The war between Israel and Iran marks the culmination of decades of shadow-boxing between Tehran and Tel Aviv. This is a war that has long worn the mask of deniability, played out in assassinations, cyber operations, and various forms of entanglements from Damascus to the Red Sea. Its rules were unwritten but widely understood: escalation without full rupture. But now it’s unfolding in a surprise Israeli intelligence and military attack, which was met with a subsequent Iranian retaliation against Israeli military installations and strategic infrastructure.
While Israel’s capacity for precise targeting — its assassinations of nuclear scientists, the killing of Iranian commanders, and its strikes on enrichment sites — has rarely been in doubt, its broader strategic horizon remains conspicuously blurred.
Official Israeli communiqués gesture, with ritual ambiguity, toward the language of victory and denying Iran nuclear capability, but the underlying ambition seems at once more elusive and more grandiose: the execution of a blow so decisive it would not only cripple Iran’s nuclear program, but fracture the Islamic Republic’s political resolve altogether.
This, however, remains far from realized. Iran’s underground facilities remain intact, and its enrichment program, far from being stalled, appears now to be ideologically and politically emboldened. Hesitations around the acquisition of nuclear weapons will probably undergo a review. Iran, while suffering from a direct blow that crippled its chain of command and placed it on the defensive, was able to recuperate and launch several barrages of ballistic misslies into Israel.
And yet, behind this Israeli choreography of operational tenacity lies a quieter, more subterranean logic. It is not only Iran that Israel seeks to provoke, but the United States. If Israel cannot destroy Natanz or Fordow on its own, it may still succeed in creating the conditions under which Washington feels compelled to act in its stead. This, perhaps, is the real gambit: not a direct confrontation with Iran, but the orchestration of an environment of urgency and provocation that makes American intervention — at a minimum — on the table. In other words, Israel’s military theatrics are a trap for the U.S.
Israel isn’t simply assembling a reactive sequence of military gestures; it’s a calibrated strategy of provocations that create the conditions for American leverage. Israel acts; the United States, while nominally uninvolved, capitalizes on the fallout, and even invokes the specter of its own military involvement as both a deterrent and a bargaining chip.
The strikes are less about immediate tactical gains than they are about constructing a field of pressure. Their strategic ambiguity is weaponized to test red lines and gauge responses.
In this scheme, Washington appears to maintain a distance, but its fingerprints are never entirely absent. The more Israel escalates, the more the U.S. can posture as the moderating force — while simultaneously tightening the screws on Iran through sanctions, backchannel warnings, or displays of force in the Gulf.
The result is a strategic double-bind: Iran is meant to feel besieged from multiple directions, but never entirely certain where the next blow might come from.
By: Abdaljawad Omar
Source: Mondoweiss
