As Iran/Hezbollah and Israel head towards a conflict that neither of them seems to want but neither of them seems to be able to avoid, it is worth stepping back and taking a look at the overall strategic picture between those two warring parties. Because of the high emotions that surround this conflict, the reporting is particularly bad regardless of which sides reporting you get. In a world that grows ever more divided, the Israel and Iran conflict still stands out as one in which it is particularly hard to get a dispassionate analysis. For this reason, I think it worthwhile to review basic facts that tend to get forgotten in the high emotions that surround this conflict.
The fundamental problem with most analysis of the conflict between Iran and Israel is that it often reduces the conflict to one of mutual hatred. Iran hates Israel and Israel hates Iran and so they fight. Therefore, the people talking about the conflict pick a side depending on their tribal preferences and hype up the conflict as if it was a sport’s game that both sides were trying to win. What this type of analysis misses is that both Iran and Israel draw benefits from the existence of the other even as they hate each other. To understand this paradox, you must look deeper into the strategic factors at play then is normally portrayed in your average news story.
One of the simplest and yet most often overlooked strategic factors is that these two nations do not exist in a vacuum. Often American news stories tend to look at the conflict as if only Iran and Israel existed with America being called on to resolve the issue one way or another. But even if you confine your analysis only to the other countries in the Middle East, the presence of other nations complicates the strategic picture. These complications make it so that the conflict is not as straightforward as it seems on the surface.
In Iran’s case, the complication is that it is the world’s only Shia Muslim power. If Iran does not stick up for Shia Muslims who will? And both in terms of history and present day experience, the biggest killers of the Shia have been Sunni Muslims. In the present day, if you look at the wars that Iran has fought directly in or supported indirectly, they are almost all against Sunni Muslims. The bloodiest of these wars was against Iraq. But the conflicts in Syria and Yemen have also been bloody fights against Sunni Muslims. The general western public is not aware of the Shia body count in these fights because they don’t care, but Iran knows very well where its people are really getting buried.
In this context, you could remove Israel off the face of the map and Iran’s problems would not improve much. Iran would still want to take “back” Jerusalem even if they were held by Sunnis just as they desire to take “back” the other two holy sites of Islam. In fact, I would argue that the situation would be worse for Iran if Israel did not exist. In such a world, the Sunnis could and likely would untie against Iran. In the present world, the only thing that seems to keep this from happening is the outrage and turmoil that the existence of a Jewish state and its actions cause in the wider Islamic world.
Broadly speaking, you could make the case that much of Iran’s hate for Israel is for public relations reasons whereby they are able to disguise Shia power plays against Sunni’s as being anti-Israel/US. For example, if you look at the various armed groups that Iran sets up, there seems to be a stark difference between their “PR” and their actual function. If you look at the news, Hezbollah gets its PR from being the “resistance” to Israel but in practice they mostly serve to control the Sunni/Christians in Lebanon and lately to help fight Sunnis in Syria. The various Shia militias in Iraq earn their PR in the news by occasional attacks against US forces but in practice their main function to ensure that the Sunnis in Iraq don’t rise again. The Houthis are in the news right now for attacking shipping, but most of their blood has been spilled fighting Sunnis back by Saudi Arabia and sometimes by attacking Saudi Arabia directly. In all these cases, Iran tries hard to hype to the wider Islamic world on their attacks against the common Islamic enemies to keep wider Sunni world from focusing on Iran’s actual anti-Sunni goals.
This propaganda does not work very well (or at all) on the Arab elite. They know very well what Iran is up to. But it does seem to have some impact on the Arab street and even more impact on wider non-Arab Sunni world (which is the majority of world’s Sunnis). While there are Sunni groups the world over who remained focused on the historical pastime of killing Shias, most of the Islamic world seems to give Iran a lot of credit for leading the charge against Israel even if in practical terms Iran don’t do much. In absence of this good PR, I suspect they would be a lot more focused on the danger that Iran posed to their fellow Sunnis.
I don’t want to oversell the benefits that Iran gets out the existence of Israel. From a purely strategic level Iran knows that Israel will do everything in its power to keep Iran from achieving any kind of decisive advantage over the Sunni Arab world. This means that in the final analysis, Israel stands in the way of Iran achieving it goals. And we should not discount the impact of genuinely held beliefs and not just pure strategic calculus in terms of what shapes Iran’s strategy towards Israel. Still, the fact remains that if you look at what Iran spends its blood and money on, it seems clear that its primary focus is on controlling and defeating the Arab world with Israel being a side show that supports this larger goal.
On the flip side, Israel has only recently had Iran as its main enemy. Up until 80s, the largest concern of Israel was its mostly Sunni neighbors. In fact, Israel secretly added Iran against Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war and was one of its main arms suppliers. And while the lion share of the weapons directed against Israel are currently funded or at least influenced by Iran, it should not be forgotten that Arab street hates Israel far worse than the Persian street does. To the extent that Sunni Arab leaders are secretly or not so secretly working with Israel, it has to do with their fear of Iran and not as reflection of the will of their people. If you should give Israel a magic wand to wipe Iran off the map, the likely result is that countries like Saudi Arabia would turn all their resources to undermining Israel. This is what their people would want and why would they not give their people what they want if Iran was not around to complicate the calculus?
The bottom line is that a world without Iran would not necessarily be any better for Israel’s security. In fact, it could well be worse. Without the complications of a hostile Iran, the Arab world might more easily pull in resources from Sunni nations such as Pakistan to aid in the Arab’s street’s desire to see Israel defeated. In short, Iran funds Israel’s enemies but it also keeps them divided.
Again, we can’t oversell this. Good PR for Iran is dead Jews and this is not something that Israel can let go unanswered even if it is not strategically significant. And if Iran became a full fledged nuclear power there is a chance that would pose an existential threat to Israel and for understandable reasons Israel does not want to take that chance. And if by some chance Iran should achieve its long term strategic goals of dominating the Middle East it would be terrible for Israel regardless if they had nukes or not. So by no stretch of imagination should we pretend that Israel and Iran could ever be friends under the current political regimes.
But Israel has a long history of helping the enemy of its current bogeyman only for that enemy to turn around and become the next bogeyman. Israel helped Iran against Iraq, it helped Hamas against the PLO, and so on and so forth. With that history in mind, the current Israeli/Sunni alliance against Iran should be looked at with a large degree of cynicism. As we shall see, Iran is not long for this world as a major factor in the Middle East due to demographic factors. And Israel may miss Iran more than most as those same demographic factors threaten to drown Israel in a tide of their enemies.
But that demographic reality is a ways away. In the here and now, both countries pose a deadly military threat to one another. At least that is the impression one gets from the news stories. But in the olden days, a military threat meant there was a risk that another nation would take some or all of your territory. On this ground, Israel and Iran pose no military threat to one another. And while the old school measure has some limitations, it is worth exploring how little Israel and Iran can really do to one another in the strict military sense.
The main reason Iran and Israel can’t do much to one another in a military sense is that they are far away from each other. This should be obvious but it often seems to be forgotten when people talk about Iran and Israel going to war like it is some existential thing for both of them. But this is silly. There was a real chance that Egypt would overrun Israel and wipe the nation off the map. For various reasons, that remains a long term risk to Israel even if most people can’t see this because they only think in the short term. But there is no realistic chance that Iran will overrun Israel. Even if Hezbollah was wildly successful with its much feared missile arsenal, they would have no chance to threaten Israel’s control of its territory. Even if all the nations in-between stood aside and let Iran marched its armies straight on to Israel, Iran would have hard time logistically sustaining their forces much less winning fights when they finally got close to Israel.
On the flip side of the coin, the reason Israel was able to overcome great odds to beat its neighbors depended in a large part on the fact that Israel had very little in way of logistical issues and could rapidly move forces around to deal with various issues. It is often talked about how Israel suffers from having no strategic depth and certainly from a long term view this is a problem as it gives Israel no room for error. But from a tactical perspective, it gives Israel the advantages of a cat. Just like there is no safe way to grab a cat because it is so agile it seems like it is all teeth and claws every which way, Israel’s lack of depth also means that there is no safe way to attack it. Since there is no depth to Israel, their forces are never far from where they need to be. In other words, there is no analog to the Ardennes Forest in Israel for an enemy to exploit. But when it comes to attacking Iran, Israel does not have this advantage.
The big talk by those blinded by Israel’s history is that Israel can destroy Iran using its air power. But geographically this is simply not possible. On paper Israel’s planes can reach up to the border of Iran and possibly beyond if they load up with external fuel tanks. But as a practical matter you don’t want to send your warplanes into a fight with the bare minimum of fuel. Even if the plan is just to fly in to bomb and fly out, you can’t be sure that something will not go wrong. Odds are good that the jets will have to maneuver and do other things that require extra fuel. For that reason, warplanes need to be over the target with fuel to spare. External fuel tanks don’t really solve this problem because they come at the expense of being able to carry ordnance.
Of course, even most of Israel’s most optimistic supporters understand this. But they think that Israel’s fleet of 7 refueling tankers will enable Israel to overcome this issue. The problem with this idea is that these tankers can only support about a dozen fighters at a time. Put your most optimistic hat on and Israel can at most attack Iran with 84 planes. That might sound like a lot, but it is only a fraction of Israel’s air force of 280 warplanes. More importantly, that number cannot be sustained. That is one attack and everyone has to come home to refuel and rearm and it will take awhile before another attack like that can be launched.
To understand how silly it is to think that 84 planes can do anything militarily significant in one attack, consider what it took NATO to do to achieve their objectives in Serbia. On the first day of air combat alone they used 250 U.S. Aircraft, including 120 land based fighters, seven B-52s , six B-2s , ten reconnaissance aircraft, ten combat search and rescue aircraft, three airborne command and control platforms, and nearly 40 aerial refueling tankers. In addition, thirteen NATO member countries contributed aircraft. When that did not work, they kept going at it. By the end of the third week of air campaign, nearly 1000 aircraft were involved (54% belonging to the US). Even with all this fire power, it would take 78 days and 38,004 sorties (10,484 of which were strike sorties) to accomplish NATO’s goals. And all this against a small nation with almost 7 million people compared to 88 million people of Iran (and Iran is much bigger geographically at 636 thousand square miles compare to 34 thousand square miles of Serbia). On top of all that, NATO bases were a lot closer to Serbia than Israel is to Iran.
The silliness of thinking that Israel can do anything militarily significant with its air force only persists because of the memory of Israel’s successful strike against Iraq’s nuclear reactor in Operation Opera. That attack took a total of 14 planes and blew up one reactor. Israel performed a similar feet in Operation Outside the Box with a similar amount of planes (accounts differ, and what took down Syrian radars remains something of a mystery). Because of these examples, there remains the widespread delusion among Israel’s fans that Iran’s nuclear program is going to go up in smoke as soon as Israel decides to do something about it.
What these fans ignore is all the differences between Iran’s nuclear program and those of Syria and Iraq. In both Syria and Iraq’s case, Israel caught them before their facilities for generating bomb making materials came on line. And in both Syria and Iraq’s case, there was only one main target that needed to be hit and those targets were far closer to Israel then anything in Iran. By contrast, Iran has seven sites publically known to be Nuclear Facilities. Moreover they are not at beginning stages like Iraq and Syria were at. Iran already has operational reactors, stockpiles of enriched uranium, and an entire well established research program. Israel has already failed to stop the Iranian program at the same stage that the Iraqi and Syrian programs were stopped at. So imagining that taking out Iran’s program is like the Iraqi and Syrian strikes is pure fantasy. If it was that easy, Israel would have done it already.
Of course, both nations could theoretically do serious military damage with weapons of mass destruction. And because of the history of various nations trying to wipe out the Jews in various pogroms and genocides Israel is paranoid about people shouting “death to the Jews” having the bomb. But as much as one can sympathize with the desire of Israel to never let its enemies get the bomb, realistically that ship has sailed. Russia’s history is full of pogroms against Jews and they have the bomb. Pakistan is full of people who hate Israel and Jews in general and they have the bomb. What makes Iran different? Perhaps they have been a little more public about it. But so far they have shown that when push comes to shove they are awful bashful about receiving the full force of conventional attacks from Israel. This is shown by their reluctance to have Hezbollah come to the aid of Hamas and their careful telegraphing that they did not really want a major conflict when they felt compelled to fire off a bunch of missiles at Israel. Why should they not be deterred by the prospect of using weapons of mass destruction?
In Iran’s case this is because its economic resources are almost entirely based around the export of petroleum products. The vast size of Iran and its large population mean that any attempt to destroy its military power would require a sustained air campaign that Israel does not have the means to sustain. On the other hand, its economic reliance on the export of petroleum products means that there are a few key targets that would cripple Iran economically. These targets are the pipelines for exporting fuel and terminals for loading petroleum products on ships. These targets are vulnerable by the nature of their construction to attacks from the air and Iran has no practical means of defending them. It would not take much of an air campaign to put Iran out of the petroleum export business.
Moreover, air attacks are not the only way in which Israel can attack Iran’s vulnerabilities. Sabotage and cyber attacks are also options. Along those lines, it is possible that a mysterious attack on Iran’s gas pipelines in February of this year was meant to remind Iran of what could be done and to prevent Iran from being too tempted complicate Israel’s life over Gaza. Regardless, what is notable about the attack in February is how unusual it is. Israel does not normally attack economic targets in Iran in spite of this being the most obvious way crippling the Iranian regime.
Israel’s reluctance in this regard is not based on altruism. Israel is also vulnerable to economic attacks from Iran and so it is deterred from attacking Iran’s economic weakness. Much was made about the success of Israel defense against Iran’s ballistic missiles and how only a few struck the ground on the Israeli air base that Iran targeted. But this was a non-event mostly because it was a military air base that had been targeted. If Iran had targeted the Port of Haifa and a few missiles had gotten through, the economic damage to Israel would have been immense. The resulting reluctance of foreign ships and crews to come to Israeli ports alone would have caused far more damage then whatever the few landing missiles managed to accomplish. Moreover, the missiles doing the intercepting cost far more that the incoming missiles.
When you add Hezbollah into the mix, there is a very real chance that a conflict between Iran and Israel could result in the Israeli electrical grid going down. The fact that Hezbollah is closer means that it is harder to defend from the attacks. And as a general rule, a short range attack is more likely to be accurate then a long range attack as there is less time for things to go wrong. These factors make it more likely that attacks lunched from Lebanon would be able to hit the smaller targets needed to take out the electrical grid then the more long range attacks launched from Iran. The military impact of the electrical grid growing down would be limited. he failure of the electrical grid would not result in Israeli losing control of territory and would not prevent them from hitting oil related targets in Iran if they wanted. And it is unlikely that Iran/Hezbollah could keep the Israeli electrical grid down for the long term so in a military sense, Israel could ride out such attacks. But in an economic sense, the damage would be profound even if serious electrical disruptions only lasted for weeks.
Even if Iran and Hezbollah are not successfully at hitting key targets in Israel, the very fact that the missiles that they are so much cheaper than the interceptors means that If Israeli had no options to retaliate, then the mere act of defending themselves from the missiles would bleed Israel dry. But Israel does have the option of hitting Iranian economic targets. And this is why I think you see Iran focus on killing the random Israeli citizen or attacking Israeli military facilities instead of aiming blows at Israel electrical grid or ports. And by the same token this is why Israel focuses on killing various people on their hit lists instead of trying to bring Iran’s economy to its knees. The balance of terror keeps Iran and Israel from coming to serious blows and is helped along by the fact that neither nation has the option of overthrowing the other in the traditional sense regardless of what they do.
Having said all this, it is mistake to think that nations work purely off of logical calculations. Mistakes happen all the time and the storms of emotion can cause nations to do things that don’t fit into logical calculus and leads them down roads they did not want to go. I personally thought the Hamas attack on Israel was going to be one such event.
I don’t believe that Iran knew of or wanted the Hamas attacks to happen. At the very least, I don’t think they expected Hamas to succeed to the extent that it did. But once the event happened I expected (and I think Hamas was counting on this as well) a kind of prisoners dilemma logic to kick in. Iran might prefer to stay out of the fight, but there seemed to be a strong risk that Israel would turn on Hezbollah after it cleared out Hamas. If you feared this (and there were/are plenty of rational reasons to fear this) the right thing to do would be to attack Israel first while its attentions were focused on Hamas. Otherwise you run the risk of letting Israel mop up Hamas and then turn to face Hezbollah without its attentions being divided.
For whatever reason, this did not happen. Iran has been trying to kill Jews at a “PR” level where it can attempt to earn brownie points for the deaths but not even attempting to achieve anything strategically effective. It went out of its way to telegraph that it did not want a major conflict with Israel even after Israel committed what would stereotypically be considered an act of war against its Syrian embassy (when two nations are already engaged in low level conflict, it is little hard for me to understand what distinguishes act of war from the normal low level conflict. On the other hand, Israeli claims that the strike did not count as an act of war because it was few yards from the real embassy are equally silly as they would never accept that logic if the shoe was on the other foot). And so far, it has kept Hezbollah from doing anything above its normal “kill Jews for good public relations” type of attacks.
By the same token, Israel basically just sat back and took a major attack from Iran without doing anything beyond demonstrating that maybe they could do something if they wanted to. And even though there is a lot of talk about the need for Israel to “do something” about Hezbollah, there is not a lot of sign that they really want to do this. For a while, it seems like their main hope was that all the talk of doing something would convince Hezbollah to be nice and stop the “PR attacks” on northern Israel.
All that said, an Israeli attack on Hezbollah still seem likely to happen. Iran and Hezbollah don’t seem to want to go all out and yet they are sustaining a level of attacks Israel’s domestic politics will not allow to continue. Perhaps Iran calculates it will get more PR value out of Israel being perceived as the one who turned the conflict into a war. Perhaps they think they can manage to keep things just below the level where Israel attacks. Regardless, even if it breaks out into “major” conflict, nothing significant is likely to change. Israel might stop Hezbollah from firing missiles in the short term and Iran might get a lot of useful PR. But in long term, it does not seem like either side has the tools to change anything in a significant manner.
What is going to change situation between Iran and Israel is the demographic changes that are sweeping the globe. Ironically, Iran is on the wrong side of these demographic changes. Iran’s total fertility rate is only 1.69. This compares to 2.92 of Egypt, 2.43 for Saudi Arabia, 2.83 for Jordan, 3.5 for Palestine, 3.47 for Pakistan, and so on and so forth. The problem for Iran is not just that it is below replacement rate although it is an issue when many of its neighbors are well above replacement. But in the short term, the bigger issue is the humongous demographic bulge that the rapid drop in Iranian fertility produced. If you look at a demographic chart below you will see that Iran there is a mountain on the chart that far exceeds similar western “baby booms” of people between the ages of the mid twenties to the mid forties.
By Sdgedfegw – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
In twenty years Iran is going to start rapidly aging at a rate this is historically unprecedented. By the time this aging process is done, Iran is going to be a basket case. This cannot be stopped. The twenty year sharp drop off in new births is already baked in. Even if Iran can succeed in raising it birth rate starting now (doubtful), nothing can stop the huge aging wave that is going to hit it.
Iranian leaders are well aware of this issue. They talk about it being the raising the birth rate is a top national priority. But like other nations trying to throw money at this issue they are having no luck. What is worse, Iranian hardliners talk about how the Sunnis in Iran are out breeding the Shias. I don’t have any figures on this so I don’t know how bad it is. But if they are accurate in their assessment (and judging by the fertility rate neighboring Arab Sunni countries they likely are) this means the total fertility rate for a Persian Shia is likely even lower than the 1.69 national figure as higher Sunni birth rates in Iran are likely spiking that number upwards.
But regardless about such speculative thoughts, the overall picture for Iran is clear. Now is the best time ever for Iran demographically speaking. They have a huge bulge of people at their most productive period in their life. For the next 10 years or so this will remain the case. Then a gradual deterioration of the demographic picture will start to set in. Twenty years from now the tidal wave of over 60 year olds starts that would overwhelm a wealthier nation. Only South Korea faces a similar situation and they are far wealthier as nation (although they are already entering their doom phase as they are farther along). The bottom line is that people in their forties and younger can expect to live through the implosion of the Iranian state. Iran will no longer be a significant threat to Israel.
By contrast, Israel seems to be doing well demographically. In Israel, the Jewish fertility rate (i.e. not counting the rate for Muslims and Arab Christians who live in Israel) is 3.03. So in that aspect they are doing better than Iran. But if you look at the broader picture, the demographic picture for Israel is extremely bad. The problem for Israel is not that they will not exist, but they will have no friend left and their enemies will be all the more numerous.
On the surface level, the problem does not look too bad. It is true that the Palestinian birth rate is above that of Israel’s at 3.5. But that is only barely higher and so not much of an advantage. And the while Sunni Arab world in general shows no signs of going away as they are still well above replacement rate, by and large their total fertility rate is below that of Israel. But this is unlikely to matter much. Arabs will still greatly outnumber Jews for the foreseeable future even if the relative balance changes a smidge. What really matters is that demographic forces put Israel’s great economical and military advantage under threat.
Israel has always been outnumbered. Their great advantage over Arab nations has always been that Israel has been part of the Western world while Arab nations have not. At the most fundamental leval, this is about culture, education, and trade ties. This has led to Israel being wealthier on a per capita basis and that wealth has in turn lead to greater military power then their size would suggest. Moreover, western world has provided a lot of aid. At the nation’s founding this was mostly limited to private donations but for much of Israel’s history this has also taken the form of massive aid from the US government.
The problem for Israel is that the western world is facing demographic collapse and most of the west is further along on this process than Iran is. Moreover, the population of people who are extremely hostile to Israel is increasing all over the west and to an extreme degree in Europe. In other words, the very culture of the West is changing even as it numbers collapse. How will Israel sustain its economic (and therefore military advantages) when the broader economic system that is sustaining those advantages is in the process of collapse?
This general collapse in the west will be compounded by the changes that are likely to accompany it in the Arab world. We got a foretaste of this when the Muslim brotherhood took over Egypt and when Syria was almost overthrown by similar groups. The only thing that kept this change taking hold in the Sunni world was the intervention of the outside world. In Egypt it was military officers funded by outside money that led to a change back to the status quo. In Syria it was Russia and Iran who put a stop to the overthrow. But demographic change is going to over throw Russia and Iran along with the West. And that same demographic change will dry up the money that has been keeping Egypt out of hands of Muslim Brotherhood and their fellow travelers. It is hard to see how the Arab world stays out of the hands of people whose hate for Israel will make Iran seem tame and moderate in comparison.
If (as seem likely at the time of this writing) Iran and Israel lunch serious attacks on each other over Hezbollah’s continued attacks into northern Israel, it is worth keeping the broader picture in mind. The TV reports will be breathless. The scale of rocket attacks and rocket defense are likely to set new records in world history. People will be running around talking about the end of the world and the possible start of World War III.
But in reality, the serious threats to both nations are still in the future. In Iran’s case it will be trying survive a demographic collapse even as its natural enemies remain demographically stable. In Israel’s case it will be trying to survive the collapse of west and resulting collapse of the existing Arab governments. Regardless, what is to come will make a conflict between Iran and Israel seem like a walk in the park by comparison. And by extension, the same is true for all of us. The truly bad is yet to come.