Israel claims victory in the '12-day war' with Iran

“He came, he bombed, he ended the war” – or so Donald Trump wants the world to believe, says The Economist. Two days after US bombers struck Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump announced a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Iran, calling it the “12-Day War”. Since Israel – which has strengthened its position in recent years by destroying Iran’s regional proxies – launched its surprise attack on Iran on 13 June, the country had managed to destroy most of Iran’s air defences, kill top generals and nuclear scientists, and begun to destroy its nuclear programme.

On 22 June, America “swept in” with “Operation Midnight Hammer”, striking key nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Although Trump’s deal initially faltered, a truce now appears to be holding, with each side portraying it as a victory. The conflict might be “winding down”, but the ceasefire is “more likely to mark a pause in hostilities” than the “definitive new start” Trump wants, says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. The conflict will only confirm Iran’s view that Israel and the US are “very dangerous enemies” and that it needs to rebuild both its “military strength” and legitimacy.

The Israelis may have “demonstrated extraordinary military and intelligence capabilities”, but they still needed America to “finish the job” – and even if they have established their regional hegemony for now, “for a country of ten million people, in a region of several hundred million, it will always remain a tenuous achievement”.

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“Going to war” against the US poses “formidable risks” for Iran’s rulers, says Farnaz Fassihi in The New York Times. Conservative hardliners in Iran have called for the country to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and close the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 20% of the world’s energy supply travels daily – a “very blunt way” to strike back, given America’s energy independence, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph. Other Iranian officials and prominent pundits cautioned restraint. The supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made no official statement and remains sheltered in a bunker, but his top foreign-policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati took a tough line on social media, warning that “the Islamic Republic of Iran will have the last word”.

The war has already “sped a power shift” to the Iranian regime’s military arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), says The Economist. If Khamenei “returns from his bunker, he may struggle to reassert his authority”. The clerics are widely loathed in Iran, and many Iranians would “rejoice in a new social contract that reduces the regime’s religiosity”. The war has sparked a “nationalist surge” that has “narrowed the gap between ruler and ruled” and may have emboldened the generals. As a result, the regime may now seek to rebuild Iran’s nuclear programme while seeking deeper cooperation with China and Russia, says Ali Mamouri in The Conversation. Even if a small portion of Iran’s estimated nuclear material survived the attack (and there has been no sign of radioactive leakage), Iran “still has enough fissile material for several nuclear bombs”, notes Philip Gordon in the Financial Times.

A new era of peace?

In the short term, Iran may “prefer to lick its wounds”, says The Economist. As for Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is unlikely to be willing to defy Trump, who covets a Nobel peace prize and won’t want the war to “drag on”. But it remains to be seen whether Iran’s “new military men” will “break the cycle of paranoia and insecurity” that has left Iran and its 90 million people in a “ruinous state”. That “new era of peace and prosperity” championed by Trump “may prove elusive yet”.

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