – as well as places like London, Riyadh, and Beijing – must be cognisant of the potential for ever-spiralling costs in pursuit of an elusive final victory.