Israel races to reshape the Middle East with few checks

Now, it is reshaping the Middle East on its own terms and forcing the Trump administration to play catch-up as Israeli leaders ramp up attacks against Iran. The moves could upend global markets and remake geopolitics—and potentially draw the U.S. into a regional conflagration.

With a series of daring intelligence operations and fierce military campaigns, Israel has effectively disabled Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, while also prompting the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. It is now taking the fight directly to Tehran.

Israel used the cover of American diplomatic efforts to mount a surprise assault that goes far beyond targeting Iran’s nuclear program, instead aiming to cripple the country’s theocratic regime.

The fight has also shoved American policy off the path President Trump laid out earlier this year. After long pushing for a peaceful, diplomatic solution to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, he praised Israel’s airstrikes and warned on social media, “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left."

Trump, who had previously pledged to disentangle the U.S. from Middle Eastern conflicts, ordered U.S. warships and fighter jets to defend Israel from Iranian counterattacks. Any move by Iran to target American military installations or to choke Persian Gulf oil shipments could pull Washington in deeper.

So far, the attack hasn’t produced the broader conflict many feared. Iran has launched barrages of missiles at Israel in response, but to limited effect. Israel’s leaders and security establishment are starting to talk about the possibility of a victory that could reshape the existing order.

“I have no doubt that your day of liberation from tyranny is closer than ever," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said addressing the Iranian people on Friday. “And when that happens, Israelis and Iranians will renew the covenant between our two ancient nations. Together we’ll bring a future of prosperity, peace and hope."

Israel’s emboldened agenda in the region comes as the U.S. increasingly focuses on domestic issues and geopolitical threats elsewhere.

Trump has discarded decades of protocol and priorities in charting his own foreign policy approach to the Middle East. His forays into the region, while ambitious, have been fickle.

Just before taking office, his intervention helped close a long elusive cease-fire deal in Gaza. But his attention to that conflict wavered after Ukraine and Iran heated up. He launched efforts to redevelop Gaza as a tourist destination and annihilate Yemen’s Houthi militants, only to lose interest later.

That has opened the door for a more single-minded leader like Netanyahu to forcefully implement his vision.

Israel now faces the challenge of converting its victories into a more permanent removal of the threat from Iran, which has assembled a vast arsenal of missiles and lined up allies to fulfill its longtime pledge to eliminate the Jewish state. The immediate need is to make more progress on the goal of destroying Iran’s nuclear program.

Its military has spent days wiping out Iranian air defenses with airstrikes and covert operations, giving it the ability to attack virtually at will. But it has yet to do extensive damage to Iran’s deeply buried and widely dispersed nuclear program. Israel said Friday it has inflicted significant damage by hitting the underground complex at Natanz, which includes a multilevel enrichment hall containing centrifuges, electrical rooms and additional support infrastructure.

Cars leaving Tehran created a traffic jam on Sunday.

Success will require taking out the hardened uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, which Israel has yet to attack in earnest, and destroying the stockpiles of enriched uranium stores that Iran may already have spread around the country.

The risk is that a failure to cripple the program could lead Iran to accelerate its work on a bomb.

“Both Israel’s and Iran’s future is tied to whether Iran has a nuclear program at the end of this conflict," said Jonathan Panikoff, a former U.S. intelligence officer who is now at the Atlantic Council. “If it does, Iran’s ability to rebuild and project influence across the region will be very much intact. If it doesn’t, it opens up a new day that we haven’t seen in over two decades."

Few constraints from U.S.

By Sunday afternoon, Israel had hit more than 250 targets in 50 hours of nonstop attacks. So far, the Trump administration isn’t reining it in. That’s a significant shift from decades of U.S. foreign policy. As far back as the Suez Crisis in 1956, the U.S. has simultaneously supported Israel while hitting the brakes on its ambitions, hoping to keep conflicts from spiraling.

The Biden administration put constant pressure on Netanyahu to lessen the intensity of attacks that could hurt civilians, end the war in Gaza and de-escalate with Hezbollah in the north. When Iran and Israel got into their first ever direct exchanges of fire last year, the administration urged Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear or energy sectors for fear of escalation. That pressure ultimately shaped Israel’s response.

This time, Trump has imposed few constraints on Israel’s targeting. The president did ask Netanyahu repeatedly this year to hold off on military action to give nuclear talks headed by special envoy Steve Witkoff a chance to work.

But he relented last week, when Netanyahu reminded him that his own two-month deadline for Iran to come to a deal had expired, according to officials familiar with the call between the two leaders.

“The greatest mistake the United States and its Western allies can make is forcing a premature end to this war," said Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

The bigger constraint could come from within Israel. After 20 months of war, many have had enough. There’s broad support for military action against Iran, but it comes after many civilian-soldiers have been called up multiple times, disrupting their jobs and families. As many as 20 hostages remain alive in Gaza, as well as dozens of still unrepatriated bodies.

The malaise is compounded by deep political divisions over Netanyahu’s leadership. Moves to remove political opponents from the military and security services, efforts to overhaul the judiciary and a failure to end the war in Gaza have split a population that was initially united around the goals of the war.

“Pain, exhaustion, and uncertainty define Israeli society right now," Oren wrote this weekend on X, “and we’ll have to hold out for who knows how long."

Despite the weariness, there is an understanding that the conflict with Iran is the one that matters most, said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute. A survey by his institute in April found that more than half of Jewish Israelis supported an attack on Iran, even without American support, compared with about a third who opposed one.

Palestinians ran for cover after an Israeli strike on the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza on Sunday.

Israelis have known for decades that Iran was building up its nuclear capabilities and funding a “ring of fire" around Israel via regional allies like Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and Hamas, whose attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, lighted the fuse on the past two years of conflict.

The country tried for years to manage those threats without triggering a war. It killed key figures and disrupted supply chains—a tactic it called mowing the grass—and hoped its military superiority would be a deterrent.

When that failed on Oct. 7, it went to war methodically, taking down Hamas and then Hezbollah. Both militias collapsed quickly without the heavy Israeli casualties or wider escalation that critics of military action had feared.

The successes solidified the idea in the security establishment that Israel can’t just live with threats, including ones as potentially dangerous to confront as Iran, which Israel sees as the root of its security problems.

“It’s a big event with potential far reaching implications in terms of Israeli psyche and regional politics," Plesner said of the war.

“It’s not just another round of violence in the Middle East," he said. “Iran is the last enemy standing."

Diplomatic goals

Israel’s effort with Iran is different from the George W. Bush administration’s idealistic effort to implant democracy in the Middle East by bringing down Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

Damage in central Israel after a missile attack by Iran on Sunday.

Israel would be pleased to see Iran’s government fall, but it shouldn’t be the goal, Plesner said. Instead, Israel needs to focus on turning its military achievement into a diplomatic one, he said.

That worked in the fight with Hezbollah. Israel set the limited goal of weakening the militia and pushing it back from its border with Lebanon. After a two-month campaign, Hezbollah was forced to stop firing at Israel and pull back. So far, it has stayed out of Israel’s fight with Iran.

Gaza is the opposite case. Israel has been criticized since early in the war for setting out to destroy Hamas while failing to settle on a plan for governing the enclave once it has been defeated.

The result is an expanding military campaign 20 months into a war that has leveled much of Gaza and left more than 55,000 Palestinians dead, according to Gaza health officials, who don’t say how many were combatants. Israel has wiped out most of Hamas’s military leaders and thousands of fighters, but the group remains the dominant force in the enclave, and there is no end in sight.

Israelis are losing confidence in the aims of that war, and a peace movement has emerged calling for it to end.

International support for Israel has waned amid the widespread destruction in Gaza and images of starving children. Criticism ratcheted up recently as Israel ramped up its military campaign and launched a new aid program that has distributed only limited amounts of food after a long blockade, deepening Israel’s isolation in a way that could have diplomatic repercussions for years.

Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert at the Tel Aviv based Institute for National Security Studies, said the enthusiasm in Israel over the early successes in Iran could turn as well if Iran manages to keep bombarding cities with missiles and force the country to keep its airspace shut.

“There’s a euphoria in Israel, but we have to be very cautious," he said.

Israel’s military victories are also pushing back diplomatic gains that could enhance its security over the longer term. The country was on the cusp of a deal to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia before the Oct. 7 attacks, which would have realigned the Middle East overnight. Hamas targeted its attacks to disrupt that agreement, but the continued war is making it impossible for Saudi Arabia to get back on board.

“It is plausible that Gulf states might say they’re going to normalize once the war is over, because Israel’s the strongest country in the region," said Daniel Shapiro, a former senior Pentagon official and a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “But pockets of resentment, ideological fervor and aggression will find expression over time. The war in Gaza will have a long tail…I don’t think Israel is thinking that it’s going to turn the region into the European Union."

Israeli history is full of spectacular military achievements that the country struggled to turn into political successes, Citrinowicz said. Israel’s quick advance on Beirut in 1982 turned into a quagmire that kept forces there until 2000. Its victory over Arab armies in 1967 was nearly followed by defeat when it was surprised by those foes in 1973.

The main challenge for Netanyahu, he said, will be turning the tactical accomplishments in Iran into a broader strategic success.

Iran is weakened, but it remains a large and stubborn adversary. Israeli officials and Trump are hoping it can be brought to the negotiating table in a weakened state, but it could refuse.

Nuclear targets like the Fordow enrichment facility are hardened, buried deep and difficult to take out from the air. Hitting targets like oil terminals and fields can cause economic pain but aren’t connected to Israel’s war goals, Citrinowicz said.

Israel faces a long campaign without a clear way out, he said.

“Israel needs to think hard about how it’s closing this war now," he said. “I think people should ask the question of exit strategy before we start the war."

Write to Shayndi Raice at Shayndi.Raice@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com