On 28 February, Israel and the United States began joint military operations to dismantle what remains of Iran’s nuclear program and topple the country’s revolutionary regime. 

Hannah Gal spoke to Israeli researcher and former intelligence officer Shmuel Bar for Quillette to discuss these historic developments. The following interview covers the changing geopolitical map, the likelihood of Iran’s fragmentation, what the future holds for the Middle East, and why future negotiations are now off the table.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Quillette: Your PhD is in Middle Eastern studies but you are the founder of a company dealing with artificial intelligence.

Shmuel Bar: Our technology tries to overcome the conventional tendency to analyse strategic developments that could be turning points. This tendency prefers the “it hasn’t happened before therefore it is not likely to happen” interpretation of events. In lieu of this, we prefer to pose the questions that could reveal if and when we are on the cusp of a watershed event, and if something that did not happen before is about to happen. We try to ask not “What is happening now?” but rather “How do events that may seem disconnected merge and create second-order and third-order events that form the future?” The questions to ask are: “Where are we going? Where does all of this lead?” If events A, B, C, or D happen now, they may lead to E and F, both of which will lead to G in another year or two.

Q: The current conflict with Iran has been a long time coming. Netanyahu has been warning of Iran’s nuclear capabilities for over three decades.

SB: Iran is a case of imperial overextension. In an attempt to reach its imperialist goals, a country may attempt to achieve political and military influence in too many places at once. Iran achieved its status as a regional superpower by presenting power and capabilities that turned out to be far greater than what it actually had. The disclosure of the regime’s actual capabilities began when Israel confronted Iran directly after 7 October 2023. Since Hezbollah—Iran’s “crown jewel”—was firing rockets into northern Israel on Iran’s orders, Israel began to attack Iranian targets, first in Syria and then in Iran itself. Iran found itself in a dilemma: either retaliating extensively or refraining from retaliation would expose its weakness. 

The exposure of Iran’s basic weakness was the result of a domino effect. The Assad regime in Syria, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iranian proxies in Syria and Iraq were all instruments of Iran’s regional power. Hamas was severely degraded by the Israeli response to 7 October, an attack that turned out to be counterproductive for Hamas. The Houthis were severely hit by Israel and the US. Hezbollah’s leadership suffered a devastating blow after the Israeli “beeper attack” in September 2024 and subsequent air strikes. And then, in December, the Syrian regime was replaced by a regime that sees Iran as its enemy, also further weakening Hezbollah.

Iran viewed the Syrian regime as an important part of its strategic alignment, but it did not take into account—like many international intelligence communities—that the Assad regime was flimsy; it was propped up by Iran and the Russians and it did not really rule all of Syria. Once the Russians became busy with Ukraine and Iran seemed weaker, the Syrian regime was ripe fruit for its opposition. Israel then humiliated Iran in the June 2025 Twelve Day War, and the facade of a strategic regional superpower collapsed.

It is important to ask how this decline in Iran’s regional status is affecting its own domestic situation under circumstances of economic crisis, hyperinflation, and water shortages. The regime sent a message to its opposition that it is strong enough to deter and frighten America, Israel, and Britain etc, so its population should also be afraid of it, too. Domestic deterrence partly derives from regional and international deterrence, so the January protests were inevitable once Iran’s regional position weakened.

Q: People are trying to figure out the potential scenarios at hand. Trump is determined to avoid a long war of attrition, while Netanyahu might insist on continuing until all stated goals are met. Is the primary aim of both parties to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities?

SB: First, Iran could develop a destructive capability against Israel even without nuclear weapons. Israel will not accept this. So Israel had to take advantage of Iran’s weakness to eliminate Iran’s conventional capabilities. Second, the Iranian economy is in hyperinflation, people in big cities like Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad have about two or three hours of water a day. When you buy bread, the shop can’t buy a new loaf because the price of tomorrow’s bread has already gone up by twenty percent. There simply isn’t the money so the stores are empty.

So what are Iranians going to do if they don’t go out on to the streets to protest the state of the economy? They are saying, “Look at what you’ve done to us, you are throwing your money into Hamas and nuclear missiles instead of feeding us.” You have a deteriorating economy caught in a downward spiral, and a situation where Israel has a vested interest in getting rid of your missiles. And the June 2025 war showed that Israel knows a thing or two about what’s going on in Iran, and how to take out its senior figures.

As for Trump, it is probably best to avoid newspaper-like analysis that asks what he is doing today or tomorrow. Trump is saying, “Iran is weak and the Iranian people want to get rid of the regime, so all I have to do is push.” Let’s not forget that the regime has been chanting “Death to America!” for 47 years, and that it has murdered Americans. So from Trump’s point of view, he is taking revenge for all that and getting rid of a regime that the Democrats before him failed to remove. The way he sees it is: “In the end, I will have destroyed the most anti-American regime and made the Arab countries beholden to me as a result.” That is a win-win for Trump.

Q: Is there room for further negotiation with regards to nuclear capabilities?

SB: What will Iran negotiate with? Uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) gas is held in centrifuges. But the moment you cut off the electricity from those centrifuges, they break, and you can’t push the toothpaste back into the tube. In any case, the Iranians boasted about the amount of enriched uranium they have because they thought it would increase their leverage. After the Twelve Day War, the Americans knew they didn’t have much left so they said: “You are telling Russia that you have more, so you have to get rid of the nuclear program, you have to get rid of your ballistic missiles, you have to stop sending death to America and subverting the Arab states. That’s our ultimatum.” Why would the US present such an ultimatum? Because they knew that if the regime obliged, they would be cutting their own throats. This is an ideological regime, a regime that asks its people to give up everything. Trump knew that and waited for an opportune time to give the people his support for change.

Q: This surely means that there is going to be a new regime.

SB: This is a fallacy. There is a tendency to think that if a regime falls there has to be another regime in its place but this is not true. When the Roman Empire fell, it disappeared and no one replaced it. The Ottoman empire fell apart and was not replaced by anything. So why would you imagine that the Iranian regime will only fall if there’s an alternative in waiting. That’s not the way history works.

Q: Someone will need to govern the Iranian people...

SB: At the beginning of the 20th century in China, the emperor lived in the Forbidden City in Beijing, enjoying his life. But the country was run by warlords. The country didn’t disappear but it also didn’t function as a single polity. Afghanistan under the Taliban was still at the United Nations as a country, but it was just a group of different sub-countries. Is Somalia a country? The fact that you have one Somalia at the United Nations doesn’t mean anything.

Q: And Iran is made of many different ethnic groups...

SB: Ethnic groups are not the same as tribes. There are people who speak Azeri and there are people who speak Kurdish. The latter call themselves Kurdish and feel affiliation with the Kurds in Iraq. So if a person lives in Kulan in Iran’s Kurdistan province, for example, and sees that the Iranian regime is falling apart, what would they do? Well, they might talk to their Kurdish brothers in Iraq, while the Azeris might talk with other Azeris...

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Q: Will there will be fragmentation either way?

SB: Yes, this is definitely the most likely long-term scenario.

Q: As we speak, Iran is firing rockets at the Gulf states and Iranian oil refineries have been hit. The war is reportedly costing the United States a billion US dollars a day. Trump has stated that this conflict will last several weeks. What would constitute a successful war as far as Netanyahu and Trump are concerned?

SB: There is almost a consensus in Israel that this war is justified in order to get rid of the Iranian regime. Israelis don’t want a regime in their neighbourhood that continues to say it wants to kill Jews. The Khomeini Revolution in 1979 adopted antisemitism as a very basic part of its ideology. Did you know, for example, that if a Jew touches something in Iran, it becomes najis (impure)? Also, Iranian Shi’a adopted a way of seeing the world inherited from Zoroastrianism—there is a god and a dark god and they are fighting for control of the world. The Iranian clerics believe the good god is Iran, serving Allah, while the West is Satan, which it is Iranians’ duty to fight. The Islamic Revolution in Iran also introduced the idea of gharbzadegi or “Westoxification”—everything bad in the Muslim world, and certainly in Iran, comes from people being intoxicated by Western culture like it’s a drug. You therefore have to purify the people of Iran of this influence.

To understand the Iranian regime, you have to see the world through the prism of a really religious and ideological worldview. The problem with trying to explain this in the West is that Westerners are generally pragmatists, and they don’t do ideology. They think that every problem can be resolved with win-win negotiations. They can’t understand situations where people really believe that they are doing this for God.

I wrote a paper on religion and war in the 21st century, identifying how religion is used in war. Many years ago, when I was giving a briefing on jihadist terrorism, I explained that some Islamists are willing to martyr themselves because they believe they will be rewarded with 72 virgins in the afterlife. The head of an intelligence agency in Europe said to me, “Well, surely, you can’t really say that they believe that, that’s ridiculous.” He was from a former Soviet satellite country. He told me, “You know, where we are sitting now, a few years ago, everyone here was a communist, and then the Soviet Union fell and suddenly we realised that there were no communists at all, everybody was pretending to be a communist because everybody thought that somebody else was a communist.”

I told him about a Hamas operative who tried to commit a terrorist attack in Israel. His explosive belt didn’t blow up but the detonator went off, so he ended up in hospital. When he woke up, he smiled. The interrogator asked, “What are you smiling about?” He replied, “I’m in paradise.” The interrogator told him he was in hospital in Ashkelon but he was convinced that he was in heaven and there was no getting through to him. In a heavy Israeli accent, the interrogator then asked, “What do I sound like and what do I look like?” He replied, “You look and sound like a Jew.” The interrogator then asked, “Now tell me, are there Jews in heaven?” That finally broke him.

We need to understand this mentality, which is fundamentally different from the West. It is similar to the way that the West misunderstood Putin by underestimating the damage he was prepared to inflict on the Russian economy to accomplish his ideological goals. We have to consider matters in the terminology and the worldview of the adversary we are trying to analyse.

Q: Are we looking at an unbridgeable gap with Iran? Is this a problem without a solution?

SB: The mathematician Gödel proved in his famous Incompleteness theorem that some equations cannot be solved unless you change one of the key functions in that equation. Politically, we are using Western axioms to solve an equation that isn’t formulated in Western terms. This is self-defeating.

Q: We see media reports of Iranians mourning the death of Khamenei but we also see large protests against the regime.

SB: In January, the Iranian streets were full of people calling for the death for their dictator. But the regime can also call people to mourn in the streets and threaten those who don’t comply. Most people just want to get up in the morning and live their lives, but they may fear they will pay the price if they don’t join in.

Counterrevolutions or revolutions that topple dictatorships do not happen during a war because people are too busy surviving. They are concerned about securing food and basic essentials. The Russian Revolution came about because the country’s failure in World War I led to the rise of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The fall of Germany’s WWI regime created the Weimar Republic. The Ottoman Empire fell and gave birth to the Atatürk regime. Argentina’s military junta fell as a result of its defeat in the Falklands War. The military regime in Greece fell because Turkey occupied northern Cyprus. During a war, people don’t usually protest; it’s only afterwards—when the regime has been humiliated or even destroyed—that they try to take control.

Q: Is there a danger that Israel and America are drawn into a war of attrition?

SB: Trump’s goal is slightly different from Netanyahu’s, but it doesn’t really matter because the joint mission serves both goals. There’s not much danger of a war of attrition because the Iranian regime doesn’t have very much left. Their missile launch capability has collapsed. The moment they roll out a launcher to fire a missile, the site is attacked within minutes. It doesn’t matter how many missiles you have if you don’t have launchers. And they don’t have any air defence. It’s not going to be a war of attrition.

Q: What do you make of Keir Starmer’s conduct during the conflict?

SB: Starmer doesn’t understand foreign policy, only domestic policy, and he’s not even doing that very well. He seems to go for appeasement. Britain’s Muslim population is not even Shi’ite, it’s mostly Sunni. And the centre of Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia, is definitely not pro-Iranian. Pakistan has some relations with Iran but Pakistan is also an extremely anti-Shi’ite regime. The Iranians have built a myth that if they are attacked, the world’s Muslims will rally for Iran. This is just a misperception of relations within the Muslim world. There is a fundamental difference between the Sunni and Shi’ite perception of the world and many people simply don’t understand these differences.

Q: Oil prices are rising, markets are anxious, and the war is causing havoc with global air travel. There is a great deal of economic uncertainty and chaos.

SB: The Iranians are trying to block the Strait of Hormuz. The US has the fifth fleet. It has the USS Lincoln and it has the USS Gerald R. Ford there. The Iranian navy is very old and small. It can’t do very much and it’s out in the Indian Ocean. How long do you think it will take two American aircraft carriers with seven or eight destroyers and another 300 planes to take out all of the Iranian navy and free the Hormuz? It’ll take a few days. Iran is more at a disadvantage than the world realises.  

Q: There seems to be a special relationship between Iranian people and the Jewish people. In the protests in London, we have seen Iranian, American, and Israeli flags flying together.

SB: There is a tradition in Iranian culture in which Jews are almost mythical. In other words, they have secret powers. There’s a lot in Iranian folklore in that direction. This idea informs conspiracy theories about both Jewish wisdom and evil. During the Shah’s reign, this idea helped to create good relations. On the other hand, it also helped Khomenei paint the Jews as a powerful enemy. As for the protests, Iranians are thinking about who can help them.

Q: Some observers have described the Islamic Republic as an octopus that reached around with its tentacles for 47 years.

SB: Yes, but it has lost many of its arms. Hamas is out, or almost out. Hezbollah is almost out. The Houthis are on the ropes. The Iraqi militias are starting to look around inside Iraq. The Syrian regime is out. What do they have left? They can’t negotiate because nobody wants to negotiate with them. They can’t accept Trump’s ultimatum, which would basically say they were wrong for 47 years and that they give up. They will never do that.

Q: What does the future hold for Iran?

SB: The regime will start to crumble as the people within the IRGC and the army start to ask themselves, “What exactly are we doing here?” These are historic times. We’re talking about the emergence of a new world order. We don’t always realise when we are in the middle of that sort of change, but such a change is happening right now. The new world order is spearheaded by a combination of things, including the terrible condition of the Iranian economy and the huge mistake of launching the 7 October massacre. In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, Muhammad Bin Salman is looking to forge a more Western-oriented and less religious country.

Q: Why have Russia and China not helped Iran?

SB: Russia is too busy losing its military in Ukraine, and China learned the lesson from the Russian debacle in Syria: if you support a hated regime, don’t expect its replacement to like you.