Beyond Victory: How Should Israel’s War Against Iran Be Assessed?

BESA Center | Dr. Eado Hecht and Prof. Eitan Shamir

Iran's grand strategy against Israel relied on three mutually reinforcing pillars: the multi-front "Ring of Fire" proxy network, long-range ballistic missile arsenals, and a nuclear program designed to secure strategic immunity. Following Yahya Sinwar's premature October 7, 2023 offensive, sustained Israeli military campaigns severely degraded proxy capabilities across Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria by December 2024.

This structural breakdown compelled Tehran to shift from an integrated offensive posture to a defensive strategy by accelerating its nuclear breakout timeline and long-range missile production throughout 2025. In response, Israeli and joint American military operations in June 2025 and March 2026 targeted these critical facilities to prevent Iran from reconstructing its regional threat architecture. Ultimately, Israeli strategic success cannot be measured by immediate regime change or battlefield destruction tallies, but by how effectively these preventive campaigns disrupted Tehran’s long-term capability to project force and pose an existential threat.

Comment

The conceptual collapse of Tehran’s "Ring of Fire" demonstrates the inherent friction of relying on geographically dispersed proxy forces to execute a synchronised multi-front war. While Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds Force (IRGC-QF) doctrine assumed autonomous proxy cells in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza could coordinate simultaneous saturation fires, localised tactical initiatives—exemplified by Hamas’s premature execution of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—decoupled the proxy network from Tehran's strategic timeline.

This operational decoupling exposes the structural vulnerability of proxy-based deterrence when centralised command authority lacks tight operational control over peripheral execution. When frontline commanders operate without real-time integration into IRGC-QF command nodes, decentralised initiative risks triggering theatre-wide escalation before supporting fires from ballistic platforms like the Khorramshahr-4 or Sejgil can be properly sequenced. Consequently, the timing breakdown during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood permanently disrupted the combined-arms sequencing required between Hezbollah's rocket barrages and IRGC-QF ballistic missile launches.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which role does Tehran's ballistic missile arsenal—including heavy systems like the Khorramshahr-4—primarily fulfill when IRGC-QF command nodes lose operational synchronisation with regional proxies: an independent strategic deterrent or a secondary retaliatory mechanism?

The operational record of recent escalations suggests that heavy ballistic assets like the Khorramshahr-4 function predominantly as secondary retaliatory instruments rather than true strategic deterrents. Without pre-coordinated saturation fires from frontline proxy networks, standalone missile salvos remain vulnerable to multi-layered air defence integration, thereby diminishing their capacity to constrain enemy decision-making prior to hostilities. Consequently, loss of proxy synchronisation degrades Tehran's long-range arsenal from an offensive shield into a reactive punishment mechanism.

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