1. Will Iran escalate, stay-the-course, or yield more in negotiations? Or take some other action I haven't thought of.
2. If Iran escalates, how far will it go?
3. If Iran does a token retaliation without major escalation, but refuses to give up its remaining nuclear program, what happens? Will the Israeli's be satisfied with a 2-4 year delay in Iran's program or will they continue low-grade attacks for the foreseeable future?
4. If Iran yields in negotiations, how far will they go? Will the agree to cease enrichment? If so, will they try to cheat? Or will the US accept some amount of enrichment and end up with a variant of JCPOA?
5. Do you think something else will happen not covered above?
6. What will the situation be in 10 years? 25 years?
The thing people seem to not recognize is: There's basically three countries on the planet capable of actually waging war in the 21st century (US, and Russia/China barely). Every other country is just a proxy for one of these three; their domestic capabilities look more like "throwing a tantrum" than actual war. Israel can't wage war without the US. Iran can't wage war without China/Russia. Currently, the superpower contribution to this fight is just dropping some bombs and diverting a few crates of AK-47s.
There's zero capability for long-term war here. But, there's also too much face-saving for negotiations or concessions to happen. So, the fire mostly quenches into embers; like the middle east has always been.
It's cheaper to build low precision rockets/drones than the Israeli interceptors, so the war _could_ swing in Iran's favor in the long term.
Additionally, Iranians aren't rising up because they don't want to be seen as being controlled by foreigners, but once the war stops, the Iranian regime will have to answer to its citizens. This means the mullahs have no incentive to stop.
In the opposite direction but with the same outcome, the just-barely-enough aid that Ukraine has received after being invaded by Russia, has demonstrated that it's foolish for countries to give up their own nuclear weapons, on the understanding that a friendly superpower will protect them.
This has been a very bad decade of events for incentivizing nuclear non-proliferation. I hate it!
Imagine that Iran already had 10 nuclear bombs and the US bombed the production sites with B2s. What would Iran do? They can't drop a nuke on the US, and even if they could, that would just ensure their destruction.
Of course, one could argue that Iran is not rational and that it would nuke NYC even if it meant being destroyed as a country. But if we're assuming that they are irrational, then that's all the more reason to get rid of their weapons, even if it meant taking casualties.
And note that the same calculation applies with Iran vs. Israel. If Israel attacks Iran conventionally, Iran cannot escalate to nuclear without also getting destroyed (since Israel has a larger arsenal).
Moreover, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, actually demonstrates the uselessness of nuclear weapons. Yes, NATO and the US were initially deterred because of fears of Russian escalation, but we've continued to cross "red-lines" in arming Ukraine without escalation (tanks, F16, missile attacks on Russian soil, etc.). I'm pretty confident that Europe at least will continue to support Ukraine with ever more powerful weapons without fear of Russia's nuclear threats.
The incentives for having a nuclear program have not changed. Ukraine did not have nukes. Crimea, as a part of Ukraine. Syria. Iraq. Afghanistan. Vietnam. Libya. None of these countries had nukes. They paid for it.
What happened today isn't only not a "massive" change to the status quo, as you seem to think it is. Its so much less significant than what happened to the rest of those countries I just listed. Yet, you used the word "massive". Why? I have no idea.
Iran did not learn any new lessons yesterday. Nothing they didn't already know. The US does not want them to have nukes. We've done everything short of boots on the ground to stop them from having them. They should still want them. They're correct, in the defense of their territorial sovereignty, to want them. But, we'll keep stopping them. That's how it was in the 2000s, the 2010s, its how it is the 2020s, and it's how it will be in the 2030s and 2040s. They keep trying, we keep stopping them. The incentives haven't changed. Nothing has changed. Yet you doomers keep thinking this is the end of the world or its WW3. It isn't.
If anything has changed: Iran just learned that something which took them a decade of development, cost hundreds of lives, and billions of dollars, was stopped by a couple planes from a country half a world away at basically no cost to us, without barely a thought or care. Fox News was tracking these B2s on ADSB a day before they hit Iran; it didn't matter. That's how ahead the US is. The asymmetry here should scare the shit out of them, and the world; that they will never have a conventional nuclear program because they're so unbelievably outmatched and outgunned that if our President has one bad nights sleep he could just wipe out half their country, half of any country, with no congressional authorization, no checks, no balances, just launch a plane and they're dead. Maybe this pushes them to non-conventional means of obtaining nukes; but it shouldn't significantly change their desire for wanting one in the first place. They've always wanted nukes.
If there’s anything to that statement, things are likely to remain messy.
We already pulled the “they have WMDs” card, despite significant credibility problems.
We have a completely inexperienced 22 year old in charge of terrorism prevention at a time when any act of terrorism against the US would be a nightmarish scenario for escalation.
To me it looks as though we sent the invitation and left a note that the front door is unlocked.
Timeline of previous events
2006 – Hezbollah–Israel War: Iran arms Hezbollah during the 34-day conflict with Israel.
2010 – Stuxnet cyberattack: U.S. and Israel deploy malware against Iran’s Natanz uranium centrifuges.
2020 – Assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by Trump who orders drone strike that kills the IRGC Quds commander
2021 – Houthi–Saudi Escalation: Iran-backed Houthis use drones and missiles against Saudi Arabia.
2022 – Iran supplies thousands of Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to support Russia’s war in Ukraine and transfer technology to Russia
2023 – Iran-backed Hamas conducts large-scale attack against Israel who responds with major military operations in Gaza.
2025 – Israel and the US bomb Iran’s nuclear sites> Dan is a congressman, and what journalist Helen really wants from him is information. She’s particularly interested in a “dirty bomb”—particularly, whether the rumors of one exploding in New Orleans are real, or merely fabricated to advance a war between America and Iran. Dan doesn’t answer, instead choosing to leave. It’s all vague, but it gives the viewer a chance to piece some details together: It was likely the bomb and the escalation of a war between America and Iran that led to the creation of the silos.