Coming full circle: The global implications of Israel’s success in Iran

Israel’s operations against Iran since June 13 have stunned military and strategic experts all over the world. And that will bear long-term consequences, beyond the short-term outcome.

America is now fully convinced that the IDF is the only army, outside its own, that has achieved a complete operational fusion of firepower, advanced technology, information (both human and non-human), and combat preparedness; and they suspect it to be superior in terms of strategic vista and morale. 

This is likely to boost an already intimate cooperation between the two countries, and to fend off the isolationists’ insistence that American military aid to Israel should be ended. A few months ago, Vice President Vance listed Israel’s defense technology as a “vital national interest” for the United States — the kind of compliment he is sparing with. 

The Europeans, who have barely awakened from a long military slumber since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, are realizing even more graphically, in front of the Iran-Israel war, the extent of the work required to establish a semblance of capacity for defense. Many experts and politicians see the IDF as  a model and a resource.

Russia — which has never severed its complex ties to Israel — must be panicked at the thought of Ukraine quickly learning from Israeli operational methods or being equipped with Israeli-tested technology. In addition, it must give a lot of thought to its geopolitical alignments, after losing its last foothold in the Levant with the fall of Assad’s Syria, and now facing the unraveling of its Iranian partner. 

India, by contrast, is taking pride in the steadily deepening relationship with Israel established twenty years ago. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit held on June 14-15 at Qingdao, Prime Minister Modi pointedly refused to endorse an anti-Israeli resolution.

Communist China has been betting on Iran for at least a decade, as part of the game of Go it is playing with the United States for control of the Middle East’s energy resources and trade routes. 

The partnership began with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015, followed by a 25-year strategic agreement in 2021, and culminated in a Chinese-brokered reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023. 

Some analysts even wonder whether China, who operates a naval base in Djibouti alongside France and the United States, has not been tempted to use Iran — or the Houthis — to test technologies against Western-made weapons. Iran’s current setbacks may lead Beijing to greater circumspection, at least for a while, not only in the Middle East, but also in East Asia.

Among Israel’s immediate neighbors, many are understandably relieved: from the leading Abraham Accords countries, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, to such close South European partners as Cyprus or Greece. For others — Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia —  the latest developments have been on the contrary seismic. 

Over the recent years, they had subscribed, or had been inclined to pay attention, to a key Iranian concept: the twin decline of America and Israel. They are shocked to learn they were mistaken.

The main exponents of the “twin decline” theory, and its corollary, a “final battle” meant to wipe Israel off the map and establish the Islamic Republic’s supremacy over the Middle East, were Major General Hossein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolution’s Guard Corps, the politico-military backbone of the Islamic regime, and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Mohammad Bagheri. Ironically, they were the first among the top brass to be eliminated at their Teheran homes by Israeli drones on June 13. 

Either out of brazenness or as a calculated ploy, to foment insecurity among the regime’s enemies, Salami spoke on these matters to the Iranian press on May 6, 2021, four days before a new battle between Israel and the Hamas-held Gaza began (the last such battle before October 7, 2023). 

“There is a gradual political decline of the great powers outside the region and inside the region,” Salami observed. The United States, once “arrogant” under Donald Trump, was “weakening,” “losing influence,” and in retreat under the Biden administration. America had been unable to protect Saudi Arabia against Houthi attacks from Yemen, and the Saudis were now begging for an Iranian mediation. 

Likewise, Salami added, the United States would not be able to protect and sustain much longer its top partner in the Middle East: Israel. Without American support, he said, the “Zionist regime” would quickly disintegrate, pointing to an ongoing political crisis, a “decaying economy,” and “growing numbers” of security setbacks. 

By contrast, Salami emphasized the achievements of the Al-Quds Force, the special IRGC branch operating outside Iran proper in “powerful centers” in Lebanon and Palestine.  

He also pointed to Iranian drones’ “range and accuracy,” enabling the Islamic Republic and its allies to neutralize other advanced military technologies, including anti-missiles systems. Ominously, he observed that a SS-20 missile almost hit the Dimona nuclear facility in southern Israel, and that “Israel can be destroyed in one single operation.” 

People observe fire and smoke from an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot on June 15, 2025 at Tehran. Photo by Stringer/Getty Images

Sober Turkish, Egyptian, or Saudi analysts knew better. They had a proper perception of the Israeli political crisis: a natural, if annoying, development in a democratic country. They were well informed about Israel’s economy: far from being in “decay,” it was to grow by 8.1 percent in 2021, against an OECD average of 5 percent. 

They had no doubt about the military strength of the Jewish state and that it was still outperforming Iran in defense technologies. And though Salami boasted of the AQF’s involvement in Lebanon and Palestine, they couldn’t help but see it as an unwitting admission that the Lebanese-Israeli conflict and even the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had become mere extensions of an Iranian-Israeli conflict, serving Iranian interests only.

However, Salami’s ultimate argument carried the day: Indeed, Israel lacked strategic depth, was smaller, and was more vulnerable to nuclear blackmail from Iran. Moreover, the days of the Israeli preemptive lightning operation (the Six Day war of 1967, the raid on the Tammuz nuclear plant in Iraq in 1982) seemed to be gone. The conclusion was that Israel’s might was bound to decline inexorably, and that friendship with Israel was a bad investment in the long term. 

The first nation to engage into this line of reasoning was Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty member who had been for years a close economic and military partner of the Jewish State, even in the first years of the Islam-oriented and neo-Ottoman Erdogan regime: bilateral relations have been suspended for the third time in the wake of October 7, and Ankara is now behaving openly as a hostile and threatening neighbor. 

Egypt, who signed a peace treaty in 1979, is growing ambivalent: while day-to-day security cooperation between the two countries is not relenting, experts have noted that its huge, American-funded military seems primarily deployed by now against Israel. 

Saudi Arabia, who had almost joined the Abraham Accords in 2019, is now making full bilateral relations conditional on Israel’s recognition of a sovereign Palestinian State. Which is the exact opposite of the Accords.

October 7 seemed initially to confirm that Israel was not working properly anymore. The subsequent counterattacks, and the fact that the IDF was able to fight on several fronts simultaneously, quickly changed the equation. Then, the decapitation of Hezbollah, the raids against the Houthis or inside Iran, and the induced disintegration of Syria improved Israel’s image even further. 

Finally, there is the present global war on Iran, which is both 1967 and 1982, albeit at a much larger scale. Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are left to ponder what might happen to them if they engage into a confrontation with Israel. Or in other terms, whether renouncing friendship was a sound move.