Wars of Policies, Regimes and Peoples
Which is Israel engaged in with Iran?
In November of 2023, a month into Israel’s war in Gaza in retaliation for the massacres of October 7th, I wrote a fretful piece asking what the political objective of that war might be.
Whatever ancillary goals of reestablishing deterrence vis-a-vis other adversaries like Hezbollah or satisfying domestic political needs, with respect to Gaza specifically the objective was to destroy Hamas and reestablish security control of the territory. The problem with this, I argued, was that it wasn’t really a political objective properly understood; it was an attempt to avoid anything resembling politics and pretend that the the problem of Gaza had an exclusively military solution.
To a considerable extent, my fears have been realized. Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been even more destructive than I imagined it would be, but there is no sign of an endgame of any kind. That has led to the natural temptation to think in terms of an endgame involving the physical removal of a population that Israel can neither come to political terms with nor find security by dominating—in other words: the ethnic cleansing of the enclave. While that hasn’t come to pass yet, it’s very much out there as a possible outcome, with various ministers in the Israeli government periodically calling for a reduction of the civilian population, President Trump briefly floating the idea of removing the population from the territory, and the Israeli Jewish public at least open to the idea.
The Israel-Gaza war is, to use the terms that Daniel McCarthy (my editor at Modern Age) uses in a recent piece for The Spectator, a “war of peoples,” a war over whose land this is and who will live in it. The Russia-Ukraine war has also become a war of that kind, and it is a terrible kind of war, exceptionally difficult to end. But contra McCarthy, this isn’t the only “real” kind of war one can wage. If, as Clausewitz famously averred, war is “the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means,” then most wars are fought not over existential questions like “will I take your people’s land (and either kill you, throw you off it, or incorporate your people into mine to do so)?” but rather over policy questions. Things like whether a given country will form an alliance with another country’s rival, or whether goods can flow freely through a given waterway, or whether a country will crack down on organized criminals or terrorist groups operating from their territory.
Israel’s war with Iran should be of this latter character. Israel has no designs on Iranian territory, and Iran doesn’t really have any designs on Israeli territory; its objection to Israel is ideological. Even before Israel launched its retaliatory war in Gaza, it had been fighting a war against Iran and its proxies on multiple fronts, a war that has heated up considerably since October 7th—and in which Israel has achieved remarkable successes. This war has included both targeted assassinations and direct strikes against Iran in 2024, the spectacular decapitation strike against Hezbollah, and most recently the brilliant sneak attacks on Iran’s air defenses, military leadership and nuclear program (which have since escalated to broader attacks on Iran’s leadership, energy infrastructure, communications infrastructure and so forth as Iran retaliated against Israel’s initial attacks with missile strikes against Israeli civilians). This war is fundamentally different from the war in Gaza because it is—or ought to be—more classically Clausewitzian, which is to say: war between regimes to force the losing regime to make specific changes in policy.
But is that actually the nature of Israel’s war? I’m not sure.
Israel is certainly capable of fighting wars like that. Its 2006 war against Hezbollah aimed to establish deterrence and cause a change in Hezbollah’s behavior. The same thing was true of Israel’s wars against Hamas prior to 2023. Although it was far more audacious and impressive than anything Israel had pulled off before, arguably the more recent campaign against Hezbollah also had that character. That war was on one level part of a campaign against Iran; Hezbollah’s ability to rain missiles down on Israel, and do so in numbers capable of overwhelming Israel’s missile defenses and therefore causing enormous destruction, enabled Iran to deter Israel from attacking its nuclear program. But Hezbollah’s domestic base of power within Lebanon derives from the way in which it represents the Shia population of that multi-confessional country; its willingness to serve Iran’s interests necessarily put that power base at risk, since few Shia Lebanese want to die for Iran’s interests. The extraordinarily successful decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership and the swift destruction of its key military assets not only crippled the organization operationally, but also gave the Lebanese state room to reassert control over territory controlled by Hezbollah, and should encourage Hezbollah to focus on shoring up its position domestically if it is able to rebuild in some fashion.
Israel’s attack on Iran is similar in many ways to its attack on Hezbollah. It showed a similarly extraordinary level of audacity, and had as its immediate objective both to radically degrade an adversary’s military and to demonstrate its ability to do so with ease. (The most damaging aspect of Israel’s attack was, as with Ukraine’s similar drone attacks on Russian air bases thousands of miles from the border, that it proved its ability to operate deep inside enemy territory without the enemy having any idea they were there.) A limited, Clausewitzian view of the war would say that its objective was to convince Iran to change its foreign policy: to abandon its nuclear program, its violent hostility to the Jewish state, and its efforts to undermine, threaten and control Arab states from Iraq to Yemen to Lebanon, and instead pursue a policy of peaceful integration into the region.
Yet Israel’s oft-expressed view is that the Iranian regime is constitutionally incapable of peacefully integrating into the region. That’s why Israel vociferously opposed the nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama: because it believed Iran would not abide by that deal, but would use it as a screen behind which it would continue to pursue nuclear weapons, meanwhile working ever more fervently to undermine Arab regimes and attack Israel via proxies. If that’s still Israel’s view, as it appears to be, then its current war is not Clausewitzian at all, is not an extension of politics by other means aimed at changing Iranian policy and forcing a more favorable modus vivendi (from Israel’s perspective) between the two states. Rather, it’s either a pure holding action—aimed at degrading an adversary that would then be expected to reconstitute as a threat as soon as it is able—or it’s a war for regime change, aimed at causing the Iranian government to collapse.
Military strikes as holding actions would fit the current war into another longer-term pattern in Israel’s history. Israel launched preemptive attacks against Iraq’s nuclear program in 1981 and against Syria’s nuclear program in 2007. When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz describes this war as “the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us,” he is presumably talking in these terms: removing by force a threat (Iranian nuclearization) that menaced Europe as well, even if it threatened Israel more proximately. But the scale of the current campaign is far vaster than those prior examples of Israeli preemptive strikes, and Iran, with a population ten times Israel’s and a vast manufacturing base, including significant capabilities in missile and drone production, could—if it were determined to do so—become far more directly threatening to Israel than it was before this campaign. Iran’s reliance on proxies was, in addition to being a way to spread its influence far beyond its borders, also a way of protecting the regime more cheaply than by investing directly in its own military capabilities. Now that own insecurity has been exposed, it will undoubtedly want to take the steps necessary to shore it up. In that regard, it’s important to realize that Israel has not destroyed Iran’s nuclear program, while it has simultaneously given Iran ample reason to see nuclear weapons as essential for preserving national and regime security.
It’s hard for me to believe that Israel would launch such a broad-based attack as a pure holding action when that attack hasn’t even achieved the most important military objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear program. That suggests that Israel is, in fact, aiming to collapse the Iranian regime, and not merely to degrade its military capabilities. Their hope would be that either the successor regime will be willing to radically revise Iran’s foreign policy, or that the country will descend so completely into chaos that it is unable to pursue a coherent foreign policy capable of seriously threatening Israel.
Americans have gotten very used, since World War II and especially since the end of the Cold War, to thinking of the objective of war as changing the fundamental character of a regime, but I agree with McCarthy that this is a distorted lens through which to view most wars. It’s also an inherently destabilizing approach to international relations. And the art of war for regime change has been far less successful for all its practitioners than its advocates suggest. The Islamic Republic is deeply unpopular with its own people, but it is has been so for decades, and is still standing. I have long thought that the regime was taking a big risk exposing itself to attack for the actions of allied groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis; how ordinary Iranians benefitted from Iran’s foreign policy is manifestly unclear, and I doubted they would be happy suffering on its account. But the nuclear weapons program may be different; becoming a nuclear state would be a national achievement, and even Iranians who hate the regime are already rallying around the flag in response to being preemptively attacked. It’s sometimes possible to bomb a country into changing its policies. It’s highly questionable that you can bomb a country into becoming more friendly.
And yet—stranger things have happened. I was thoroughly surprised to discover that Syria’s armed opposition was still well-constituted enough to quickly sweep over the country and depose the Assad regime after Israel decapitated Hezbollah. During that revolution, Israel sent its troops into Syrian territory and systematically destroyed the old regime’s military assets through aerial bombardment lest they could fall into the rebels’ hands. Yet notwithstanding those flagrant violations of Syrian sovereignty, the new regime is now promising not to allow its territory to be used for strikes against Israel, while staying silent on Israel’s airforce violating its airspace to attack Iran. Is it possible that Iran’s regime could prove as brittle as Assad’s, and that its successor would be more concerned simply with stopping the attacks than with defending itself? I doubt it—but I’ve been surprised before.
If that is truly Israel’s objective, though, then if it fails to achieve that victory even this dramatic escalation will only be a prelude to further conflict. That’s the big risk not only for Israel but for the whole region and for the United States. The old line—if you strike at a king, you must kill him—applies to wars for regime change as well. So Clausewitz still matters. War is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means—even apparently existential wars between peoples, if they are not to take on a genocidal character, and even wars for regime change, if they are not to evolve into increasingly draining military occupations.
Indeed, even if you win a war—whether for regime change or for territorial conquest or for more limited political objectives—you have to think of the day after. In that regard, Israel should consider that Iran’s aggressive behavior and disregard for their neighbors’ sovereignty is precisely what caused so many Arab countries to bandwagon with Israel against it. That same dynamic could now start to work against Israel. Israel has impressed countries within the region and without with its prowess; right now most Arab countries are just happy to stay out of the fight. But if Iran is dramatically weakened by this war—and particularly if it descends into chaos—those Arab countries that have been working more and more closely with Israel over the past decade or two might decide that it makes more sense to bandwagon against Israel, which now appears both the strongest and most destabilizing of the region.
To forestall that outcome, Israel needs to demonstrate that it has read Clausewitz. No matter how spectacular Israel’s military achievements, the question remains whether they are capable of politics.