It began, as so many events begin in the Middle East these days, with missiles flying through the darkness. As the first impacts struck targets inside Iran at between three and four AM local time, questions piled up. Was this only an Israeli operation or were the Americans involved? How deep would the target list go? Would it be demonstrative or destructive, threatening the survival of the regime? And would a wider war inevitably result?

Early reports indicate that Israel’s air force and intelligence agencies undertook strikes on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — Quds Force (the IRGC’s foreign operations unit), the IRGC’s Aerospace Force, and on parts of Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme and its leading scientists and administrators. Israeli sources have predicted an immediate Iranian response of hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles launched at Israel. It is unknown at this time whether the Israeli campaign of strikes is time-limited, and what the Israeli response to the inevitable Iranian counterattack will be. As so often in the Middle East, an exchange of fire could be over within a few days, almost forgotten in a month, or it could begin a new conflict that lasts ten years.

The toll of the strikes will be difficult to compute, not least because Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are likely to be hushed up or obfuscated away. There is no incentive to be honest for a regime that believes a degree of mystification about its nuclear programme protects it from invasion and overthrow.

The high profile dead include the IRGC leader Hossein Salami, the army chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri, Gholam Ali Rashid, who was a regional commander, and the nuclear scientists Fereydoon Abbasi and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi. All of their deaths were confirmed by Iranian state media. Reuters quotes one senior Iranian military source as saying up to twenty senior commanders were killed, but we do not know many of their names. It is widely asserted that the death of so senior a man as Salami would necessitate a massive Iranian response. But when the United States killed Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC—Quds Force and the Islamic Republic’s most visible commander, in 2020, the Iranian response was muted, despite rhetoric suggesting hellfire and American annihilation.

Donald Trump, who ordered the killing of Soleimani and who has been for some time marked for assassination by Iran, congratulated the Israelis on their actions and said Iran must negotiate with him as fast as possible.

The result of all of this will not be the building in quick time of a new order. Instead, it’s as likely to bring the injection of a new element of chaos into the region. If the American president can be believed, in his summing up on Truth Social overnight, the primary goal of this wave of strikes was not the damage they caused, but the threat of more and worse to come. Trump’s post suggested that Iran must negotiate with him, and conclude the nuclear deal his administration has ineffectively but obsessively pursued for months, or the end might come to what Trump called the Iranian Empire.

But the opposite is as likely to happen. Iran may have been perfectly willing to sign a new nuclear deal that gave away as much as the last one, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action from 2015. But if its leadership is threatened and some of it killed, and its nuclear scientists are being whittled down, Iran’s leaders may decide that all negotiations with the Americans are worthless. That Israel will do whatever it wants, no matter what the Americans say. Reuters reports that the Iranians have withdrawn from nuclear negotiations scheduled for this weekend.

Some in Israeli and American security circles are jubilant. They think this is the beginning of the long-overdue overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Many critics see the project of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s life to be the overthrowing of the Iranian regime by the United States, with everything he has done for a quarter of a century tending towards that end. At the moment, America is staying out of the war, although President Trump said that more American weapons, the ‘most lethal’ in the world, were on their way to Israel.

Despite taking loss after loss for the past eighteen months, since the October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023 by Hamas, the Iranian regime is not going to fall without a push. It survived the women’s rights protests of 2022 and 2023 following the murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police thugs — and did so much more easily than its opponents anticipated.

The destruction of the leadership of Hezbollah and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria have denied Iran effective proxies. But neither collapse threatened the regime in Tehran. When the American Operation Rough Rider targeted the Houthi movement in Yemen, an Iranian proxy, it inflicted much damage on some Houthi networks and killed some key people. But the operation ended in a draw, or even a tactical American defeat.

The Islamic Republic has cards to play. It has withstood punishing sanctions for many years and has not fallen. The Iranian public does not like the regime and has protested many times and in its millions against the authorities’ worst excesses. But, every time, the Islamic Revolution has survived. Its networks of repression are sophisticated and deep. Unless Israel targets them, the regime will retain much of its practical control of the country.

Across the Middle East, even after taking a pounding from Syria’s rebels, from Israel in Lebanon, from the United States in Yemen, Iranian proxies in the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ are large and capable. An initial Hezbollah statement last night implies it might sit out this exchange of fire, but that does not mean it will not fight in other circumstances.

If they were given the order, Iranian proxies could ignite a vicious civil war in Iraq, just as they have murdered many public intellectuals and critics in that country over the years and menaced the country’s leaders. Continual Iranian efforts to undermine and overthrow the transitional authorities in Syria, meanwhile, could work in tandem with Islamic State terrorism and, perhaps ironically, the Israeli occupation of Syria’s south begin again the civil war there.

The fall of the regime in Tehran, which still seems unlikely, might temporarily end the nuclear question. But it would introduce a new element of chaos into the region. Iranian proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and the Shia militias in Iraq would have no orders to follow if the regime in Tehran went down in flames. They might settle down, or they might become more violent and disruptive. In fifty years, the overthrow of the Islamic Republic might seem an obvious good, removing one of the more malignant actors the Middle East has ever seen. But it could take that long to pay dividends — or by contrast, threatening the regime could engulf the region in a new wave of violence unseen in decades.

A wider war would be a big gamble. But as Israel has shown when it destroyed the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programmes in years past, when it entered Gaza in 2023, and invaded Lebanon soon after, and occupied part of Syria this year, its leaders are always prepared to gamble — no matter the odds.