Rarely in modern history has a military offensive been as loudly and persistently foreshadowed as the June 2025 Israeli and American strikes on Iran’s nuclear program. For more than three decades, leaders in Tel Aviv and Washington have issued stark warnings about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions and activities, and five American presidents have pledged to prevent Tehran from crossing the threshold of nuclear weapons capability.
Despite this forewarning and the signals of imminent preparations, Israel’s initial attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure—capped by a brief but decisive U.S. intervention—still shocked Tehran and much of the world. The element of surprise helped facilitate the stunning success of the operation, which briskly decapitated Iran’s military leadership, secured Israeli air superiority over Iranian territory, blunted Iran’s ability to retaliate, and inflicted substantial damage on the crown jewels of the country’s nuclear infrastructure.
The virtuoso execution of the operation and the absence of an effective counterattack by Tehran or its once fearsome network of regional proxies led to another surprise: the rapid denouement to the crisis via an American-imposed cease-fire on the conflict’s 12th day. In less than two weeks, the joint U.S.-Israeli effort accomplished what many had thought impossible, delivering an extraordinary setback to Iran’s nuclear program without igniting a wider regional conflagration. Tehran’s retaliatory missile attacks on Israel, as well as a performative strike on the U.S. airbase in Qatar, were showy but ineffectual.
For many in Washington, the result seemed to exorcise the ghosts of failed or frustrated American military interventions in the Middle East over the past four decades. The remarkable outcome compounded a broader collapse in Tehran’s strategic posture that had begun the preceding year, when Israel decimated the regime’s most valuable asset—the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah—and Iran’s foothold in Syria crumbled alongside Bashar al-Assad’s regime. As the June conflict erupted, Iran’s ostensible strategic partners in Moscow and Beijing offered nothing more than mild condemnations.
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