A War That Did Not Deliver Its Own Objectives
When the United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeting nuclear and military infrastructure in the opening hours, the stated goals were sweeping. Israeli officials had been explicit for months beforehand that regime change was the underlying aim, with a senior Israeli source telling the press as early as November 2025 that Israel intended to bring about the fall of the Iranian government before the end of President Trump's term.[1] Alongside regime change sat two further objectives repeated consistently by American and Israeli officials through the opening weeks of the war, the permanent dismantling of Iran's nuclear programme and the forced surrender of its ballistic missile arsenal, the deterrent Tehran has spent decades building specifically because it lacks the air force or air defence network to match its adversaries by conventional means.
Six months on, none of the three original objectives has been achieved. Iran's government remains in place under President Masoud Pezeshkian, with the Supreme National Security Council continuing to function and a new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, installed rather than any alternative structure. A Pakistan mediated ceasefire in April and a fourteen point memorandum of understanding in June halted the largest scale fighting, but a durable settlement remains elusive, with core disputes over the nuclear programme, the Strait of Hormuz and sanctions relief still unresolved as of mid August.[2] Iran's ballistic missile programme, the single item Tehran's negotiators have repeatedly said is not open for discussion at any table, remains intact and is discussed below in far more alarming terms for Israeli planners than it was in February.
The Regime Change Plan That Cost Two Mossad Careers
The clearest evidence that the first objective failed came not from Tehran but from Tel Aviv. On 6 August 2026, Mossad director Roman Gofman removed the two officials most closely associated with the operation, the head of the agency's intelligence directorate and the head of its Iran division, both architects of a written plan to bring down the Islamic Republic using Iran's minority populations, principally Kurdish fighters based across the border in northern Iraq, combined with a revived mass protest movement the plan's authors expected to grow into a broader uprising reaching Tehran itself. The strategy envisioned Israeli strikes on Revolutionary Guard positions near the Iraqi border clearing a path for Kurdish forces to advance into Iran's northwest, on the expectation that thousands of young Kurds would join the effort, and it was never fully implemented before Washington moved away from it.[3]
The dismissals produced open backlash inside Israel's own security establishment rather than closure. Overthrowing Iran's government had long been a personal priority for Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had used the same operational plan, which reportedly envisioned former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a possible replacement leader, to help persuade President Trump to authorise the war in the first place. A source close to the agency told the newspaper Haaretz that Gofman himself had been one of the plan's key supporters during his earlier tenure as Netanyahu's military secretary, and suggested the dismissals were intended to help the prime minister distance himself from the fact that Iran's government never fell, a reading Channel 12 reported left agency officials in shock.[4] Netanyahu has continued to describe the war publicly as a resounding success, without acknowledging that the regime change which never materialised was one of its stated central aims.
Why the Streets Stayed Quiet
Part of the reason the uprising the Mossad plan anticipated never materialised is that Iran had already lived through its own comparable rupture, and the state came through it. Beginning 28 December 2025, protests erupted in Tehran and spread nationally, evolving into the most serious internal challenge to the Islamic Republic since the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, itself triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Iran's January 2026 crackdown, which some observers compared in scale and brutality to historical mass killings, marked the deadliest episode of internal repression since 1979 and followed a year of economic collapse in which the rial had lost more than forty percent of its value since the earlier 2025 conflict with Israel.[5]
When external strikes began in February, that pre war unrest did not translate into the anti government uprising Israeli planners expected. Analysts have described this as a textbook rally around the flag dynamic, reinforced by state repression as much as by genuine nationalism, in which foreign attack narrowed the space for protest even as underlying economic grievances remained fully intact rather than resolved.[6] Trita Parsi, a longtime Iran analyst, described a significant rallying around the flag and a huge surge of nationalism following the strikes, while cautioning that the same dynamic could reverse just as quickly if economic conditions worsen further.[7] Iranians who had marched against their own government months earlier, including some former participants in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, found themselves facing a harder calculation once foreign bombs started falling, one that gave Tehran's authorities more room to operate than they had possessed before the war began, not less.
External attack narrowed the space for protest, at least temporarily. Citizens who may have opposed the state on economic or political grounds were less likely to mobilise publicly while the country was under bombardment. This does not mean pre war grievances vanished. War suspended and displaced them.
Cracks in Tehran, Not Collapse
None of this means Iran's political system is unified. It means the argument inside it has shifted from whether the state survives to how it should use the position it currently holds, a genuinely consequential difference. President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, both generally described as pragmatists favouring a negotiated settlement that secures sanctions relief, have found their authority persistently constrained by the IRGC leadership and hardline figures aligned with the new Supreme Leader.[8] Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former IRGC Air Force commander turned pragmatist, has increasingly aligned with the negotiating camp alongside Pezeshkian and Araghchi, while principlist hardliners have intensified pressure on all three, fearing any comprehensive deal would marginalise their political position and weaken their long term influence over Iran's direction.[9]
The dispute has occasionally broken into open public view. A hardline lawmaker accused Pezeshkian in May of bypassing the Supreme Leader's authority by agreeing to the April ceasefire, arguing this had effectively saved American and Israeli forces from the crushing blows Iran's missiles and drones were poised to deliver, a claim that drew unusually sharp pushback even from senior conservative figures with long standing security establishment ties, who warned that this kind of extremism damages the system from within and alienates the Iranian public.[10] IRGC affiliated outlets including Tasnim, Fars and Mehr have nonetheless maintained a consistently tough editorial line against any deal with Washington, and IRGC commanders retain institutional interests, an economic empire estimated at thirty to forty percent of Iran's GDP among them, tied directly to the narrative of permanent struggle against the United States and Israel continuing rather than resolving.[11]
Washington's Diminishing Hand
While Tehran's factions argue over how hard to press an advantage, Washington's own capacity to escalate has been quietly eroding. A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis published in late July found that Patriot interceptor stockpiles have fallen from roughly 2,300 before the war to fewer than 827, a reduction of about two thirds, while THAAD interceptor inventories dropped from 452 to fewer than 278, with some Pentagon sources describing losses of closer to eighty percent for that system specifically.[12] A US official who declined to discuss specific numbers told reporters both stockpiles are extremely low, and retired senior military officers said the depleted figures would factor directly into Pentagon planning and into President Trump's own decision making regarding any new phase of the conflict.[13] The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump paused a planned two week American air campaign against Iran specifically to pursue negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz, with White House discussions explicitly citing the stockpile depletion as a factor in that decision.[14] CSIS estimates it could take three years or longer to rebuild these interceptor stocks to prewar levels, a timeline that sits well beyond the political horizon Washington is currently operating on.[15]
Layered onto that constraint is the discovery, reported by the Jerusalem Post and corroborated across Israeli outlets in the days immediately before this note was published, that Iran's own military industrial recovery has stunned both IDF and Mossad assessments. Israeli and American planners had projected Iran's production capabilities were set back by years following roughly 2,600 targeted strikes across some 30,000 individual attacks during the war's active phase. Instead, Tehran's ballistic missile arsenal, estimated at approximately 1,300 missiles in June 2025, had already grown to around 2,500 by February 2026, and senior Israeli defence officials now acknowledge Iran has developed methods, including using bulldozers to rapidly clear debris from damaged underground production tunnels, to prioritise rebuilding critical capabilities even as much of the surrounding industrial base remains in ruins.[16] Satellite imagery reviewed by the Wall Street Journal has shown renewed activity at missile base tunnels in Dezful and Kangavar and construction work at a suspected component facility near Tehran, and Israeli assessments now suggest that if Iran can sustain production of one hundred to three hundred ballistic missiles a month, its arsenal could return to prewar levels by early or mid 2027 and constitute a major renewed threat by 2028.[17]
Why Tehran Has No Reason to Rush
Iran's negotiating position, as it stands, centres on a small number of unresolved issues rather than the sweeping demands Washington and Israel originally set. Tehran wants firm guarantees against future aggression, formal recognition of what its negotiators call Iran's legitimate rights, and reparations, alongside a new governing regime for the Strait of Hormuz that would include transit charges, a proposal Oman, which has historically managed the strait jointly with Iran, opposes and which Washington has called unacceptable to include in any deal.[18] Notably absent from the current negotiating agenda is any discussion of dismantling the ballistic missile programme, precisely the demand that anchored the war's original justification. As of this week, US officials have said progress toward a narrower Hormuz specific agreement could be reached within days, even as Washington simultaneously imposed fresh sanctions targeting Iranian financial networks it says sustain the ruling elite.[19]
That second track, sanctions rather than settlement, escalated sharply this week. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Newsmax on 14 August that Washington would soon apply economic measures against Iran unlike anything previously seen in the history of economic isolation of a single country, describing it as one half of a one two punch that also includes the continued naval blockade of Iranian ports.[20] Objectively, this is precisely the kind of pressure that makes patience the rational choice for Iranian hardliners rather than a costly gamble. Iran has weathered decades of sanctions before, its economy remains severely strained but functional, and conceding ground now, before the midterms, would represent an unforced gift to an American administration that badly needs a resolution to campaign on. Israel, for its part, is unlikely to accept any settlement in which Iran emerges with its deterrent intact and its regime unchanged, which describes the situation as it currently stands, meaning the diplomatic track has structural limits even where individual issues like Hormuz get resolved.
The through line connecting Iranian strategy to both governments' electoral calendars is not subtle, and Tehran's hardliners appear to understand it clearly. Israel goes to the polls on 27 October 2026, the first election since the October 2023 attacks and the war on Iran, with Netanyahu unable to point to the regime change his own government had promised.[21] The American midterms follow one week later. Should either government emerge from its election in a strengthened position, freed from the immediate political pressure of an unresolved war weighing on domestic politics, both Washington and Jerusalem gain considerably more latitude, including latitude to pursue heavier escalation without the same domestic political cost. A strengthened Trump administration or a strengthened Netanyahu after their respective elections is therefore not in Tehran's interest under almost any reading of its own position, which makes the current minimum viable level of asymmetric, responsive rather than proactive confrontation, matching each American or Israeli move rather than initiating new ones, the most likely posture for Iran to maintain through at least early November. This is the essential planning assumption for Gulf Cooperation Council governments and regional business interests over the coming months, that the floor of the conflict is unlikely to drop further before either vote, but the ceiling remains capped by Iran's own calculation that waiting costs it comparatively little while a premature deal, of any size, before either election could cost it everything.
Note: This intelligence note was completed on 14 August 2026 and reflects open source information available as of that date, a fast moving situation in which specific figures, especially interceptor stockpile counts and Iranian missile production rates, are drawn from analyst estimates that officials on both sides dispute. The strategic reading offered here regarding Iranian intent is analytical judgement, not a confirmed fact, and remains subject to revision as further information emerges. This note does not constitute legal, investment, or policy advice.
