Not so long ago, Iran-US negotiations still appeared to be promising. So, why the seemingly sudden escalation?
Last Thursday, the board of governors of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that Iran wasn’t complying with its nuclear obligations. That set in motion an effort to restore the UN sanctions on Tehran later this year. Yet, this is a diplomatic track that should not have military reverberations.
So, what changed?
Weaponizing regional diplomacy
Since the possible costs of any major attack are likely to prove extraordinarily high – as I argue in my The Fall of Israel (2005) – Israel will strike Iran only with the tacit greenlight by the US administration.
Presumably, the sixth round of talks was to take place on the weekend in Oman. President Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was due to travel there to meet with his Iranian counterpart. When Trump was asked what could reduce tensions in the region, he said Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Nonetheless, the US – from the Biden administration to the Trump team – has acknowledged it has no evidence Iran was building a nuclear weapon. Moreover, in early May, the IAEA did not say Iran was close to a nuclear weapon; only that it was on the verge of a nuclear weapon.
In critics’ view, the misrepresentation of the cause of Israel’s pre-emptive strike is reminiscent of the misrepresentation of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as a trigger for the 2003 Iraq War.
Yet, such scenarios are very much in line with President Trump’s penchant for fostering “strategic tension,” which is then exploited as a pretext for military solutions in the name of the West’s ” rules-based order.”
Diverting attention away from Gaza
On June 12, Israel launched an air campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear program and its political and military, to “degrade, destroy, and remove [the] threat” of Iranian weaponization of its nuclear program.
Subsequently, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu – an alleged war criminal according to the International Criminal Court (ICC), who is amid a lingering corruption trial and needs immunity to stay out of prison – announced that the June 12-13 strikes were just “an opening volley in a weeks-long air campaign.”
His rhetoric was seconded by Defense Minister Israel Katz: If Iran continues firing missiles, he warned, “Tehran will burn.” Like Netanyahu, Katz has a personal stake in the deflection. After October 7, he was the Israeli energy minister who subjected Gaza to a devastating blockade and the subsequent famines – and who hopes to avoid targeting by the ICC as a war criminal.
Targeting not only multiple Iranian military targets and prominent members of Iranian nuclear research cluster, Israel focused on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure hoping to cripple Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities. Hence, the strikes against enrichment capabilities at Natanz, nuclear facilities in Esfahan and reported attacks near Fordow, possibly targeting air defense systems.
These strikes are taking place at a historical moment when Israel has effectively demolished Gaza, committed genocidal atrocities against its Palestinian residents and is conducting ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Like in Gaza, Israel pulled the trigger in Iran, but only with the intelligence, arms and financing by the United States and its allies – thanks to the effective impotence of the international community.
A simulated Israel-Iran confrontation
That all begs the question: how would Israel respond to a conventional “existential crisis” with Iran? That is an issue I addressed in detail in my The Fall of Israel (2025), based on research over a year ago.
In late 2023, such military scenarios of “existential crisis” were tested in a high-level U.S. war game in which participants included members of U.S. executive branch, Republicans and Democrats in the Congress, leading academics, think-tank experts and Pentagon officials.
The game starts in 2027 with Israeli intelligence reports that Iran is mating nuclear warheads to its long-range missiles. Consequently, Israel targets Iran’s key nuclear and missile sites with U.S. standoff hypersonic missiles. That is followed by devastating conventional missile strikes against Israel with thousands of casualties, to which, in this projected 2027 scenario, Israel retaliates with aerial strikes.
Iran responds by striking key Israeli nuclear and government buildings and withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), thereby signaling its readiness to deploy nuclear weapons. Washington urges Israel to stop escalation. But in an emergency that is perceived as existential for national survival, Israelis have little interest in US concerns.
Isolated and unable to halt Iran’s possible nuclear strike, the Israeli PM greenlights a non-lethal nuclear demonstration detonation over a remote location in Iran, coupled with conventional strikes and cyber-attacks against the main Iranian nuclear facilities and military sites.
Instead of overwhelming Iran, these assaults strengthen resolve in Tehran, which begins preparing a new response. Then, Israel launches a nuclear strike of 50 weapons against 25 major Iranian military targets.
A joint-regime change operation?
Intriguingly, initially the U.S. participants presumed that self-restraint would prevail in this high-level war game. Yet, the simulation’s cold logic compelled them into a sequence of steps that quickly went nuclear.
What’s immediately needed is forceful de-escalation to preempt the massive, unwarranted human and economic costs that now loom ahead in the region and that have potential to cause great human costs in the region and further downgrade global economic prospects.
Instead, so it appears, the Trump administration and the Netanyahu cabinet are jointly engaged in a massive, pre-calculated regime change operation that seeks to eliminate entire Iranian political, economic and military capabilities – irrespective of the devastating net effects in the region and worldwide.
And like with Gaza, the world is watching, in real time.
