Israel vs. Iran: Let’s Hope This Works

A couple of decades ago, U.S. President Donald Trump was a real-estate investor and casino operator trying to establish a foothold in the Philadelphia gambling market.  His efforts failed due in part to the intervention of a company called LHTW Inc. in a dispute over the property where Trump wanted to build a casino.  LHTW stood for “let’s hope this works,” and if the objective was to shove Trump out of the running, it did indeed work.

LHTW is a sentiment shared by Jews worldwide as the IDF continues pre-emptive strikes on Iranian targets.  There’s a strong case that Israel had no choice but to act, and act now.  Israel crippled Iran’s air defenses in October 2024, and Russia, which depends on Iran for the killer drones it needs to slaughter Ukrainian civilians, has vowed to help Iran rebuild them.  There are reports that Iran is (or maybe, now, was) close to developing triggering devices for nuclear weapons.  And Trump’s feckless negotiations with the mullahs have predictably exceeded his self-declared two-month deadline.  Trump demands that Iran stop uranium enrichment, Iran flatly refuses, yet the negotations have continued and may go on still.  They’ve taken on a too-big-to-fail vibe.  Their pointless persistence has allowed Trump to avoid following through on his bombastic threats.  Had Israel hesitated and allowed the talks to veer toward closure along the lines of the disastrous deal Trump exited in 2018, an attack would represent an unthinkable defiance of Trump.

“When you strike at the King, Emerson famously said, you must kill him.”  That was Donald Trump in 2020, taunting the authors of his second impeachment.  Facing a rapidly closing window of opportunity, Israel acted, and reaction in the west has largely ranged from measured support to muted concern.  Can Israel kill the king – put a permanent stop to Iran’s annihilationist ambitions – on its own?

There is no permanent stop.  Anything that’s destroyed can be rebuilt.  So what counts as success?  What amounts to killing the king?

Let’s start with what success doesn’t look like.  If Israel – due to operational capability, diplomatic pressure, or some combination – cannot set Iran’s nuclear program back to square one, it will have failed strategically.  Iran is resourceful and willing to starve its people to serve its revolutionary ends.  It will quickly repair and rebuild its nuclear infrastructure.

Dealing the regime a “heavy blow” by eliminating prominent military and even political leaders will not change the regime’s ambitions.  Its legitimacy in the eyes of its supporters and, more importantly, its multilayered military depends on those ambitions.  Radical regimes rarely evolve into something less radical, and when they do, it’s because they lose the army’s support.  A sizable fraction of Belarus’s population turned out to protest Alexander Lukashenko’s sham re-election in 2020, but the military, with help from Russia, has kept him in power.  More than a quarter of Venezuela’s population has left the country since dictator Nicolás Maduro took over, yet the country’s huge army and internal security forces prevent his ouster.

For years the conventional wisdom has been that Israel cannot possibly eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure on its own.  It’s dispersed and Iran has had decades to harden it.  The critical Fordow enrichment site lies under a mountain.  To truly dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, to make the mullahs start all over again, would probably require U.S. military participation if not outright leadership.  Although you never know with Trump, that seems unlikely.  Yes, Trump likes a winner, he quickly praised Israel’s actions as “excellent,” and Iran has been playing him for a fool in the farcical negotiations.  But Trump campaigned as a war avoider.  He hopes, risibly, for a Nobel Prize.  He has the Israel-hating Tucker Carlson wing of his base to consider.  And as soon as he got off the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 14, Israel’s “excellent” actions became “very alarming.”

An aspirational objective of Israel’s “Operation Rising Lion” is regime change.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged Iranians to rise up against their country’s broadly unpopular theocratic regime.  But the regime’s brutal and effective response to recent uprisings – the Green Movement in 2009, the 2022 uprising following the beating death of a young woman by the Islamic morality police – means that until Iran’s military sides with the masses, popular sentiment will remain only tangentially relevant.

Still, it may be no accident that Israel’s first attacks against Iranian energy infrastructure took place in Teheran, where the rising smoke was visible to its large population.  The highways out of the city are jammed with fleeing traffic.

Teheran residents watch as the Shahran oil depot burns on June 15, 2025. (Getty Images)

But regime change will not happen with a revolt by or within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s most powerful military force.  Formally tasked with protecting the regime and advancing its ideological goals, it controls vast sectors of Iran’s economy, ranging from construction and energy to telecommunications and agriculture.  Estimates suggest the IRGC runs up to one-sixth of Iran’s GDP for its own benefit.  Killing IRGC leaders will make no more difference than killing the Sinwar brothers did in Gaza.  Destroying their offensive weapons only annoys them.

Some of the IRGC are surely true believers, and just as surely, the loyalty of others depends on their continued power and privilege.  Israel has targeted key IRGC-controlled businesses, including the Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters (KAA), a conglomerate overseeing 800 companies across energy, construction, and transportation sectors, and killed KAA’s leader.  Having established air supremacy over Iran, a rare feat in the history of aviation warfare, Israel may be in a better position to break the IRGC’s economic backbone than to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.  A headless, economically crippled military, faced with dissident officers, demoralized regulars, and small organized militias such as those fielded by Kurds and Baluchis, could abandon or even turn on the regime.

There are many more former unpopular dictatorships than present ones.  Even if Israel is unable to fully wipe out Iran’s nuclear program, it may, with the help of a panicking IRGC and an energized public revolt, be able to topple the Iranian regime.  The IDF and Mossad obviously have tremendous operational capability and have penetrated Iran’s military and government at the highest levels.  But Iran is geographically large, far away, and its military has a headcount of nearly a million.  Even when regimes crumble, the timing of the final curtain is never certain. And until the curtain falls on Iran’s execrable rulers, they will stop at nothing to develop nuclear weapons and wreak revenge on the Jewish state.

Let’s hope this works.