The Next Israel-Iran War Is Coming

Both countries’ strategic calculus suggests it will be even more violent.

By Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Israel is likely to launch another war with Iran before December—perhaps even as early as late August.

Iran is expecting and preparing for the attack. It played the long game in the first war, pacing its missile attacks as it anticipated a protracted conflict.

In the next round, however, Iran is likely to strike decisively from the outset, aiming to dispel any notion that it can be subdued under Israeli military dominance.

As a result, the coming war will likely be far bloodier than the first. If U.S. President Donald Trump caves to Israeli pressure again and joins the fight, the United States could face a full-blown war with Iran that will make Iraq look easy by comparison.

Israel’s June war was never solely about Iran’s nuclear program. Rather, it was about shifting the balance of power in the Middle East, with Iranian nuclear capabilities being an important but not decisive factor. For more than two decades, Israel has pushed the United States to take military action against Iran to weaken it and restore a favorable regional balance—one that Israel cannot achieve on its own.

In this context, Israel’s strikes had three main objectives beyond weakening Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It sought to draw the United States into direct military conflict with Iran, to decapitate the Iranian regime, and to turn the country into the next Syria or Lebanon—countries that Israel can bomb with impunity and without any U.S. involvement. Only one of the three goals was realized.

What’s more, Trump did not “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear program, nor has it been set back to a point where the issue can be considered resolved.

In other words, with its June attacks, Israel achieved a partial victory at best. Its preferred outcome was for Trump to fully engage, targeting both Iran’s conventional forces and economic infrastructure. But while Trump favors swift, decisive military action, he fears full-scale war.

His strategy in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities was thus designed to limit escalation rather than expand it. In the short term, Trump succeeded—much to Israel’s chagrin—but in the long run, he has allowed Israel to trap him in an escalatory cycle.

His refusal to escalate beyond a limited bombing campaign was a key reason that Israel agreed to a cease-fire. As the war continued, Israel took serious losses: Its air defenses were degraded, and Iran grew more effective at penetrating them with its missiles.

While Israel would have likely continued the conflict if the United States had fully committed, the calculus changed once it became clear that Trump’s strikes were one-off. Israel succeeded in drawing Trump and the United States into the war, but it failed to keep them there.

Israel’s other two objectives, however, were clear failures. Despite early intelligence successes—such as killing 30 senior commanders and 19 nuclear scientists—it was only able to temporarily disrupt Iranian command and control.

Within 18 hours, Iran had replaced most if not all of these commanders and launched a heavy missile barrage, demonstrating its ability to absorb significant losses and still mount a fierce counterattack.

Israel hoped its initial strikes would incite panic within the Iranian regime and hasten its collapse.

According to the Washington Post, Mossad agents, fluent in Persian, called senior Iranian officials on their cellphones, threatening to kill them and their families unless they filmed videos denouncing the regime and publicly defecting.

More than 20 such calls were made in the war’s early hours, when Iran’s ruling elite was still in shock and reeling from significant losses. Yet there’s no evidence a single Iranian general capitulated to the threats, and the regime’s cohesion remained intact.

Contrary to Israel’s expectations, the killing of senior commanders from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps did not lead to mass protests or an uprising against the Islamic Republic. Instead, Iranians of all political stripes rallied around the flag, if not the regime itself, as a wave of nationalism surged across the country.

Israel could not capitalize on the Iranian regime’s broader unpopularity. After nearly two years of committing atrocities in Gaza and launching a deceptive attack on Iran amid nuclear negotiations, only a small segment of Iranians—mostly in the diaspora—view Israel positively.