After the first cycle of attacks between Israel and Iran, on Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a direct appeal to Iranians to rise up against theocratic rule. Operation Rising Lion—the code name for Israel’s sweeping assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders—was “clearing the path” for them, he said, in a video released by his administration. “The time has come,” he said, “to unite around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from an evil and oppressive regime.” That regime, he added, has “never been weaker.” Then, in Farsi, with Israel’s flag behind him, Netanyahu invoked the rallying cry that mobilized tens of thousands of Iranians during the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022. “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” he said. On Saturday, he claimed, in another video, that senior Iranian leaders were already “packing their bags” and preparing to flee.

Israel’s campaign, militarily and rhetorically, has quickly evolved beyond its initial targets. Over the weekend, it hit Iran’s energy facilities, including a gas depot and an oil refinery, triggering huge fires and spewing smoke across the sprawling capital of about ten million people. “Tehran is burning,” the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, boasted on X. Energy resources were struck in other cities, too, sabotaging Iran’s main sources of revenue. Israeli officials also began telling local and foreign media outlets that assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader since 1989, was “not off limits.” (President Donald Trump reportedly vetoed the idea, but the fact that Israeli leaders even discussed it with their counterparts in Washington reflects how far they’re willing to go.)

Israel has long had military superiority over Iran. In the past two years, it has conducted brazen air strikes and novel covert operations against the Islamic Republic’s allies across the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. It has assassinated senior political leaders and killed thousands of fighters. Israel has even more momentum now. But achieving conclusive results will be tough—whether that’s obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its sophisticated arsenal of missiles, crippling its economy, or spurring a counter-revolution.

“The initial attack was so spectacularly successful that it’s hard not to raise your goals,” General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., who led U.S. Central Command from 2019 to 2022, told me. But, he cautioned, “You’ve got to know what’s feasible.” Israel can “significantly” degrade Iran’s nuclear program, “but I don’t think it’s possible to completely eliminate it.” In 2020, McKenzie carried out President Trump’s order to kill General Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, who masterminded dozens of attacks on U.S. targets. The Quds Force has continued to orchestrate attacks on U.S. personnel in the region, however.

Ehud Barak, a former Israeli Prime Minister and a retired general, estimated that Israel could delay Iran’s nuclear program only by several weeks. “Even the U.S. cannot delay them by more than a few months,” Barak said, on Friday, on CNN. Iran has dispersed its nuclear program—which Tehran claims is only for peaceful energy production—among different parts of the country. One of its primary facilities is at Fordow, which is buried more than two hundred feet under the Zagros Mountains, near the holy city of Qom.

Israel and the international community have long worried that Iran’s program could be expanded to build a bomb. In Washington, the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group led by nuclear experts and former U.S. officials, warned that Operation Rising Lion could backfire by “strengthening Tehran’s resolve to advance its sensitive nuclear activities and possibly proceed to weaponization, a step it has not taken up to this point.”

Israel’s elimination of Iran’s military brass may be a setback, “but it is not a strategy for ending Iran’s program,” Wendy Sherman, who led the U.S. team that negotiated the nuclear deal signed by Iran and the world’s six major powers, in 2015, told me. (Trump unilaterally withdrew from that deal, which placed limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for economic-sanctions relief, in 2018.) In just two days, Israel assassinated the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, the top commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the head of the country’s aerospace-and-missile program. “The Supreme Leader will just replace them with their deputies, and then their deputies, and their deputies after that,” Sherman said.

The odds of Israeli-inspired regime change also seem small right now. On X, Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of Iran analysis for Israeli military intelligence, warned that Netanyahu’s government has embarked on a war based on the “illusion” that it can suck in the U.S. for the “hidden goal” of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. “The bigger problem,” he wrote, is “how exactly . . . Israel intend[s] to end the war and preserve its achievements without entering a war of attrition” that becomes open-ended, like its war in Gaza, with no clear exit strategy.

In 2003, President George W. Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to destroy Baghdad’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The implicit goal was also to topple then President Saddam Hussein. However, Iraq turned out not to have any weapons of mass destruction—and the U.S. was stuck there for eight turbulent years, an occupation that generated the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which was led by prisoners detained by American forces. Israel’s opening salvos in the current conflict are “reminiscent of our shock and awe going into Iraq, when everyone thought we were so powerful,” Sherman noted. “And then shock and awe became mired down.” In any country under attack, people tend to rally around the flag. Persian nationalism dates back some five thousand years, when tribes united to create the world’s first major empire. “I don’t think that dies easily,” Sherman said. “And you don’t know what you’re creating when you try to destroy.”

For more than three decades, I’ve had a running dialogue with Nasser Hadian, a U.S.-educated political scientist who has taught at both Columbia and the University of Tehran. We spoke again—I in Washington, he in Tehran—this weekend, via WhatsApp. About eighty per cent of Iran’s ninety-two million people oppose the country’s hard-line leadership, he said, but only a “very small number” would embrace Netanyahu’s call for regime change. Israel’s onslaught makes any “attempt to replace the government” less likely, at least for now. Even with possible unrest among minorities on the geographic and political periphery of Iran, such as the Baloch and the Kurds, the Iranian state still “has enough support to survive,” he said.

Jonathan Panikoff, a former career U.S. intelligence officer, recently wrote that many Israelis once thought political change in Iran would “prompt a new and better day,” because “nothing could be worse than the current theocratic regime.” But, he cautioned, history proves the alternatives can “always be worse”; the more likely outcome, Panikoff argued, in a piece for the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, is not a democracy but a “Revolutionary Guard Corps–istan” that is even more radical. “In such a case, Israel might find itself in a perpetual, ongoing, and far more intense war that is no longer in the shadows, as it has been for years.” Or, other experts are warning, Iran could devolve into a failing state bogged down in internal chaos, as happened in Iraq, with unintended consequences that rippled throughout the region.

There is, as yet, no organized or disciplined opposition group—either in Iran or in exile—capable of marching into Tehran and seizing power, Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, told me. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, who was overthrown in the 1979 Revolution, has lived outside Washington, D.C., for more than four decades. I once asked him at a Washington dinner party what language he dreamed in. “English or French,” he replied. He couldn’t remember dreaming in Farsi.

Now under siege, Tehran has few options. Its only “good strategy” is not to appear willing to back down, Vaez said. Its vast energy resources and geostrategic position in the Persian Gulf do provide some leverage, and oil prices have surged since hostilities erupted. The price of U.S. crude jumped seven per cent in the first twenty-four hours. Iran has the world’s third-largest oil reserves; it also controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of global energy supplies pass each day. If the war spills beyond the Middle East, Vaez said, Tehran may be hoping that international energy markets become even more rattled and that “Trump would blink first and get Israel to stop.”

There appears to be no off-ramp yet, as the destruction and death toll mount in both countries. In Iran, more than two hundred people have been killed, and thousands more injured. Israel, in turn, has been deeply shaken by retaliatory missile attacks, which have killed at least twenty and injured hundreds. On Saturday, Iran pulled out of nuclear negotiations that had been scheduled to take place in Oman the next day. The Trump Administration is insisting that diplomacy is not dead, however. On Sunday, the President said, “Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal.” Many calls and meetings were happening behind the scenes, he claimed, on Truth Social. “I do a lot, and never get credit for anything, but that’s OK, the PEOPLE understand. MAKE THE MIDDLE EAST GREAT AGAIN!”

On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, charged that Israel is undermining attempts at diplomacy on nuclear issues. Tehran has been willing to limit its controversial program, but also does not want to lose its right to enrich uranium at low levels for peaceful applications, he told foreign diplomats. (As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to produce civilian nuclear energy.) Iran needs nuclear energy to meet the demands of its growing population; sporadic blackouts are already commonplace.

In April, the Trump Administration set a sixty-day limit on negotiations for a new nuclear deal. (The 2015 pact took two years of tortured diplomacy and ended up as a hundred-and-fifty-nine-page document, plus annexes.) Israel’s attack on Friday happened on day sixty-one, Trump noted. Hadian, the political scientist, told me that many Iranians now believe that the U.S. engaged in “coördinated deception” with Israel. Just getting back to the table will be hard. Reaching a new deal will almost certainly be even harder, despite Iran’s losses. Revolutionary regimes are inherently paranoid. Like Trump’s efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza, the President is unlikely to be able to end the new hostilities—in an enduring way—quickly. ♦