Israel Is Not Afraid of Victory

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 13, 2025

 

It hasn’t even been two weeks since the Ukrainians pulled off a defensive operation of such magisterial competence that it could only be compared with the feats achieved by Israel’s special forces. Well, today, it looks like the Israelis have done something so adroit that the closest precedent is the one set by the Ukrainians.

 

Israel’s initial strikes on Iranian military and nuclear targets have made the weaponized pager operation against Hezbollah terrorists look like child’s play. Acting in simultaneous concert with the hundreds of Israeli aircraft that executed dozens of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israeli intelligence and special forces on the ground inside Iran disabled the country’s air defense systems. The operation reportedly relied on the use of drones and missiles launched from inside Iran. One Israeli source told N12 that they had “establish a covert drone base ‘in the heart of Iran,’ to neutralize Iranian air defenses and create other critical effects to kick off the long-awaited campaign.”

 

Accurate damage assessments from the first waves of Israeli strikes may take time to assemble, and Jerusalem maintains that this is only the outset of a campaign that could take days or weeks before it concludes. But early reports indicate significant success.

 

Israel has so thoroughly penetrated the Iranian security and intelligence establishment that it was able to target and neutralize much of Iran’s military and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership within the first minutes of the operation. Much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including Tehran’s primary uranium-enrichment complex at Natanz, appears to have been disabled. Israel appears to have avoided targeting the regime’s political leadership, although the precision with which it dispatched IRGC and army commanders suggests it might have and still could — a fact of which the mullahs are surely aware.

 

The utter collapse of Iranian air defense has allowed Israeli kinetic strikes to continue all but unmolested. Almost every piece of ordnance Iran put in the air overnight aimed at Israel was intercepted. Mossad agents are still likely operating actively on the ground in Iran, sabotaging critical infrastructure and destabilizing the regime from within. Iran’s decimated terrorist proxies in the region cannot or simply will not mount a response, and the Iranian armed forces have been decapitated. There can be no coordinated reaction until their chain of command is reestablished. And this was just day one.

 

At the outset of this campaign, the Trump administration stressed that it played no direct role in it. Indeed, it adopted the good-cop posture, insisting that it just couldn’t restrain Israel any longer and, all things being equal, it would be better served making a deal with Washington. But that posture was misleading. “Two Israeli officials claimed to Axios that Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public — and didn’t express opposition in private,” Axios reporter Barak Ravid revealed. Netanyahu’s aides maintain that any appearance of distance between Washington and Jerusalem was only a ruse. This was the plan all along.

 

The U.S. side will not confirm the Israeli characterization of events, but Trump’s reaction to the overnight attacks on Iranian targets does appear to substantiate their claims. The president deserves credit for refusing to succumb to the Western temptation to languish in tormented apprehension anytime an American ally achieves a military success. Israel’s efforts to disable the Iranian nuclear program advance American interests — an Iranian bomb would threaten and complicate U.S. security, too. But the muted response to Israeli actions in London, Paris, and Berlin suggests that Western Europe is on board with this operation as well.

 

Enthusiasm for Israel’s actions is absent only among the usual cast of spineless paper-pushers, global malefactors, and those who see any display of Western muscularity as hideously provocative. Senator Rand Paul launched into an instinctual dirge in which he lamented the degree to which the hated “Neocons” are dragging the United States into a war with Iran — the lack of a U.S. war with Iran apparently notwithstanding. Top Eurocrat Ursula von der Leyen tore at her garments. “Europe urges all parties to exercise maximum restraint,” she wrote, despite the absence of a European consensus, “de-escalate immediately and refrain from retaliation.” Moscow, which already lost one vassal regime in the Middle East to Israeli action, condemned Jerusalem’s “unprovoked aggression” against Iran.

 

“Unprovoked”? Really? Israel has warned the world that this day was coming for a decade. It was attacked on 10/7 by the Iranian terrorist proxies with which it is literally surrounded on nearly all sides. Its successes in its defensive operations against those Iranian proxies begat direct Iranian retaliation against the Israeli homeland not once but twice last year. The Iranian regime has had every opportunity to climb down from the war its proxies started, likely with Tehran’s knowledge. It has remained committed to the course of action that it had been warned time and time again would lead to this level of violence. It chose to press on.

 

There is a long operation ahead of us — one that will go on longer than it must if the United States refuses to contribute to offensive operations. And it will be a fraught campaign. The Iranian playbook relies on asymmetric tactics, including terroristic events inside Western countries like the United States. Iran — not the United States — may broaden the scope of this conflict by targeting U.S. positions in the Middle East, a sequence of events that is certain to be inverted by the pathological skeptics of American military power. Heightened vigilance will be necessary in the coming weeks.

 

But there can be no doubt today that Israel is a worthy partner. Its actions are justified by any number of casus belli that no other nation would be expected to just stoically endure. The work it is doing on the ground and in the skies over Iran directly advances U.S. interests. Defanging the Iranian regime, if successful, will contribute to a more stable and peaceful status quo in the region.

 

The Israelis have many lessons to teach us, but foremost among them is that there is no substitute for victory. Westerners have had it beaten into them that there is no such thing, that all successes come at a cost, and that the unintended consequences associated with battlefield achievements are so undesirable that inaction is the most prudent course. Thankfully, Israel is not beholden to that paralyzing misconception.