In the early morning hours of June 13, Israel launched a vast attack against the Iranian regime. It struck parts of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, eliminated key military leaders and nuclear scientists, and destroyed Iran’s remaining air defenses. On June 15, Tikvah held a special online briefing in which Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver discussed these incredible developments with four distinguished experts: John Spencer, Assaf Orion, Elliott Abrams, and Amiad Cohen. You can watch a video of their conversation, or read the transcript below.

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Jonathan Silver:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The time is 8:00 in New York. It’s 3:00 in Jerusalem and 3:30 in Tehran. Two days ago, in the early hours of Saturday, June 13th, the Israel Defense Forces commenced a large-scale, highly choreographed, and highly coordinated set of operations in Iran. The operations included targeted assassinations, the bombing of nuclear sites, and the systematic downgrading of ballistic-missile and drone capabilities. striking into the heart of Israel’s most powerful and most menacing adversary. At this very hour, thousands of Israelis are in the sea, land, and air, defending the lives and livelihoods of millions of Israelis at home. They are also defending the Western world, of which Israel has made itself the indispensable moral capital.

We are meeting this evening in the opening days of one of the great wars in Zionist history. We do not know––we cannot know––how this war will turn out and what costs it will bring. All wars have costs, but we have reason to hope that the war that began on June 13th could create the conditions for a fundamentally freer and more peaceful Middle East. Our purpose in convening this briefing is not to try to break the news or provide minute-by-minute coverage. Tikvah is an educational institution, and our aim tonight is to help our students, their parents and their teachers, and our larger community of ideas discern the meaning of those events and the significance of what’s happening.

That’s our aim this evening. Joining me is a very distinguished group of experts. Elliott Abrams is the chairman of Tikvah and a senior fellow at the Council in Foreign Relations. He’s the veteran of many high-level government posts in the State Department and in the White House. His last full-time job in government was as the U.S. special representative to Iran. John Spencer is the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He’s also the host of the Urban Warfare Project, and he’s emerged over the last two years as the most sophisticated analyst of IDF operations in Gaza working in English.

Assaf Orion is a retired IDF brigadier general, a defense strategist, and the Liz and Mony Rueven International Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Before retiring from active duty, he was head of the strategic division in the planning directorate of the IDF general staff. Amiad Cohen is the CEO of the Herut Center, an important think tank in Jerusalem. Over the last 619 days since the war in Gaza began, Amiad has been leading soldiers as a major in the reserves, probably over 300 of them. He joins us this evening in the middle of the night from the northern border of Israel.

Elliott, I want to begin with you. For those of our listeners and watchers who have not been glued to Twitter and the Times of Israel and the Washington Post and all the other news sources that we’re all trying to take in, what has actually happened over the last two days?

Elliott Abrams:

I want to start by going back a little bit further. In 2007, Israel said to the United States, “We have information that Syria is building a nuclear reactor, and we can’t let that happen. We have to work on that together.” After two months of consultation, President George W. Bush said, “We’re going to take this to the IAEA and then to the UN.” The then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said, “Actually, no, we’re not. We’re going to hit it.” Bush said, “Okay, you do what you have to do.” I think we’re seeing a bit of a repeat of that, where the United States was in favor of negotiation, and the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “Negotiation is not going to do it. We need to hit this program.” It looks as if the president of the United States then said, “Okay, you do what you need to do.”

On Tuesday [June 10], it would appear, that conversation took place. History will tell us what happened, but it seems as if President Trump then kept that information silent and has been, of course, ordering U.S. forces to defend Israel, as has happened in the last year when there have been Iranian attacks. Now we have seen, since Thursday, this interchange with tremendous barrages of Iranian missiles, close to 300 now, shot at Israel, plus many, many drones. Some of those missiles, of course, have hit and caused destruction, death, and injury. The Israeli strike on Thursday was, I’ll borrow a word from Donald Trump, excellent. I’m sure we’ll hear more about it. It was an extraordinary feat of arms, and it looks as if Israel is now methodically destroying the Iranian nuclear program, broadly defined to include research labs, storage units, and centrifuges. Every part of it is now a target.

So far, the position of the United States and a number of other allies has been that Israel has a right to defend itself and has a right to do what it it’s doing. As always happens, more diplomatic pressure will start to grow as the days go by. This is the history of Israeli efforts in Lebanon and in Gaza: every time, there is a crescendo of diplomatic pressure. Thus far, it’s almost invisible. Now, it’s been three days and it will be interesting to watch in the coming days. Does that pressure begin to grow? Is the United States part of that pressure? Meanwhile, there has been destructive targeting of Israeli civilian sites by Iran, and damage by Israel to Iranian military, nuclear, and, more recently, political and economic—meaning oil—targets. Why don’t I leave it at that?

Jonathan Silver:

Assaf, see if you can bring us into the war plan of the IDF, explaining what they hit when, and why doing it now was so important. Bring us into the days and minutes before this strike commenced and explain what Israel is trying to achieve.

Assaf Orion:

I can happily say that I don’t know what happened in the rooms [where the decisions were discussed], and therefore I can speak about it more freely. Back in 2007 and 2008, as Elliott said, the discussions about striking Iran’s nuclear project were already underway and I started participating as a colonel. There were a number of main conditions we had to meet in order to launch a strike back then, and I think those conditions still hold today.

The first is necessity. We strike as a last resort—as the late Meir Dagan, chief of the Mossad, would say, “When you have the sword on your throat and the blade has even started breaking the skin.” In recent days there were some reports from Israel indicating that the Iranian nuclear-weapons program was re-initiated and speeding up, accelerating, and that the accumulation of [fissile] material had been substantive. In fact, Israel saw that it was nearing the last moment in which it could prevent a nuclear Iran, so this was some kind of point of no return.

The second element is capability. Israel needs to be sure that whatever it does achieves the actual goal or objective of taking out what needs to be taken out.

The third is legitimacy. As we heard from Elliott, I think that Israel got an okay from America. “We are not joining,” I think [the Americans] said, “but we’re with you on the defense, and so on. You have our blessing, but you break it, you own it. This is your war.” On the operational level, I think it was indeed a feat. What we’ve seen is a spectacular show of arms in a large, surprising, precise, and very effective attack on several families of Iranian targets.

First, I would say that the purpose of this attack is to go after the nuclear capabilities, but the actual choice of targets is driven by necessity and time sensitivity. The first to be hit, before they can move, are commanders and nuclear scientists. These were hit in their homes or in their command posts and so on. I think we read today that some of them were taken out by car bombs inside Tehran. The knowledge and command, I think, are among the first targets. In parallel, some things in the nuclear program which could have been moved were hit immediately, and this is why. The rest will be taken care of later. The third family is air defenses, to achieve air superiority and allow Israel the freedom to operate in Iranian airspace. When we are now seeing UAVs hovering above Iranian sky, hunting surface-to-surface launchers, that is a manifestation of air superiority. On top of that, it wasn’t only kinetic air-force operations with hundreds of planes; there were also two additional parts of the offensive.

One was a Mossad campaign with several moving pieces. I was quite surprised to see it in the press, because usually you don’t run and tell [the Iranians] how to find it. But it included attacks from within Iranian soil, which greatly enhanced the efficiency and efficacy of the attack in Iran. Last, but not least, was the protective or defensive element with missile defense, with aerial defense, with sirens and warnings to the population. I think what we saw was a fantastic opening gambit.

Then came responses by Iran with salvos of heavy missiles against population centers. I think we need to understand—unlike in 2007, when we thought about one or two rounds of attacks—here we are talking about a prolonged campaign, which you hear our leadership talking about. The road to Tehran is paved from Israel, and the air force is preparing for intensive and continuous work over Iranian skies against those specific targets: nuclear capabilities, ballistic missiles, air defenses, and key members of the regime. And, as our population centers continue to be struck, I think that also the Iranian economy will start to become a target.

Jonathan Silver:

Assaf, I think astute listeners to the answer that you just gave can pull apart, potentially, two separate war aims that I want to ask you about. One is the neutralization of Iran’s nuclear threat and the second is [targeting] the Iranian regime. Those are not the same, and I think the Americans assess those differently, and I wonder if the Israelis assess those two war aims differently.

Assaf Orion:

I would say that on the purely military side, it’s the nuclear aspect and it’s the ballistic missile aspect, because we see that Iran is using these against Israel in a profound way. It’s not only the missiles, launchers, bases, and so on, but also the factories that were supposed to widen this capacity. The initial [Israeli] statements were not focused on the regime, but a later statement said, “We hadn’t started this way, but it may go this way if things go badly.” I think it’s a message at least. I cannot say that it’s a stated objective right now, but as I said when I started, I’m not in the rooms—so I can only speculate.

Jonathan Silver:

Elliott, I will want to come back to this because I think that the way that the Israelis prioritize these war aims will have a great effect on the American domestic support and perhaps even joining in with the Israeli effort. John, I want to come to you and ask what you, as someone who studies weapons and tactics, have learned from the operational art and the technological capabilities of the Israelis over the last couple of days?

John Spencer:

Something I’ve learned in studying Israel’s military operations from the Six-Day War, and even before that, is never to be surprised at, or to underestimate, Israeli operations. This one, I’ll assess basically from the first phase. We didn’t get too strategic on what the objectives are. Strategy is a process, not a plan, so even the objectives can change in the war based on the events on both sides.

Let’s start from the operational level. The foundation of shock and awe—the strategic surprise—is still a core element of operational art, and we saw how Israel synchronized not just an airstrike, but a multi-domain offensive that combined cyberwarfare, human intelligence, electronic warfare, special operations, and even psychological operations. And achieving strategic surprise on a modern battlefield is not easy with ubiquitous satellite imagery and everything else, which mean that, most of the time, people can see things in advance. So that’s a huge lesson that we can study from this operation.

But, as I repeatedly mentioned, there was just a deep intelligence penetration into human terrain that was a part of this operation, and that was instrumental in achieving this shock and awe. Not only did the Israelis know where the nuclear scientists and the Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders were, we know now that they manipulated the generals’ schedules and lured several of them into the same underground facility and then hit that in the opening hours and killed four major commanders. That’s like taking out the leadership of the German army on the opening day of D-Day. It’s just incredible.

And something that I also say, having studied multiple wars, is that war is always a combination of low-tech and high-tech. The evolving character of warfare means that there are always new technologies, but this operation, again, showed how it was a combination of very advanced and fairly low-level technologies [that allowed Israel’s successes]. There is the F-35, which Israel has made better since October 7th, adapting it so it can engage in new missions. But then, also, with Mossad agents infiltrating drone parts and then assembling drone parts inside of Iran, Israel used those in combination to create the opening for the strategic surprise. They assembled cheap, ubiquitous drones and then sent those drones out to hit radar systems and air defenses to create the opening for the air force to come in.

In effect, the Israelis achieved air supremacy without having air superiority. That is, they didn’t control all of the Iranian sky, but they created corridors where all of the Israeli air force could get to it objectives, hit them with precision, and then get out successfully with zero casualties.

Now, this wasn’t just shock and awe, causing pain to the regime’s ballistic-missile program, its nuclear program, and its leadership. An added element of this is that it also crippled their ability to retaliate. In these opening phases—five waves, basically—Israel was able to target what it knew would come in response, which would be the retaliation. The Israelis didn’t just take out the head of the missile command, who would [direct the counterstrikes], but also the mobile trailers [used to launch the missiles]. Many of the Israeli drones would target the mobile trailers that they knew the ballistic missiles would be fired from.

Israel really crippled the actual retaliation that they figured would come, and reduced Iran’s ability to respond down to what is believed to be 200 ballistic missiles at a time, which is greatly reduced from what was possible a day before.

Just like Israel’s operations against Hizballah with the beepers and the walkie-talkies, and the strategic decapitation of the leadership over a matter of two weeks, this was also a psychological operation. If you can hit all of those commanders in a single operation, basically in a single night, it makes it so that not a single commander can trust where they’re going to be, and you cause something like paralysis. There are a lot of lessons here for the United States.

Jonathan Silver:

By the way, John, on that last point, that’s my own guess as to something that Assaf mentioned before, which is the fact it’s one thing to have these Mossad operatives constructing a drone facility inside Iran; the fact that footage of that was then leaked is something else. And my own interpretation would be that the leaking of that footage was designed to have a psychological effect, to reveal for everyone with social media just how thoroughly penetrated Iran is.

John Spencer:

Absolutely. That level of fear affects decision making—beyond personal decisions about your own safety. It really leads to a strategic paralysis. So that can’t be discounted. There are a lot of lessons here for others, and we’ll see where this goes in the continuing days, like I said, where Israel has been redefining the operational art on the modern battlefield. And I can go through some of the lessons that I’ve already taken that I haven’t mentioned yet, if you want me to, or we can save it for later.

Jonathan Silver:

Amiad, I think John mentioned that the successful conduct of war always requires both technological superiority and the low-tech will of the women and men who actually need to wage that war. And to speak about that, I want to turn with you.

I think before this campaign began, we would’ve looked at Israel and said to ourselves, “It’s 600-and-however-many days in which the citizen soldiers of the IDF have been leaving their businesses, leaving their families, leaving their studies. Fathers are leaving the birth of their children and going to serve in the reserves.”

And that there have been such high rates of return to service is amazing—is miraculous—but you have to ask yourself, “How much can you test this population in this society?” Israel has now undertaken a harder, bigger, stronger, tougher adversary, and I want to ask you if you can tell us, as someone serving in the reserves right now, about the will of Israel to take on this fight.

Amiad Cohen:

I’ll by saying: don’t believe CNN, Haaretz, and the other media in Israel. We’re strong, we’re resilient, and we believe that we’re doing everything that’s needed and that we don’t have other options. I can’t move to Florida tomorrow morning. I’m here, and we’re here to stay, and we are here to win. And that’s the spirit of the great majority of the population in Israel, which doesn’t get reflected in the mainstream media.

The second thing is that I think this operation in Iran is definitely a consequence of what started on October 7th. We wouldn’t have had the opportunity to attack in Iran without destroying Hamas and Hizballah up north. We were deterred from attacking Iran directly because of what we call “the circle of fire” that surrounded Israel with long-range and short-range ballistic missiles from Hizballah that were supposed to destroy Tel Aviv and Israel while we were attacking Iran.

The process that has been taking place since October 7th did two things: the first thing is that it gave the Israeli population a deeper understanding about the threat facing us, s that we can see and understand the brutal enemy that we need to defeat, because we cannot live any longer with this gun to our head. That’s one element.

The second element is that you can see the process of success: since October 7th, and the big failure of the Israel on the strategic and tactical level, we moved to the offensive and since then we’ve gone from success to success. It started gradually, but we did things in Gaza we never believed we could ever do, and then we did in Lebanon things that we never believed we could do. And that success is giving the people of Israel a lot of power and motivation to continue the war to the end.

And I think if you try to understand where the people of Israel are today, you need to close your eyes and imagine Israel without a real enemy. Imagine Israel without Iran, without Hizballah, without Hamas. It’s a different Israel. We call it in our think tank “Pax Israeliana.”

Imagine the Middle East with Israel as a central power that actually creates a new order in the Middle East. Imagine that. Imagine Israeli GDP in that scenario. And that gives us a lot of motivation to spend even 100 days in the reserves now because we’re changing the history of the Jewish people. It’s not only the state of Israel: it’s 3,500 years of history, 2,000 years of exile, 75 years of fighting for our existence, and maybe in a month or two from now we’ll be liberated for let’s say 20, 30, 40 years—no one knows—from a real enemy. And that’s something that is motivating the people here. We believe in a very good future and we’re optimistic. I will not stop reporting to reserve duty because of the particular technical challenge facing us now.

Jonathan Silver:

This is a question both for Amiad and for Assaf. I’ll ask you to go first. How do you see the initiation of this campaign in Iran as it relates to Gaza, and concluding the war there?

Amiad Cohen:

I think everyone knew that the end game would be Iran. And by the way, going to the previous question, I think toppling the regime is the number-one goal, but no one will say that because it’s politically complicated to argue for that. But in the end, we learned that we cannot have a regime that wants to kill us and destroy us on our border. Practically speaking, the goal is to eliminate their abilities, but in the end, the real goal is to eliminate the people who want to destroy us.

I think the war in Gaza and the war that we had in Lebanon are on the way to that, but they’re secondary now to the real enemy, and they themselves were funded by Iran. If we see what’s happening today, the second we chop off the head of the snake it will further weaken Hizballah in the north. I’m now practically sitting here defending the northern border against Hizballah, which still has the will to destroy Israel today, but lacks the ability thanks to a year-and-a-half of battle in the north, in which we totally dismantled Hizballah, part-by-part, and prevented it from being a real threat to Israel.

The battle in Gaza, I think, is also on the way to an end. The real shift in strategy that started a month-and-a-half ago when Israel switched the chief of staff and switched the defense minister, shifted the strategy to two main pillars—prevented by the chief of staff at the beginning of the war—which are occupying territory, and separating the population from the Hamas regime. It’s the beginning of the end of the war in Gaza.

And I believe that, in 30-to-60 days, it’ll be over with a clear surrender by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. So I’m very optimistic on all our fronts. I believe we’re on the right track. It took time. It wasn’t planned to be like this: not the operation in Gaza, not the operation in Lebanon, definitely not the operation in Iran. But it evolved in some way that the attack from Hamas in the south opened the opportunity to destroy Iran.

Jonathan Silver:

How do you see it, Assaf?

Assaf Orion:

Well, there’s a lot to unpack, and I find myself a bit reserved about attributing the design of the campaign to general officers, when the design of the campaign is first and foremost the responsibility of the political echelon.

And the fact, as you can read in my recent piece in Foreign Affairs, is that so far Israel has waged two campaigns in Gaza with two different strategic concepts, and wasted a lot of time doing that. And in my view, since this is a great violation of our national-security doctrine, there need to be ulterior motives to explain why it has taken so long, and why so much time, treasure, and blood were wasted in procrastination.

Putting that aside with Gaza, I really recommend that whoever wants to understand more of my thinking read my recent piece. But on Iran, I think there is a sense of understanding of the urgency, of the necessity, of the need to take care of that problem. And this is how it goes.

Now, it’s not just politically incorrect to say that the campaign goal or the war goal in Iran is a regime change. I think we need to look at the mirror, modestly, and ask ourselves, “Is it a job for a country of Israel’s size to change the regime of a nation of 80-million people, which does not have a border with Israel?” It tried to create borders, but it does not share a border with us.

I think we need to be humble and realistic in what we can achieve, and what we can’t achieve. Kinetically, we can do a lot of things. As for changing regimes: let’s ask ourselves how comfortable Israel is with its own government in the last two years, and then ask ourselves questions about other people’s regime change. I think we need to stay focused on our existential threats, on our severe security threats, on the enemy’s capabilities, on nuclear weapons, on missiles, and on proxy forces. All of these battles are underway and I think are going well.

We shouldn’t be now delirious and say, “Oh, we can have it all. We can now have 600 days of ballistic exchanges with Iran.” We cannot. We need to bring it to a closure after we achieve our main goals and objectives before we get delirious and outstretch ourselves.

Jonathan Silver:

Assaf, there’s a question there too embedded in your answer, which has to do not with Israel’s desires, but with Iran’s desires. And I suppose I’d formulate the question like this: would the Iranian regime be willing to endure, to survive, if it had the nuclear program taken away from it? If Israel is successful in fully neutralizing the capability of its nuclear arsenal, would the regime survive? Not because Israel wants it to or doesn’t want it to, but of its own volition.

Assaf Orion:

My experience is that we need to be humble. It was very good to see Bashar al-Assad fall, and Syria change its regime. Was it our direct objective? No, it was an unintended consequence, which I think we are happy with. If the regime in Iran would fall, I think it would be good. Should we set it as an objective, that we can’t stop the war without achieving? No, I think we shouldn’t.

Jonathan Silver:

This exact conversation is one of the axial pivots in American domestic policy and the Trump administration’s own deliberations over how to proceed. Elliott, the MAGA camp is split down the middle on this question. I think that the specter of the Global War on Terror looms very large in at least part of the way that the MAGA movement thinks about regime change and American involvement in the Middle East. Tell us how you analyze these different factions within the administration.

Elliott Abrams:

I would say the administration is divided into two parts. One of them comprises the many, many officials, maybe including the vice-president, who are isolationists or are restrainers, who think mostly about the model of Iraq and don’t want the United States to get involved at all. That’s one group. And the other group is called Donald Trump. It’s a very odd thing because he’s not one of them. He shares some views with them. But we see this in the last few days in his reaction. Theoretically he could have really reacted strongly against Netanyahu and said, “Don’t do that. There’ll be a rupture in relations.” That’s not what he said. He’s been really quite supportive. He has not wanted the United States to attack Iran unless Iran attacks us, and he’s made it very clear for Iran, which threatens to attack U.S. bases, that if it ever does attack a U.S. base, it’ll pay a very heavy price.

But it is a very odd division. We’ve all seen or heard about people like Tucker Carlson really viciously attacking Trump policy this week. And I would say, generally speaking, the MAGA movement is not supportive of the president’s position of strong support for Israel. Now, why he allowed all of these people to get high positions throughout his administration is a very good question. On the question you were just debating, Trump is famously unsympathetic to the idea of regime change, really anytime, anywhere, and would I think he would be unsympathetic to an Israeli war aim of regime change. Because as Assaf says, “Nobody knows how long that will take.” It could happen tomorrow and it could not happen for years and years and years. We really are unable to predict these things.

I think if Israel is trying to get American, and more broadly Western, support for its goals, by talking about the nuclear program—and the need not just to damage the nuclear program, but to destroy the nuclear program to the extent possible—it’s going to have a lot more support than by any discussion of regime change. It is true that the ultimate solution is the fall of this regime, which is devoutly hoped for, prayed for by the people of Iran who hate this regime. But I would agree with Assaf that this is not Israel’s job and it isn’t clear how, through military action, it could achieve that.

Jonathan Silver:

John, I want to go back to the question of how Israel can achieve the war aim that seems to be the higher priority, that is, more precisely neutralizing Iran’s nuclear arsenal. We know that, in the opening days of this campaign, Israel struck a great many sites in which uranium had been enriched to such a degree that it could have been weaponized and then put on missiles directed at Israel and elsewhere. However, the most secure of those sites is in Fordow, and it has often been said that Israel does not have the capabilities to neutralize that site on its own. I wonder if you still think that that’s true. How would you analyze Israel’s options when it comes to the Fordow nuclear facility?

John Spencer:

Well, it’s interesting what the Israelis named their operation into Syria to hit an underground site that was not as deep as Fordow, but was at a very deep range beyond the capabilities of their bunker busters. That was called Operation Many Ways, and there are many ways to attack a site beyond needing one bomb that can reach those depths. Israel is infamous at this point after the elimination Hassan Nasrallah, Mohammad Deif, and Mohammad Sinwar at drilling—the ability to drill down with a series of successive airstrikes. In Operation Many Ways, however, they put special forces on the ground to go into the site and blow it up from the inside.

For me, there are some specifics I noted regarding the tactics of destroying the nuclear program versus the objective that the prime minister articulated in the opening days of “rolling back” the nuclear program. And I think that the Israelis are trying to combine both military and political means. I think that President Trump’s offer was genuine when he said,
“Now you should tell the ayatollahs to come to the table to discuss the dismantling of the nuclear program.” Israel does have limitations on what it can do to roll back Iran’s program, but it’s not just about the physical sites of Natanz and Fordow and the depth of them and the centrifuges and the uranium that’s already enriched to a certain 60-percent level. It’s also about the nuclear scientists. It’s also the missile programs. To destroy the program, there are limitations to what you can do when you aren’t on the ground to destroy something.

So it’s both a tactical and a strategic question. Ultimately, is the strategy to force a political settlement by asking, “Could the regime survive if it abandoned its nuclear program altogether?”

Jonathan Silver:

Assaf, how far do you think  the nuclear program, has been rolled back?

Assaf Orion:

I think it’s too early to say and it’ll take us more time to take care of additional parts and even more time to understand what we’ve achieved. But since this is a very old problem, I think we should remind ourselves that Iran is a large country and its nuclear aspirations mean that its efforts are regenerating. Whatever you roll back will start growing again under a new situation. So I think we need some rollback to a point from which another position or another solution and additional campaigning will be needed to continue rolling the Iranians back until they let go of their nuclear ambitions or until the regime falls.

I think it’s a posterity campaign, but that doesn’t mean perpetual war. And we need this combination of what Israel now does [and diplomatic action from the U.S.]. I think President Trump hit it right on the head by saying, “We can now go back to negotiation, and I told you there will be calamity if you don’t come.” What we say in the Middle East is that we demonstrated very well what the alternative will be if there is no agreement.

Jonathan Silver:

Amiad, we were speaking a while ago about how the possibility of this campaign in Iran is a function of earlier Israeli successes against Hizballah in Lebanon. In other words, the operations against Iran’s proxies shaped Israel’s ability to target the head of the snake itself. Now, I wonder if that dynamic might go in the other direction too: when Israel is focused so precisely on Iran, might we have reason to worry about the Palestinian territories, the regenerative power of Hizballah in Lebanon, [and Hamas] in Judea and Samaria, and in Gaza itself?

Amiad Cohen:

Obviously, we are thinking about these threats today. The IDF summoned hundreds of thousands of reservists back to duty on the day of the attack. And they’re defending these borders. I will add two other borders here. I will add the Egyptian border and the Jordanian one. We have 350 kilometers of border between us and Jordan, and Jordan is 80-percent Palestinians, and it has a number of jihadist Sunnis, and followers of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Islamic State, who might be willing to attack Israel now seeing the successes we have around us.

Another border is the Lebanese border. Unfortunately, Israel, during this war—and I criticized this decision in the past—did not destroy Hizballah and it them to surrender, but we got to a point where we weakened them so they cannot threaten us anymore in the meantime, but they’re obviously continuing to rebuild themselves, and Hizballah is still some kind of a threat and has a lot of capabilities. Despite all the successes we had on the Hizballah front—they aren’t so strong as they used to be—they still are a real threat, with invasion capabilities and with some kind of medium-range missiles and rockets that will not be a real existential threat to Israel and will not deter Israel from attacking in Iran, but are still a threat.

The only place where we don’t have a real threat is in Gaza, and that’s the only place where we are trying to conduct regime change and trying to dismantle a real existing state and trying to change the way that a country treats us and thinks about us. I think that needs to be representative of how we address our enemies. I agree [with Assaf]: Israel’s power is limited when it comes to changing regimes. Every power has its limits. But I think the examples of Gaza and Hizballah are good projections of how we need to think about Iran.

The conception in Israel was that we have people who don’t like us. They’re jihadists, but they’re rational people. And there is a limit to the ability that they have to attack us, but we can’t enforce the willingness. That’s what we call Vladimir Jabotinsky’s iron wall––that we assumed that they would always hate us, but we thought that we could limit their military capabilities. I think the lesson learned of that conception is that we cannot let our enemies have a regime in which they control territory without paying a real significant price and experiencing a real threat from us. I think the IDF actually succeeded in doing that in 2011 and 2012 in Syria, where the jihadists tried to build a real military force to attack Israel from the Syrian border, and surrounded us from the northeast. And we succeeded in preventing the formation of a real, local [antagonistic] leadership to rise there under the weakened Assad regime from 2009 until today.

I think, in the end, we have no other alternative but weakening the countries around us and having some kind of relationship with them. Having a real enemy that sits on our border and wants to destroy us brought us to October 7th. Our acceptance of it brought us to October 7th, and we need to verify that we don’t have any more enemies like that around us. And Egypt can be something like that. There’s a big population of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and, looking forward, the second we destroy the Shiite jihadists, we will look forward to having a challenge from the Sunni jihadists on the ten-to-twenty-year horizon.

Jonathan Silver:

Now we can turn to questions from those who’ve been listening to our conversation. Elliott, here’s a question about whether it is essential to destroy the economic engine of the Iranian regime by targeting refineries and gas fields to make sure that it doesn’t have an efficient regenerative capacity of the kind Assaf was discussing.

Elliott Abrams:

This should not be the primary target. The primary target should be Iran’s ability to harm Israel. So that means missile launchers, missile sites, and plants where they build more missiles. And of course it means the entire nuclear infrastructure. The economic targets are from that point of view, I think, secondary. Part of what Israel is doing, I think, may be a message to Iran. “This can get a lot worse for you if you don’t stop attacking civilian targets.” Israel’s not going to respond by trying to kill innocent Iranians and attacking shopping malls. But attacking the economic targets is, I think, a way of telling the Iranians, “Watch out about the targeting.” And, as you’re suggesting, or as the questioner asked, it weakens Iran. It weakens Iran—depending on how much damage is done—for a long time. And Iran is completely vulnerable now since Israel controls the skies. You could see a situation in a matter of days in which Iran’s ability to export oil is largely compromised, and that compromise could last for weeks or months, or it could last for years.

Would that bring regime change? I think that’s unclear. It’s really hard to predict regime change. But it’s certainly true that it’s something the regime has to think about. Again, they have a restive population that very largely hates the regime. If the regime, through its insistence on a nuclear-weapons program, immiserates the people further, those people will be even more deeply against the regime. This regime has been around since 1979 and it has done nothing for the Iranian people, nothing. It has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this nuclear-weapons program, on supporting Hizballah, on supporting Hamas, on supporting the Houthis. It really doesn’t care about the people of Iran, which is why I am very optimistic that they will overthrow it. I think we just can’t predict the timetable.

Jonathan Silver:

Assaf, I want to try to steel-man my argument to make the best version of the claims made by some within the MAGA coalition, and some within the Trump administration, who want to restrain America’s involvement in this fight. I think that the best articulation of that argument is that America has one strategic adversary: that strategic adversary is China, and everything else is a distraction. Now, I want to ask you to engage this argument, From the perspective of this great-power competition between America and China, how do you think that the Chinese might look at what’s happened, and how do you think the Americans should look at what’s happened?

Assaf Orion:

Well, it’s a great question because it goes back in many ways to how some Americans look at great-power competition and locate that great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific while assuming the Middle East is some kind of a relic of the Global War on Terror. It’s seen as the place of the huge and wrong-headed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then the war between Russia and Ukraine is seen as some sort of glacier from the cold war. In actuality, all these theaters are connected. You see North Koreans and Iranians fighting in Ukraine. You see the weapons systems and the knowledge flowing back and forth. You see China very interested in how America and its closest allies are shooting down drones and missiles.

What we’re seeing is the so-called axis of evil, or of upheaval—what might be called the Euro-Asian, China-Iran-Russia-North Korea axis. It’s a learning network and this network is learning how the West fights in order to defeat it. China loses no time studying what Iran is doing politically and diplomatically. It once again took a stand and condemned Israel’s violation of Iranian sovereignty, but never bothered to say anything about the sovereignty of Iraq, Jordan, and Israel that Iran is violating while shooting things into or over these countries.

I think that everybody is looking at this because it’s a test that will reflect how the U.S. stands by its allies. And right now the ally is Israel—by the way, fighting most of the war on its own without U.S. involvement, except maybe the THAAD [anti-missile] battery. But in the gallery watching are Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Germany, and NATO, and everybody’s asking whether the U.S. can be trusted.

And in this, I think I hold a wider sense than many American commentators do of what it means to be America First. America First is when America is the first one you call when something bad happens and you want somebody trustworthy to stand by you when it hits the fan. I think that in this sense, Iran is a test. It’s not only an expenditure of weapon systems and so on, but it’s a real test of the mettle of the U.S. and its network of allies—of the weapons systems, the doctrines, and so on and so forth. And I think that U.S. support of its allies in the Middle East is only widening and expanding U.S. power in the Indo-Pacific context; it’s not just the spending and refocusing of scarce resources. Whatever happens in Iran will influence what happens in Taiwan. We should just watch the Chinese observing it and we will understand that this is the case.

Jonathan Silver:

John, there are several questions that have come in about Iran’s own offensive capabilities and the Iranian air force. Can you tell us anything about them?

John Spencer:

They don’t really have much of an air force. They’ve instead invested heavily in their ballistic-missile program. And again, without knowing what has been eliminated, it was vast. It was the greatest threat. The threat was not just the progression of the nuclear program, but it was also the progression of the ballistic-missile program. I mean, two weeks ago, Iran tested the largest ballistic missile it’s ever tested, a two-ton ballistic missile. And the United States Treasury Department had basically sanctioned, two months ago, the Chinese and others trying to provide Iran with the capability to have intercontinental ballistic missiles.

So, the Iranian air force was very minimal. And this again leads to why Iran is unable to be precise in its retaliation—instead of trying to target specific sites, it’s targeting and hitting civilian targets. We’ll see what’s left of the ballistic-missile program and see the effect of Iran’s decision to invest so much in these mobile firing systems. It also invested heavily in Russian air-defense systems that were shown, back in April and October of 2024, not to be a good investment.

But the Iranians’ offensive capability is very limited, though what capabilities they still have are very lethal. They have an abundance of drones, which is something we have seen the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow 3, the THAAD, and the Patriot prove very effective against. But even if these systems together are 95-percent effective, if you attack with a swarm [of drones or with many missiles at once], some things might be able to get through. But we’re seeing each round of attacks, and we don’t know if Iran is holding anything back I kind of have my own doubts that they’re holding anything besides that ballistic-missile program.

Jonathan Silver:

We are all impressed, wowed, dazzled by the innovation that Israel showed by erecting this forward drone-operating base inside Iranian territory. There are a number of questions that have come in asking about whether the reverse is possible and how vulnerable Israel might be to the presence of similar capabilities inside Israeli borders.

John Spencer:

Although I’ve spent time with Israeli intelligence services, I wouldn’t be able to say that that’s not possible. I mean, this is the second time this has happened. We saw something similar during Operation Spider’s Web with Ukraine and Russia, and it has signaled to the world that the old way of thinking about border security and protecting strategic infrastructure needs to be updated. But this goes to Elliott’s comment that, of the 80 million people in Iran, most of them hate the regime. That creates intelligence opportunities to infiltrate the society. It wasn’t just a matter of getting low tech into the country, it was knowing exactly where to send the tech to. You need human intelligence for that. Although, even since October 7th, Israeli intelligence services have caught Iranian double agents and people trying to do this, I don’t think, personally, that there’s any capability for Iran to do that in Israel. But, again, this was a second notice to the world.

Jonathan Silver:

Here’s the last question that I wanted to ask to each of you. Assaf, I’ll come to you first. For now, in this round of the conflict, what does victory look like? How does some kind of settlement emerge? And, crucially, who are the decision makers responsible for that settlement?

Assaf Orion:

Just a small note on Iranian infiltration. We already have dozens of cases of Israelis working for Iran, mostly for financial reasons, reporting from within Israel. On top of that, you have a huge Iranian effort to arm and militarize the West Bank, which geographically is inside Israel, and you have the ring of fire around us, where, again, [Iran-backed militias] have launched short-range rockets for strategic effect. So Iran is already doing it. We are just doing it our own way. We’re a little different in style.

About what victory looks like and how this ends, I think Israel has two issues here. One is how to stop the fighting. Termination of such fighting is uneasy. You sometimes need to escalate to persuade the other side to stop. Iran just said, we will not come back to negotiations so long as we’re attacked, which tells you, “Okay, if you stop attacking, maybe we’ll come back to negotiations.”

But at the end of the day, we need to create a mechanism in which the military campaign degrades a lot of capabilities in Iran and also persuades it—compels it—to accept more agreeable terms in the negotiations. Basically, the final phase is some kind of agreement to which Israel is not a party. It’ll be between the U.S. and Iran, or between the U.S. and France and Iran, with Israeli agreement about the conditions, but making sure that Iran will never have the capability to decide to go for a nuclear weapon and reach that point alive. I think that’s the end state. It ends diplomatically, but that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.

Jonathan Silver:

John?

John Spencer:

There are three reasons that people go to war: fear, honor, and interest. So, it only ends when you’ve resolved one of those. I do think the United States is really the main broker that can bring the operation to an end, as in bring Iran to the table with certain assurances. With Israel, the end state has to involve complete dismantling of any pursuit of any nuclear capabilities, with all the necessary guarantees. The president had gotten to that point and really the conflict within his own administration is about what enrichment means, and whether a little bit is acceptable. I think zero enrichment is acceptable. It would take that to end this fighting because, other than that, at this point, Iran has a bit of honor at stake in continuing to retaliate. Keeping the objective limited I think is really key for Israel. Like Assaf said, while the byproducts can be many things, the objectives are very limited, and that way you can end it within that limited framework.

Jonathan Silver:

Amiad?

Amiad Cohen:

I think it’s complicated to articulate exactly how it’s going to end. I think it depends on so many parameters. It’s very hard to assess. I think yes, it will obviously end in a diplomatic way, but the question is how much leverage and how much military success we will achieve. That’s why it’s always connected to what’s happening in Gaza and what’s happening in Lebanon. It’s all connected.

If we create a situation where we have total victory, where the enemy puts up a white flag and surrenders, that will be obviously desirable. And I hope that is going to happen in Iran and I think we need at least to work in some ways to achieve that. Is it possible that it will happen eventually? I don’t know. So, 100-percent of what you want is to have decisive victory over your enemy and achieving their total surrender because we won’t have a second opportunity to attack the nuclear facilities in Iran, and if we don’t destroy them and give peace to our people for the next 40 years, we will have failed our mission.

I think we need to continue fighting until we assess in some ways that we’ll get there. If it would be only militarily, like the northern border of Israel in 1973 with the Syrians, where we didn’t have a real agreement, but we got a status quo in which they never attacked us again, then that would be a good thing. Or if we have a peace process that will create a situation where, as Israeli proponents of Oslo said, “I can eat hummus in Damascus, or I can eat whatever they eat in Iran and I can go visit there,” that’s desirable too. Will that happen? I don’t know. I believe we need at least to push for that outcome and compromise on what we can get in the middle.

Jonathan Silver:

Elliott, you have the last word.

Elliott Abrams:

I think one has to remember that this is a highly ideological regime, which is really built around “Death to Israel, death to America.” This regime will not abandon those goals, nor, I think, just because of this terrible defeat it has suffered will it agree to anything more than a truce. Its main goal in the short run is regime survival and for that it has to agree never to do any of this stuff again. Iran’s rulers won’t agree to that because that will make them look weak in the eyes of their neighbors and above all of the Iranian people. So I think the most you can hope for realistically is a truce. And therefore, I think as Amiad was just saying, Israel should try to achieve as much as it can in the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program through bombing. I think therefore that it should not agree to shortening this effort until it has achieved most of what it wants in the destruction of the nuclear program.

Jonathan Silver:

Gentlemen, thank you very much.