What was the point of the conflict in Iran? To keep three men in power

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Full of sound and fury, signifying … what, exactly? Assuming the Great Iran War of 2025 has ended, we are likely to spend generations staring at this footnote in history textbooks, asking ourselves: What were they all thinking? Why now? To what end?

True, hardly anyone in the world is unhappy about the demise of figures such as Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – particularly most Iranians, who have suffered horribly under the IRGC. And nobody will miss the bunker-busted Shahid Ahmadi Roshan Nuclear Facilities in Natanz, whose turbine halls have served as a menacing bargaining chip for years.

But the week of attacks by Israel and the United States have not changed anything significantly. Iran’s authoritarian regime, should it decide to develop a nuclear weapon, could still reportedly do so within months, and no plausible amount of bombing or assassination was ever going to change that more than marginally – it’s really not very difficult today, and doesn’t require much uranium at all (or even your own uranium). All that is required is a suicidal degree of political will.

Likewise, Iran’s self-imposed Islamic regime, deeply unpopular with its people, appears no closer to being driven out of power, and no amount of further warfare is likely to accomplish that. In fact, many Iranian democracy activists believe this brief war has hindered rather than helped their goal.

The U.S. (and presumably Israel) were aware this would be the outcome. Intelligence agencies knew, and confirmed again this week, that Tehran poses no greater or lesser threat than it did in 2012. Their militaries surely knew that such an action in 2025 would likely make the region less peaceful and more dangerous than otherwise.

The objectives of the 2025 Iran War, from either side’s perspective, could not have really been about nuclear arms or regime change or regional dominance or peace. The only observable motive for the war was the political survival of three men, all unpopular leaders, each of whom chose his actions and responses in order to maintain his hold on power.

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Benjamin Netanyahu is the most transparent in this regard. Israelis have long been terrorized by missile attacks from Iran and by atrocities committed by Iran’s proxy militias on its borders. Any action against Iran is going to be popular with most Israelis, even the 70 per cent who are furious with their Prime Minister and say they want him to resign, even the 87 per cent who hold him personally responsible for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities, because he paid Hamas to remain in power in Gaza and failed to secure the border.

This month, the cross-examination of Mr. Netanyahu in his sweeping political corruption trial began, with many expecting the outcome to end his office. An all-out war on Iran in the summer of 2025 did not especially make strategic sense, but it made considerable political sense.

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, also responded in ways evidently calculated not to punish the enemy but simply to maintain his hold on power. The self-styled Supreme Leader, during his 35 years in office, has constantly used the country’s potential nuclear technology, and its declaration not to use that power under the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty, as an instrument of international and domestic legitimacy.

He has so far stopped short of launching a weapons program, likely out of the realization that this would doom his regime. Likewise, he has responded to Israel’s assassination campaigns with only symbolic military responses, as he did this month (even informing Washington in advance). The eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, and the half-million lives it cost, looms large in the Iranian public memory, and there would be no public tolerance for an actual sustained war.

Donald Trump was at first the least comprehensible or predictable of the three. Having promised repeatedly and loudly, both during his campaign and as recently as last week, that he would not allow the United States to enter a war in the Middle East again, and given that half the members of his cabinet are ardently opposed to using the military abroad, he seemingly risked his hold on power by joining the attacks. And Washington still exercises enough control over Mr. Netanyahu that a president could have prevented the Iran attack, as was done in 2012.

But Mr. Trump’s actual motives became apparent this week, as he boasted loudly that he’d successfully ended a war, even likening his dropping of bunker-buster bombs, rather distastefully, to the war-ending effect of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. Is it possible that Mr. Trump ginned up a profoundly risky war for no reason other than to claim credit for having ended it? It is not just the only logical explanation – it is the one the President himself seems to prefer.