.jpeg)
A day after the United States struck Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, Iran on Monday (June 23) retaliated with missile attacks against the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the forward headquarters of the US Central Command.
The Iranian attack was telegraphed, calibrated, and evidently symbolic in nature. After promising retaliation following the American strikes, Iran gave “advance notice” to their Qatari and American counterparts to minimise casualties. Almost all Iranian missiles were intercepted, with no American or Qatari casualties reported.
This was confirmed by US President Donald Trump himself, who posted on Truth Social that Iran’s response was “weak and expected,” and “there will, hopefully, be no further HATE.”
“I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same,” he wrote.
Less than two hours later, Trump once again took to Truth Social to announce that Israel and Iran have agreed to “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” which will begin taking effect “in approximately 6 hours from now” after the two countries have “wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!”
Monday was the 11th straight day in which Iran and Israel exchanged missile strikes. According to reports, the latest Israeli strikes were the largest in scale, including an attack on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC’) headquarters.
Iran’s Qatar gamble
The American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites have neither eliminated Iran’s enrichment capabilities, nor destroyed its existing stock of enriched uranium.
Iranian officials claimed that stockpiles of 60%, 20%, and 3.67% enriched uranium had already been withdrawn from Fordow, partially or fully, ahead of the strikes. (This stockpile will remain central to Iran-US negotiations, if they ever resume).
Arab media reports suggest that Washington supplied advance notice to Tehran of its June 22 strikes, and communicated privately that the attacks were a “one-off” and that it was willing to resume negotiations.
Across the 10 days of Israeli attacks, the Iranians consistently maintained two positions – that it was willing to resume nuclear negotiations if Israel ceased its attacks, and that Iran would certainly attack US bases (including those in Arab states) if the US joined Israel’s attack.
After the American attacks, Tehran had to find the optimal point between acting to preserve the credibility of its threats, and restraining itself enough to retain space for negotiations and recuperate. This is more so given Iran’s abject economic condition, which has increasingly worsened over the last five years.
Among all Arab states, Qatar was arguably among the few where the Iranians could risk targeting US assets, and attempt to contain diplomatic fallout.
Qatar, which has positioned itself as a neutral mediator for the region’s many conflicts (including between Israel and Hamas), has long maintained strong ties with Iran. This relationship was among the crucial reasons for Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain imposing an unprecedented blockade on Qatar between 2017 and 2021. This blockade ended in 2021, two years before the Arab rapprochement with Iran.
Iran’s “advance notice” allowed Qatar to shut its airspace an hour before the attacks. Moreover, the US has spent the last week removing its aircraft from the base. By June 19, there were reportedly less than five American aircraft left at Al-Udeid.
Iran’s Israel challenge
While the US strikes were the first American military attacks on Iranian soil in history, it is Israel’s sustained attacks which have imposed the most substantial costs. Even if a ceasefire were to come into effect (and hold), over the past 12 days Israel has eliminated key IRGC leaders, all but decimated Iran’s homeland defences, damaged military, energy and nuclear sites, and posed an active threat to the Supreme Leader.
That said, Ali Khamenei has reportedly named his successors in the event of his own demise, and the IRGC has reorganised itself enough to sustain missile salvos against Israel. For Iran, this is both symbolically and substantially important.
Its threshold of success is lower, defined simply by its ability to hit Israel, beating both American air defence units in the region, and Israel’s multi-layered AD systems. Following the US strikes, the IRGC for the first time employed its homegrown Kheybar Shekan solid-fuel missiles against Israel.
This is what triggered a larger-than-before Israeli salvo on Monday. Before Trump announced the ceasefire, Israel’s campaign continued to be fought with the maximal objectives of both Iranian nuclear dismantlement and regime change. It is yet to be seen what will be the impact of the final round of strikes (if at all they are final).
However, any bombing campaign, let alone a one-off strike, is likely to only delay, not end, Iran’s road to a nuclear weapon. It is this clear inference that has always pushed both the US and Europe to seek negotiations with Tehran, despite the severe imbalance in conventional military power.
What did not happen
Despite issuing threats to this end, Tehran in the end did not close — or even try to close — the Strait of Hormuz, as has also been the case in the past. The Strait is vital for both global and Iranian energy needs, and even now, the Iranian position is not dire enough to warrant a blockade.
What is more interesting is the complete absence of its proxies in the Iranian retaliation.
While the Yemeni Houthis declared an end to their April ceasefire with the US, the group has not yet resumed attacks against US shipping. The Houthis have thus far shown a marked ability to start/halt attacks on their own terms.
On the other hand, Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, has consistently maintained ambiguity, especially in the light of its significant internal challenges.
Even after the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel, Hezbollah engaged only in calibrated rocket and drone attacks, drawing Israeli retaliation at a level it could absorb. Hassan Nasrallah did not commit to a full-scale war — until Israel initiated it in the second half of 2024, and killed Nasrallah himself.
On June 20, Hezbollah’s current chief, Naim Qassem, expressed strong solidarity with Iran amid Israel’s attacks, but committed only to “act as we see fit” — retaining the ambiguity that the group has now preferred for the past 20 months.
In Iraq, Iran has cultivated the Hashd-al-Shaabi as an umbrella proxy group since 2019, after their successful campaign against ISIS in Iraq. The government in Baghdad, though firmly opposed to the Israeli and American aggression against Tehran, has long worked to remove Iraq as a proxy battleground, and to potentially integrate the Hashd, which has a strength of about 50,000 fighters collectively, into Iraq’s armed forces.
While US bases in Iraq were most expected to bear the brunt of any Iranian retaliation, Iran evidently did not press this militia into action, much like in January 2020.
That month, after the US assassinated Iran’s Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani, the IRGC launched missiles directly at US bases at Ain-al-Assad and Erbil in Iraq but excluded Hashd from an operational role. The Americans did not suffer any casualties, and chose not to escalate — then too Iran had telegraphed its impending attack.
Not using its proxies, arguably allows Iran a greater ability to calibrate its actions, with relatively lesser risk of inadvertent escalation. But the attack on Al-Udeid was nonetheless markedly different from the Iranian 2020 action in Iraq.
The Al-Udeid base is the US military’s crown jewel in the Middle East. The 29 year old self-sufficient base houses 10,000 troops from multiple countries and is the nerve-centre for US operations in the region. However, like in 2020, the US has recognised Iran’s need to save face, and has refrained from escalating in response.
What now?
What Trump’s latest post makes amply evident is that Washington has zero appetite to get bogged into another, possibly protracted conflict in the Middle East. The big questions now are whether Israel will indeed stop well short of its repeatedly reiterated maximalist goals or if Iran would indeed be willing to take Trump’s olive branch.
Note that despite threatening to withdraw from the NPT and suspending cooperation with the IAEA, Iran’s economic imperatives to negotiate remain. As long as Israel follows suit, there is not much Iran is likely to gain from continuing its attacks.
In the larger scheme of things, the developments of the past few days might have convinced the Arab states in the Middle East of the value of nuclear deterrence. While Saudi Arabia and the UAE have long worried about an Iranian nuclear weapon and Iranian or Houthi-led attacks against their energy sites, Israeli actions may have potentially created a new threat-in-being.
The UAE completed the first nuclear power plant of the Arab world last year, and Saudi is on the road to its own. One downstream impact of the Israeli aggression against Iran may be an increase in the collective Arab anxiety, regardless of their recent rapprochement with Israel.
