Two months ago, I wrote an article in anticipation of Israel or the United States conducting a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program. Such a strike occurred overnight, with Israel initiating Operation Rising Lion throughout Iran to eliminate senior military leadership, technical and scientific know-how, fissile material enrichment capability, and ballistic missile production capacity, all with the stated goal of ensuring “at the end of the operation, there will be no nuclear threat.” Given the decades of brinksmanship leading up to this strike, its arrival feels like a historical tipping point (in addition to the policy-oriented one referenced in my original article).

There will no doubt be a lot of commentary and analysis in the coming days that reflects on the historical tipping point and the strategic significance of Israel’s actions. But even now, just hours after the operation commenced, we can examine what the strikes are likely to achieve—either intentionally or unintentionally.

First, there is the question of what Israel seeks to accomplish. Israeli military officials believe that Israel is “in the window of strategic opportunities.” This suggests that its strategic calculus went beyond merely a cost-benefit analysis about Iran’s nuclear program vis-à-vis the preventive war paradox. Indeed, the scope of the targets involved greatly exceeds that of Operation Opera, the 1981 Israeli airstrike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor that I examined in my previous article. To be sure, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent finding of Iran’s failure to comply with nonproliferation requirements and Tehran’s statement in response that it would establish new uranium enrichment capability away from international monitoring gave Israel a casus belli of sorts. If Israel had attacked Iran’s nuclear program in a proportional way to the IAEA’s finding, however, it would have resembled Operation Opera, with perhaps a few more targets thrown, but still limited to the physical infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program. The apparent scale and ambition of Operation Rising Lion make it something altogether different, better explained as part of Israel’s broader campaign against Iranian proxies that followed Hamas’s attacks of October 7, 2023 rather than a mere preventive war action.

What is most telling is Israel’s targeting of senior Iranian military leadership in addition to the top nuclear scientists. This follows Israel’s successful decapitation of senior Iranian proxy group leadership over the past eighteen months, first Hamas and then Hezbollah (along with threats made against Houthi leaders to boot). The emergent pattern is clear: Israel is eliminating its enemies through a series of decisive, ambitious actions that are converging on Tehran. In this context, concern over Iran’s nuclear program may have been Israel’s own proxy—just a way to settle its long-standing issues with Iran once and for all. Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu all but declared this intention in his announcement of Operation Rising Lion. “[Israel’s] fight is with the brutal dictatorship that has oppressed you for forty-six years,” he told the Iranian people. “The day of your liberation is near.” An operation of this scale and with such expansive objectives was perhaps difficult to contemplate until now because it is so brazen and risky, and this was a failure of past analysis, mine included. But, like Operation Opera and my original article indicated, a strike against Iran’s nuclear program was bound to entail considerable cost—not least, political costs—so it is in Israel’s interests to try and extract maximum benefit from it. The danger now, of course, is that a whole new set of costs encompassing a new set of actors and potential actions gets introduced in response to Israel’s ambition.

Second, although the recent IAEA finding gave Israel casus belli, the fact that the next round of American-led negotiations to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue diplomatically was scheduled for this weekend in Qatar suggests that Israel was not quite at the point of last resort for the timing of Operation Rising Lion. Whether this was a deliberate gambit to lull the Iranians into a false sense of security is not particularly important. The sequencing matters, however, as it reveals an opportunity cost that Israel hopefully considered in its it cost-benefit analysis. Israel will still have enemies moving forward, and some may continue to seek Israel’s destruction like the current regime in Tehran seems to. Whereas the Iranians could perhaps not be dissuaded diplomatically, Israel’s other enemies may be, yet the key question is the degree to which potential future diplomatic power has been compromised by the current operation. And even if future regional rivals cannot be dissuaded, simply getting them to the negotiating table has value since diplomatic reps make the enemy’s intentions clearer over time. Not every prospective enemy carries the same threat level, and intentions become highly relevant to this assessment.

This opportunity cost exists on top of a fixed cost associated with Israel’s situation in the Middle East. In a 2012 article in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Kenneth Waltz provided the neorealist insight that Israel’s position as the de facto regional hegemon in the Middle East (since it is the only nuclear-armed state in the region, which everybody knows despite Israel’s policy of deliberate ambiguity) begs to be balanced. Otherwise, regional relations will remain unstable due to the obvious security dilemma present for regional states not aligned with Israel. The implication is clear: If not Iran, then there will be another nuclear-aspirant state that emerges in the Middle East to balance against Israeli regional hegemony. From a neorealist perspective, then, Operation Rising Lion only addresses a singular, temporal manifestation of a much bigger strategic problem. Historical tipping point, indeed, and the ultimate judgment of how effectively Israel has managed the preventive war paradox induced by striking Iran’s nuclear program cannot come until we know who the next balancer is and what means they will seek to employ.

Colonel Patrick Sullivan, PhD, is the director of the Modern War Institute at West Point.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Mizan News Agency