The direct war between Israel and Iran has, for now, ended almost as suddenly as it began. After twelve days of Israeli strikes, Iranian missile attacks and the unprecedented American bombing of Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, a ceasefire announced by Donald Trump took effect on 24 June. Iran had retaliated for the American strikes by firing missiles at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest American military facility in the Middle East, but reportedly gave enough warning for personnel to take protective measures and the attack caused no American deaths. Trump then announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to stop fighting, angrily pressuring both governments when early violations threatened the arrangement. Israel can point to the deaths of senior Iranian commanders, damage to missile and air-defence infrastructure and major attacks on nuclear facilities. Iran can point to its survival, continued missile capability and the fact that the Islamic Republic remains in power. The United States can point to an operation against nuclear sites completed without entering a ground war. Each government therefore possesses enough evidence to claim success domestically, which is probably one reason the war could stop. Yet the central strategic question remains unresolved: did twelve days of extraordinary military force make an Iranian nuclear weapon less likely, or did it merely destroy enough infrastructure to delay a programme whose political rationale may now be stronger than before?
The distinction between capability and intention is crucial. Before the war, Iran possessed an advanced nuclear programme, substantial quantities of highly enriched uranium and the technical knowledge required to move significantly closer to weaponisation if its leadership chose to do so. Israel and the United States have now damaged the physical capability severely, although the exact extent remains contested and intelligence assessments are still developing. But the Iranian leadership’s incentive calculation has changed too. Before 13 June, Tehran could debate whether remaining below the weapons threshold provided enough strategic security while avoiding the enormous diplomatic costs of building a bomb. After Israeli and American aircraft demonstrated that Iranian airspace, military leadership and hardened nuclear facilities could all be attacked, advocates of nuclear deterrence inside Iran have a much stronger argument: the absence of a nuclear weapon did not prevent attack.
This is the central paradox of preventive war. Military action can lengthen the time required for an adversary to acquire a weapon while shortening the political distance between the adversary and the decision to acquire one. Those effects need to be compared rather than assuming destroyed centrifuges equal solved proliferation. If Iran requires several years to rebuild but decides immediately that eventual weaponisation is essential, Israel has purchased time rather than resolution. Time is valuable, but its strategic value depends on what diplomacy does with it.
The uncertainty surrounding Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium therefore matters enormously. Physical enrichment facilities can be reconstructed. Highly enriched material, if it survived and was moved before the strikes, could allow Iran to rebuild from a much more advanced starting point. International inspectors need access to determine what remains, where it is located and whether additional enrichment occurs. This makes the International Atomic Energy Agency more important after the bombing, not less.
Yet Iranian political incentives point towards reducing cooperation. Tehran can reasonably ask why it should continue allowing international monitoring if information about its programme ultimately helps adversaries understand where facilities are located and how advanced they have become. Iranian lawmakers have already moved towards suspending cooperation with the IAEA. From Tehran’s perspective, secrecy may now appear safer than transparency.
This creates the verification paradox of military counter-proliferation.
The more successfully military action demonstrates that visible facilities are vulnerable, the greater the incentive to make the next programme invisible.
A dispersed clandestine nuclear programme is much harder to monitor and therefore potentially more dangerous even if its physical capacity is initially smaller.
The international community consequently needs to offer Iran a reason to return to inspections.
That reason cannot simply be another threat.
Threats can compel temporary behaviour.
A durable agreement requires a payoff from compliance.
Sanctions relief.
Access to trade.
Civil nuclear cooperation.
Security assurances.
These incentives are politically difficult after a war, but they are precisely what makes restraint rational.
This does not mean rewarding Iran for violating nuclear obligations. It means recognising that deterrence requires both punishment and reassurance. A state needs to know what happens if it violates the agreement and what happens if it follows it.
If the only message is “approach the threshold and we bomb you”, Iran has incentives to approach the threshold secretly.
If the message becomes “accept intrusive verification and economic normalisation follows; violate it and sanctions and military risk return”, the incentive structure becomes more balanced.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) attempted something broadly similar. Iran accepted restrictions and inspections in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2018, arguing that it was too temporary and failed to address Iran’s missiles and regional behaviour. Iran subsequently expanded enrichment dramatically.
This does not prove the JCPOA was perfect.
It demonstrates that agreements need to be compared with their realistic alternatives rather than ideal agreements that never existed.
The relevant question is whether Iran’s programme was more constrained under the agreement than afterwards.
Any future deal would need to learn from both the strengths and weaknesses of the JCPOA.
Longer restrictions.
Stronger verification.
Clearer consequences for violations.
Potentially broader negotiations over missiles.
But maximalism can make agreement impossible.
Iran will not voluntarily surrender every strategic capability while Israel retains overwhelming conventional superiority and an undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Negotiation therefore needs to identify the minimum restrictions sufficient to prevent weaponisation rather than attempting to remove every source of Iranian military power.
Israel faces a similar choice because its operational success has been extraordinary. Israeli intelligence located senior Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists, its air force operated extensively over Iranian territory and Iranian air defences were degraded. The campaign demonstrated a degree of Israeli military superiority that Tehran will need years to address.
That success creates a temptation to believe military dominance can substitute indefinitely for political settlement.
If Iran rebuilds, strike again.
If missile production resumes, strike again.
If another commander emerges, target them.
This strategy can manage threats.
It cannot guarantee they disappear.
Repeated preventive war also creates adaptation.
Iran can bury facilities deeper.
Disperse production.
Reduce electronic communications.
Improve counter-intelligence.
Acquire better air defence.
Build more missiles.
Every Israeli success teaches Iran how the attack worked.
Military advantage therefore depreciates as adversaries learn.
This is the adaptation problem of repeated coercion.
The first attack exploits vulnerabilities.
The second confronts an adversary that redesigned around them.
That is why the current Israeli advantage should ideally be converted into a political arrangement while it is strongest.
Military leverage is perishable.
Diplomacy can institutionalise some of its effects.
Iran’s missile campaign provides its own lesson. Despite Israel’s extraordinary air-defence capability, Iranian ballistic missiles penetrated on several occasions and caused deaths and significant damage. Iran therefore demonstrated that it retains a capacity to impose costs even under severe military pressure.
This may have helped produce the ceasefire because deterrence rarely requires equality.
A weaker actor needs enough retaliatory capability that eliminating it completely becomes more expensive than bargaining.
Iran could not defeat Israel conventionally.
It could make continuing the war costly.
That is deterrence through residual capability.
The lesson matters for smaller states globally.
Military power is not binary.
A country does not need to match an adversary platform for platform.
It needs enough survivable capability that aggression carries unacceptable expected costs.
This explains why missiles, drones and dispersed weapons systems have become so important to countries unable to compete with American or Israeli air forces directly.
The Qatar strike demonstrates another aspect of deterrence: calibrated retaliation. Iran needed to respond to the American bombing or appear incapable of imposing any consequence on Washington. Yet killing large numbers of Americans could have triggered a much larger US campaign. Tehran therefore appears to have selected a target and method allowing it to demonstrate retaliation while limiting casualties.
This resembles Iran’s response after the United States killed Qasem Soleimani in 2020, when Iran struck American bases in Iraq but avoided American fatalities, although troops suffered traumatic brain injuries.
The pattern suggests Iranian decision-makers understand the importance of signalling boundaries even while retaliating.
That does not make the behaviour safe.
It demonstrates that adversaries can communicate through the scale and design of military action.
The United States appears to have interpreted the Qatar attack accordingly.
This is violent signalling, an uncomfortable but real part of international politics.
An attack can communicate:
we are capable of hitting you.
We were also capable of doing something worse and chose not to.
Recognising the second message is essential to escalation control.
Governments that interpret every limited response as weakness can destroy the signalling mechanism and encourage larger responses next time.
Trump’s role in ending the conflict is therefore worth examining separately from his role in entering it. His administration authorised one of the most consequential American strikes in the Middle East in decades and then pushed aggressively for termination only days later. This fits his broader foreign-policy model: high-intensity coercion combined with low appetite for prolonged occupation or open-ended war.
There is a strategic logic to this approach.
Credible willingness to use overwhelming force can increase bargaining leverage.
Refusal to pursue regime change can limit mission expansion.
The weakness is that the adversary determines whether the conflict remains short too.
Trump could order the bombing of Fordow.
He could not guarantee Iran would retaliate symbolically rather than kill Americans.
The strategy succeeded in remaining limited partly because Iran itself chose a limited response.
That should reduce triumphalism.
Crisis management is interactive.
The opponent gets a vote.
The ceasefire itself illustrates how personalised diplomacy can sometimes move faster than institutional negotiation. Trump publicly announced the agreement, communicated directly with regional actors and then criticised both Israel and Iran when violations appeared to threaten it. Rapid presidential intervention can be effective when decisions need to be made within hours.
But personalised diplomacy has a durability problem.
Trump will eventually leave office.
Netanyahu will eventually leave office.
Iran’s current leadership will eventually change.
A ceasefire depending primarily on individual leaders’ calculations needs to become embedded in institutions if it is to survive.
Monitoring.
Communication channels.
Nuclear inspections.
Clear red lines.
Regional diplomacy.
These are less dramatic than presidential phone calls.
They are what convert temporary restraint into stable expectations.
The Gulf states have strong incentives to support such institutionalisation. Qatar became directly involved when Iran targeted Al Udeid. Saudi Arabia and the UAE watched a conflict capable of threatening energy infrastructure and investment. All three have spent years attempting to diversify their economies away from oil dependence and present the Gulf as a global hub for capital, tourism, technology and logistics.
Regional war threatens that development model.
This means the Gulf increasingly has a commercial interest in geopolitical stability.
Economic diversification can therefore change foreign-policy incentives.
A state dependent almost entirely on oil exports can sometimes tolerate regional instability if oil prices rise.
A state building airlines, financial centres, tourism and technology clusters loses much more from instability.
Development changes the utility function.
This may explain why Gulf governments have increasingly pursued dialogue with Iran even while maintaining close Western security relationships.
They do not need to trust Tehran.
They need conflict risk low enough that investors continue treating the region as investable.
India’s incentives are similar. The immediate oil-market panic has moderated as the ceasefire reduced fears around Hormuz, but the episode again demonstrated India’s exposure to Middle Eastern instability. India imports most of its crude oil, receives enormous remittance flows from citizens working in the Gulf and depends on regional shipping routes.
A conflict involving Iran, Israel and Gulf infrastructure therefore is not distant foreign policy.
It affects India’s inflation, current account, diaspora and connectivity.
This is why India benefits from maintaining relations with competing regional powers.
Israel provides defence and technology cooperation.
Iran provides geography and connectivity towards Central Asia.
The Gulf provides energy, investment and employment for millions of Indians.
America remains a central strategic and economic partner.
India cannot maximise all relationships simultaneously.
It can diversify enough that one crisis does not eliminate every option.
Again, strategic autonomy functions like portfolio diversification.
The broader global lesson concerns nuclear proliferation incentives. North Korea will observe that Iran’s non-nuclear status allowed Israel and America to attack directly. Saudi Arabia will observe it. South Korea will observe it. Japan will observe it. States facing powerful adversaries will ask whether conventional alliances remain sufficient or whether ultimate deterrence requires nuclear capability.
The United States therefore needs to ensure the post-war settlement does not unintentionally teach that lesson too strongly.
Security guarantees matter.
Alliance credibility matters.
Non-proliferation institutions matter.
If countries trust external guarantees, they need nuclear weapons less.
If guarantees appear conditional or reversible, domestic nuclear debates become stronger.
This connects Iran unexpectedly with Ukraine.
Both cases affect how governments price the value of security assurances versus independent deterrence.
A world where every medium power concludes it needs nuclear weapons would be dramatically more dangerous, even if each individual decision appears rational.
Non-proliferation is therefore a collective-action problem.
Everyone may prefer a world with fewer nuclear states.
Each vulnerable state can still prefer possessing its own weapon.
International institutions exist to alter that calculation.
The twelve-day war may have made their job harder.
Iran’s domestic politics could also change substantially. The regime can portray survival against Israel and the United States as evidence of resilience. Critics can point towards the extraordinary penetration of Iranian intelligence and air defence as evidence of institutional failure. Both narratives can coexist.
This is where authoritarian information problems become important.
Iran needs to understand how Israeli intelligence penetrated its military leadership and nuclear networks.
A security system responding primarily through purges can remove genuine infiltrators.
It can also create paranoia that damages organisational effectiveness.
Officials become afraid to communicate.
Command becomes more centralised.
Bad news travels upward less reliably.
Again, counter-intelligence can impose a paranoia tax long after the bombs stop.
Israel may therefore receive continuing strategic benefits from demonstrating penetration even if Iran replaces physical infrastructure.
But Iran will adapt.
That is why intelligence advantages should never be assumed permanent.
The conflict also leaves Gaza and Lebanon unresolved. Hezbollah was weakened severely before this war, reducing Iran’s ability to retaliate through Lebanon and probably making Israel more willing to attack Iran directly. This demonstrates how theatres interact. Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah changed the balance with Iran. Assad’s collapse weakened Iranian logistics. Those changes altered the expected cost of striking Iranian nuclear facilities.
The June war therefore did not begin suddenly.
It was the product of a regional balance that shifted cumulatively during 2024 and 2025.
This is important because deterrence depends on networks, not isolated capabilities.
Iran’s nuclear programme became more vulnerable partly because its conventional and proxy deterrence weakened first.
Tehran will understand that.
Its future strategy may therefore focus on rebuilding redundancy across missiles, proxies, cyber capabilities and potentially nuclear latency.
Israel’s future strategy will attempt to prevent exactly that.
The security competition therefore continues even while the shooting stops.
This is why describing the ceasefire as “peace” would be inaccurate.
It is an armed pause inside an unresolved deterrence contest.
The most useful indicators over the next several months will not be victory speeches.
Does Iran allow IAEA inspectors meaningful access?
Where is the enriched uranium?
Does enrichment resume?
Do the United States and Iran restart negotiations?
Does Israel refrain from further strikes if Iran remains below agreed thresholds?
Do sanctions become bargaining instruments rather than permanent punishment?
Does Iran rebuild missile production?
These variables determine whether the war altered the equilibrium.
The casualty count and destroyed facilities tell us what happened during the twelve days.
The institutions created afterwards tell us what the twelve days accomplished.
That distinction matters because military history often overweights visible destruction.
A satellite image of a damaged nuclear facility looks decisive.
An inspection agreement looks bureaucratic.
Yet the second may ultimately constrain proliferation for longer than the first.
The best possible outcome from this war is therefore paradoxically one in which military success makes future military action less necessary.
Israel and America demonstrate capability.
Iran understands the cost of approaching weaponisation.
Iran receives a credible path towards sanctions relief if it accepts verification.
Inspectors return.
The programme remains constrained.
Regional states gain confidence that another war is less likely.
That would be coercive diplomacy functioning as intended.
The worst outcome is equally clear.
Iran withdraws from monitoring.
Moves nuclear activity underground.
Concludes a bomb is necessary.
Israel concludes every reconstruction effort requires another strike.
America is repeatedly drawn back into the conflict.
The Middle East enters a cycle of periodic preventive war.
Both futures remain possible.
The ceasefire has created the space in which the choice will be made.
That is why Trump’s claim that the Iranian nuclear programme has been “obliterated” should not become the endpoint of American strategy.
Even if every targeted facility were physically destroyed, the nuclear question survives because the political incentives survive.
Bombs can create time.
They cannot decide what governments do with it.
The twelve-day war has stopped.
The clock it purchased has started.
What happens during that clock will determine whether June 2025 becomes remembered as the war that prevented an Iranian nuclear weapon or the war that convinced Iran it eventually needed one.
