Having earlier opposed an attack, Trump ultimately called it “excellent.” As Elliott put it, “This is a little bit reminiscent to me of the 2007 Israeli attack on the Syrian nuclear reactor, because President Bush—George W. Bush said to them, we’re going to do diplomacy; we’re going to go IAEA, we’re going to go U.N., and the Israeli response was, no, no, no, no, that’s not good enough; we’re going to take it out. As for the legitimacy and stability of the Iranian regime itself, Steven observed, “I think that the Israelis are seeking to greatly weaken the regime, if not by use of its military force, to actually create the conditions in which it could be overthrown by the—by the Iranian people, of course.” Politically, there is no shortage of “compounding pressures” at home, including now strained civil-military relations and state-civil society relations. The combination of economic pressures, the failure to defend the country from attack, and the potential that the billions of dollars invested in its nuclear program might all of have been for naught raises questions from all sectors of Iranian society.
Author: Michael Froman, Council on Foreign Relations
Published at: 2025-06-15 22:41:57
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