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For decades, predictions about a war with Iran carried an air of inevitability: Analysts warned a conflict would close the ranks of the Iranian military and political elite, unite the Iranian people behind the regime, unleash the vengeance Tehran foretold, set the Middle East ablaze, sending oil prices to the roof, and even ignite a world war.

And yet, literally none of this happened.

Instead, the 12-Day War pitting Israel, and later the United States, against Iran exposed just how brittle those assumptions were. The fighting remained narrowly contained, and Tehran’s vaunted “Axis of Resistance” stood idle. The regime emerged more fractured than fortified and, despite its best efforts, the people of Iran did not rally around it. Indeed, public anger at years of misrule reemerged as soon as the fighting stopped. Tehran did not leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, did not close the Strait of Hormuz, and did not strike U.S. bases across the region. Its partners in Moscow and Beijing stayed on the sidelines, and even Hizballah refused to enter the fight.

Rather than confirming the inevitabilities so often invoked in Western capitals, the confrontation exposed the limits of Iran’s power, the fragility of its partnerships, and the deep gulf separating state and society in Iran. This does not mean, however, that this is what will happen again should Israel and America choose to attack once more.

Whether the next round spirals out of control will hinge on Iran’s ability to rebuild military capacity and its willingness to take risks, especially with missile strikes against Israel or U.S. forces. At the same time, structural constraints tied to regime survival — Tehran’s reluctance to provoke a war it cannot win — will continue to limit how far it goes. The 12-Day War has unearthed a number of misguided assumptions that have long been dominant regarding likely ramifications from a war against Iran – domestically, regionally, and globally.

Iranian Elite Cohesion?

It has long been assumed that a war would close the ranks of Iran’s military and political elite, in the effort to ward off foreign pressure, and thereby prolong the regime’s lifeline. Although no apparent rifts occurred among Tehran’s power elite, there were hidden fissures among an establishment adamant to portray rock-solid unity and closed ranks. For instance, during Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s hiding in a bunker during the war, some potential successors brought themselves into position, while others reportedly tested the muddied waters for a soft coup on the back of the decapitation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ top command. In the meantime, the war has not appeased — or closed the ranks — of intra-elite rivalry. After the war, disagreements over the best way to ensure regime survival during these times of foreign military threats — e.g. on the issue of Tehran’s red line of enriching uranium — have added another layer to this.

All this shows how the war has made elite cohesion more fragile instead of mending fissures. However, more importantly, Israel’s attack was predicated upon a vast intelligence penetration of Iran, especially the highest echelon of its power elite. This dimension alone reveals that elite cohesion in Iran is akin to a house of cards, with immense distrust reigning among Tehran’s political, military, and intelligence establishment. This acute fear over being surrounded by Israeli agents was also the reason why Khamenei fled to a bunker during Israel’s assault, while cutting most communication even with the rest of the ruling elite.

And more recently in mid-August, in an unprecedented manner, Khamenei did not attend the top Shiite mourning ceremony of Arbaeen in his office’s Hosseiniyeh (Shiite mourning hall). His renewed disappearance occurred just days after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, in response to an assassination list of Israeli top figures released by a Telegram channel affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had threatened him personally: “I suggest to the Iranian dictator Khamenei that when he leaves the bunker, he occasionally look up at the sky and listen carefully to every buzz.”

Rallying-‘Round-the-Flag Effect?

In contrast to Israeli suggestions, Iranians have largely opposed foreign aggression and did not — for various reasons — embark upon bringing down the regime in the fog of war. They have expressed their patriotism but not necessarily pro-regime nationalism or sentiments that would have amounted to a conventionally conceived rallying-‘round-the-flag effect — i.e. one that would have stabilized the regime through newfound public support.

While the Iranian regime has been trying to abuse this patriotic sentiment during and since the end of the war, it is unlikely to benefit from it even in the mid-term. Public disenchantment with the authorities’ incompetent governance has already reemerged, as a water and electricity-shortage crisis has gripped Iranians’ daily life this past summer. More generally, Iran’s systemic political, socioeconomic, ecological, and gender-based crises are unlikely to allow the immense gap between state and society to close anytime soon, short of radical political and economic transformation. This overall situation will continue to place regime stability on a fragile footing, while authoritarian rule may be sustained by the lack of an organized opposition.

The Middle East in Flames?

A war, it has been argued, would open the gate for a geographically boundless and protracted regional and even global conflagration. Instead, despite the U.S. entry on the 10th day, we have seen a war limited to Israel and Iran. In fact, Tehran’s regional network — the Axis of Resistance — was not activated. While the latter was significantly weakened by Israel in 2024, Lebanese Hizballah — the longtime crown jewel of the axis — even publicly proclaimed to not enter the war between its archenemy Israel and its Iranian patron, even after the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. Even Yemen’s Houthis — the remaining disruptive member of the axis — did not escalate its missile attacks on Israel during the war. And Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite militias did not target U.S. bases in their country. Those regional allies’ reluctance to enter the fray has been a combined result of their historic weakening since 2024 and, in the cases of Lebanon and Iraq, the mounting pressures these pro-Iranian forces face domestically to abandon their role as Tehran’s proxies. Also, neither of those two groups had the appetite to provoke a destructive Israeli and/or U.S. military retaliation against them by supporting Iran. In this context, it has also been argued that war would cost the lives of a high number of American soldiers and also cause oil prices to skyrocket. Neither, in fact, happened, as Washington evacuated personnel from the Middle East and oil prices remained relatively stable.

In fact, the timing of Israel’s assault was barely surprising in retrospect. After all, in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas operation against Israel, Iran’s notorious Axis of Resistance had unraveled, if not collapsed: Hizballah, Iran’s once-powerful iron fist at Israel’s doorstop, had been eviscerated in September 2024, Hamas militarily debilitated during Israel’s relentless bombings of the Gaza Strip, the Assad regime in Syria — Iran’s land route toward arming Hizballah — had collapsed like a house of cards in December 2024, and Yemen’s Houthis had just endured another weeks-long bombing campaign by Washington. As such, Tehran’s regional muscles were largely crippled if not amputated. With Operation Rising Lion, Israel’s “Octopus Doctrine” reached its erstwhile peak: After cutting off Tehran’s main regional limbs, the way to the “head of the octopus” was cleared. In other words, with the Axis of Resistance having become a shadow of its former self, escalation via proxies was simply not in the cards for Tehran.

To prevent a nuclear-armed Iran in the long term, to destroy its expansive ballistic missile infrastructure, and to “improve Israel’s strategic balance” (according to an unnamed senior military official), Israel thus used a window of opportunity. The latter had resulted from Iran’s historic regional weakness, its diplomatic preoccupation with Washington (after all, Israel’s attack occurred just ahead of the sixth round of U.S.-Iranian negotiations), concomitant military unpreparedness, with even leading Iranian military figures belittling if not ridiculing any chance of renewed Israeli aggression just days before it actually occurred, as well as a politico-diplomatic cover using and abusing the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “damning report” on Iran’s nuclear program.

Yet, at the outset of the war, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-affiliated daily Javan tried to mask those regional weaknesses as untapped capacities, instead highlighting Tehran’s ability to inflict great damage on Israel without full-scale engagement. In fact, Iran’s missile salvos on Israel had led to more harm than in the April and October 2024 direct military confrontations between the two. Launching over 500 ballistic missiles and around 1,100 drones, Iran’s retaliation killed 31, injured over 3,000, and displaced over 13,000.

World War III?

Moreover, pundits and even scholars have long warned that a war on Iran would ultimately pit the West against a powerful, ironclad alliance consisting of Iran, Russia, and China, effectively kicking off an Armageddon-like World War III. Yet, neither Moscow nor Beijing entered the war on Iran’s side against Israel and later the United States. Nor did they provide any military or even meaningful diplomatic support to Tehran to either arm it to defend itself or to shield it against further pressure, such as deterring a U.S. entry into the war. Instead of the much-feared Iranian-Russo-Chinese “axis of autocrats” flexing its combined military muscles, it was the Israeli-U.S. partnership that proved decisive against Iran.

Neither Moscow nor Beijing would benefit strategically from directly entering a war on Iran’s side against the United States and Israel. Their respective relations with Washington are key, while ties with Tehran have often served as leverage in that context. In other words, Iran is one important pawn on the chessboard of their global rivalry with Washington. As such, their ties with Tehran are mostly opportunistic. They both exploit Iran’s geopolitical isolation resulting from its enmity with the West and are therefore willing to sustain it rather than see Tehran mending its ties with Washington.

Against this backdrop, Russia and China have forged wide-ranging yet non-transparent long-term agreements with Iran. Given the power asymmetry separating Iran from both countries, one can assume that with these pacts the Iranian regime has sold out Iranian national resources and interests. In return, Tehran expected both to act as an outside guarantor of its regime’s survival. Now, given their passivity in the 12-Day War, Iran’s political elite has become even more disillusioned with its much-lauded “Look to the East” policy, which has clearly failed. Additionally, a nuclear-armed Iran would reduce the power imbalance that systemically favors Moscow and Beijing over Tehran. Conversely, a destroyed Iranian nuclear program could revitalize Russia’s struggling nuclear industry. And last but not least, as if military passivity was not enough, Tehran speculates that Moscow has covertly colluded with Israel in its aggression against Iran, revealing sensitive details about the Russian-supplied Iranian air defense systems.

Between Rhetoric and Reality

Against this backdrop, Iran’s response was largely limited to Israel. In fact, not only did Tehran not implement its oft-issued threat to unleash its regional axis. It also did not opt to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz that links the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean, as this would have pushed the United States into the war even earlier, while constituting a strategic own goal undermining Iran’s own oil exports and the confidence of its Asian clients, especially China, as well as alienate those Gulf Cooperation Council states reliant on the strait for their oil and gas exports as Tehran needed them diplomatically to help bring about an end to the war. Neither were all U.S. military bases in Iran’s vicinity targeted, nor were American soldiers killed. Instead, Iran attacked U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar following prior warning, i.e. in a symbolic rather than militarily decisive way.

The Roots of Wrong Predictions

In fact, this set of misguided assumptions were based upon some long-held analytic inaccuracies. First, these have been in place regarding the nature of state-society relations in Iran and that of Iran’s ruling system. In fact, the depth and extent of disillusionment and even detestation many Iranians have developed vis-à-vis their rulers has been vastly underestimated. Moreover, many pundits do not distinguish between Iranian regime security interests on one hand and national security interests on the other. In reality regime policies are dictated by narrow elite interests often violating the national interest, i.e. the political, economic, and security interest of the bulk of the Iranian populace. As case in point, Tehran’s diplomatic red lines of rejecting considerable limitations of its nuclear and missile programs as well as its support for the so-called “Axis of Resistance” all constitute the regime’s sources of power. Such intransigeance is less about securing the nation’s legitimate security concern, as continuously claimed by Iranian officials, but is instead inviting costly political, economic and military pressures against the country. Second, Tehran’s military retaliation has been subject to its regime survival concerns. As such, Tehran cannot afford to provoke Washington to join Tel Aviv in a prolonged all-out war against itself. Third, the nature of the relationship between Iran on one hand and Russia and China on the other has often been falsely characterized as a robust alliance, by some even a NATO-style one. In reality, both Moscow and Beijing have consistently acted as opportunistic actors, abusing Tehran’s geopolitical isolation and hence weakness, and are therefore rather precarious partners.

In other words, many Western-based Iran experts’ core assumptions about the impacts of a war with Iran have turned out to be imprecise. Rather than being a result of sober analysis, these claims have been embedded in a longer continuity of misassumptions underpinning Iran-related analysis — with many of them rhyming with the dominant narratives emerging from regime circles.

The Next War

As we have seen, the analytic fallacies have been striking. Recognizing them will help better assess risks and scenarios of a renewed military conflict. Yet, needless to say, wars cannot be neatly predicted analytically; they are inherently subject to unexpected events, including miscalculations by the warring parties.

In fact, as I concluded my preliminary assessment of the 12-Day War that ended with a fragile ceasefire, this war may presage the next. Ever since then, the conflict has relocated to below the radar of our attention, with a large number of explosions occurring at military-related locations in Iran, which its authorities have routinely attributed to gas leaks, while an educated guess would rather suggest it was Israel. And now, over two months after the end of the war, top Iranian figures publicly acknowledge that they view another Israeli attack as imminent.

To deter this looming threat, Iran’s military commanders have started to threaten a far harsher reaction than last time. This is based on their — not entirely misleading — belief that the ceasefire was the result of Iranian missiles being able to penetrate Israel’s air defenses. In other words, will Tehran engage in ruthless retaliation that would enflame the entire Middle East, also targeting U.S. military bases via its embattled proxies? Will such a scenario be precipitated by Tehran’s fear of regime decapitation? After all, in June, its top security and political figures all assembled in a Supreme National Security Council meeting and only escaped extermination by Israeli bombs by a whisker. How far will these existential concerns about regime survival that could encourage severe retaliation à la “offense is the best defense” be offset with the kind of reluctance witnessed during the 12-Day War? In brief, an expanded and full-fledged military conflagration will depend on Tehran’s ability to restore defensive and offensive capabilities, regional authority, and to keep its military and political command intact in times of war. At the same time, Iran and Israel are respectively trying to fortify their air defenses and capabilities in preparation for the next round of military confrontation.

In other words, from those war assumptions, the one about the Middle East going up in flames may come closer to reality than last time, but it will very much depend on Iranian risk-taking and missile penetration of its Israeli and potentially U.S. enemies. While this contingency of a coming war reaching a new level of escalation certainly exists, powerful structural counterbalancing forces binding Iranian retaliation to regime-survival concerns are likely to remain.

Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Ph.D., is an Iranian-born and Berlin-based political scientist and analyst. He is director of the Center for Middle East and Global Order and teaches Middle East security at the Hertie School in Berlin.

Image: Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia Commons