The U.S. faces a consequential choice: take advantage of Israel’s audacious attacks on Iran to shepherd a new Middle East into existence, or allow this transformational strategic opportunity to pass. By giving Israel the time it needs to destroy Iranian military capacity, Washington can seize a strategic advantage in Europe and Asia.
Operation Rising Lion is a prime example of Israeli strategic culture. Israel doesn’t adapt well to fluid situations, in which it must react on the fly. The Oct. 7, 2023, attacks are a case in point: The Jewish state was frozen for much of the attacks, with individual heroism, not strategic response capacity, driving back Hamas. But when Israel has the time and capacity to plan an operation down to the smallest detail, the results are spectacular, whether the pager/walkie-talkie attack that crippled Hezbollah’s leadership, the September 2024 commando raid against an Iranian missile facility in northwestern Syria, the 2007 attack on Syria’s nuclear site, or the 1981 strike against Iraq’s Osirak reactor.
Rising Lion is on a completely different scale from those earlier operations. Israel sequenced its opening moves, simultaneously disabling Iran’s remaining air defenses and radars, killing high-ranking Iranian military leaders, and hitting Iranian missile silos. Subsequent strike waves began against nuclear and conventional military targets. Israel has crippled Iran’s command structures, dented its missile arsenal and substantially damaged its nuclear weapons program, hitting key sites in Isfahan, Arak, Natanz and Parchin. Israel also killed several Iranian nuclear scientists and leaders involved with the nuclear program, extinguishing crucial institutional and bureaucratic knowledge and creating more hurdles between enrichment and weaponization. If Rising Lion ended tonight, Israel would have set back Iran’s nuclear program by one to three years.
Yet the crown jewel in Iran’s nuclear program, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, remains. Housing several thousand centrifuges and buried 80 to 100 yards underground, the facility would allow Iran to reconstitute a fissile material stockpile even if other elements of its nuclear infrastructure are badly damaged. Israel has two options to destroy Fordow. It can drop a large number of 1,000-pound and 5,000-pound bunker-busters, using its understanding of the facility’s design to maximize damage and dig through layers of soil, rock and concrete. This would take several strike waves, increasing the risk that Iran’s remaining air defenses might “trap” Israeli fighters. Alternatively, Israel could stage a commando raid, physically sabotaging the site, with profound risks to personnel.
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Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute.
