The Era of Israeli Hegemony?

With a few weeks of perspective, what can we say about the brief conflict between Iran and Israel?

It doesn’t matter that much that Iran’s nuclear program was not “obliterated,” as the Trump administration claimed. No one believes it was. The world’s leaders and media have long since factored in Trump’s hyperbole and learned to put a steep discount on such words. That’s a telling commentary on American diplomacy under Trump. But it matters less for Israel and Iran than one might think.

Having bombed Iran once, Israel has definitively demonstrated its willingness to do so again. Trump is more mercurial, but he has at least demonstrated how easily he can be maneuvered into complying with a fait accompli once the Israelis move first. The physical infrastructure of Iran’s program is damaged, not destroyed, and could be repaired. But it could be bombed again.

Which means that more lasting damage has been done to Iran’s appearance of regional strength, to the perception that it would become a nuclear power in due course, and that its enemies and rivals lacked the will to stop it. Those mirages have evaporated for good. The Persian emperor has no clothes.

But he’s unlikely to be graceful about it. Though an armistice was patched together, a de facto state of war exists and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Iran has been waging a hot and cold war against Israel, the United States, and its Arab neighbors for forty-five years, motivated by its theocratic, revolutionary ideology. What Trump wants to call the Twelve Day War is more accurately seen by Tel Aviv and Tehran alike as a twelve-day campaign in a much longer conflict.

But it is a conflict which Israel, for now, is winning. Having demonstrated unmatched military success and superpower backing, Israel is poised as a regional hegemon. What kind of hegemon it will be remains to be seen. It could act with magnanimity to seek reproachment and peace with the Palestinians and its neighbors, and at least a cold peace with Iran. But neither Israel nor its neighbors seems likely to move that way. The only safe prediction about the Middle East is that it will continue to be plagued by violence, instability, and privation for years to come.

Iran’s Fifty-Year Conflict

Most observers have probably forgotten, or never knew, the details of the longer conflict. They are worth remembering because, despite Americans’ renowned historical amnesia, the rest of the world understands that history matters.

That history includes Iran’s role in the 1983 Beirut bombings, the 1988 tanker war, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, support for Shia militias throughout the Iraq war, and the 2006 Lebanon War. It includes Iran’s ten-year war against Iraq in the 1980s, an attempt to sponsor a coup in Bahrain in 1981, decades of treating Syria and Lebanon like colonies, and its sponsorship of Houthi rebels in Yemen.

It includes a troublingly recurrent dribble of reports that Iran had or has some sort of relationship with al-Qaida. And it includes a list of Iran’s half-baked but destabilizing plots: Iran tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US—on US soil—in 2011. It plotted to assassinate former US national security advisor John Bolton in 2021 and 2022. Iran has caused diplomatic incidents with Denmark, Albania, Belgium, and the Netherlands over various failed attacks across Europe. 

Why does Iran do this? Because ideology matters. Despite a century of so-called “realists” telling us that only power matters, most observers intuitively understand that if a state professes a religious duty to seek your death, you are not safe—ask Salman Rushdie. Iran’s ideology is barbaric, inhumane, and at war with the basic tenets of human civilization. Most governments in the world accept the principle of national sovereignty, territorial inviolability, and the legitimacy of the international system. Iran joins a very small group of nations that blatantly, repeatedly, and violently reject those principles.

Israel’s Response

Which is why Israel treated the October 7, 2023, attack as the last straw. When militants from Hamas—yet another Iranian proxy—stormed into Israeli territory and murdered 1,200 people, Israel chose to calibrate its response not to that attack alone, but to a half-century of Iranian aggression and to a century-long campaign by its enemies worldwide to deny its legitimacy and subvert its existence.

Israel was also responding to a long string of ineffective counterattacks. Reagan did nothing in response to the Beirut bombings in 1983; Clinton did nothing in response to Khobar Towers in 1996. Bush fought back against Iranian proxies in Iraq—and lost. Israel fought to a draw in Lebanon in 2006.

Netanyahu is likely to be remembered more for military ambition (and intelligence failure) than diplomatic courage.

Unconventional methods fared no better. The Stuxnet computer virus probably set back Iran’s nuclear program in 2011—but only temporarily. Israel allegedly sponsored the targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists in the 2010s, again to unsatisfying effect. Decades of sanctions and diplomacy only resulted in a deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2015—with ineffective enforcement mechanisms.

Trump took the most drastic—even rash—step when he exacted a small measure of revenge with a drone bomb that killed Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, in January 2020. But for what? The strike was like the 1943 bombing raid that killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor, minus the war that overthrew his government. It was a one-off with no strategic effect.

That accounts for the present war’s brutality and length. Israel had no patience for another one-off reprisal strike, another round of diplomacy, or an ineffective campaign that only kicked the can down the road. Israel wanted a definitive war. It is probably bloodier than any Israeli conflict since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And Palestinian civilians have paid the price.

The Nuclear Question

In 2016, I argued that Iran was functionally a nuclear power, a “near-nuclear” state whose “acquisition of nuclear weapons is virtually assured.” Because of that, Iran didn’t actually have to cross the nuclear threshold. Regional security dynamics have “already adjusted to treat Iran as a nuclear power.” The US had little choice but to sponsor an Israeli- and Saudi-led regional order to contain Iranian influence, I concluded, which meant “a militarized crisis with Israel is possible and even likely.”

I was wrong about Iran’s “virtually assured” acquisition of nuclear weapons because I was right about the militarized crisis with Israel. What I did not foresee was that Israel would successfully use the looming crisis with Iran to destroy Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Those had been the major obstacles to direct action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Having removed the implicit threat of terrorist retaliation, Israel and the United States were free to go after Iran’s nuclear program with impunity.

In doing so, Israel was following a long-standing doctrine that it will not allow hostile states in its neighborhood to possess nuclear weapons, having bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981 and Syria’s at al-Kibar in 2007. Note that the three different bombings occurred under three different prime ministers in three different decades from two different political parties: the strike on Iran was not solely a function of Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership or political agenda, and Israel’s nonproliferation policy will long outlast him.

To Israel belongs the credit for keeping the Middle East nuclear-free—except, of course, for Israel’s own rumored program. Hypocrisy is the price of hegemony. And Israel is the regional hegemon: that much should be clear from the past eighteen months of warfare—if not the past seventy-five years. When a nation can, with impunity, wage war on essentially any of its neighbors at will; use their airspace at will; impose its nonproliferation doctrine on an entire region; assassinate entire terrorist networks; leverage the foreign policy of the world’s sole superpower; and still be the most prosperous and flourishing society in the entire region from Gibraltar to the Kyber Pass, that’s hegemony.

The New Hegemony

What sort of hegemony will it be? That seems less clear, as it depends on the future of Netanyahu’s government and its stance towards the Palestinians, its neighbors, and the future.

The biggest unanswered question of the war is: what next? What is Israel fighting for? It is clear what the war is against: Hamas, perpetual terrorism, Iranian hegemony, and Iran’s nuclear program. But war—effective war, successful war, just war—uses violence to build a better peace. What is the peace that Israel is fighting for?

Netanyahu does not seem to have an answer, and therein lies the problem and the likely seeds of forever war. One could imagine an Israeli Prime Minister seizing the moment to act with magnanimity and courage, as Menachim Begin did when he signed the Camp David Accords, or Yitzhak Rabin did when he signed the Oslo Accords. They could envision peace between Israel and its neighbors that included a place for the Palestinians. Netanyahu is not that prime minister. He is likely to be remembered more for military ambition (and intelligence failure) than diplomatic courage.

Of course, Begin and Rabin had credible interlocutors with whom to negotiate. There is no Palestinian leadership, the Iranian government seems in no rush to talk, and the Arab states are not lining up to join the Abraham Accords. That is their choice—but it means they are standing idle while the era of Israeli military hegemony begins.