The War That Wounded Iran and Shattered Israel’s Myth of Middle East Mastery

By Elijah J. Magnier –

Benjamin Netanyahu is expected at the White House encounter with Donald Trump carrying the burden of a strategic miscalculation. The Israeli prime minister did not merely ask for American support against Iran. He reportedly helped frame the war as a campaign that could deliver a rapid political result: severe military degradation, internal Iranian fracture, and even ruling system collapse. Netanyahu presented Trump with what supposed to be a perfect and successful plan for a joint war against Iran during a February Situation Room meeting, and that the next White House encounter would be their first face-to-face meeting since then.

The model behind that pitch was not new. Washington has often been tempted by the belief that a hostile state can be broken quickly if enough military pressure is applied at the right moment. In Trump’s case, the Venezuela operation had encouraged the illusion that a dramatic use of force could produce an immediate political outcome. Trump’s January decision to attack Venezuela, arrest after kidnapping its president and temporarily run the country as a major departure from his anti-entanglement rhetoric. Iran, however, was never Venezuela. It is a civilisational state, a revolutionary system, a security apparatus, a regional network and a Shiite symbolic universe at the same time. To imagine that it would collapse under the first wave of strikes was to mistake vulnerability for brittleness.

The war did inflict serious damage. Iran lost its top leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei and several of his family members, senior commanders, military infrastructure and strategic assets. Its economy, already weakened by sanctions, came under immense pressure. Yet the political system did not disintegrate. Iran’s government, backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, remained in power after weeks of war and a shaky ceasefire. Iran managed to strike U.S. bases in the region, hurt Gulf Arab countries hosting them, and assert control over the Strait of Hormuz, a development that contributed to higher global energy prices. The result was not the clean victory Israel has promised in private briefings but a contest of endurance.