The recent Iran-Israel direct military confrontation, and the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have sparked a geopolitical rebalancing across the wider Middle East. From Islamabad to Ankara, capitals across West Asia are urgently rethinking their strategies after the dramatic events of the past two weeks. Every actor with a stake in the region’s decades-long conflicts is now re-evaluating its position and seeking to understand where the major powers and other regional countries stand. Most crucially, the lessons that Tehran and Tel Aviv draw from this showdown will shape the emerging power dynamics across the region.

The 12-day war catapulted the simmering covert and proxy battles between the two sides into a direct war of attrition, the first for Iran since the Iran-Iraq War. For three decades, the Islamic Republic had relied on various militias in its protracted conflict with both Israel and the US. But as the war came home — with direct Israeli attacks and targeted US strikes on Iran’s prized nuclear facilities — the absence of a capable air force able to defend Iran’s skies became evident.

Although this may be an outcome of decades-long sanctions that have constrained Iran’s military procurements, the fact that the Iranian air force did not engage Israeli fighter jets when they entered its airspace has significant implications for the post-ceasefire rebuilding of its nuclear enterprise. Tehran will have to factor in Israel’s air superiority as it seeks ways to regain control of its skies.

Politically, Iran now faces its most existential question: should it seek a nuclear shield to ensure the security of the regime?

For nearly three decades, Iranian leaders have toyed with the notion of ‘nuclear latency’ or ‘nuclear threshold’ — that is, putting in place the building blocks of a nuclear capability that would enable them to sprint toward a nuclear weapon whenever a political decision is made. US and Israeli strikes have sought to neutralise one of the bomb pathways — uranium enrichment — in which Iran has invested over the past decade. The extent of the setbacks to Iranian nuclear facilities is

© Dawn Prism