After hesitating if the United States would enter the Israel War against Iran, President Donald Trump finally made a decision. In the early hours of Sunday, American combat planes and submarines attacked three nuclear facilities in Natanz, Isfahán and Fordow, where the Iranians have a buried uranium enrichment plant about 80 meters under a mountain.
These attacks should be considered part of a sequence that began with Gaza’s War after Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, and continued with Israel’s attacks against Hezbollah (the militant group backed by Iran in Lebanon) and the fall of the Assad regime, backed by Iran, in Syria.
Iran has never been as weak as now. And when Trump said it could take two weeks to decide whether to bomb you, Iran, it is likely that the Israelis pressed him to act before.
We can assume that there was a lot of Israeli pressure on Trump to use mass ammunition projectiles, Bunker Buster of 13,600 kilograms. “Bunker Buster”, which only the United States can deploy with its B2 bomber.
What can happen now? There are several possible scenarios.
Iran Contraataca
Iranians know that they do not have the necessary strength to face the US and that Americans can cause enormous damage to their country and even endanger the stability of the Iranian regime.
This is always the main consideration of the clerical regime led by supreme leader Ali Jamenei: everything else is secondary.
To evaluate Iran’s possible reaction, we can look at how he responded to the murder of the chief of the Quds force, elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, in January 2020.
Iran said there would be a great reaction, but all he did was throw a brainstorm against two US bases in Iraq, which did not cause fatal victims or significant damage. After that symbolic retaliation, Iran declared that the matter was settled.
It is likely that Iran’s reaction to the new attacks will follow this line. He will probably want to enter a spiral of reprisals launching attacks against US facilities in the region. Trump has promised to respond with force:
Iran, a middle Eastern thug, must now make peace. If you do not, future attacks will be much older and much easier.
Nor is it clear how long this war will continue. It depends largely on the number of ballistic missiles and pitchers that remain.
There are several estimates about how many ballistic missiles I will have in its arsenals. It was believed that he had about 2,000 missiles capable of reaching Israel at the beginning of the war. Some estimates claim that Iran has triggered 700 of them; Others talk about about 400. Whatever the figure, their reserves are decreasing rapidly.
Israel has also destroyed approximately one third of Iran’s ballistic missile launches. If you all destroy them, Iran would have a very limited capacity to counterattack.
Iran reverses
Before the United States got involved in the conflict, Iran said he was willing to negotiate, but would not do so while Israel continued to attack.
Thus, one possibility is that some type of commitment is now achieved, in which Israel announced a high fire and Iran and the United States agree to resume negotiations about Tehran’s nuclear program.
The big problem is that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said that he does not trust the negotiation process and that he does not want to stop military actions until all Iran’s nuclear facilities have been completely destroyed. It has also been bombing the oil terminals and gas facilities to exert even more pressure on the regime.
But the regime has been incredibly determined not to lose prestige. He suffered great pressure at different times during the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s and never considered surrendering until an American missile mistakenly demolished an Iranian passenger plane, killing 290 people.
Iran then accepted a high negotiated fire by the UN. But the war between Iran and Iraq lasted eight years and caused approximately one million dead. And when the then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Jomeini, accepted the high fire, said it was “worse than drinking poison.”
Given the state of the military capacities of Iran, Jamenei, the current supreme leader, could simply surrender to try to preserve the regime. But this would be a great setback to him.
The regime is very unpopular, but, according to my experience, the Iranian people are very patriot, loyal to their country, if not to the regime. Although it is difficult to evaluate the opinion in a country of 90 million inhabitants, many Iranians would not want the United States or Israel to order anything and prefer to continue fighting.
Netanyahu has said that they want to create the conditions for the Iranian people to rise against the regime.
But it is worth taking into account that the opposite of autocracy is not necessarily democracy. It could be chaos. Iran has a wide variety of ethnic groups and there could be huge disagreements about what should replace the clerical regime in case it fell.
At this stage, the regime is likely to stay together. And even if Jamenei died suddenly, the regime could probably quickly replace it.
Although we do not know who will be its probable successor, the regime has had a lot of time to plan it. The high positions also know that a struggle for succession after Jamenei would really endanger the regime.
The involvement of the USA. UU. It is limited
According to the new survey of The Economist and Yougov, published on June 17, 60 % of Americans opposed to join the conflict between Israel and Iran, with only 16 % in favor. Among Republicans, 53 % opposed military action.
Therefore, these attacks are not a clearly popular measure among Americans at this time. However, if it is an isolated event and manages to quickly end the war, Trump is likely to receive the applause of the majority of the population.
Another issue is whether the 400 kilograms of enriched uranium at 60 % of Iran have been destroyed in the American attack.
If they have not been destroyed, and depending on the damage caused to their centrifugators, Iran could rebuild their nuclear program with relative speed. And it could have more incentives to further enrich this uranium until reaching 90 % purity, or an apt level to manufacture weapons, in order to build a nuclear device.
Ian Parmeter, Research Scholar, Middle East Studies, Australian National University
This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original.
