Netanyahu wants to prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but at what price?

The attack plans had been ready for years. It remained to find the right moment. By launching his country in a war against Iran, on June 13, 2025 before dawn, Benyamin Netanyahu plays his va-all. The Israeli Prime Minister, in power for more than seventeen years in the past three decades, is faithful to the promise on which he has built his political career: never let Iran of Mollahs access the atomic weapon. Even if it means redrawing, at the end of a new armed conflict called to last, the political map of the Middle East. In his speech in English intended for international opinion, the Head of Government bluntly fixed his war goal: “to dismiss the Iranian threat to the existence of Israel”, by destroying the Iranian nuclear potential, economic and administrative sites in order to cause the fall of the Islamic regime. But is it credible?

Admittedly, the circumstances are favorable. Last October, Israeli strikes led to Iran’s anti -aircraft defense system. For months, “the resistance axis”, the Allies of Tehran, has been dismantled; The military potential of Hamas in Gaza, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, has been significantly destroyed; The Syrian army has not been a threat since the fall of Bashar El Assad; The Houthi rebels of Yemen represent only peripheral risk for the Hebrew state. Israeli intelligence services also have a remarkable network of informants in Iran, as evidenced by the targeted executions of senior military officials.

In Washington, above all, Donald Trump continues to recall that in any case Tehran can only become a nuclear power. Finally, on June 12, 2025, UN experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency have, for the first time in twenty years, denounced violations by Iran of its obligations by noting the presence of “illicit nuclear materials” on its atomic sites. A dissemination that falls at stake for a disputed Netanyahu inside his country, prosecuted for corruption and whose government failed to fall on the same day in Parliament. The Israeli cabinet now believes that Iran would have enriched enough uranium to make 15 nuclear heads and would have entered the testing phase.

Dangerous uncertainties

If he managed to fulfill his double objective, the Prime Minister would no doubt win, and despite the dead in Gaza, his place in the Pantheon of the State of Israel, at the level of the founding father, David Ben Gourion. The Islamic Republic has never ceased, in fact, to place the annihilation of “the Zionist entity” at the heart of its rhetoric since its creation, more than half a century ago. But can Netanyahu reasonably believe in it as the vagaries are numerous?

First, the magnitude (thousands of centrifuge) and the dissemination on dozens of buried sites of the nuclear program makes its total destruction improbable. The targeted elimination of Iranian physicists for fifteen years was able to slow down its boom but is not enough. However, Israeli aviation does not have the type of bomb necessary to strike in depth in the basement. “We can worry that in reaction, Iran is finally convinced that it has no choice but to develop nuclear weapons as an ultimate deterrence,” notes Darya Dolzikova, analyst at the Royal United Services Institute. Netanyahu would only have precipitated the result he wanted to avoid. At best, “it would delay several years” the deadline, estimates at the National Institute for Security Studies in Tel Aviv, researcher Danny Citrinowicz.

Hope for an uprising

However, a Shiite Iran holding nuclear fire is the assurance of seeing Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt to choose to imitate it. A nightmare. Then, many depends on Donald Trump, with volatile positions. Warned by the attack, the president did not prevent him and indicated that it was possible that the United States gets involved in the conflict; After saying the opposite 48 hours earlier. What would happen if the American bases in the region were struck by Iran or its networks? This is the other danger: all war bears in it the risk of climbing. If neighboring countries were affected, Western pressure on Netanyahu to stop his attacks not immediately rising from several notches?

Finally, can the Iranian people and do they want to provoke the fall of a regime, certainly mainly hated by their youth, but who still controls the repression apparatus? By giving his offensive the code name “the lion that rises”, a possible allusion to the emblem of the ex-Persian monarchy, the Prime Minister suggests the hope of an uprising of the “great Iranian people that we admire,” he said. But then again, this is more of the bet than cold strategy.