What Was the Point of Israel’s Iran Strike?

The Limits of Provocation

At some point, the world will have to ask: what exactly was Israel hoping to achieve?

In the days following the dramatic escalation between Tel Aviv and Tehran, we are left not with clarity but with a deepening sense of confusion. If the intention was to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, there is little to show for it—centrifuges still spin, scientists remain in place, and the infrastructure of Iran’s deterrent capability stands unshaken. If the aim was to trigger chaos within the Iranian regime, then that too has failed—Tehran did not descend into disarray; it retaliated, measured and intact. And if the goal was symbolic, to remind the world of Israel’s reach and resolve, then the moment has already passed, clouded by questions of proportionality, legality, and consequence.

For all the fire and fury, the strike landed with the strategic weight of a gesture.

Trump’s Brake: From War-Starter to War-Manager

In a moment few would have predicted even a year ago, Donald Trump—long cast as the great destabilizer in American politics—emerged as the unlikely arbiter of restraint in the most dangerous U.S.–Middle East crisis in decades. As Israel launched a high-risk wave of strikes across Iranian territory, including direct hits on radar installations and nuclear infrastructure, it was Trump who abruptly intervened. From the NATO summit stage and via an all-caps post on Truth Social—“ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!”—he drew a bright, if temporary, line against further escalation.

Yet this was no mere performative tweet. Trump personally telephoned Prime Minister Netanyahu, directed a freeze on Israeli sorties already in the air, and announced a phased ceasefire—with Iran first, then Israel—a sequence brokered with the help of Qatar. He enforced it not with idealism but with forceful pragmatism, reportedly using expletives and ultimatums behind closed doors when both parties violated the terms in the hours that followed. Though the U.S. had just executed “Operation Midnight Hammer,” deploying B‑2 bombers and bunker-busting payloads on Iranian nuclear sites, Trump’s messaging pivoted swiftly: declare victory, freeze the war, contain the damage.

What emerged from this episode was a profound irony. The man who had campaigned on tearing up the Iran deal and led chants of “bomb them,” was now the very actor pulling the plug on Netanyahu’s decades-long campaign to drag Washington into a full-scale war. It was not liberal diplomats or think tank restraint caucuses that interrupted the Israeli war machine—it was MAGA itself, exhausted by foreign adventures and deeply wary of entanglements that offer spectacle but no security.

This episode revealed a crack in the foundation of Netanyahu’s strategic doctrine: for thirty years he has counted on unwavering American escalation. But in this new political moment—where the populist right is more interested in nation-building at home than regime change abroad—he may find that old promises no longer hold. Worse, Trump’s public theatrics and contradictory posture—striking, then restraining—exposed just how little control even a superpower retains once the fires are lit.

For Israel, the lesson was bitter: Washington might still fight your war, but not on your timeline. And not, perhaps, to your end.

A Doctrine Three Decades in the Making

Jeffrey Sachs, in his sweeping indictment of Israel’s strategic doctrine, reminds us that this is not a crisis born overnight. Since the early 1990s, Netanyahu has followed a clear trajectory: neutralize regional adversaries, eliminate Iran’s deterrent capabilities, and draw the United States into a final confrontation that would permanently alter the regional balance of power. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan—each strike, each assassination, each cyber-attack has been a step along this path. But Iran was always the endgame. The crown. The final domino.

And yet, every attempt to trigger that decisive showdown has only exposed Israel’s limitations. Not its resolve, which is undeniable—but its capacity to shape outcomes in a world that no longer runs on unipolar time.

Mossad’s Overreach, MAGA’s Rejection

In chilling detail, leaked communications revealed Mossad operatives threatening Iranian officers with violence against their families, demanding surrender videos to stage regime collapse. And yet the regime did not collapse. The Islamic Republic, battered and imperfect, stood firm.

Meanwhile, the American public—especially on the populist right—asked an inconvenient question: What for?

This wasn’t 2003. There was no phantom WMD, no illusion of a cakewalk. No Colin Powell moment. Just a nuclear-armed state bombing another sovereign country and daring the world to blink.

And for once, the world did not.

Iran: Too Rooted to Crack

Calls for Iran’s fragmentation misunderstand the nature of the Iranian state. Unlike the artificial constructs of the colonial era, Iran is not a patchwork hastily stitched by outsiders—it is the heir of imperial lineages stretching from Cyrus to the Safavids. Its ethnic heterogeneity is real, but so too is its institutional cohesion: an integrated bureaucracy, a deeply embedded clerical state, and a national identity anchored in a shared Shi’a framework that spans both Persian and non-Persian populations. Even figures at the top—Khamenei, Pezeshkian, the last Shah—are themselves Azeris, reflecting the deep interweaving of minority elites within the state fabric. Iran is not Iraq; it is not Yugoslavia; and the fantasy that it might unravel under pressure is less strategy than delusion. Its discontent is cyclical, not centrifugal. And though the Islamic Republic may fall, Iran itself—as a nation, as a polity, as a civilization—almost certainly will not.

Multipolar Patience: Chess, Go, and Poker

Russia, always conscious of its image as a global spoiler, made its presence felt but quickly pulled back (Chess), signaling strength without overreach. China, playing the long game (Go) as ever, said little—but ensured everyone knew it was watching. The United States, true to form, shuffled its deck, bluffed loudly, and ultimately folded (Poker) when it realized it was playing with a hand too weak for the stakes on offer.

This isn’t the post-9/11 world. The Middle East is no longer a sandbox for American experimentation. The emerging world order—one defined by multipolarity, not hegemony—has begun to enforce ceilings. Even for Israel.

A Crack in the Iron Dome of Narrative

Perhaps the most revealing development came not from the skies above the Middle East, but from the ballots cast in New York City. In what could only be described as a political earthquake, Zohran Mamdani—a 33-year-old democratic socialist, Indian-Ugandan immigrant, and unapologetically pro-Palestinian candidate—took the lead in the Democratic primary for mayor in what is perhaps the most Jewish city on Earth.

Cuomo, once the embodiment of centrist power and Wall Street consensus, conceded with grace but not illusion: “Tonight is his night. He won.”

The symbolism could not have been sharper: in the very week of Israel’s most aggressive regional campaign in decades, a practicing Muslim with the surname Mamdani surged past the establishment in a city long considered a bastion of pro-Israel political orthodoxy. This was not merely an electoral upset—it was a rupture in the moral consensus. A signal that younger, multiracial, digitally native Americans are no longer beholden to AIPAC talking points, nor intimidated by the rhetorical policing of criticism as antisemitism.

But Mamdani’s ascent also reflects a quieter, more intimate fault line—one that runs not through party platforms but through families, civilizations, and inheritances. His mother, Mira Nair, gave us Monsoon Wedding—a masterpiece of high-cultural desiness, drenched in the aesthetics of the South Delhi and animated by a feminist but unmistakably Hindu civilizational warmth. Her son, though proudly “South Asian,” is not the continuation of that world but a break from it. A product of interfaith union, he has chosen a faith, a political identity, and a cultural discourse that, for all its eloquence and justice-orientation, sits firmly outside the civilizational grammar his mother helped bring to global recognition.

In that sense, he is proof—however unconsciously—that love across lines often culminates not in synthesis, but in defection. His Persianate Shi’ite Faith is clear (Twelverism is essentially an Iranian affair), his Hindi video persuasive (and so is his Spanish), but the deeper register of high Sanskritic culture—its poetics, its metaphysics, its silent codes—is absent. That is not a flaw; it is simply a reality. A new alignment. A signal of which stories now win hearts—and which ones are receding from memory.

The Beltway may still worship the myths of Entebbe and Osirak.

But Brooklyn has moved on—and so, it seems, have some of its sons.

India’s Parallel Path: Sentiment Over Strategy

It is worth noting that Israel is not alone in its descent into emotionally-driven decision-making. India, too, finds itself reacting with ever-increasing theatricality to perceived threats—projecting power, yes, but often without strategic payoff. In both cases, a deeper pathology is evident: nationalism untethered from pragmatism, hawkishness detached from horizon-thinking. Projection replaces policy, and ego replaces expertise.

And when perception flips—as it now has—it does so with unforgiving speed.

The Myth Fractures

Israel’s aura of invincibility, long nurtured through surgical strikes and global silence, has cracked. The world has seen a nuclear-armed state bomb six countries in a single week, including one that retaliated in kind. The veneer of impunity has thinned. The era when Tel Aviv could act as it pleased, buffered by Washington’s veto and Europe’s complicity, is nearing its end.

This is not to deny Israel’s power. But power is not the same as persuasion. And it is certainly not the same as permanence.

What Peace Requires—and Why It’s Possible

As Sachs rightly notes, the path to peace is neither abstract nor naïve. It lies in the documents the world has already authored:

• End the occupation.

• Recognize Palestine.

• Uphold international law.

This is not a utopian fantasy—it is the bare minimum standard of postwar diplomacy. And if Trump is indeed chasing a Nobel, this is the only door left open to him.

The question is not whether peace is possible. It is whether it will be chosen.

In Sacred Time: June 23rd, 155 Years Later

And then, beyond geopolitics, beyond missiles and mayors, a stranger coincidence whispered through history.

On June 23rd, 1870, Mirza Mihdi—the son of Bahá’u’lláh, imprisoned in the fortress city of Acre—fell through a skylight and lay dying. His father, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith & Manifestation for this Age of human history, offered him healing. But the son refused. “Let my life be the price,” he said, “for the gates of this prison to open.” And soon after, those gates did in the months that followed as Bahá’ís were once again allow to visit Bahá’u’lláh after a long period of absence.

But again on June 23rd, 2025—155 years to the tragic day—the gates of Iran’s most notorious prison, Evin, were blasted open. Where generations of Bahá’ís, activists, poets, and students have suffered in silence, the walls trembled. Whether by fire or fate, something moved.

If it is too much to claim divine causality, then what of Albert Schweitzer’s remark “coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” But too precise to ignore. Some dates shimmer. Some wounds echo across time. And some acts of sacrifice ripple longer than missiles ever will.

Because heaven remembers—long after the world forgets.