The entire region just witnessed the whimper of the Tehran regime and the bang of Israel and its allies. It is time to capitalise on this opportunity for real political gains, Samuel J. Hyde writes.

Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari reports from Tehran on Iranian reactions to the country’s attack on Israel.

Updated 11:29 a.m., April 14, 2024

The moment we were all afraid of finally arrived yesterday evening. For me, it was announced by a phone call from a terrified teenage cousin in Iran. Had the war started? she asked me through tears.

Iran had fired hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, hitting much more widely than most of us had anticipated. Only thanks to Israel’s excellent defenses, and the help of its Western and Arab allies, have almost all of these been intercepted. The only casualty so far is a 7-year-old Arab girl in southern Israel.

Nevertheless, the Rubicon has clearly been crossed. Iran and Israel have been fighting a shadow war for years, but on April 13, the conflict came into the open. No longer hiding behind deniable actions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the militia that holds most of the power in Iran, declared that it was behind the attacks, which seem to have been launched from various cities in Iran as well as by Tehran-backed militias in Yemen and Lebanon. The IRGC said that it was responding to Israel’s April 1 attack on an Iranian consular building in Damascus, which killed several commanders, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC’s chief official in the Levant region.

You don’t need to be an expert on Iran to know some facts about Iranians in this moment: First, most are sick of the Islamic Republic and its octogenarian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been in charge since 1989, and whose rule has brought Iran economic ruin, international isolation, and now the threat of a war. You need only look at the majority of Iranians who have boycotted the past two nationwide elections, this year and in 2021, or the hundreds killed in the anti-regime protests of recent years to know that this government doesn’t represent Iranians.

Second, the people of Iran have no desire to experience a war with Israel. Despite decades of indoctrination in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment by their government, Iranians harbor very little hostility toward Israel. In the past few months, many Arab capitals have seen mass demonstrations against Israel, but no such popular event has taken place in Iran. In fact, in the early stages of the Israel-Hamas war that broke out in October, many Iranians risked their lives by publicly opposing the anti-Israel campaign of the regime.

[Read: What Hamas promises, Iranians know too well]

Third, Iranians have a recent memory of how terrible war can be. I was born in Tehran in 1988, in the final throes of the brutal eight-year conflict that began when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and continued for way too long because of the Iranian regime’s ideological crusade. My mother spent many nights in Tehran’s bomb shelters when she was pregnant with me, taking refuge from the missiles that Iraq rained down on Iran. A cousin of mine was killed in that war, and my father was among the many injured. Iranians remember those years too well to want to repeat the experience. (Incidentally, some also remember that Israel gave occasional military help to Iran in that war.)

The people of Iran know that their main enemy is at home, and that war will bring them only more repression and hardship. Hours before Iran started firing missiles on Israel, it sent police around Tehran to crack down on women’s compliance with the mandatory veiling rules. After the attack, for hours past midnight, thousands of cars thronged gas stations around Tehran; a friend FaceTimed me from a Tehran supermarket crowded with people frantically stocking up. Another friend told me he had retreated to his rooftop and was refusing to sleep for fear of an attack.

The U.S. dollar was already trading for a record 647,000 Iranian rials yesterday morning, and now Iranians are bracing for another increase, which will further diminish their livelihoods. As a point of comparison, in 2022, the dollar sold for fewer than 220,000 rials. I’m old enough to remember when it was just 8,000; in 1979, it was 70. The collapsing Iranian currency reflects Iran’s economic destruction.

Many Iranians will hold their own regime accountable for the horror that a hot war with Israel could bring. Labor unions have already said as much. “With firing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, the Islamic Republic has adventurously begun a war that could turn a society of 90 million to a torched ground,” declared the Independent Iranian Workers Union, which represents thousands of workers around the country. “The regime is concluding its final mission to destroy Iran.” A teacher’s union issued a similar call. On X, a user well-known for her support of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote, “I spit on anybody supporting this war on either side. Poor Iran and the people of Iran who are saddled by you.” The Persian-language hashtag #no_to_war has been shared by thousands of Iranians inside and outside the country. Many have used it to attack Khamenei and the Islamic Republic.

The regime has tried to muster a show of public support for the strikes on Israel, with unimpressive results. Videos of a Saturday-night rally for this purpose in Tehran’s Palestine Square appeared to show a couple of hundred people there at most. A gathering at Zahedi’s grave in Isfahan looked to consist of fewer than 30 people. Only slightly more assembled at the grave, in Kerman, of Qassem Soleimani, IRGC’s leading commander who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020.

For his part, Israel’s troubled prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may want nothing more than a war with Iran to distract from his failing war in Gaza and his declining popularity at home. The United States and its European and Arab allies, who rightly stood by Israel against Iranian aggression tonight, would be wise to push Netanyahu to avoid a broader conflagration that will benefit no one in the region, least of all the people of Iran or Israel. Saudi Arabia, which joined Jordan last night in helping to intercept Iranian missiles, has started off well by calling for immediate de-escalation. Israelis should remember that even after six months of their brutal war in Gaza, several Arab nations stood by them against aggression from Tehran.

Decision makers in Riyadh and Amman, as well as elsewhere, are well aware that Khamenei and his murderous regime are a threat to the peace and security of their own people, the region, and the world. The interests of the whole region lie in helping the people of Iran in their long-lasting quest to overthrow Khamenei and build a different Iran. Short of such a victory, it is quite likely that when the octogenarian Khamenei dies, Iran’s rulers will move away from his disastrous policies, which have brought Iran to the brink of a disastrous war. Even many of Iran’s current elite don’t want such a conflict.

More than a decade ago, in 2012, when Israel came close to attacking Iran over its nuclear program, an online campaign began in Israel that led to thousands of ordinary Iranians and Israelis posting their pictures online with a seemingly naive message: “Israel loves Iran” and “Iran loves Israel,” an announcement that the people of these two nations had no desire to die in a war with each other.

This fundamental reality has not changed. The people of Iran don’t want a war against Israel. And the people of the region and the world can’t afford one.

My wife the photo archivist likes to point out that all stills are a double crop—a crop in time (we do not know what happened before or after) and a crop in place (we do not know what was outside the photographer’s frame). So, too, are pulses of violence, like Iran’s recent salvo of 300 drones, cruise, and ballistic missiles aimed at Israel. To understand what we are observing, we have to push out beyond the frame of what we at first see.

The attack last night was not a mere response to the Israeli strike in Damascus on April 1 that killed two Iranian generals and five other officers in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Rather, it represents an inflection point in a semi-covert war that has been going on for years. That conflict has included attacks on shipping by both sides, the bombing of Jewish and Israeli civilian targets, the launch of rockets across Israel’s northern border, and the occasional assassination of key figures, such as Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the godfather of the Iranian nuclear program.

Israel’s sardonic war humorists have been cracking jokes about the first direct flight from Tehran to Jerusalem since 1979, but as tends to happen, the joke has a kernel of insight: Unflinching hostility toward Israel is part of the Islamic Republic’s DNA. That hostility, moreover, is inextricably linked to its hostility toward the United States: One is the lesser Satan, the other the great. Reconciliation with either is ideologically impossible; hostility toward both, and the belief that the two are intertwined, is unshakeable.

But there is a departure here. Iran’s semi-covert war has used Hezbollah in Lebanon (and elsewhere in the world), Iraqi militias, and Yemen’s Houthis to attack and kill its enemies. That inhibition has begun to dissolve. Firing more than 300 guided weapons, and claiming responsibility for doing so, is an overt declaration that Iran is willing to wage war in the sunlight and not just the shadows.

This, in turn, is part of a larger pattern of Iranian belligerence: It includes the use of Iraqi militias to attack American bases, and the arming and assistance of Houthi militias in their attacks on civilian shipping in the Red Sea and beyond. It forces the question: Why has Iran begun to act more blatantly, less cautiously, and at greater ranges than ever before?

One answer may be the seemingly irrevocable march of that country to the possession of nuclear weapons, a march that was briefly slowed by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 (which was followed by a pause in the Iranian program) and the ill-fated and time-limited Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015, abandoned by the Trump administration and unsuccessfully attempted to be revived by the Biden administration.

A second and deeper answer, however, is Iran’s entry into a coalition—not an alliance—with Russia, China, and North Korea. Iran now plays an important role in Russia’s war in Ukraine. Iranian drones fly every night at Ukrainian cities, revealing and stressing Ukrainian air defenses to pave the way for Russian cruise and ballistic missiles. Iran has reportedly helped with the construction of Russian factories to manufacture the drones, presumably in exchange for Russian assistance on other fronts.

It is this bigger geopolitical shift that makes the Iranian attack on Israel so significant. The major players in the Russia–China–Iran–North Korea coalition are increasingly willing to use open violence (against Ukraine, Israel, and the Philippines), and to threaten much worse, including the use of nuclear weapons. They are united by a growing belief that their moment is coming, when a divided and indecisive West, richer but flabbier, will not fight.

In response, as is so often the case, the Western states turn to technological and tactical solutions. In the short term, they work. The Israelis, assisted by the United States, Great Britain, and possibly other powers (there have been references to France and Jordan), shot down almost every single projectile heading their way. It is an amazing feat, and will undoubtedly create a great deal of demand for Israeli antimissile technology. In the same way, American and European warships have been shooting down most Houthi (actually, Iranian) missiles flying at merchant ships attempting to approach the Suez Canal.

But antimissile defense is, in the long run, a mug’s game. If every defensive missile you fire, together with all of the systems that cue and direct it, costs an order of magnitude more than the incoming missile, even the richest countries are going to bankrupt themselves. Such systems are not currently mass produced, although that may change. Furthermore, the new era of missile and drone warfare is still at an early stage. As the drone war over the fields of Ukraine shows, the numbers, sophistication, and quantity of such systems grow fast under the spur of actual conflict. The game becomes one of measure and countermeasure, and in any case, no defense is 100 percent effective in the long run. And so, sooner or later, ships will sink, apartment buildings will explode, civilians will die.

In such exchanges the attacker wins, because of the larger effects. Shippers will avoid certain routes, companies will hesitate about doing business in a war zone, and tourists and corporate executives will stay away from airports where the sirens go off periodically. That is the larger strategy at work here, and make no mistake: The Iranian purpose is, as has been repeatedly and unambiguously stated, the extermination of the Israeli state, an objective shared by Hamas, and possibly by the crowds shouting “From the river to the sea” on the streets of New York or London. In itself this is not new; it was, in the middle of the previous century, the objective of Egypt and Syria, but that was through a single climactic battle or two. This is something much more protracted.

The aim here is also something a lot bigger than the struggle to destroy Israel. The target of the Russia–China–Iran–North Korea coalition is the overthrow not of a “rules-based international order”—a phrase that misleads more than it informs, because there have always been rules of some kind—but of the American-led world order, which is an artifact of the past 75 years. The coalition’s frame, as it were, is a large one, in which the United States and its allies represent one frangible whole that, if tapped hard in several places, will disintegrate.

It is in this frame, then, that the United States and its allies have to consider next steps. The Iran versus Israel campaign is just one campaign in a much larger conflict. In the mid-1930s, it was a mistake to treat the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, and Japan’s launching of war in China in 1937 as a set of unique and unconnected events. Rather, they represented one big problem. American leaders will err if they similarly attempt to compartmentalize each of their challenges today: the Ukraine war, Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the Middle Eastern conflict.

That a coalition of the West and its partners were willing to act in countering the Iranian missile barrage is a promising sign. Still, until Iran pays a visible and heavy price for its behavior in attacking not only Israel directly but its Arab neighbors and global shipping through its proxies, the problem will only get worse.

If ever there was a time for strong American statecraft backed by military muscle, this is it. But even as the United States berates its allies for failing to spend enough, its own defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product is declining to levels not seen since the halcyon days of 1999, down to 2.7 percent. That does not begin to give the politicians the big stick they need if their soft words are to carry conviction.

Until the United States gets serious about what it needs to preserve the order it helped create and sustain, benefiting itself and others enormously in the process, many more missiles will fly at the cities of democratic allies. It is cold comfort that others will pay the price in blood long before Americans do—but sooner or later, we will as well.

Israel stopped an Iranian drone and missile barrage last night, with help from the United States Navy, Britain’s Royal Air Force, and Israel’s Arab allies.

Israel’s Arab allies is a strange phrase to write in the midst of the war in Gaza, but it’s important to understand. The Jordanian air force shot down many of the Iranian drones, Reuters reported—meaning Arabs flew and fought to protect Israel. The Economist speculated that Saudi Arabia may have provided surveillance and refueling assistance to the Jordanian planes. Alliances are a powerful asset. They also come with a price, which is that allies’ views need to be consulted. Those allies, especially the United States, are saying: Pause here. That’s advice Israel may not like but would be wise to ponder.

Early in April, Israel scored a big win against Iran. It struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed important figures in the Iranian terror system. Iran acknowledged the death of two top commanders and five other senior officers.

Last night, Iran struck back with a lot of noise and commotion but impressively little result.

Iran attacked Israel directly from its own national territory—a risky escalation from Iran’s past practice of striking by proxy. That escalation should not get a pass because Israeli defensive technology and the solidarity of the international community together outgunned the Iranian missiles. Iran struck Israel to maim and kill and terrorize. Those malign intentions mostly failed, but not because Iran was merciful or restrained—only because of the limits of Iranian power. Israel has an open account with Iran. But that account does not need to be settled immediately.

Every item in the ledger of Iran’s offenses against peace should be carefully preserved for future repayment: the missile attacks on Red Sea shipping by Iran’s proxies in Yemen; the Hezbollah missiles against Israel’s north; and the Iranian role in the Hamas massacre of October 7. But the repayment can wait until the right time and then be settled in the right way.

Iran put on a big show for the world. Like the sword-waving warrior in the first Indiana Jones movie, Iran made a spectacle of its weapons. Indiana Jones did not perform an equal show. He simply shot the swordsman. In the same way, Israel does not need to meet like with like. It needs only to inflict an appropriate cost that Iran will feel. The less fuss, the better. Maintaining Israel’s network of regional and international partnerships matters as much for Israel’s security as a conspicuous retaliation.

The action that most urgently needs to follow this Iranian attack is not action in the Middle East. It is action in Washington. The drones fired at Israel are the same drones terrorizing Ukraine: an Iranian design originally exported to Russia, now manufactured in Russia. Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian aggression has been sabotaged by Trump-loyal Republicans in Congress.

In 2022, Congress approved four aid packages to Ukraine totaling about $75 billion. Republicans took control of the House in January 2023. Since then, Congress has refused any further aid to Ukraine. President Joe Biden asked for a fifth package in August 2023. No action. Biden asked again in October 2023. Again, nothing. Over the winter, Ukrainian forces ran short of ammunition and other military supplies. Ukraine’s successes in 2023 are fading in 2024 because congressional Republicans are blockading Ukraine into defeat.

Anti-Ukraine Republicans offer many excuses for their refusal to assist a friendly democracy under attack. One by one, each of those excuses has been discredited. Aiding Ukraine did not provoke nuclear war with Russia. The European allies are not freeloading—in fact they have provided more than twice as much as the United States. Aid to Ukraine does not distract the United States from commitments in Asia: This past week, the prime minister of Japan addressed a joint session of Congress to insist that the defense of Asia begins in Ukraine, saying, “Ukraine of today may be East Asia of tomorrow.”

When each story collapses, Trump Republicans replace it with a fourth or sixth or eighth. The rationalizations shift and twist. The anti-Ukraine animus remains fixed.

Pretty obviously, some deeper motive is at work.

Iran’s attack on Israel has, at least temporarily, complicated the political calculus for Republicans in Congress. Republicans want to sound strong, to criticize President Biden as weak. But when Trump Republicans thwarted aid to Ukraine, they also stalled Biden’s request to help Israel bear the immense costs of its self-defensive war after the Hamas terror attack. Last night’s defense will be expensive: Hundreds of interceptors must now be replaced; fighter-jet operations burned fuel and weapons.

Because of Donald Trump, Republicans are now the party of foreign-policy weakness, passivity, and surrender—and not only to Russia. Trump accepted an invitation from the billionaire donor Jeff Yass, who holds a large stake in ByteDance, and then flip-flopped on TikTok, one of the firms in which Yass holds an interest. The Republican refusal to aid Ukraine has also denied Israel money to replenish its Iron Dome defenses. Biden’s October 2023 request included funds to add 100 new anti-missile launchers to reinforce or replace the existing 30 to 40. Israel is still waiting for that assistance. Ukraine is waiting—and bleeding. The border is waiting, too, because Trump Republicans first demanded a border deal as the price of Ukraine aid—then rejected the toughest deal in a generation because they feared that Biden might get credit for it.

After months of nonaction, House Republicans have now proposed to schedule next week a vote on aid to Israel—separate from the requests for Ukraine aid and border security that President Biden combined in his October 2023 request. A vote on only the Israel portion of Biden’s defense program does too little of the job of defending America’s allies and honoring America’s promises.

So far, the Biden administration has not made much of an issue of Republican weakness. Biden’s superpower is his ability to work with unlikely people. His administration continues to hope that Speaker Mike Johnson will someday allow a vote on Ukraine aid.

After the Iran attack, now is the time for Biden to make Trump’s foreign-policy weakness painful and personal to Trump’s party. Say: “Trump’s not even for ‘America Second,’ never mind ‘America First.’”

In June 1994, President Bill Clinton traveled to Normandy to commemorate the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Imagining a more triumphant ceremony would be hard. Leaders of the former Allies attended to honor the day. Yet the president also paid tribute to former adversaries, and above all to the newly reunified Germany. “Liberated by our victory,” he said, the former Axis states now ranked with “the staunchest defenders of freedom.” Clinton offered words of praise, too, for a long-estranged ally: Russia, the president said, had been “reborn in freedom.”

Three decades after Clinton’s 1994 speech, a dictatorship is again waging a war of atrocity in Europe. And although a long queue of Republicans will be eager to travel to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, their voting record is on the other side of the great issues at stake, then and now.

On social media, on cable news, in speeches to security conferences, Republicans are pretending that they still live in the bygone world in which they were the party of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and John McCain. When it comes time to schedule and cast votes, however, they reveal the new reality in which they are the party of thugs, dictators, and aggressors from Tehran to Beijing to Moscow to Palm Beach.

Ukraine is one casualty. Israel could be the next. President Biden should make it clear, make it hurt, and make it change.

EasyJet has suspended planes travelling to Tel Aviv until 21 April following Tehran's attack.