Why Iran Believes It’s Winning Against Israel

On Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and several other officials, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, died in a helicopter crash. This incident occurred following an unprecedented round of escalation between Iran and Israel in April, sparking speculation on the potential implications for Iran’s regional policy and the ongoing conflict with Israel.

Despite the sudden vacuum that has emerged at the top of Iran’s executive branch, the strategic direction of its foreign and regional policies, primarily determined by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and influenced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), are expected to remain unaltered. However, the recent escalation between Iran and Israel is already impacting Iran’s strategic thinking and its regional calculations.

For Iran, Israel’s April 1 attack on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus that killed several IRGC members, including high-level commanders, crossed a line. From its vantage point, both the targets’ seniority and the facility’s character represented an unacceptable Israeli escalation.

As an immediate matter, Tehran believed that leaving unanswered an attack on what it considers equivalent to sovereign territory could lead Israel to target more Iranian officials on Iranian territory. But perhaps more importantly, Iranian officials likely perceived the Damascus attack as the latest way station toward a bigger objective: an Israeli incursion into Lebanon aimed at cutting off Hezbollah’s logistical support.

Israel’s killing of Brig. Gen. Razi Mousavi outside Damascus in December eliminated the Iranian chief of logistics in charge of supporting Iran’s nonstate allies in the Levant; a similar attack in January removed the IRGC’s intelligence chief in Syria; and taking out Gen. Mohammed Reza Zahedi on April 1 eliminated the chief of operations in that area.

Iran also needed to save face at home and among its regional allies. After the April strike in Damascus, some hard-liners started openly criticizing the leadership. Tehran thus felt it had to react with force, but needed to restore a degree of deterrence without triggering a war.

It squared the circle by conducting a highly telegraphed but massive drone and missile strike on Israel in the early hours of April 14. The priority was not death and destruction—though the scale of the attack risked both—but demonstrating that it dared to strike Israeli territory directly. Tehran likely chose which parts of its capabilities to expose while at the same time gathering significant intelligence on Israeli and U.S. defensive capabilities.

The commander of the IRGC’s aerospace force suggested that Iran deployed less than 20 percent of the capacities that it had prepared for the operation, whereas Israel, helped by the United States and other allies, had to mobilize its full defensive arsenal. If these claims are even remotely accurate, it raises questions over whether the successful defense could be replicated were Iran to mount an even more significant barrage using more advanced weapons, especially one that comes as a surprise and continues over an extended period of time.

While Israel and its partners largely succeeded in neutralizing the attack, Tehran boosted its standing among its supporters, and perhaps its reputation as an avowed defender of Palestinian rights on the Arab street as well. It achieved all this without distracting international attention from the horrors of the war in Gaza—a fact further highlighted by the pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses in the United States and some European countries.

From this perspective, the attack’s success came not from its limited military achievement but from the very fact that it directly targeted a powerful adversary backed by an even more powerful superpower. As Khamenei has contended, the key signal that Iran sent to Israel was Tehran’s high tolerance for risk, which aims to deter Israel from future operations aimed at decapitating the Iranian military and cutting off its hand in the Levant.

Yet the red line set by the IRGC’s chief commander immediately following the strike—that any attack anywhere on any Iranian target would be cause for another direct Iranian attack on Israel—was quickly shown to be an empty threat in light of Israel’s subsequent strike in Isfahan on April 19 local time, carried out with an air-to-surface missile strike from Iraqi airspace on an S-300 missile defense system’s radar, near sensitive nuclear facilities in Natanz.

A return to a status quo ante shadow war is probably an acceptable outcome for Iran. From Tehran’s perspective, it would at best find a way to limit the scope of Israel’s mabam (“war within the wars”) campaign of targeting Iranian arms shipments and facilities in Syria. At a minimum, Iran hopes to put an end to Israel’s targeting of senior Iranian commanders and its humiliating covert operations on Iranian soil. It is too early to determine if Iran can achieve any of these objectives.

A key question now is how the bilateral rivalry fits into the wider regional picture. While Israel and the United States could boast that they activated an ad hoc regional cooperation with Arab states to intercept the salvo of projectiles, the Arab states involved were keen not to be named or seen as taking sides. Contrary to the Israeli attempt to frame Arab states’ actions as signaling the emergence of an anti-Iran regional alliance that would benefit it, Arab leaders instead saw proof of what they have long feared might happen: that tensions between Israel and Iran could put them in the crossfire.

Iranian leaders seem convinced that their retaliation, which did not even include the tip of their regional spear, Hezbollah, successfully mitigated the possibility of further escalation—for now. That defending Israel against an Iranian strike cost upward of $1 billion and required a major team effort involving at least five countries versus a $200 million price tag for Iran implies that neither Israel nor the U.S. seeks additional rounds of fighting. Iran thus has a window to focus on the lessons learned, just as Israel and the U.S. military are likely doing the same.

Despite the Iranian assertion of having pulled its punches, U.S. officials assess that the goal “clearly was to cause significant damage and deaths”—in which case those punches failed to land. This appears to be the result of both offensive vulnerabilities and defensive strengths, as Iranian drones traveling long distances were detected in near-real time, many of the projectiles were intercepted before even reaching Israeli territory, and a significant percentage—perhaps as many as half—of the ballistic missiles reportedly failed of their own accord.

To correct for these failings, Iran may seek to bolster the development and stockpiling of arms closer to Israel, necessitating a deepened presence in Syria, as well as to redouble the development of more advanced missiles—including hypersonic missiles—as part of any future strike package.

Israel’s retaliation was a reminder to Iranian leaders that Israel has the capability to do significant harm to Iran’s nuclear facilities. It also exposed Tehran’s principal shortcomings—its lack of more capable air defense systems like the S-400, as well as Israel’s essentially unchallenged ability to penetrate neighboring airspaces. To address the former, Tehran is likely to redouble efforts to obtain advanced Russian weaponry in exchange for ballistic missiles, even if doing so would further damage Iran’s relations with Europe.

Addressing the latter shortcoming could also cause it to look for help from Russia, especially in Syria; but in Iraq, the U.S. military stands in the way, which is likely to further motivate Iran to try to evict the nearly 2,500 U.S. forces from Iraq by encouraging its allied militias to continue targeting U.S. bases and ramping up political pressure on the Iraqi government.

Tehran is also likely to intensify efforts aimed at loosening the already precarious hold of the U.S.-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces on territory east of the Euphrates River in Syria. This could give Iran more land access points to Syria (and to Lebanon beyond), while strengthening its influence on the river’s western bank in Deir ez-Zor province. Finally, Tehran will also likely focus on addressing repeated intelligence failures that have exposed its senior commanders abroad and rendered it vulnerable at home.

Iran’s leadership believes that the capabilities it has demonstrated since October—the asymmetric warfare capacity of its regional partners as well as the enduring image of Iranian warheads soaring over Israeli skies—could, together with the Gaza conflict’s fallout, portend a regional reordering.

In Tehran’s eyes, Israel will become increasingly ostracized globally; the United States will no longer be the region’s most pivotal player as other powers like Russia, China, and India extend their influence; and the Gulf Arab states will steer clear of banding together against Iran, instead seeking to improve their relations with Iranian allies such as Syria and Hezbollah.

The Iranian leadership complement this vision with a desire to consolidate Iran’s status as a threshold nuclear weapons state that could in short order develop a nuclear warhead, which would complicate any future deal aimed at significantly rolling back Iran’s nuclear capabilities, especially given Tehran’s cynicism about the West’s ability to deliver effective and sustainable sanctions relief.

Yet Iranian leaders may find that enduring realities will undermine their bullish narrative and bring both short- and medium-term risks. Given that Iran and Israel have yet to fully define and test any new rules of the game, both may miscalculate, especially because those in Tehran who believe that Iran should abandon its vaunted strategic patience and replace it with a more aggressive posture appear to be ascendant. These hard-liners believe that Israel will soon test Iran’s willingness to stand firm on its red lines, and that if Tehran fails to do so, the returns from the massive risk it took on April 14 will be lost.

That increases the risk of miscalculation on both sides and could lead to an escalatory cycle that could be devastating. In the medium term, what Iran sees as the beginning of an emerging new order to replace a vanishing Pax Americana in the Middle East could instead push Gulf Arab states to double down on their request for stronger U.S. security assurances, and this in turn is bound to deepen Tehran’s perception of the threats it faces.