 "A fire at Tehran's Shahran oil depot after an Israeli attack. Explosions were also been reported in Jerusalem and Tel Avivin the early hours of Sunday after Iran launched another round of retaliatory strikes. Reuters")
After Hamas in Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis of Yemen, Israel is now fighting a war with Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime in Iran.
While there are concerns that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gambled the future of Israel and West Asia by launching a war without means to execute it to the end or without an exit strategy, there are also concerns that the war would alter power dynamics in West Asia in unforeseen ways for a long time.
Netanyahu has not just sought to stop Iran from developing a nuclear regime, but has sought to overthrow the regime of Khamenei . Only he knows if that is rhetoric to bolster support domestically and whip up opposition of a disgruntled population inside Iran or whether he is actually aiming for it.
Irrespective of Netanyahu’s true intentions, there are no assurances that the war would go as per his wishes or whether the regime change in Iran would work in Israel’s favour or that of its allies. Here are the ways in which his war on Iran could change the balance of power in the region — for good or bad.
Weakened Iran emboldens Israel
Iran appears to be at its weakest in the longest time.
Iran’s air defences have virtually been destroyed. Iranian military leaders are dead — and the remaining ones keep dying. Iranian military bases, energy sites, missile bases, and missile production sites have been hammered. Iran does not have any proxies that can come to its aid as its top proxies, Gaza-based Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, have already been degraded in the post-October 7 war with Israel.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsWith complete air superiority over Iran, Israel can bomb Iran at will at the time and place of its choosing.
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After the degradation of Hamas and Hezbollah and the ouster of the Assad dynasty in Syria, the decapitation of the Iran empowers Israel not just in the long-running Israel-Iran conflict but also in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. As Iran had become the main external sponsor of Palestinian armed groups, its weakened position would embolden Netanyahu to deny a Palestinian state even more firmly.
As Firstpost’s Madhur Sharma noted previously , Netanyahu could go ahead with Greater Israel and kill the Palestinian statehood and two-state solution with US President Donald Trump on his side. Israel already controls most of Gaza and controls swathes of Lebanon and Syria.
But what if Netanyahu fails?
Even as Israel has decapitated Iranian military, the main objective of the war remains unfulfilled so far: the destruction of the Iranian nuclear capabilities.
Main Iranian nuclear sites of Natanz and Fordow remain standing and have only suffered limited damage. As these sites are built underground, with Fordow nuclear site built inside a mountain and located half a mile underground, these sites cannot be destroyed without active US involvement either directly via US warplanes joining the bombardment or indirectly via the United States providing ‘bunker buster’ munitions to Israel.
So far, Trump has not indicated that he has the stomach for overt US involvement in the war. He has maintained throughout the war that he sees the Israeli bombardment as a pressure campaign he can utilise to reach a deal with the United States.
If Iran does reach a deal with the United States and Trump pressures Netanyahu to end the war, he would stand defeated.
Moreover, as he stands with his back to the wall, Khamenei has just two options: either give up nuclear programme entirely or go full-throttle to develop the nuclear weapon to get some deterrence at last. If Iran develops the nuclear weapons, Israel’s supremacy in the region evaporates.
A regional nuclear race
If Iran does develop a nuclear weapon or it is reliably learnt that it is at the cusp of developing a nuclear weapon, the other Islamic powerhouse in the region, Saudi Arabia, will not remain without a warhead for long. West Asia would be in a nuclear race unprecedented in world history.
All bets would be off if the world’s most trigger-happy region would have three nuclear powers, particularly as two of those regimes —Israel and Iran— would be committed to destroying each other.