Iran’s regime has a huge problem: how to retaliate

ALI KHAMENEI, the supreme leader of Iran, promised that Israel would face “severe punishment”.  But his first effort to impose it was barely a nuisance. On Friday morning Iran launched around 100 explosive drones at Israel (some were deployed from Iraq to shorten their flight times). This was Iran’s initial response to a wave of Israeli air strikes that knocked out its air defences, damaged its nuclear-enrichment facility at Natanz and decapitated its military.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) initially told citizens to stay near bomb shelters. It seemed like a repeat of April 2024, when Iran sent a similar wave of slow-moving drones toward Israel. Back then it also added scores of cruise and ballistic missiles, which fly much faster; they were all timed to hit simultaneously. Such a layered attack was meant to overwhelm Israel’s air defences.

Yet this time there were no missiles. The IDF lifted the shelter-in-place order at around 11am and said it had intercepted all of the drones, mostly over Syrian and Jordanian airspace. There were no injuries or damage reported in Israel. The first round was over.

It will not be the last. Israel has promised further waves of strikes over “as many days as it takes”, in the words of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.  Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s nuclear agency, said after the initial attack that the Natanz facility had been “impacted” and that there was no reported damage to Iran’s enrichment plant at Fordow or its uranium-processing facility in Isfahan. Both are presumably on Israel’s target list. A second round of strikes on Friday afternoon hit Shiraz, Tabriz and other cities. Though Israel insists its goal is to cripple Iran’s nuclear programme, its real aim seems to be destabilising the Islamic republic.

Iran will want to hit back—both to avenge a humiliated regime and to compel Israel to stop. It has few good options, though. If its response is too weak, it will not deter Israel; too strong, and it might draw America into the war. That would only compound the threat to the regime, which has not looked so vulnerable since the 1980s, when it fought a long war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The least risky option is to carry out further attacks using missiles and drones. The IDF may have parried Iran’s first strike, but its luck—and its supply of interceptors—will not last forever. Iran can try to wear down its defences. If it fires enough missiles at enough targets, some will get through.

The Islamic Republic will face attrition of its own, however. Drones are plentiful but easy to repel. However Iran’s arsenal of around 3,000 ballistic missiles, cannot be quickly replaced (and not all have the range to reach Israel). They can be launched only from a limited number of fixed depots and mobile launchers. The first round of Israeli strikes seems to have done some damage to such installations. It also killed General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the top missileer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). That may explain why Iran failed to launch any missiles in its first reprisal.

In years past Iran would not have relied solely on its missile force. Its first line of defence was its Arab proxies. The most formidable of these was Hizbullah, the Shia militia and political party in Lebanon that had an enormous arsenal on Israel’s northern border. But Hizbullah was weakened by a year of war with Israel, in which its leaders were killed and many of its missile depots were destroyed—a preview of Israel’s battle plan in Iran.

The group probably has some guided missiles left in its arsenal. Using them would be politically perilous, however. Lebanon is struggling to rebuild; few people, including Hizbullah’s own Shia constituents, want to be dragged into another conflict on Iran’s behalf. Some members of Hizbullah are still bitter about Iran’s apathy after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, their leader, last year. A statement on Friday afternoon expressed solidarity with Iran, but said nothing about military action: thoughts and prayers, not threats.

Nor can Iran rely on Hamas, the Palestinian group, which has been ravaged by 20 months of war in Gaza. That leaves it reliant on farther-flung proxies. The Houthis in Yemen will keep lobbing missiles and drones at Israel, as they have done since October 2023. Militias in Iraq might do the same. But their arsenals are probably too limited to inflict serious damage.

Iran’s limited ability to strike back at Israel may force it to contemplate a riskier option: to widen the war. It could strike at American targets in the Middle East, in an attempt to spook Donald Trump, hoping this might lead him to restrain Israel. Earlier this week America withdrew some diplomats from its embassy in Baghdad, which has been a frequent target for Iranian-backed militias. Yet that approach could easily backfire. If an incensed Mr Trump ordered his own strikes on Iran, America’s air force could do even more damage than Israel’s.

Instead of striking America directly, Iran could take aim at its allies in the Gulf—for example by using its proxies to attack oil fields in Saudi Arabia, as it did in 2019, or targets in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as it did in 2022. That would send oil prices soaring. Financial markets are worried about this possibility, and have bid the price of oil up by as much as 13%, to above $70 a barrel. In this scenario Mr Trump would feel pressure from both Gulf monarchs, with whom he has a warm relationship, and Americans angry about pricier petrol. Fear of such a scenario drove Gulf states to pursue a years-long rapprochement with Iran, their long time foe. They were quick to denounce the Israeli strikes (Saudi Arabia called them “heinous”). Still, this is a break-glass option for Iran. It would poison relations with its neighbours—and might end up dragging America into the war as well.

If you believe Mr Trump, Iran has one other option: it could negotiate. In a social-media post on Friday the American president lamented that two months of talks had failed to reach a new nuclear pact to replace the one he abandoned in 2018. “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he wrote. The president warned that the next round of Israeli strikes would be “even more brutal” and urged Iran to hammer out a deal “before there is nothing left”. His comments suggest a sort of good-cop, bad-cop routine with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. They add weight to the theory that America not only knew of Israel’s plan in advance (which it certainly did) but approved it.

For years Mr Khamenei pursued a strategy often described as “neither war nor peace”. He maintained a perpetual conflict with Israel and America, but largely kept the conflict away from Iran’s borders. Now the war has come home, and his foes are trying to force him to make a choice: if his regime does not surrender to America, it risks a sustained Israeli effort to bring it down.■