Iran Remains Defiant As Israel Fights On

BY MARCUS WALKER

Talks with European leaders and Iran ended Friday without a breakthrough as waves of Israeli warplanes hit targets across Iran for the past week, testing the limits of what air power alone can achieve in the conflict.

The fighting threatens to intensify with the possible entry of the U.S. if diplomacy can’t resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program. Top European officials lined up behind the Trump administration’s demand that Iran give up its uranium- enrichment program. Iran has remained defiant, raising doubts about whether a negotiated solution can be found.

Israel has gained air superiority since the conflict began and has carried out hundreds of strikes. Conventional wisdom among military thinkers has long been that missiles and bombs, while essential to modern warfare, are seldom enough to achieve victory on their own, especially if the strategic aims of the warring states are expansive.

In this case, Israel has said its goal is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, by physically destroying its ability

to do so or by coercing Iran to give up its atomic ambitions in some kind of negotiated settlement. Israeli politicians have also called for the ouster of Tehran’s theocratic regime.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel wants the U.S. to join in and boost his chances of fulfilling his goals. U.S. bunker-busting bombs, for instance, have the best chance of knocking out Fordow, Iran’s fortified underground uranium-enrichment facility.

The White House said Thursday that President Trump would decide within the next two weeks.

Israeli policymakers appear to be counting on the ability of air power to win the day without ground operations, perhaps aside from small deployments of special-forces soldiers and intelligence officers assisting airstrikes.

For Israel, there is little choice. It lacks the wherewithal to mount large-scale ground operations far from its borders and against a vastly bigger adversary. The U.S. has the capacity, but the Trump administration has signaled great reluctance to put boots on the ground in any foreign war.

If Israel succeeds, with or without U.S. help, it could prompt a serious reassessment of the capabilities of modern air power, its effectiveness augmented by unmanned aircraft and more sophisticated surveillance and intelligence-gathering technologies. But skeptics abound.

There are few if any precedents for a large-scale armed conflict in which two states exchanged blows via air power alone. This approach, with no ground forces, “certainly changes the course of any war—you cannot physically seize things, you can only physically destroy,” said Phillips O’Brien, a military historian.

Both sides have to look at the enemy country as a functioning machine and identify components, such as military production or command and control, whose destruction can lead to a win. “That’s never easy—which is why there are so few” purely aerial wars, O’Brien said.

Israel and Iran have been trading blows overtly and covertly for years. Since 2023, the two have been at war indirectly, via Iranian-backed militant groups in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, and directly with exchanges of missile salvos and airstrikes last year.

“If you have limited political goals that don’t require a presence on the ground, then in theory you can achieve victory even through air power alone,” said Ofer Fridman, a former Israeli officer.

Israel’s broad array of targets, from military and nuclear facilities to props for regime power such as police and economic assets such as oil refineries, make it difficult to divine just how expansive Israel’s strategic aims are.

Iran’s war aims are simpler. The regime wants to preserve its power—and its freedom to continue the enrichment of uranium. But its capabilities are far more limited. Iranian ballistic missile attacks haven’t caused major damage in Israel, given the country’s robust air defenses.

Meanwhile, Israeli planes dominate the skies in the western half of Iran and are bombing targets at will. Tehran’s best hope, analysts said, is to hold on grimly until Israel’s expensive, logistically onerous air effort runs out of time.

There are at least four ways the war could end.

Israel—especially with U.S. help—might succeed in physically destroying so much of Iran’s nuclear program that it would take Tehran many years to rebuild it. A l t e r n a tively, mounting damage could force Iran’s leaders to cave in and sign a deal that foreswears uranium enrichment. Thirdly, the Iranian regime might collapse, taking its nuclear ambitions with it.

But a muddled outcome is also possible if the regime holds on and doesn’t give in on enrichment, and if the damage to its nuclear facilities is incomplete. Tehran might then repair its nuclear program with greater determination, with less international monitoring and in harder-tohit locations.

Even if Fordow is destroyed, the war might only buy time until Iran tries again to build a bomb. That too would be a gain for Israel, depending on the length of any delay. In the time won, other events could intervene. The Iranian government could collapse or change its approach.

When Israel used airstrikes to destroy nuclear reactors in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, it set back the nuclear-weapons programs of Saddam Hussein and the Assad regime.

In Iraq, “the short-term effect was success and the longterm effect was to drive Iraq underground with its future programs,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

In Syria, civil war broke out before Bashar al-Assad could do much to revive his nuclear program. He fell from power last year, in a surprise side effect of Israel’s mauling of his Lebanese ally Hezbollah.

Examples of air power on its own leading to regime change are nearly nonexistent, military historians said. Experience suggests it takes ground forces too—or at least a competent allied rebel force on the ground.

When a U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, it cooperated with local military forces. U.S. ground troops were also quickly deployed. (The Taliban returned to power 20 years later when the U.S. pulled out.)

Israel’s battering of Iran from the air could weaken the government’s prestige and damage its mechanisms of domestic control and repression. But there is currently no sign of an opposition force in Iran that can sweep the regime away, whether through armed rebellion or mass protests.

Almost all major air campaigns in history have been part of wars that involved ground forces too. Examples include Nazi Germany’s blitz against Britain, Allied strategic bombing of Germany, the prolonged U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the first weeks of the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1991 and Russia’s ongoing bombing of Ukraine since 2022.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air campaigns in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya involved cooperation with local allies. India and Pakistan traded airstrikes in May this year but also shelled each other with artillery.

The closest precedent for a purely aerial war, apart from the Israel-Iran clash, might be Israel’s fight with Yemen’s Houthi militia since 2023. Involving exchanges of longrange missiles and bombing raids, it has been the most inconclusive front in Israel’s wars since the Oct. 7 attacks.