The Epic Disaster of Operation Epic Fury

There has also been no mention of Iran cutting off support for its regional proxies, Leaf noted. Iran has instead stipulated that any deal include a parallel end to Israel’s war with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite political party and paramilitary group, long backed by Iran. Israel has announced its intention to occupy ten per cent of Lebanon, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue military operations until Hezbollah is no longer a threat—the same pledge he made about Hamas, in Gaza.

In mid-February, two weeks before the war, Trump told reporters that regime change in Iran “would be the best thing that could happen.” That notion is now moot. On the first day of the war, Israeli air strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had led the country for nearly forty years, and severely injured his son Mojtaba, the new Supreme Leader, who has not been seen in public since then. In March, Trump claimed that “one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.”

The current government in Tehran is, however, even more hard-line than the last, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps holding outsized influence, including in the negotiations, Leaf said. The I.R.G.C. has control over the nuclear program. The lead envoy in negotiations is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who is now speaker of parliament. Trump underestimated “the regime’s resilience,” she said. The war has only made the regime “more cohesive.”

Having survived punishing U.S. and Israeli air strikes, Iran now has more confidence that the Islamic Republic can survive, albeit at a cost. “Paradoxically, one of the most serious consequences of this campaign may be the erosion of deterrence vis-à-vis Iran, specifically, the loss of the implicit sword hanging over Tehran as it considers whether to move toward nuclear-weapons capability,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli-military-intelligence specialist on Iran, wrote on X on Monday.

One of the main factors preventing the regime from openly pursuing a nuclear weapon was “the fear that doing so could trigger a large-scale military campaign aimed not merely at damaging Iran’s capabilities but at threatening the regime itself,” he said. “From Tehran’s perspective, however, Iran has now endured precisely such a confrontation and survived it.” Now the U.S. and Israel know their own military limitations in dealing with Tehran.

On Hormuz, Iran has demonstrated audacity and generated unprecedented leverage. The country’s leaders now know that they have the ability to close the strait again and again, at enormous cost for the U.S. Tehran has even proposed charging ships to cross the narrow waterway, which had been free to navigate in the past. On Monday, a spokesman for its Foreign Ministry said that discussions were under way with Oman on a new protocol to provide “services” on “safeguarding the environment” through the Hormuz waters. “All these acts entail certain expenses,” he said.

Over the weekend, in a perplexing gambit, Trump abruptly expanded the U.S. goals in a phone call with eight Middle East leaders—by calling on them to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for his efforts to end a war that he started. “After all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together, it should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously, sign onto the Abraham Accords,” he said, in a Truth Social post.

“It will be a Document respected like no other that has ever been signed, anywhere in the World. Its level of Importance and Prestige will be unparalleled!” he wrote. The Abraham Accords, which originated during Trump’s first term, are designed to get Arab countries to recognize Israel. Several have balked at the idea until there is a Palestinian state. Leaf noted that Trump’s proposal, during the call, was met with “a stunned silence . . . There are no takers.”

Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, mocked Trump. “There’s a concept in diplomacy. When the problem is too hard, expand the pie. Bring in more stakeholders, and solve one problem by packaging it with others,” he wrote on X. “That would be the charitable interpretation of this post. The realistic interpretation is that this pie is as delusional as a moon made of green cheese.”