Massive explosions were reported on Saturday morning in the Iranian capital, Tehran as US President Donald Trump announced in an 8-minute video that the United States had begun a large military operation. Israel also announced that it had begun its own attack on Iran in coordination with the United States. Iranian state television announced that Iran’s armed forces were preparing to retaliate. (Credit: Mehr News via Telegram)
Early on Saturday, Israel and the United States struck Iranian targets in Western, Central, and Southern Iran in a military campaign Israel named “Lion’s Roar,” reminiscent of—and arguably a continuation of—Operation Rising Lion last June. To those watching closely, this was not a surprise. The question was never whether a second campaign would come, but when and what it would look like.
Any serious analysis of these strikes demands an honest reckoning with how we got here. One can periodize this conflict from the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979, whose revolutionary ideology made confrontation with Israel and the United States structural rather than contingent. Or one can begin with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which accelerated through the 1990s and early 2000s, or even begin with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear deal that briefly offered an off-ramp, and by extension, the US withdrawal in 2018 that unraveled it.
No matter how one looks at it, the June 2025 campaign was not a beginning. It was the culmination of years of Israeli covert operations, sanctions, and systematic degradation of Iran’s regional deterrent architecture since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023: Iran-allied Hezbollah in Lebanon weakened, its S-300 air defenses destroyed, and its generals killed. The strikes that followed were made possible by years of groundwork. Likewise, the strikes happening now have been made possible by the events that came before them.
Just one month ago, Iran faced the most serious domestic challenge to the Islamic Republic since the revolution itself. On December 28, shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar shuttered their stalls and walked out. Within days, protests had spread to all 31 provinces, fueled by a collapsing currency, record inflation, and decades of accumulated fury at a government that had delivered repression and mismanagement in roughly equal measure. The demands shifted quickly from economic relief to something far more fundamental: an end to the Islamic Republic altogether.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered Iranian security forces to crush the protests by any means necessary, leading to the massacres of January 8 and 9, with tens of thousands dead in the space of 48 hours— the deadliest period of state repression since the revolution. President Donald Trump publicly encouraged protesters to keep demonstrating, saying “help is on its way,” and warned Iran that the United States would take “very strong action” if executions proceeded—rhetoric that doubled as cover for a military buildup that would soon serve a different purpose entirely.
At the time, discussions within the Trump administration about military action were reportedly active. That they did not materialize immediately was almost certainly a function of logistics rather than hesitation. The United States needed time to reposition assets, reinforce allied defenses, and ensure that a second campaign would not leave US personnel and regional partners exposed to an unmitigated retaliatory response. The protests provided the immediate opening for the strikes, though the nuclear issue soon became front and center.
The current strikes appear to focus primarily on military targets, leadership, and residual nuclear infrastructure, including the sites that survived or were only partially degraded in the June 2025 attack.
It is worth being clear-eyed about the stated justification. Iran’s nuclear program, which formed the immediate public rationale for the original June 2025 strikes and continues to frame this new campaign, is not, by any serious assessment, a near-term threat commensurate with the scale of military action being undertaken.
Since June 2025, the picture has only moved further from justifying military action. Iran is not enriching. The physical infrastructure for a reconstituted program, including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, has been severely damaged, with key facilities either destroyed or rendered inoperable for the foreseeable future. Dozens of the scientists and engineers who carried institutional knowledge of the program have been killed.
Even under optimistic conditions for Tehran, credible analysts estimate a timeline of one to three years before the program could be restored to meaningful operational status. And even that assumes sustained political will, the ability to source hard-to-obtain components under intensified sanctions, and the complete absence of further interdiction. None of those conditions is guaranteed. The Pentagon’s own mid-range estimate settled on roughly two years. The International Atomic Energy Agency, more cautiously, suggested months for partial restoration of enrichment. But partial enrichment capability is a far cry from a weapons program.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that the second round of strikes is being conducted against a nuclear program that the first round already largely neutralized. The policy justification has not kept pace with the facts on the ground. What is being targeted now is not an imminent proliferation threat but the residual infrastructure, the reconstitution potential, and increasingly the conventional military capacity of a state that has been functionally defanged in the nuclear domain.
The nuclear framing, therefore, persists not because it reflects operational reality. Rather, invoking Iran’s nuclear program provides the most internationally legible and domestically palatable rationale for a military campaign that likely has broader objectives such as the permanent weakening of the Islamic Republic, the elimination of its regional power projection, and potentially regime change by attrition.
And that is the deepest irony of Iran’s nuclear strategy.
For decades, Tehran calibrated its enrichment activities as a form of what strategists call “coercive ambiguity,” maintaining a threshold position that was threatening enough to matter politically without being unambiguous enough to justify an overwhelming response from adversaries. The logic was straightforward: Stay below the red line, use the program as leverage in negotiations, and extract concessions from a West that preferred a deal to a war. This approach worked, up to a point. The JCPOA was its highest expression, a formal acknowledgment that Iran’s nuclear capability was real enough to negotiate with.
But Iran’s strategy rested on the critical and ultimately fatal assumptions that the other side shared an interest in managed competition, that the rationality of deterrence was mutual, and that staying below certain thresholds would reliably provide protection. Clearly, Tehran miscalculated on all three counts. It underestimated the degree to which Israel, unconstrained by the diplomatic equities that had historically checked US action, would be willing to strike preemptively regardless of where Iran sat on the escalation ladder. It overestimated the deterrent value of a program it was unwilling to complete. And it fundamentally misread the Trump administration’s tolerance for the kind of prolonged ambiguity that the Obama and Biden years had, however reluctantly, accepted.
The result is a tragedy of Iran’s own making. A nuclear program that was almost certainly intended, at least at the level of ambition and design, to produce a weapons capability, but was never taken to the final step of operationalization, ended up providing the perfect justification for military strikes that went far beyond the nuclear program itself. The enriched uranium stockpile, the centrifuges, the scientists: All of it was real enough to alarm, visible enough to target, and advanced enough to justify action, but never complete enough to deter attack. Iran had built the appearance of a deterrent without the substance of one. When the moment came, the signal proved hollow, and Iran is now paying the price for a weapon it was never willing to actually build.