Iran after nearly six months of war
Nearly six months after the opening of joint United States–Israeli operations against Iran, the central strategic question is no longer whether the Islamic Republic has been militarily weakened, because on every conventional indicator it has been, nor whether the United States and Israel possess the capacity to inflict additional destruction, because they clearly do. The problem is instead whether the destruction already imposed, and that which can still be imposed, is capable of producing a political termination corresponding to the military balance, or whether the conflict has entered a different phase in which continued instability may itself acquire strategic utility for some of the actors involved, even though none of them necessarily entered the war intending to create a permanently destabilised Middle East
