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As the Middle East braces for further escalation, what are Tehran’s options?
All of the Middle East can agree on one thing right now: Something big is coming. Airlines are canceling flights to major cities in Iran, Israel, and Lebanon as they await a major new escalation in the conflict that has roiled the region for 10 months.
The proximate cause for the latest round of anxiety stems from last week, when Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. The killing represented a humiliating intelligence failure for Tehran. And it came just days after a top commander of Hezbollah—another group in Iran’s network of proxies—was killed by an Israeli bomb in Beirut.
Iran and its affiliates have vowed to respond, but it’s an open question as to what options they will exercise, and whether that retaliation will further drag the region’s powers into a dangerous escalatory spiral of conflict.
To try to piece together what Tehran might be thinking, I spoke with Trita Parsi, a Middle East expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the former head of the National Iranian American Council. Subscribers can watch the full discussion in the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast for audio. What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: Israel hasn’t formally claimed responsibility for the killing of Haniyeh, but it’s generally acknowledged it was likely behind it, and Tehran has said it will respond in kind. It sees the assassination on its own soil—on a big day for the state—as a humiliation. How is Iran gaming out its response?
Trita Parsi: The key thing you just said is that this was a profound humiliation of Tehran, and a deliberate one. The Israelis had the capacity to assassinate Haniyeh in other instances, but they chose this one specifically, and I don’t think that was a coincidence. They wanted to maximize the embarrassment, particularly mindful of the fact that Israel is not winning in Gaza. But by maximizing humiliation, they also maximized the likelihood that the Iranians would respond.
Iran is, in some ways, trapped in an escalatory cycle because it has abandoned the strategic patience that it had until April. The Iranians have taken a lot of hits from the Israelis, in Syria in particular, and had chosen to play the long game instead of responding. They feared that a response would play into an Israeli effort to drag Iran into an open war at an earlier stage that what Iran is ready for.
But after the April 1 bombing of the consular section of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, the Iranians essentially had enough and switched strategies. At least in the immediate aftermath of the missile attacks, it seemed the Iranians thought that they had managed to restore deterrence. But after this very humiliating assassination, clearly, that was a failure. And because they responded in April, it puts pressure on them to respond now as well.
Iran has already abandoned strategic patience. The question is, how do you respond now to this attack (which was, in some ways, worse than what happened in Damascus) without escalating matters into a full-scale war? The Iranians clearly do not want war. In April, they talked about retaliation and restoring deterrence. This time, you’re hearing rhetoric of blood for blood. It suggests that they’re actually looking for casualties, whereas last time, the key objective was to inflict damage on Israel without causing casualties in order to deprive Israel of a pretext for further escalation.
In the discussion here in the West, there have been arguments that because the person who was assassinated was not an Iranian official, the Iranians have a way out. The Iranians view it the other way around. Haniyeh was a guest at the inauguration. That actually makes it more important for them to retaliate. This embarrassed them in front of all the different other groups that the Iranians tied to themselves in this “axis of resistance.”
Israelis essentially sent the signal that no one from the axis is safe anywhere, and that Tehran cannot protect you. This dramatically reduces Iran’s standing within those different groups, and as a result, the pressure on it to respond is actually greater.
RA: As you say, this took place just after the inauguration of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian. He is seen as more of a reformist figure in Iranian politics. But how much say does he actually have in any of the decision-making around this response?
TP: Well, we should be careful not to overstate the role and the influence of Iranian presidents, but we should also be careful not to underestimate it. The influence depends on the president himself. Some have actually had a tremendous amount of influence and imposed themselves on the decision-making process or defied the supreme leader. Others have played a much more pliant role. We don’t know yet what type of president Pezeshkian aims to be. But in his rhetoric, he has gone out of his way to say that he is loyal to the supreme leader. He’s not taken on the persona of an anti-establishment candidate.
Now, as to the question of timing, I don’t think it can be seen as a coincidence. The reality is, Pezeshkian ran on the platform of restoring diplomacy with the United States and not making that diplomacy contingent upon who ends up in the White House. And this is a very significant shift from the stated position of the Iranians in the last couple of years, as such. After the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) under former President Donald Trump, the Iranian position was to not engage directly with the United States until Washington was back in the deal. That meant that once President Joe Biden came into office, because he wanted to get back into the deal through negotiations instead of through an executive order, the Iranians still officially refused direct engagement.
But Pezeshkian ran on a platform of saying that the Iranian economy cannot be fixed unless Iran reengages with the United States and resolves some of those tensions. Given the Israeli opposition to the JCPOA and to U.S.-Iran diplomacy, if the United States and Iran were to resolve their tensions, it would not necessarily reduce Israel and Iran’s tensions. It would leave Israel feeling abandoned by the United States.
Nothing really makes it more difficult for Pezeshkian to muster the political space and capital to push through sustained diplomacy with the United States than the humiliation of the kind that we saw the Israelis inflict on Iran. So I suspect that one motivation for doing it on this day was to close a very small, but nevertheless important, window that had been opened for U.S.-Iran diplomacy.
RA: What is the general mood in Iran? How much, for example, does the Israel issue matter to the Iranian people?
TP: Israel has always been a political football inside of Iran. Iran’s own ills have been at times blamed on Israel. At times, it’s not entirely incorrect. Without Israeli pressure, there would not have been so many sanctions against Iran, and those sanctions have played a critical role in devastating the Iranian economy.
Similarly, since the mid-1990s, Iran has been a political football in Israel. Earlier, Israeli officials during the terms of [former Prime Ministers Yitzhak] Rabin and [Shimon] Peres used that potential threat of Iran in order to motivate the Israeli public to support a peace deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Essentially, as a Rabin advisor told me, to muster the political will to make peace with Yasser Arafat, whom the Israelis viewed as the main terrorist in the world, there needed to be another, greater threat looming on the horizon. Incidentally, [current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu played down the Iranian threat then, for the very same reason that Rabin played it up.
But to your larger question, I don’t think there’s any constituency among the population that necessarily would want to see a larger confrontation with Israel. But also, within the regime, I don’t think that constituency is particularly large. The debate is mostly whether to retaliate to restore deterrence or for some other purpose. There’s not really an argument within the system right now favor of an all-out military confrontation. It’s been interesting to see how they’ve been using Iranian TV to whip up support among the population for a limited response against Israel, for the very explicit purpose of restoring deterrence and making sure that the Israelis cannot do this again.
RA: More explicitly, how does Iran explain to its people its support of this so-called axis of resistance: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, all of these groups. How does the regime explain that coalition when in return, Iranians seemingly get humiliations, isolation, sanctions?
TP: So you pointed to all of the costs. And I think that’s where the focus tends to be in the West.
But we have to recognize that in Iran, there are several different narratives because there are some very distinct constituencies. Some feel very strongly about this issue and feel a strong degree of Islamic sympathy and empathy for other groups and populations in the region. Then there are others who strongly believe that this adds unnecessary headaches to Iran.
But we first have to recognize that this has actually given the Iranians a tremendous amount of influence in Iraq, in Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Middle East, precisely because of the investment in some of these different groups. They’re also pointing to the way that these groups act against Israel, saying that this is Iran’s first line of defense against an aggressive Israel or an aggressive United States. Pointing to the fact that immediately after [the U.S. invasion of] Iraq, there were plenty of voices in Washington that said, “you have to invade Iran.”
So they’re pointing to these different investments as creating levers of influence as well as degrees of deterrence against such attacks.
RA: There are, broadly, two views of Netanyahu’s actions in recent weeks. One is that he needs a few “big wins,” however you define them, before he moves forward on a cease-fire. Or the other perspective is that he is trying to distract from Gaza by refocusing global attention, and perhaps egging Tehran on to inspire a domestic jingoistic reaction in Israel.
What is your sense of Netanyahu’s motivations? What outcome do you think he’s hoping to achieve?
TP: I would go perhaps further than your second scenario. Assassinating the lead negotiator of Hamas does not send the signal that you’re interested in a deal. It’s the most effective way of actually killing negotiations. Then there’s the fact that this was also done within 24 or 48 hours of the assassination of the No. 2 of Hezbollah. Again, it makes it very difficult to believe that this is just done for distraction. But rather, as the world was waiting to see what Hezbollah would do, Israel itself took action and further escalated matters. It’s easy to see Netanyahu as acting precisely because he wanted further escalation and to goad the Iranians and Hezbollah into war.
I think we have to recognize that after Oct. 7, 2023, there’s been a very significant shift in the narrative in Israel. Israel lived in belief that it was untouchable, that it was invulnerable, that its military and technological dominance made it so safe that it didn’t have to worry about its safety, nor did it have to worry about striking a deal with the Palestinians—and that it could, every once in a while, bomb Gaza and keep this situation under control. Not only Oct. 7, but also the April attacks, really pierced that perception of Israeli invulnerability both inside and outside of Israel.
It also pierced another belief, which was one that the Israelis and I personally shared. I thought that the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region would not significantly impact the Israelis, because Israel is, at the end of the day, militarily and technologically extremely advanced. Now we see very clearly that that is not the case. If it is in a prolonged state of war, Israel is actually quite dependent on the United States.
So, I think there is a degree of shock in Israel, not just over the horrors of Oct. 7, but over that dramatic shift in its position of invulnerability.
Those circumstances led to another belief, which is that if Israel miscalculated about Hamas, and Hamas was capable of conducting Oct. 7, then it is intolerable for Israel to live next to Hezbollah, which is a much more powerful group. And as a result, Israel cannot wait for such an attack, but has to take action beforehand. This narrative has taken a pretty strong hold.
But with the two assassinations, it’s quite likely that we’re going to see a very significant exchange of fire and a potential larger war there. I don’t think that is something that Netanyahu hoped to avoid, but rather something that he was willing to risk and perhaps even desired. When you listen to some voices inside of Israel, senior Israeli officials such as the former deputy head of the National Security Council, they’re openly accusing Netanyahu of trying to bring about a larger war because it serves his political interests, even though it doesn’t serve the national and security interests of Israel.
RA: I wanted to talk more directly about the United States’ role. What do we know about how Vice President Kamala Harris differs from Biden on handling the Middle East?
TP: We don’t know a tremendous amount. Without going into details, folks in my organization who have had conversations with her were left with the very strong impression that she actually differs quite a lot from Biden’s perspective on this. And I think it’s not necessarily just because of the empathy that she managed to show in her first comments about this regarding the suffering of the Palestinians—which, I should note, Biden has more or less failed to do over the course of 10 months.
It’s also because of an understanding of the politics around this. The Biden administration’s handling leaves a strong impression that its political calculus is based on how the politics of Israel in the United States looked like two or three decades ago. But things have changed quite dramatically, not just over the course of the past 10 months, but even before that. Harris may be a bit closer in her understanding of that reality, particularly when it comes to young people in the United States, and particularly when it comes to certain communities of color in the United States who are increasingly important in the Democratic Party. So that combination points to a likelihood of at least some sort of a shift.
The shift that we’ve seen so far has mainly been in tone and rhetoric. And that’s not unimportant in any way, shape, or form. I mean, her body language after the one-on-one meeting with Netanyahu was starkly different from the bear hug that Biden offered.
But there was also one issue of substance that I don’t think we should paper over, which is that she told Netanyahu, “Take the deal.” The Biden administration has since started to use that language. Prior to that, the language the administration used was that the problem lay with Hamas, that Hamas was not taking the deal. But she looked at Netanyahu and told him, “Take the deal,” [which] at least implicitly suggests the problem lies with the Israeli prime minister, which many people in Israel completely agree with.
That is not just a rhetorical shift. That is a substantive shift. Whether that is followed up with other type of pressures in order to actually move towards a cease-fire remains, of course, to be seen.
RA: And on the other hand, what would a Trump-Vance Middle East policy look like, in this particular case?
TP: The Trump campaign also does not seem eager to talk too much about this; the politics is actually dicey on their side of the aisle as well. They take a very strong position in favor of Israel, mainly to be able to criticize Biden, saying that he’s abandoning Israel and he’s betraying Israel. But I think there’s some significant concerns on their end not to go too far on that and perhaps shift the conversation toward Ukraine, which they feel more comfortable talking about on the foreign-policy front.
The reality is that a large part of Trump’s base has adopted this idea of America First. I’m not saying that it’s a particularly sophisticated doctrine, but certain elements are strengthening among the grassroots here. They don’t believe the United States should be involved in unnecessary wars and division. They don’t believe the United States should be involved in other countries’ wars. And it’s very difficult for them to then make a massive exception to that principle for the case of Israel.
If Trump wins, however, I think there’s a decent likelihood that he will put some significant pressure on the Israelis to, at a minimum, not escalate. Perhaps his administration will not be particularly concerned about Gaza, but it will be concerned about Gaza leading to a larger war that would drag the United States into it. That’s not what Trump wants to deal with in his first year in office.
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