Does Iran Think it Won the War?

After defeating the Regime militarily, the United States and Israel must disabuse it

By Michael Oren

Israelis have every reason to celebrate the extraordinary and historic achievements of the IDF during Operation Rising Lion. Over the course of a mere 12 days, Israel knocked out over half of Iran's missile and launching capabilities, eliminated dozens of military leaders and nuclear scientists, destroyed key regime facilities, and degraded fortified nuclear plants – all without losing a single plane or soldier. It is a military victory that will be studied by scholars for generations. Similarly, Israelis are fully justified in extolling the remarkable display of U.S.-Israel cooperation culminating in the B-2 bombings at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

In my memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, I posited that the world looks at the alliance between the United States and Israel as a litmus of America’s strength in general. In the aftermath of America’s Operation Midnight Hammer, as President Trump called it, there can be little doubt about the alliance’s might and American muscularity.

All of that is true from an Israeli and American perspective. But how do Iran’s rulers view this war? Were they, as we believe, humiliated, unnerved, and deterred? Or will they again dare to test either Jerusalem or Washington’s resolve?

Despite the extensive damage and losses inflicted on them, the Ayatollahs might conceivably conclude that they successfully withstood an onslaught by the world’s greatest superpower and its vastly armed Middle Eastern proxy. Iran, its leaders can claim, never surrendered. So insists another jihadist leadership – of Hamas – which, after every devastating battle with Israel, stands on the ruins of Gaza and declares victory.

The Iranian regime might also surmise that it has found Israel’s soft spot – civilian casualties – and that, irrespective of its military achievements, the Jewish state could not long sustain continued missile attacks against its cities.

Lastly, the U.S. bombing, the Supreme Leader might reason, was restricted to a small number of targets and limited to a single night when American pilots faced negligible dangers. Indeed, the minute Iran responded with a performative missile barrage at an American base in Qatar, the United States immediately called for ceasefire, and pressured Israel to accept one as well.

On the basis of their interpretation of war, Iranian leaders might well be tempted to start rebuilding their damaged nuclear facilities and to replenish their ballistic arsenals. Observing American surveys that repeatedly show the overwhelming majority of public opinion against continued U.S. military action against Iran, and even the significant opposition within the president’s own party, the regime might think it can get away with violating the ceasefire on a major scale. Calculating not in terms of weeks and months as we do in the West, but in the Middle East, in units of years and even decades, Tehran could take its time in restoring its former strength and perhaps even wait out President Trump’s term in office.

Accordingly, in determining their next steps in the Middle East, the United States and Israel must take into account not only the way we see the war but how it looks in the Islamic Republic’s eyes. We must agree on the necessity of dispelling the Iranian interpretation and disabusing the Ayatollahs of any hope they might have of revival.

The sole means for accomplishing this remains, as in the past, the maintenance of a credible military threat against Iran. The United States and Israel must not only agree on the red lines of possible Iranian violation of the ceasefire, but also on the punitive actions to be taken should they be crossed. The Supreme Leader must internalize that the American and Israeli interpretation of the war, and not his own, reflects Iran’s new and permanent reality.