sergio de los ríos feghali

Looking back at this useless war, a few takeaways: (1) There is no evidence that Iran's nuclear program has been decisively crippled. It may have suffered great damage, but nothing guarantees that Iran won't resume it—nothing short of a negotiated settlement; (2) Iran now has an incentive to do what it has not done for over two decades, namely accelerate its development of a nuclear weapon, since the post-conflict phase, and the general distaste for more war among the Americans, buys it time to do so; (3) Israel may have destroyed many buildings and killed many officials in Iran, but in the bigger picture this was meaningless. Individuals can be replaced and buildings rebuilt. Israeli operations by the end of the fighting with Iran reminded me of the operations in Lebanon near the end of the 2006 war, where there no longer appeared to be any strategy guiding them; (4) Israel was unable to impose a balance of firepower that affirmed a decisive advantage. On the contrary, the major destruction in Israel by Iranian missiles, regardless of the relatively low casualty count, was quite shocking in light of what Israel faced in the past; (5) Netanyahu's early victory cries were premature, and it became fairly evident by the second week of the conflict that he needed the U.S. to bail him out of a war of attrition Israel was incapable of engaging in. The U.S. did so, but in a limited attack that surely fell short of Israeli hopes and expectations; (6) For those of us concerned with the future of Iranian proxies and allies in the region, this will be spun as an Iranian victory. I anticipate that Hezbollah will be far more resistant to disarmament than it already is today, which is to say that we will see more unilateral Israeli efforts to hit the party in Lebanon, while the Lebanese state erodes credibility. (7) Finally, the ambiguous outcome of this war only reaffirms how hegemony by any one party is an illusion, underlining the need by all parties to try to put in place a regional architecture that stabilizes the region. This would encompass nuclear weapons, deconfliction institutions, proxy militias, maritime passages, and other sources of regional tension.