The recent shift in geopolitical events against Iran and its proxies provides Israel with a clear opportunity — and the second Trump administration with one as well. Israel must strike Iran now, hitting any number of high-value targets within the Islamic Republic. This sets the stage for the second Trump administration to go beyond just maximum pressure, and target the heart of the Iranian regime.
By providing Mr. Trump with an alternative to the first anti-Iranian coalition through a muscular demonstration of Israeli power, Jerusalem can provide Washington enormous leverage over the New Eurasian Axis.
The collapse of the Assad regime should remind observers of international events of two basic facts. First, the strength of authoritarian states can dissipate without any apparent warning. Bashar al-Assad was thought to have won the Syrian Civil War quite handily after 2020. The Gulf States and Europeans, when the Islamist rebel group HTS began its offensive in early December, were in midst of a year-long process to rehabilitate the Assad regime and integrate it back into regional political structures.
Assad was viewed as having options and may have been able to choose between his Iranian and Russian backers in a manner relevant to the broader, ongoing Eurasian crisis. Yet just a few weeks later, the Assad regime has vanished. Despite expectations that Syria’s various minorities, from the Assad-aligned Alawites to Syrian Christians, Druze and others would resist an Islamist group’s offensive, the entire political-military structure unraveled.
There was no last stand in Damascus. Nor was there a dogged defense of the majority Alawite areas in Latakia and Tartus governorates. Russia in particular has noted the collapse of its most crucial regional partner, under two years after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s putsch attempt took Wagner Group columns to the outskirts of Moscow.
Second, international crises intersect in unexpected, largely chaotic ways that produce shocking outcomes — or more accurately, expose extant weaknesses. The Assad regime was never strong enough to withstand sustained opposition absent overwhelming external support. Assad’s forces defeated Syria’s various rebel groups in the 2010s not because of ideological commitment to Assadist Baathism, or even fear of Sunni Jihadist domination, but because Iran and Russia committed extensive resources to keep Assad in power.
Iran deployed the bulk of Hezbollah’s ground forces to support Assad, while providing cash, weapons, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operatives to coordinate various proxy forces. Russia initially provided weapons and cash, and from 2015 onward used airpower, naval forces and some special operators to pummel the rebels into submission, while working with Iran to create a full-fledged combined and joint staff.
But Russia’s assault on Ukraine has limited its ability to act in the Middle East. The aircraft Assad needed to bomb rebel supply lines were largely redirected to Ukraine. The airfields from which Russian strategic bombers would launch strikes on Syria are under Ukrainian drone attack. Russian naval forces cannot simply transit the Turkish Straits, given Ankara has closed them since late February 2022.
And the rapid-deployment forces Russia would call on to fight on the ground, whether Russia’s paratroopers and special operators or Wagner Group and other mercenary organizations, have been battered after three years of combat in Ukraine. Iran, meanwhile, has experienced significant damage over the past year-plus of war with Israel.
Hezbollah has lost its command structure and taken heavy casualties since September, limiting its ability to deploy in support of Assad. Israel has killed a number of IRGC liaison officers from its strike on Damascus in April onward. Iran was thus in no position to react to a rapidly-developing crisis. In a direct confrontation, isolated from its international backers, the Assad regime thus predictably collapsed.
This opens up a clear opportunity for Israel. It also has direct implications for U.S. strategy.
The Assad regime was crucial to Iran’s strategy. Transit of Syrian territory enabled Iran to sustain Hezbollah in Lebanon, threaten Israel from two axes in the north, pressure Jordan through cross-border drug smuggling, and transfer arms to Iran’s partners in the West Bank. Critically, Iran could also forward-deploy several air defense and early warning radars in Syria.
Given Saudi Arabia concluded a modus vivendi with Iran in 2023, Israel cannot strike Iran by transiting Saudi airspace. It must follow a corridor over Syria and Iraq instead. When combined with long-range radars based in Iran, Iraqi air defenses, and a variety of aging but numerous anti-air systems, the Syrian early-warning radars allowed Iran to detect an Israeli strike at any significant scale, particularly because of fuel consumption issues if Israeli aircraft were to fly at low altitudes for such a distance.
Without Syrian-provided early warning, a strike against targets in Iran becomes much more practical. Israel is surely considering this today. Iran’s hold on Iraq may also be in jeopardy. Once one proxy falls, others will begin to chafe under Iranian domination, particular actors like the Iraqi Sadrists who opposed the U.S. in Iraq but also view Iran with extreme suspicion.
If Israel could pull off a strike on the Iranian nuclear program in the coming weeks — or against other critical targets in Iran from arms factories to intelligence and security institutions — then the Iranian state may well face a broader domestic and regional backlash, with each actor it has contained sensing weakness.
Israel may be tempted to wait until Trump’s inauguration to move against Iran. This is a mistake. The president-elect’s administration will take a distinctly hawkish stance towards Iran, particularly because amongst its personnel, pressure on Iran is a natural point of strategic, ideological and prudential-political agreement — especially because Iran took the extravagantly imprudent step of trying to assassinate the president-elect.
However, once the Trump administration sets U.S. Middle East policy on a more rational bent than that of the past few years, it will face a distinct challenge. It cannot simply resurrect the anti-Iranian coalition of the late 2010s, enshrined through the Abraham Accords. Nor will the levers of the previous maximum pressure campaign be entirely available given the resilience Iran has cultivated through its relationships with Russia and China.
Instead, the U.S. needs a new strategy to apply pressure on Tehran, one that incorporates sanctions, threats and action against proxies, and intelligence operations to degrade what remains of Iran’s Axis of Resistance.
Creating this strategy will take time. An Israeli attack on Iran directly, whether against the nuclear program or other critical targets in the country, will help set the parameters for U.S. policy towards Iran, and open other possibilities for American action to end the radical clerics’ rule.
The departing Biden administration can be counted on to oppose any effort by Israel to topple Iran, the source of the warfare that has engulfed the Middle East since Oct. 7, 2023. But Trump possesses a clearer understanding, and his administration should welcome a new approach, one that redefines maximum pressure on Iran.
Seth Cropsey is president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”
