As 2024 hurtles to its end, the urge to forecast what lies ahead is as tempting as it is tenuous. It is idle to wonder if 2025 will plunge us into a major global conflict when we cannot even be sure about the next upheaval to come out of the Middle East, or whether the United States will face a constitutional crisis that makes the events of January 6 seem restrained. What we can say is that, despite centuries of the most astonishing technological advances, human nature remains unchanged. And that fact alone suggests the unsettling probability that 2025 may well bring us closer to conflict than it will to peace.
Enraged and humiliated by Israel’s dual assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, and Hezbollah’s chief, secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut, the Iranian government launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on 1 October. The barrage of missiles – targeting areas north of Tel Aviv, east of the coastal port of Ashdod and in the Negev Desert – marked the second such attack in the space of six months. April’s attack consisted of 300 ballistic and cruise missiles and attack drones and, as would occur on 1 October, most were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome air-defence system.
Israel vowed to retaliate. Almost four weeks later, in the pre-dawn of Saturday 26 October, retaliation came in the form of a bombing blitz on strategic military targets, including two buildings at the Khojir military base near Tehran, in what Western analysts alleged was a launch site for long-range ballistic missiles.
Reports suggesting that Netanyahu heeded U.S. calls to avoid striking any of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities may not have been entirely accurate. Iran says four soldiers were killed and structures were damaged at Parchin, a site that is, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, enmeshed with the government’s nuclear program.
Each of these tit-for-tat blows – and the next one, if Iran disregards American exhortations not to reciprocate – is a choice by a Mideast state or non-state actor – whether they are inflicted by Israel, Hamas, Tehran or Hezbollah – made with the aim of changing the local or regional balance of power.
It helps to appreciate what at first glance looks like a contradiction: throughout the modern history of Mideast statecraft and the host of missed opportunities for peace, the choices that change the balance of power, whether they be committed by