Over the past two years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has sustained a series of major blows that may prove fatal to its survival over time. These have included the extended Israeli assault on its key non-state ally, Hizbullah, in Lebanon, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria – its closest supporter in the Arab world – and the very public manifestation of its own weakness, in intelligence and military terms, as Israeli and US attacks on Iran’s nuclear programme, and military and political leadership, went almost without a response from the regime’s much-vaunted military apparatus.

The clearest and most remarkable expression of its vulnerability came on Saturday morning when US intelligence penetration of the regime at the highest levels enabled the Israeli assault that killed the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and dozens of other senior figures, including the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Despite all of this, there is little to indicate the likelihood of regime change in Iran in the immediate term.

Recent history suggests that the sort of outcome proclaimed both by US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu as the key objective of the current onslaught on Iran – the removal of the Islamic regime in Tehran – is only likely to come about if there is direct intervention in the country by the US military. There is no indication of planning for this on the part of the US leadership, nor of any willingness to countenance the prolonged and damaging conflict that would ensue from such intervention. Instead, both Trump and........

© The Irish Times