Commentary
If no one is willing to stop Netanyahu, why would he?
The strike is an enormous military provocation: the fait-accompli approach, set against the soaring cost of nonstop mobilization, is again pushing Washington to embrace the path favored by Israel.
Israel’s latest act of war had been both expected and feared, even as the Italian government – which only weeks ago hosted nuclear talks with Iran in Rome – kept assuring the public that there were no signs pointing to an imminent strike.
More than the expiry of Donald Trump’s informal 60-day ultimatum, it was the resolution adopted two days ago by the IAEA board – on which China and Russia also sit – that opened the window of opportunity. While stressing the need for diplomacy, the agency flagged “essential and urgent” issues to the U.N. Security Council: Tehran is amassing 60 percent-enriched uranium at a pace unrivaled among non-nuclear states, flouting key verification rules. Its stocks have jumped from 274.8 kg in February to 408.6 kg today, far beyond the limits in the 2015 deal, later torn up by Trump. The vote came just as U.S.-led negotiations, backed by Arab and European capitals, were stalling.
Despite the chilly reaction of Secretary of State Marc Rubio, Israel’s new front overturns the logic of the talks yet does not cross any red line drawn by Trump. The strike is an enormous military provocation: the fait-accompli approach, set against the soaring cost of nonstop mobilization, is again pushing Washington to embrace the path favored by Israel for redrawing regional and global balances. That remains true whether the series of strikes proves to have been a complete success – crippling command chains, nuclear capacity and air defenses – or whether the regime of the Ayatollahs can still unleash massive retaliation on Israel and its allies.
Iran’s (largely Russian-made) air defenses proved ineffective, perhaps also because they were damaged by earlier Israeli raids. Accounts of the attack come as another confirmation of the fast strides towards a drone-war landscape, as we have discussed in il manifesto: Mossad is likely to have used covert infrastructure inside Iran, smuggling heavy weapons-transport vehicles to knock out SAM batteries and give Israeli jets free rein, with tactics not too different from those employed by the Ukrainians in their surprise attack against the Russian nuclear deterrent forces. It is also likely that a special operation was conducted with precision missiles near central Iranian air defense sites.
To offset its military inferiority to Israel – an undeclared nuclear power – Tehran, most of all under General Qasem Soleimani (before he was taken out by Trump), has built a formidable asymmetric response capacity: mostly the so-called “axis of resistance” bringing together non-state armed groups. Now, when Iran needs it the most, that axis looks near-paralyzed. Damascus no longer has a friendly regime, Hamas is struggling to survive, Hezbollah says it will not fight for Tehran, and Yemen’s Houthi forces cannot threaten Tel Aviv. The Gulf monarchies have actually improved their relationships with Iran since the Gaza war, but are not going to do anything beyond routine condemnations, mindful of the U.S. bases on their soil. On Wednesday, Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh warned that “all U.S. bases are within our reach and we will boldly target them in host countries.”
There is still heated debate about how much of a threat the Iranian nuclear program truly poses. Some trust the 2012 fatwa by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei against weapons of mass destruction; others, such as former Israeli premier Ehud Olmert, say Iran is already a threshold state and that no military intervention by Israel could stop its development of military nuclear capacity. And there are other views as well: notably, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate that the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment is that Iran is not in fact building a nuclear bomb.
But if the goal is to bind Iran to a control mechanism that would block the diversion of its nuclear program towards military purposes and put a stop to the nuclear dreams of some among its leadership, what is certain is that such compliance will not be reached through a humiliating surrender at gunpoint, the beheading of its scientific and military elite, or – despite Israel’s denials regarding such plans – the possible assassination of the Islamic Republic’s political leadership.
History has shown time and again that it favors hidden, underground dynamics over the neat, domino-style calculations of what is called “geopolitics.” The Iranian regime is probably divided and certainly mistrusted by large segments of Iranian society; however, attempts at regime change engineered through aerial bombardment – with the many civilian victims that come with it – are not wanted by anyone.
The price of any ambition to redraw maps along friend-versus-enemy lines – as the neocon folly of the 2003 invasion of Iraq proved – is almost always an explosion of violence that spreads and deepens, betraying the very expectations that lit the fuse. No one wants to celebrate the “global war on terror” today, which fed on those expectations and ended by delivering a new Taliban regime in Kabul.
The image of Donald Trump ending wars through a clever blend of negotiations and decisive strikes is a dangerous chimera, all the more so for Europe, now exposed on both its Ukrainian and Middle Eastern flanks. It is disheartening that Italy – timid and silent when it comes to anything Israel does – is clinging stubbornly to that false projection.
From the statements of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – who is boasting that the Pentagon has contingency plans to “take Panama and Greenland by force if necessary” – to the dynamite Israel is setting under the pillars of international law, it is plain that the violent dismantling of the global order is not limited to Russian revisionism or Chinese hegemonic ambition. And the war scenarios are drawing ever closer.
The awkward reluctance of politicians and the media to apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu the same standards of politics, law and war that they apply to any other state raises a stark question: why should Netanyahu stop when he has met no real obstacle so far?
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-via-libera-alla-logica-del-fatto-compiuto on 2025-06-14