Special Briefing: Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear program

Ross Harrison
Senior Fellow

In what appears to be a bold attempt to cripple Iran’s nuclear program in its June 13 attacks on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities across the country, Israel seems to be applying tactics drawn from its 2024 playbook for dealing with Hezbollah. Last year, Israel employed remote explosives and a series of targeted assassinations to severely weaken Hezbollah’s leadership structure and its military capabilities.

Now, based on preliminary reports, Israel appears to be pursuing a similar strategy with Iran — aiming to achieve the same strategic effect through the assassination of key figures, including Iran’s top military commander, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Gen. Hossein Salami, as well as several prominent nuclear scientists.

While such actions may deal a blow to Iran’s capabilities, the analogy to Hezbollah is deeply flawed. Iran is a modern nation-state with far more institutional resilience, strategic depth, and far greater capacity to absorb and respond to attacks than the militia Hezbollah.

There are several reasons why this approach is unlikely to succeed in the Iranian context. First, despite the erosion of the regime’s legitimacy over the past decade, an external attack is likely to rally national support around the government. The highly nationalistic Iranian people are likely to view the strike as an unprovoked assault on their national sovereignty and an affront to their country’s dignity. Therefore, any Iranian retaliatory moves are likely to be supported and perhaps even cheered by a wide swath of Iranians.

Second, the narrative that Israel is the aggressor and Iran is a victim could prevail, both within Iran and possibly across the region and the international community. This perception is especially potent given that Iran was engaged in diplomatic negotiations with the United States to limit its nuclear program. While talks seemed to be at a standoff, it appears that not all diplomatic options had been exhausted with Washington before Jerusalem launched such a brazen attack. Given this, Israel’s actions may not only damage its own legitimacy but also undermine broader regional support from the Gulf Arab countries, which increasingly see Israel as a threat to regional stability. This, added to the carnage in Gaza and Israeli incursions in Lebanon and Syria, risks painting Israel, and not Iran, as a dangerous regional hegemon.

Third, and most crucially for US interests, this escalation may foreclose any opportunity for diplomatic engagement with Iran, undercutting the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who ran for office on a platform of rapprochement and could now play a political price for that stance. If there was any window — however narrow — for a reset or recalibration of US-Iran relations, it has likely been slammed shut, at least for now.

Israel and the United States must recognize that dealing with a nation-state like Iran requires more than tactical military victories. Unlike Hezbollah, which operated largely in an international vacuum, Iran is embedded in a complex web of regional and international relationships.

As the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously said, war is the continuation of politics by other means. It remains unclear whether Israel’s military actions are guided by any coherent political endgame — one that is achievable, constructive for Israeli security, and mindful of broader regional stability. Absent such a strategy, the risks of escalation without resolution loom large.