Despite speculation that the Israel-US war on Iran could destabilize the current regime, the reality is that it is more likely to consolidate the power of Iran’s hardline faction. This would make the already challenging task of finding a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program even more elusive.
On June 12 Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on Iran, targeting key military commanders, miliary installations and nuclear facilities. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified this attack by arguing that Iran was harbouring ambitions of possessing nuclear bombs which presented an existential threat to Israel. The United States initially distanced itself from the Israeli attack but soon echoed Israel’s claim of self-defence. On June 23, US President Donald Trump ordered strikes on three nuclear facilities in Iran. Within 24 hours Iran hit Al Udeid air base in Qatar that houses one of the US Central Commands bases, with advance warning to mitigate casualties.
Conflict will have far reaching consequences for Iran’s foreign policy
This has been a fast-moving conflict with contradictory messages. Despite his electoral campaign promise of extracting the US from wars in the Middle East, President Trump finds himself in the middle of a new war. After initially insisting that the US was not seeking regime change in Iran, President Trump called for the Iranian leadership to step aside to ‘make Iran great again.’ He also called for Iran’s unconditional surrender. But hours after the Iranian attack on Al Udeid, President Trump announced a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. This ceasefire offered an opportunity for Iran to see an end to the war while saving face by not accepting unconditional surrender.
This war will have far reaching consequences for the way Iran engages with the international community and its domestic affairs. The Iranian leadership has been critical of the US for what it calls hegemonic and bullying behaviour. US support for Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran is seen as further evidence of that behaviour. This is very likely to entrench the already hostile attitude towards Washington, more specifically towards President Trump for his brash threats and ultimatums. This experience puts Iran’s return to the negotiation table at risk.
Deepening diplomatic distrust on nuclear negotiations
Iranian authorities also blame the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for preparing the ground for the Israeli attack by issuing a report about Iran’s non-compliance, which they reject as misleading. The Iranian parliament has now adopted a bill to stop cooperation with IAEA and expel its inspectors. There is a hardening of attitudes in the Iranian leadership that sees earlier efforts at nuclear negotiation and finding a diplomatic compromise as futile.
Tehran sees Trump as unreliable and untrustworthy and blames him for the war. It was President Trump who originally tore up the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and imposed ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran during his first administration. President Trump’s zig-zags on what the US wanted to achieve in US-Iran talks before they were sabotaged by Israel, has deepened distrust. In the early rounds of talks, Trump drew a line about the weaponisation of Iran’s nuclear program but half-way through the talks he changed his message and insisted on no uranium enrichment in Iran. Once, Israel attacked Iran, President Trump seemed to distance himself from the attack before sending in B2s with bunker-busting bombs. All this has made the Iranian leadership very reluctant to recommence any more talks with Washington.
The ‘12-day war’ played into the hands of Iran’s hardliners
The war has played into the hands of the hardline faction in Iran, which was already critical of subjecting Iran to IAEA intrusive inspections. Voices of dissent have become louder in the Iranian parliament questioning Iran’s peaceful nuclear doctrine. For them, developing the nuclear bomb presents the ultimate deterrence, as various other deterrence strategies fail. Iran had invested in a range of regional proxies to project power and keep threats at bay under the mantra of ‘forward defence.’ The so-called Axis of Resistance, comprising of Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, Shia militia in Iraq as well as the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, was expected to spring into action in case of threats against Iran or its interests in the region. For a while, this strategy seemed to work as Hezbollah and Shia militia mobilised to defend Iran’s close ally Assad against threats by the Islamic State. But the 2023 war in Gaza changed the strategic landscape. Israel seriously depleted Hamas in Gaza and pushed Hezbollah away from Israel-Lebanon border and undermined its ability to challenge Israel by targeting many of its commanders and leadership. In December 2024, Assad was forced to flee Syria in the face of advancing Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an anti-Iran rebel group that hails from the Islamic State. The rapid succession of these setbacks for the Axis of Resistance in 2024, made Iran’s deterrence strategy through proxies ineffective.
The hard-liners’ instinct is to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and pursue the atomic bomb. Many draw inspiration from North Korea that they view as achieving protection from US attacks due to its possession of nuclear weapons. And they view the Israeli favoured Libyan model of dismantling the national nuclear program as a prelude to regime change. The ‘12-day war’ has reinforced this view.
Conflict could fuel further repression and crackdowns on civil society
The upsurge of hardliners is very likely to have domestic implications as well. The ruling regime has been suspicious of civil society activists, often branding them as misguided by Western propaganda at best, or foreign agents at worst. The response has typically been arresting, harassing and in some cases, execution of civic activists. This harsh response belies the ruling regime’s awareness of its deep legitimacy crisis. In 2022-23 Iran was rocked by widespread protests against the authoritarian rule of the clerical regime. Chants of ‘down with the dictator’ during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, reminiscent of the ‘down with Shah’ chants during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, shocked the establishment. Protests were put down by brute force, but the schism between the ruling regime and the vast majority of the population remains. The regime’s likely response is to crank up the pressure on its domestic critics.
Israeli PM Netanyahu called on the Iranian people to free themselves from the yoke of the Islamic regime as Israeli bombs fell on Tehran. And President Trump endorsed the idea of a regime change in a social media post before changing tact. But the war was never a threat to the ruling regime. It simply vindicated the narrative of resistance against Israel and the United States and served to consolidate the regime. The consequences will likely be a more belligerent regime that challenges international rules and norms as tools of US hegemony and punishes civil society through accusations of Western infiltration.
Prof Shahram Akbarzadeh is the Director, Middle East Studies Forum, Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha.
