On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched against Iran operations that Donald Trump described as “massive”, simultaneously striking fourteen cities across the country, targeting the nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow, and killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the very first day. The objectives, though expressed with hesitation, appeared to be at least two in number: to provoke a regime change and to dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme. Two months later, one is forced to acknowledge that neither of these objectives has been achieved. On the contrary, the war produced precisely the effects it claimed to prevent.
First failure: the regime resists, transformed and hardened
The strikes killed Ali Khamenei, but they did not bring down the regime. The regime had long prepared itself for an attack, by decentralising power, designing redundant chains of command and anticipating the disappearance of certain leaders. What emerged from the rubble is not a faltering Islamic Republic but a stronger and more radicalised power structure dominated by the Revolutionary Guards. Today, Iran no longer has a single, uncontested clerical arbiter. The new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — son of the deceased, elected under pressure from the IRGC — has no real command: his role, insofar as he is physically in a condition to play it, is limited to legitimising the decisions taken by the generals. Power has passed to the war directorate, whose centre is the Supreme National Security Council.
The Iraqi precedent should have served as a warning. Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, recalled from the very first days of the war: “Wisdom in foreign policy begins with the capacity to distinguish between problems that can be solved and those that can be managed but not eliminated. George W. Bush believed that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would transform the Middle East. Barack Obama believed that ending Gaddafi’s rule would stabilise Libya. Neither was right.” Iran, with its long history, its numerous and educated population, its institutional stability, its structured revolutionary ideology and its decentralised military apparatus, was precisely the type of problem that could be managed — not eliminated.
Second failure: thirty years of “a few months away”
If the first objective — regime change — belonged to the realm of political illusion, the second — preventing Iran from acquiring the bomb — rested on equally fragile premises. To measure this fragility, one must return to the rhetoric that, over three decades, constructed the justification for this war.
It was in 1992 that Benjamin Netanyahu began to alarm the entire world: the construction of an Iranian atomic bomb was imminent… As a member of parliament, he told the Knesset that Iran was “three to five years away” from nuclear capability. In July 1996, during his first address to the United States Congress, he declared that the consequences of a nuclear Iran would be “catastrophic for my country, for the Middle East, and for all of humanity”, adding that this prospect was “extremely close”. This alarm was reiterated in 2002, 2009 and 2012 — always on the same register of urgency. In September 2012, Netanyahu told NBC that Iran was “six or seven months” away from obtaining the atomic bomb. By 2025, the timeline had shrunk to “a few days”. Thirty years, and always the same countdown, invariably contradicted by events.
This constant rhetoric of imminent danger did not go unchallenged, including within the Israeli intelligence apparatus itself. Mossad cables revealed by Al Jazeera in 2012 indicated that the agency itself assessed that Iran was not actively seeking to acquire a nuclear weapon.
American intelligence had reached the same conclusions, repeatedly and in documented fashion. In its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, the American intelligence community concluded with “high confidence” that Iran’s organised military nuclear programme had ended in 2003. The IAEA had reached the same conclusion in 2015. More recently, in its 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, the American intelligence community declared once again: “We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003, even though pressure has probably accumulated to incentivise him to do so.”
Just days before the strikes of 28 February, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was asserting before Congress that Iran had not decided to manufacture an atomic bomb. Trump then declared that Gabbard “was wrong”, leading her to publicly retract her position — an illustration of a decision-making process in which ideology overrides facts.
To this intelligence background was added an element too often dismissed, because it rests on a logic incomprehensible to our secularised societies: the official religious position of the Islamic Republic. In 2003, Khamenei had orally issued a fatwa declaring nuclear weapons “haram”, that is to say forbidden by Islam. This fatwa was cited in an official statement by the Iranian government to the IAEA in 2005, reiterated publicly in 2010, and registered as an official document at the United Nations.
The exact nature of this commitment has been debated: fatwas can evolve according to circumstances, and voices within the Revolutionary Guards themselves were pressing Khamenei to revise his position. But it would be foolish to see in it a mere diplomatic posture. Otherwise, how does one explain that in 2026, before the strikes, Iran had agreed during negotiations in Oman to “never, ever possess a nuclear material capable of creating a bomb”, according to Omani mediator Badr Albusaidi?
Yet it is precisely these moderating clerics, these voices that held the fatwa as a genuine commitment, that the war has marginalised in favour of the generals. This is where the first failure and the second converge in fatal fashion.
The perverse logic of proliferation
It is on the nuclear terrain that the American-Israeli failure is most manifest — and most consequential. The war waged to prevent Iran from acquiring a bomb it did not desire has provided it with a compelling reason to do so. The North Korean precedent is on everyone’s minds. Is it not because that country possesses the atomic bomb that it escaped the fate reserved for Iraq and Libya?
It is difficult to conceive of a more complete demonstration of what the theory of international relations calls the security dilemma applied to nuclear proliferation: a preventive attack designed to prevent the acquisition of a weapon creates precisely the conditions in which the acquisition of that weapon becomes an existential necessity.
The Iranian bomb: to claim or to deny?
The question that now arises is therefore no longer whether Iran will succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons. The objective conditions — documented technical capabilities, maximum military pressure, power now in the hands of generals for whom nuclear deterrence is a necessity — render this prospect highly probable. The question is of a different nature: how will Iran choose to manage this reality on the international stage?
Two models are available to it. The first is that of North Korea: openly claiming possession of the atomic weapon, making it an assumed instrument of power, and negotiating from this position of strength. The second is that of Israel: practising what strategists call “nuclear ambiguity” — never confirming, never denying, while knowing that everyone knows.
Of these two models, Iran will in all likelihood choose the second — that of Israel —, and for a decisive reason: its two principal allies, Russia and China, do not wish to see nuclear proliferation in a region whose balance they intend to preserve. The civilian nuclear partnership between Russia and Iran is in this regard revealing. In September 2025, Rosatom and the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran signed a 25 billion dollar agreement for the construction of four nuclear reactors. The text of the agreement stipulates explicitly that “all of the agreed projects will be overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency and comply fully with the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, as well as other treaties and international agreements that Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran are parties to”. The very structure of the partnership with Rosatom is conceived as an anti-proliferation device: Russia supplies the nuclear fuel and recovers the spent fuel for processing on its own soil, precisely in order to prevent any diversion for military purposes.
In this context, nuclear ambiguity in the Israeli manner appears as the most rational path for Tehran. Openly claiming the bomb, in the North Korean fashion, would expose Iran to the collapse of its partnership with Rosatom, to a cooling of its commercial relations with Beijing — on which the bulk of its oil exports now depends —, and to a condemnation at the Security Council that neither Russia nor China could block without a considerable diplomatic cost. Calculated silence, on the other hand, would allow it to benefit from the deterrent effect of the bomb without paying the political price. Israel has demonstrated this for sixty years. Ironically, Iran has everything to gain by following this example.
Whatever the case, history will record that the United States and Israel waged a war to prevent an Iranian bomb that their own intelligence services assessed Iran was not seeking to build — and that this war will have been the most powerful accelerator of nuclear proliferation since the decision of Pyongyang to cross the threshold.
