Weakened by Israel, Iran seeks to save face without sparking a war it would likely lose

It’s Iran’s move now.

How the Islamic Republic chooses to respond to the unprecedentedly public Israeli aerial assault on military sites in its homeland could determine whether the region spirals further toward all-out war or holds steady at an already devastating and destabilizing level of violence.

In the coldly calculating realm of Middle East geopolitics, a strike of the kind that Israel delivered before dawn Saturday would typically be met with a forceful response.

Israel struck Iran — which is openly committed to Israel’s destruction — in response to Iran’s massive October 1 missile barrage, which came days after Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. Iran had been bracing for the reprisal after its latest direct attack on Israel, in which it fired 200 ballistic missiles that sent most of the population to bomb shelters on October 1, killed a Palestinian man in the West Bank, and caused damage in residential areas and at military bases, though the IDF says the attack had no operational impact.

Responding militarily to Saturday’s Israeli strike would allow Iran’s clerical leadership to show strength not only to its own citizens but also to Hezbollah and Hamas, the terror groups that form the vanguard of Tehran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance.”

It is too soon to say whether Iran’s leadership will follow that path.

Tehran may opt to hold back for now, not least because doing so might reveal its weaknesses and invite a more potent Israeli response, analysts say.

“Iran will play down the impact of the strikes, which are in fact quite serious,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the London-based think tank Chatham House.

She said Iran is “boxed in” by military and economic constraints, and the uncertainty caused by the United States election and its impact on American policy in the region.

Even while the Middle East wars rage, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, considered a relative moderate in Iranian politics, has been signaling his nation wants a new nuclear deal with the US to ease crushing international sanctions.

A carefully worded statement from Iran’s military issued Saturday night appeared to offer some wiggle room for the Islamic Republic to back away from further escalation. It suggested that a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon was more important than any retaliation against Israel.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ultimate decision-maker, was also measured in his first comments on the strike Sunday. He said the attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed,” and he stopped short of calling for an immediate military response.

Saturday’s strikes targeted Iranian air defense missile batteries and missile production facilities, according to the Israeli military.

With that, Israel has exposed vulnerabilities in Iran’s air defenses and can still step up its attacks, analysts say.

Satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press indicate Israel’s raid damaged facilities at the Parchin military base southeast of Tehran that experts say was previously tied to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and another base tied to its ballistic missile program.

Current nuclear facilities were not struck, however. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that on X, saying “Iran’s nuclear facilities have not been impacted.”

Israel stepped up operations against Lebanon’s Hezbollah in late September, after almost a year of the terror group’s relentless rocket fire at northern Israel, which has led to the internal displacement of some 60,000 residents.

Hezbollah says its attacks are in support of Gaza amid the war there, sparked on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages. Hamas had reportedly lobbied both Hezbollah and Iran to assist in the attack.

Amid the escalation in Lebanon, Israel has all but decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and allegedly targeted its operatives in an audacious exploding pager attack.

“Any Iranian attempt to retaliate will have to contend with the fact that Hezbollah, its most important ally against Israel, has been significantly degraded and its conventional weapons systems have twice been largely repelled,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, who expects Iran to hold its fire for now.

That’s true even if Israel held back, as appears to be the case. Some prominent figures in Israel, such as Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, are already saying the attacks didn’t go far enough.

Regional experts suggested that Israel’s relatively limited target list was intentionally calibrated to make it easier for Iran to back away from escalation.

As Yoel Guzansky, who formerly worked for Israel’s National Security Council and is now a researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, put it: Israel’s decision to focus on purely military targets “allows them to save face.”

Israel’s target choices may also be a reflection at least in part of its capabilities. It is unlikely able to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities on its own and would require help from the US, Guzansky said.

Besides, Israel still has leverage to go after higher-value targets should Iran retaliate — particularly now that nodes in its air defenses have been destroyed.

“You preserve for yourself all kinds of contingency plans,” Guzansky said.

Thomas Juneau, a University of Ottawa professor focused on Iran and the wider Middle East, wrote on X that the fact Iranian media initially downplayed the strikes suggests Tehran may want to avoid further escalation. Yet it faces a dilemma.

“If it retaliates, it risks an escalation in which its weakness means it loses more,” wrote Juneau. “If it does not retaliate, it projects a signal of weakness.”

Vakil, the Chatham House researcher, agreed that Iran’s response was likely to be muted and that the strikes were designed to minimize the potential for escalation

“Israel has yet again shown its military precision and capabilities are far superior to that of Iran,” she said.

One thing is certain: The Middle East is in uncharted territory.

For decades, leaders and strategists in the Middle East have speculated about if and how Israel might one day openly strike Iran, just as they wondered what direct attacks by Iran, rather than by its regional proxies, would look like.

Today, it’s a reality. Yet the playbook on either side isn’t clear, and may still be being written.

“There appears to be a major mismatch both in terms of the sword each side wields and the shield it can deploy,” Vaez said.

“While both sides have calibrated and calculated how quickly they climb the escalation ladder, they are in an entirely new territory now, where the new red lines are nebulous and the old ones have turned pink,” he said.