1). “Notes from the Editors: April 2024 (Volume 75, Number 11)”, Apr 01, 2024, The Editors, Monthly Review, First 5 Paragraphs of “Notes ….”, at < https://monthlyreview.org/
2). “The Premises of the Diplomatic Mission Shall Be Inviolable: The Fifteenth Newsletter (2024): From Israel’s bombing of Iran’s embassy in Damascus to Ecuador’s raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito, leaders feel emboldened by the impunity granted by the Global North to disregard diplomatic norms and respect”, Apr 11, 2024, Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental,
3). “Israel beat Iran — for now: Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel was a military failure. But things could still get a lot worse”, Apr 15, 2024, Zack Beauchamp, Vox, at < https://www.vox.com/2024/4/15/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The ongoing crisis of U.S. Empire seems to be becoming more acute and severe. The Shipping lanes, that not so long ago functioned well enough that they were not particularly noticed by most of the populations of the “Global North”, have now become a significant source of worry, delay, and apprehension.
This would seem to mark the end of the the neo-liberal project to move all highly paid jobs, in industrial operations, out of the U.S. to low-wage, low-regulation places. China, once poor and backward willing to take any dirty labor intensive facility has now reached the level of a Great Power itself. The majority of the containers on the Container Ships are filled with finished Chinese goods moving towards The West (Europe being a larger market than the U.S.). The Houthis (in their attacks on ships in the Bab al Mandab, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden area) declare that Chinese Ships are welcome to pass. The recent Iranian commando raid that seized an Israeli owned vessel that was passing through the Strait of Hormuz points out another location that is vulnerable to disruption. The Port of Baltimore, the 10th largest U.S. Port by overall cargo movements, was disrupted when the MV Dali hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge at a vulnerable spot and the bridge collapsed. The Francis Scott Key Bridge had disastrously inadequate physical protection from such a collision and as a result a bridge that certainly had another 20 or 30 years of useful safe operation now lies in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
The Navies of the West, led by the predominant forces of the U.S. Navy, cannot protect every ship, from companies the Iranians and Houthis dislike, that passes through the Suez Canal or the Straits of Hormuz. Even the Chinese navy, with far fewer challenges to contend with, has been unable to control the increase in Piracy in the Strait of Malacca area.
Now, with the latest exchange between Israel and Iran (Israel bombed the Iranian Consulate in Baghdad on April 1, the Iranians responded a couple of weeks later with an odd drone and missile attack. The Iranian attack seems to be a face-saving operation (they announced it was going to take place and alerted neighboring countries, and even the U.S. forces to its occurrence).
Richard Haas, for years the director of The Council on Foreign Relations, has published many articles, reports, and books about how to maintain a U.S. Empire. Some analysis of his role and thinking is provided in Item 1)., “Notes from the Editors: ….”, he has publicly admitted and lamented that the U.S. has lost the industrial capacity to fight and win Proxy Wars. The current situation, with the U.S. ruling class prosecuting a now 9 year long proxy struggle in transferred to Ukraine. But since the Oct 7 offensive by Hamas the real hierarchy of alliances and client/master relationships has reasserted itself. Ukraine can be left in the lurch, but Israel will be supplied even if it means stripping the U.S. military of its own supplies and weapons. Haas, who is Jewish but not by any means an Israel First figure, thinks the U.S. must support Israel and supply it with weapons, but wants to rein Israel in to the extent possible.
In Item 2). “The Premises of the Diplomatic Mission ….”, Vijay Prashad has written an interesting essay that looks at the checkered history of the “Diplomatic Immunity”, of Embassies and consulates. He notes that while it has certainly been violated in the past there were sanctions and apologies in the aftermath of such incidents. Not so this time with the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Iraq, or with the Ecuadorian raid on the Mexican consulate/embassy in Quito to arrest a political opponent of the current Ecuadorian Regime. This should be compared to the killilng by the U.S. in a bombing raid at Baghad Airport, on January 2nd of 2020, Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. That was considered to be pretty outrageous but did not violate Diplomatic traditions.
Item 3)., “Israel beat Iran — for now: ….” provides some analysis of the Iranian drone missile launches against Israel. The article, that discusses the current situation in some detail.
What all these events seem to indicate is a period during which the actions of the U.S. will be more constrained than previously. This is difficult for a society, whose rulers are accustomed to dictating the policies they want to see pursued to much of the world. And prospects are for a vastly diminished role for the U.S. in world affairs. Maybe we can secure significantly better socioeconomic conditions in a struggle over the future role and nature of the U.S.
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Monthly Review | April 2024 (Volume 75, Number 11)
On December 14, 2023, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with premier U.S. imperial grand strategist Richard Haass titled “A World in Disarray?” From 1989 to 1993, Haass was special assistant to President George H. W. Bush and senior director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. While in these positions, he played a central role in developing the strategy for the U.S.-led 1990 Gulf War against Iraq. From 2001 to 2003, he served as director of policy planning for the Department of State under President George W. Bush. In this capacity, he was the principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, helping to coordinate regime change during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. For two decades, from 2003 to 2023, Haass was president of the Council on Foreign Relations (commonly known as “the imperial brain trust”). Today, he is a senior counselor for the investment bank Centerview Partners, advising on geopolitical matters. Recently, he headed up a group of top U.S. foreign policy figures, all drawn from the Council on Foreign Relations, engaged in “secret talks” with Russia on the Ukraine War (Richard Haass interview, “A World in Disarray?: A Longtime Diplomat Says It’s Worse than That,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2023; Josh Lederman, “Former U.S. Officials Have Held Secret Talks with Prominent Russians,” NBC News, July 6, 2023; Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, The Imperial Brain Trust [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977]).
In its December 2023 interview, the Wall Street Journal asked Haass about his 2017 book, A World in Disarray. In his judgment, were things better or worse, six years later? He answered that today it is “Disarray on Stilts. When the [2017] book came out, I was criticized for being too negative. In retrospect, I wasn’t negative enough.” Not only has the “new world order” pronounced by Washington after the 1990 Gulf War and the demise of the Soviet Union turned into a “new world disorder” as “the relative position” of the United States has “deteriorated,” this disorder is now turning into a state of chaos. This is partly due to the rise of other powers, but also derives from the neglect of “the U.S. defense manufacturing base,” which means that the United States is no longer capable of fighting major proxy wars effectively. For Haass, “the rise of China, which is not a status quo power, represents a shift in the balance” on the world stage, while “a truly disaffected Russia” now has the ability to act, “as we’re seeing in the Ukraine and elsewhere.” This represents a transformation in power relations, taking various forms and “moving around the world.” Ukraine, Haass declared, will not be able to regain its lost territory, and it should concentrate on maintaining its mere existence, taking advantage of the fact that it is now “integrated one way or another into the EU and NATO.” The strategy at present, we are told, is to await the anticipated weakening of the Kremlin following Putin’s eventual departure. The United States/NATO could then presumably exercise leverage against Moscow as a “pariah” state, thereby bringing about all-out regime change (Haass, “A World in Disarray?”; Richard Haass, A World in Disarray [London: Penguin, 2017], 11).
Israel’s full-scale assault on Gaza, Haass explained to the Wall Street Journal, is a major foreign policy disaster for the United States, but one in which Washington simply has no choice but to back “Netanyahu and his colleagues” at all costs, supporting Israel’s “one-state nonsolution” with its no-holds-barred war on Hamas and the continued movement of settlers into the West Bank. “They [the Israeli forces] are causing an awful lot of civilian casualties and deaths in the process,” Haass acknowledged, while indicating that this “is a separate conversation,” one with which he has no intention of engaging. After Hamas is “degraded”—it cannot, he said, be destroyed—Gaza will have to be ruled by Israel directly with continued U.S. backing. There is no viable regime change strategy, no real endgame, only the sheer exercise of force, viewed as necessary to maintain Israel as a “democratic Jewish state.” On the Chinese front, the United States, Haass insisted, must declare that it is willing, ready, able, and committed to go to war with China over Taiwan (Haass, “A World in Disarray?”; Richard Haass, “What Friends Owe Friends,” Foreign Affairs, October 15, 2023).
A historical perspective on Haass’s views can be obtained by going back to 2000, when he delivered an important speech titled “Imperial America,” presented at the Atlanta Conference in Puerto Rico on November 11, 2000, shortly before he joined the George W. Bush administration. Here, he envisioned a strategy modeled after British hegemony in the nineteenth century. Ten years after George H. W. Bush first spoke of a “new world order” and nine years after the demise of the Soviet Union, Washington’s hopes of creating a unipolar world under U.S. “primacy,” Haass warned, were rapidly receding in the face of a much stronger China and the re-emergence of Russia as a great power. However, a resurgence of U.S. “imperial power” was still possible, he argued, through the continued enlargement of NATO further to the east toward Russia (with the objective of eventually bringing Ukraine into NATO); a renewed U.S. commitment to so-called humanitarian military interventions across the globe; the bolstering of U.S. hegemony over “free trade” institutions; and the global expansion of U.S. missile defense systems (part of the Pentagon’s overall nuclear counterforce strategy). In The Reluctant Sheriff, published a few years before his “Imperial America” speech, he had argued that U.S. military interventions should be based on unilateral decisions by the United States, as the world’s “sheriff,” but backed up each time by a “posse” that submitted to its orders, forming a “coalition of the willing,” thus giving a sense of support by the international community. Haass ended his “Imperial America” speech with a reference to “Imperialism Begins at Home,” calling for national unity as the basis of U.S. empire (Richard Haass, “Imperial America,” Atlanta Conference, Puerto Rico, November 11, 2000, Brookings Institution; Richard Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff [New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997]), 93; John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006], 97–106, 115–16).
Yet, only a decade and a half after Haass first proposed his “Imperial America” strategy, he was forced to recognize that the U.S. unipolar world that he had dreamed of was no longer possible. This could be traced primarily to the abandonment of any sense of national unity on the domestic front (that is, adherence to the “Imperialism Begins at Home” principle). This was particularly evident during the 2016 election campaign of Donald Trump, with the rise of what Haass referred to as “class” conflict foreign to the “common American identity,” leading to a tendency to “continued paralysis and dysfunction at best and widespread political violence and dissolution at worst” and extending to all parts of the body politic. Ironically, it was the class struggle endemic to capitalism, in Haass’s own account, that finally put an end to his (and Washington’s) grand design for an “Imperial America.” The fallback strategy today, he informs us, is a defense of the hegemonic “rules-based international order” made in Washington. “Medium powers in Europe and Asia, as well as Canada,” we are told, cannot hold the world together since they “would simply lack the military capacity and the domestic political will to get very far.” The “rules-based international order” thus can only be fashioned and kept in place by the United States of America, viewed as the indispensable imperial power (Richard Haass interviewed by Thomas B. Edsall, “Trump Has Ushered in the Age of ‘Great Misalignment,'” New York Times, January 10, 2024; Richard Haass, The World: A Brief Introduction [London: Penguin, 2020], 302–3; Haass, A World in Disarray, 8–15).
On February 27, 2024, Jacobin republished a 2012 article titled “Paul Sweezy Was One of the 20th Century’s Great Economic Thinkers” by John E. King, author with Michael Howard of the multivolume academic tome, A History of Marxian Economics. Most of the article was a commendable exposition of Sweezy’s ideas. However, King’s article ended with two major fallacies. He contended that Sweezy at the end of his life “gave up his almost lifelong opposition to reformism and ended his life…as a left social democrat.” King’s claim here had us, as Sweezy himself liked to say, rubbing our eyes in disbelief! At no time did he abandon the notion that a revolutionary transcendence of capitalism was necessary. In fact, as a result of planetary ecological crisis he came to emphasize this even more strongly.
King goes on to refer to Sweezy’s failure “to give serious consideration to the possibility that a new competitive, neoliberal stage of capitalism had begun in the 1970s, undermining monopoly power and casting doubt on the law of the rising surplus.” Not only is this incorrect with respect to Sweezy’s recognition of a neoliberal phase, but all existing evidence (see the influential article “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” by John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, in the April 2011 issue of Monthly Review) demonstrates that monopoly power has been accelerating in the neoliberal age, with a more rapid concentration of economic surplus or gross profits at the very top of the corporate world. In fact, it is the widespread recognition of this today that has been drawing so much recent attention to Paul Baran and Sweezy’s late twentieth-century critique of monopoly capital.
We have only recently received notice that John S. Saul, longtime MR and Monthly Review Press author, died on September 23, 2023, at age 85. Saul, a Canadian political economist and professor at York University in Toronto, was for over half a century one of the world’s leading analysts and activists in support of revolutionary struggles in southern Africa, particularly in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, and Angola. He was one of the founders of the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal’s African Colonies, which in 1974 changed its name to the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa, famous for its magazine, Southern African Report. He published some twenty-five books, a number of these with Monthly Review Press, including Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (with Giovanni Arrighi, 1973), State and Revolution in East Africa (1979), The Crisis in South Africa (with Stephen Gelb, 1981), A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique (1985), and The Next Liberation Struggle (2005). A key article in Monthly Review capturing his indomitable spirit was “Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-Apartheid Denouement” (January 2001). Saul’s autobiography, Revolutionary Traveller: Freeze-Frames from a Life (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Arbeiter Ring, 2009), provides a remarkable story of “critical solidarity” with Africa during his lifetime as a scholar-activist. MR editor John Bellamy Foster, who worked with Saul in Toronto, remembers him as a very warm, creative, critical, energizing, and supportive person, the epitome of a Gramscian organic intellectual, who in his every thought and action embodied “pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will” (see Chris Webb, “John Saul and the Meaning of Solidarity,” Canadian Dimension, February 4, 2024).
Merle Ratner, who attained fame as an antiwar activist in the 1960s and who was a lifetime supporter of the Vietnamese people and friend of Monthly Review, died on February 5, 2024, aged 67. In her early teens, she gained widespread notoriety for hanging antiwar slogans on the Statue of Liberty. After 1975, she worked for the normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam. Ratner was cofounder of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign in the New York area. Among her many actions in support of the Vietnamese people, she helped coordinate the Workshop on Marxist Theory and Practice in the World Today, jointly held with the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics and Political Administration, in Hanoi in 2009. On that occasion, attendees consisted of a number of international friends and representatives of MR, including Samir Amin, Bill Fletcher, John Bellamy Foster, Jayati Ghosh, Marta Harnecker, Michael Lebowitz, John Mage, Biju Mathew, Ngo Thanh Nhan (Ratner’s husband), and Ratner herself. In 2016, Ratner was presented with the Vietnam Friendship Medal. She also received the insignia “For the Development of Vietnamese Women” in 2010, and the insignia “For Vietnam Agent Orange Victims” in 2013. Her death represents the loss of a towering figure in the struggle for world peace.
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The Premises of the Diplomatic Mission Shall Be Inviolable: The Fifteenth Newsletter (2024)
Afshin Pirhashemi (Iran), Untitled, 2017.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
We live in dishonest times, where certainties have crumbled, and malevolence stalks the landscape. There is Gaza, of course. Gaza above all else is on our minds. Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since 7 October, with more than 7,000 people missing (5,000 of them children). The Israeli government has brutally disregarded the global public opinion mounted against them. Billions of people are outraged by the stark fact of their violence and yet we are unable to force a ceasefire from an army that has decided to raze an entire people. Global North governments speak from two sides of their mouths: clichéd phrases of concern to ameliorate their own disheartened populations, and then vetoes at the United Nations and arms transfers to the Israeli army. It is this two-faced behaviour that bolsters the confidence of people like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and enables their impunity.
That same impunity allowed Israel to violate the UN Charter (1945) and Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) on 1 April 2024 when it bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killing sixteen people – including senior Iranian military officers. This impunity is infectious, spreading amongst leaders who feel emboldened by Washington’s arrogance. Among them is Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa, who sent his paramilitary forces into the Mexican embassy in Quito on 5 April to seize the country’s former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum by the Mexican authorities. Noboa’s government, like Netanyahu’s, set aside the long history of international respect for diplomatic relations with scant regard for the dangerous implications of this kind of action. There is a feeling amongst leaders such as Netanyahu and Noboa that they can get away with anything because they are protected by the Global North, which anyway gets away with everything.
Lucía Chiriboga (Ecuador), Untitled from the series ‘Del fondo de la memoria, vengo’ (‘I Come from the Depths of Memory’), 1993.
Diplomatic customs go back thousands of years and across cultures and continents. Ancient texts written by Zhuang Zhou in China and his contemporary in India, Kautilya, in the fourth century BCE set the terms for honourable relationships between states through their emissaries. These terms appear in almost every region of the world, with evidence of conflicts resulting in agreements that include the exchange of envoys to maintain peace. These ideas from the ancient world, including Roman law, influenced the early European writers of customary international law: Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Cornelis van Bijnkershoek (1673–1743), and Emer de Vattel (1714–1767). It was this global understanding of the necessity of diplomatic courtesy that formed the idea of diplomatic immunity.
In 1952, the government of Yugoslavia proposed that the International Law Commission (ILC), set up by the UN, codify diplomatic relations. To assist the ILC, the UN appointed Emil Sandström, a Swedish lawyer who had chaired the UN Special Committee on Palestine (1947), as special rapporteur. The ILC, with Sandström’s assistance, drafted articles on diplomatic relations, which were studied and amended by the 81 member states of the UN. At a month-long meeting in Vienna in 1961, all the member states participated in the Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Amongst the 61 states that became signatories were Ecuador and Israel, as well as the United States. All three countries are, therefore, among the founding states of the 1961 Vienna Convention.
Article 22.1 of the Vienna Convention says: ‘The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission’.
Safwan Dahoul (Syria), Dream 77, 2014.
At a briefing in the UN Security Council about Israel’s recent strike on the Iranian embassy in Syria, Deputy Ambassador Geng Shuang of China reminded his colleagues that 25 years ago, the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia resulted in an attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. At the time, US President Bill Clinton apologised for the attack, calling it an ‘isolated, tragic event’. No such apology has come from Israel or Ecuador for their violations of the Iranian and Mexican embassies. Geng Shuang told the chamber, ‘The red line of international law and the basic norms of international relations have been breached time and again. And the moral bottom line of human conscience has also been crushed time and again’. At that briefing, Ecuador’s Ambassador José De la Gasca condemned the attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus. ‘Nothing justifies these types of attacks’, he said. A few days later, his government violated the 1961 Vienna Convention and the 1954 Organisation of American States’ Convention on Diplomatic Asylum when it arrested Jorge Glas in the Mexican embassy, an act that was swiftly condemned by the UN secretary-general.
Such violations of embassy protections are not new. There are many examples of radical groups – from the left and the right – attacking embassies to make a political point. This includes the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, when students held 53 staff hostage for 444 days. But there are also several examples of governments forcibly entering the premises of foreign embassies, such as in 1985 when the South African apartheid regime sent its forces to the Dutch embassy to arrest a Dutch national who had assisted the African National Congress and in 1989 when the invading US army searched the residence of the Nicaraguan ambassador in Panama City. None of these interventions went by without sanction and a demand for an apology. Neither Israel nor Ecuador, however – both signatories of the 1961 Vienna Convention – have made any gesture towards an apology. Neither Iran nor Syria had any diplomatic relations with Israel, and Mexico broke diplomatic ties with Ecuador in the wake of recent events.
Graciela Iturbide (Mexico), Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (‘Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert, Mexico’), 1979.
Violence traverses the world like a new pandemic not only in Gaza, but spreading outward to this brewing conflict around Ecuador and the ugliness of the wars in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and the continuing stalemate in Ukraine. War breaks the human spirit, but it also invokes an enormous instinct to go to the streets and stop the trigger from being pulled. Again and again, this great anti-war feeling is met with the wrath of powers that arrest the peacemakers and treat them – and not the merchants of death – as the criminals.
Parviz Tanavoli (Iran), Last Poet of Iran, 1968.
Iran has a glorious tradition of poetry that goes back to Abu Abdallah Rudaki (858–941) and then shines in the Diwan of Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz Shirazi (1320–1390), who gave us this bitter thought: in the world of dust, no human being shines; it is necessary to build another world, to make a new Adam.
In this tradition of Farsi poetry comes Garous Abdolmalekian (b. 1980), whose poems are saturated with war and its impact. But, even amidst the bullets and the tanks sits the powerful desire for peace and love, as in his ‘Poem for Stillness’ (2020):
He stirs his tea with a gun barrel
He solves the puzzle with a gun barrel
He scratches his thoughts with a gun barrelAnd sometimes
he sits facing himself
and pulls bullet-memories
out of his brainHe’s fought in many wars
but is no match for his own despairThese white pills
have left him so colourless
his shadow must stand up
to fetch him waterWe ought to accept
that no soldier
has ever returned
from war
alive
Warmly,
Vijay
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Israel beat Iran — for now
Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel was a military failure. But things could still get a lot worse.
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When Iran launched a large retaliatory drone and missile assault on Israel on Saturday night, it raised fears that the Middle East was on the precipice of a regional war. But by Sunday morning, the situation looked far less dire.
Iran had telegraphed elements of its attack and its willingness to end the two-week period of hostilities there. And assisted by the United States and its Arab neighbors, Israel shot down 99 percent of the drones and missiles heading in its direction. Those strikes that got through did not kill anyone, doing minor damage to a military base and injuring a child.
If this sounds like an Israeli victory, that’s because it was.
Two weeks earlier, Israel escalated its several-year-old assassination campaign against top Iranian security figures by killing a senior Iranian general at the country’s embassy in Syria — a brazen move given that states generally treat embassies as militarily out-of-bounds. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei billed Tehran’s response as “punishment” for that attack, but the failure to do significant harm illustrated that Israel is fairly well shielded from Iran’s vaunted drone and missile fleet.
Iran “had to realize that any strike on Israel would benefit Israel’s end game far more than Iran’s. That they chose to attack anyway shows one again that strategy is always the victim of emotion,” writes Afshon Ostovar, an expert on the Iranian military at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Israel hit Iran in an especially harsh way and more or less got away with it. But this does not mean things are stable between Israel and Iran. Far from it.
The immediate question is whether Israel’s leadership understands when to leave well enough alone. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proven himself reckless during the Gaza war and depends on some exceptionally extreme governing partners to stay in power. The United States is trying to restrain him — with President Joe Biden reportedly telling Netanyahu to “take the win” — but it’s unclear if he will.
And even if Israel chooses restraint for now this episode may have permanently raised the risk of a wider war between Jerusalem and Tehran.
What was Iran thinking?
When news of Iran’s attack broke Saturday night, a former US military officer who studies Iran texted me skeptically. “None of these drones get through,” he correctly predicted.
Iran had indeed chosen a curious strategy. Tehran had been telegraphing a response targeting Israeli territory for weeks, giving Israel and its allies plenty of time to prepare. The drones it chose to launch were slow-moving, taking hours to reach Israeli airspace and passing over neighboring countries (notably Jordan) that shot them down. Fears that Iran would overwhelm Israel’s air defenses with fast-moving missiles proved largely unfounded.
There are two basic ways to think about Iran’s intent in light of this failure.
It’s entirely possible that Iran miscalculated. In this scenario, Iran attempted to do real damage to Israel and simply failed to appreciate its enemies’ capabilities. Leading military analysts and defense reporters see this interpretation as consistent with the structure of Iran’s strike, particularly its use of ballistic missiles and targeting of a military base in Israel’s south.
But it’s also possible Iran didn’t intend to do serious damage to Israel. In this second scenario, Tehran merely aimed for a symbolic strike so it wasn’t seen as backing down after Israel struck its embassy.
There’s precedent for this. After the United States killed Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Quds Force, in 2020, Iran’s military retaliation was limited to firing missiles at a US airbase — a response successfully calibrated not to force the United States to retaliate further.
Indeed, Iran is publicly signaling a similar intent: An official government account tweeted that “the matter can be deemed concluded” even before the first drone reached Israeli airspace. That’s as close to publicly saying “this is a fake attack” as it gets in international relations.
If Iran wasn’t intending serious damage, then the attack wasn’t as obviously a failure — but it still looks like a kind of strategic defeat. Iran’s ineffectual response sends a signal that Israel can attack Iranian interests with relative impunity because it is outclassed by Israel and its allies.
How things could calm down — or get worse
With Iran’s retaliation largely a dud, Israel is in a stronger position than it was before it hit the Damascus embassy.
Israel conducted arguably its most politically risky assassination of an Iranian military commander yet — one that could have triggered an outright war. And it emerged not just unscathed, but having demonstrated that its homeland appears safe from direct Iranian assault in the immediate future. The mass Iranian assault also seems to have galvanized Israel’s Republican supporters in Congress, where an aid package has been held up for months as part of the fight over support for Ukraine.
But if Israel responds aggressively to Iran’s attack, all bets are off.
Any major retaliation would force an Iranian response, potentially leading to an escalatory cycle that ends in a full-scale war. This would certainly pull in Iran’s regional proxies, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, and would result in tremendous amounts of death. Even if this disaster is averted, an Israeli response would infuriate the American government — which both played a critical role in intercepting Iran’s missile barrage and are strongly opposing any future Israeli retaliation.
Israeli escalation would snatch strategic defeat from the jaws of victory. Yet Israel’s government is reportedly considering it anyway. A source told reporter Ronen Bergman that “if the [internal government] talks were broadcast live on YouTube, you’d have 4 million people clamoring at Ben Gurion airport trying to get out of here.”
Prior to October 7, Netanyahu had a reputation for being cautious about using force. But since the Hamas attack, he has been astonishingly aggressive — embracing a maximalist, open-ended campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians while putting Israel on the road to strategic defeat. The general sense among Israeli analysts is that Netanyahu’s shift is in large part political: With his poll numbers in the toilet and a radically right-wing coalition, he needs war to stay in power (and keep himself out of jail). This politically cornered Netanyahu might be open to taking more risks — including the risk of a wider confrontation with Tehran.
The cooler heads in Israel seem to recognize reality. When war cabinet member Benny Gantz vowed that “this event isn’t over yet,” he also said that “we will build a regional coalition and we will make Iran pay the price at a time and in a manner that we choose” — framing that at least implies that Israel isn’t planning imminent unilateral action.
So Israel might yet get out of this mess without a major disaster. Yet experts also warn that this attack might have longer-term destabilizing ramifications.
“Even if Israel chooses not to retaliate now, we are not quite back to where we were before. Status quo has changed with the precedent of a large-scale Iranian attack on Israel,” writes Thomas Juneau, a Middle East scholar at the University of Ottawa, who predicted “a higher baseline of tension and violence” going forward.
A post-attack statement from Hossein Salami, the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, supports Juneau’s analysis. Salami said Iran has “decided to create a new equation” with Israel, one where any Israeli attack against Iranian personnel anywhere will be met with direct attacks by Iran on Israel. Previously, Israel had managed to conduct strikes on Iranian interests in places like Syria without direct retaliation — which carries greater risks of escalation to out-and-out war.
On Saturday night, the term “World War III” began trending on Twitter/X. It’s safe to say at this point that these fears were overblown. But the Middle East remains a powder keg — one that’s slightly more stuffed with gunpowder than it was before.
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