Regime change is not an easy task. And Israel and US have been able to set back Iran’s nuclear capacities without permanently removing the threat
It has now become customary for people around the globe to take sides easily in the war between Israel and Iran and respond to the strategic and political needs of this confrontation rather than to answer to their own conscience. Right now, the correct question to ask is why we got here and, of course, the right answer is that the ideological face-to-face between the state of Israel and the Iranian regime during the past 40 years has been all about hegemony in the Middle East. On the one hand, the Iranian Shiite clerics and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in Iran lived, until very recently, with the illusion that Iran was so powerful that it could fight back Israel and the US at the same time. For nearly five decades, the Iranian regime made the mistake of being immensely loudmouthed about its rhetoric against the state of Israel and minimising the US power in the Levant. This was intensified after the end of the eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with the starring role played by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, especially the Quds Force. The unexpected killing of Qassem Soleimani by the American military in Iraq during Donald Trump’s first presidency was a decisive step against the mastermind of Iran’s proxy wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Despite the assassination of Soleimani, the Iranian regime continued to push forward its hegemonic perception of international relations in the Middle East and beyond.
In the past five years, the Iranian regime has tried to attack Israeli and American interests in the Middle East through its proxies, like the Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis of Yemen. The Iranian people had to pay the price of the presence of this “syndrome of hegemony” by being isolated economically and politically through Trump’s maximum pressure campaign and the EU sanctions against Iran in response to its human rights abuses, nuclear proliferation activities and military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, despite this, Iran continued to play a diplomatic game with the Biden administration and the EU, leaving Israel out of the equation each time in talks on the nature of Iranian nuclear sites. It also did not get involved in direct clashes with these two countries. However, on October 1, 2024, Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, and on October 26, Israel responded with three waves of strikes against Iranian military targets. Unlike the recent war between the two countries, though, Iran and Israel did not aim at each other’s citizens, army officers or sensitive installations.
