Since the joint US-Israel war with Iran resumed on February 28, nine months after the previous attacks, many have asked whether President Donald Trump has a strategy for what he wants to achieve and for when he will declare another ceasefire.
Those questions, interesting though they are, are less important than this one: What does Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu want to achieve and how far is he prepared to go in order to get it?
All the logic of Trump’s involvement and his record would suggest that he would prefer a quick war. Like last June’s assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the war has already demonstrated American air power. It has now also killed many of the leaders of Iran’s brutal theocratic dictatorship and has shown that America is willing to attack its foes anywhere in the world.
The sinking of an Iranian warship, which was in international waters in the Indian Ocean as India’s guest for part of multi-country naval exercises, demonstrated the ruthlessness of a great power that can afford to ignore international law and diplomatic niceties.
However, the main motive for this war is not the demonstration of American military power. Nor is it simply the removal of a brutal dictator. The main motive is to remove a long-term threat to the security and survival of Israel. That motive is shared between Trump and Netanyahu, whose collaboration has already been the closest between any American and Israeli leaders for decades. But the two mens’ definitions of what removing that threat requires are different.
For Israel, the more than two years of conflict that followed the atrocity inside Israel by the Hamas military group in October 2023 have represented both a tragedy and an opportunity, just as those years have represented a disaster for Iran. In response to the attack by Hamas, a group financed and supplied by Iran, Israel has succeeded in greatly reducing the military capabilities of Hamas and those of Hezbollah, its fellow Iranian proxy in Lebanon. And Israel has shared in the destruction last June – probably for a generation – of Iran’s nuclear-weapons potential.
The deterrent power of the Israeli military has been restored and the Iranian threat weakened. Governments farther away, whether in Europe or America, may feel that those achievements should be quite enough for the time being. Some Israelis probably feel the same.
The fact that Trump set up his Board of Peace in January as part of his plan to rebuild and reform Gaza, with the involvement of Arab and other Muslim countries, suggests that he and his advisers did not really expect to do more this spring than to intimidate and pressure the weakened Iranian regime into submission.
That is not, however, Netanyahu’s view, as he has made clear in several public statements since the war on Iran was resumed. Where Trump said that he wanted to seek a deal with the new leader chosen to succeed the assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, including demanding a say on who that new leader would be, Netanyahu threatened to kill whoever was chosen.
Israel faces the same dilemma it has faced with every war it has fought since the Israeli state was founded in 1948: the need to eliminate or at least defeat today’s threat without creating a new threat for tomorrow. No one can know what new regime or form of government may succeed the theocratic regime in Iran that Ayatollah Khomenei established in 1979 and which his successor Ayatollah Khamenei perpetuated. But what Netanyahu’s statements implied is that Israel was not prepared to see the theocratic regime perpetuated further through a third supreme leader, for it would expect that such a regime would eventually wish to seek revenge on Israel and might become powerful enough to do so.
For the same reason, Israel looks more determined than America is to destroy all the military facilities and leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the elite force that has led the long-established Iranian policy of using proxies in Lebanon, Israel and Yemen to destabilize the region and intimidate Israel.
These two goals of destroying both the military and the political leaderships of Iran, beyond the point of potential repair, suggest the war may well last for many more weeks.
The size and strength of Iran’s own stockpiles of missiles and drones will also determine how long the war lasts. With this clearly now a fight to the death for Iran’s old political and military leaderships, we also cannot exclude the possibility that they may attempt to use some sort of concealed radioactive weapon related to their nuclear research, as a last, perhaps suicidal, act. As the Iranian authorities weaken further, new dangers could emerge.
From the point of view of the rest of the Middle East, the destruction of the Iranian threat may count as a gain, but that gain is being balanced by the fact that all the Gulf states have found themselves under attack. Those attacks and the associated disruption for Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar will end eventually and the Gulf states can then seek to recover their reputations for safety and stability. However the big fear in the Gulf and the wider region will be of a long-drawn-out civil war inside Iran among factions and the many large ethnic minorities.
There is no obvious potential government waiting to take over in Iran and to re-establish stability and any sort of harmonious relationship with Israel and America. The obvious danger is of Iran descending into the sort of violent division and chaos that occurred in Libya following the overthrow and killing of Libya’s brutal dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Such a prospect is alarming for all Iran’s neighbors, some of whom, such as Turkey and Iraq, share the ethnic minorities that might fight such a civil war.
But it is not clear that this would be such a bad option for Netanyahu and Israel. A weakened, divided, warring Iran might even suit Israel quite well, at least in the short term, for it would be too distracted to pose a threat.
The question of whether Netanyahu is prepared to continue this war for long enough to make this prospect the likely outcome promises to be the main determinant of when the war will end. Whatever outcome Trump might prefer, he is going to find it hard to stop Netanyahu from going all the way.
Originally published on Bill Emmott’s Global View, this is the English original of an article published on March 7 in Italian by La Stampa. It is republished with permission.