Iran’s bar for victory was survival. It survived. Approximately 440 kilograms of enriched uranium — enough, if further enriched, for ten or more nuclear weapons — remain in Iranian hands, reportedly stored in hardened underground facilities at Isfahan that US strikes have not destroyed and may not be able to reach without a ground operation. Its missile capabilities, though degraded, remain. The regime is still in control. Whatever this ceasefire is, it is not a victory for Israel.

The goals were ambitious and explicit. Trump stated the objectives of the war were to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, eliminate their navy, prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons, and stop Iranian proxies from holding power. Netanyahu, for his part, consistently communicated that the central objective was regime change. These were not modest aims. They were a promise to fundamentally alter the strategic reality of the Middle East. The ceasefire announced last night tells a different story.

Iran’s missile capabilities are degraded but intact. The enriched uranium remains. The regime survived — and the dynastic transfer of power from Khamenei to his son, unprecedented in the Islamic Republic, signals institutional fragility, not collapse. Trump and Netanyahu’s objectives had been diverging for weeks. The ceasefire has made that fracture permanent.

The distance between ambition and outcome is sharpest when measured against what Netanyahu told Trump before the first strike. On February 11, according to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in the New York Times, Netanyahu made a hard sell in the White House Situation Room — suggesting Iran was ripe for regime change and that a joint US-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic. His team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The Strait of Hormuz would remain open. The regime would be so weakened it could not retaliate against US interests in neighboring countries. American officials were not convinced. General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was blunt: “Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)