Today, the crisis long foretold has finally arrived – and Iran has seldom had fewer options for striking back. No one in Tehran would have relied on any other country to come to their aid against the US.
Iran has a “strategic partnership” with Russia, and Abbas Araghchi, the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister, is expected in Moscow on Monday.
True enough, Vladimir Putin was always happy to buy Iran’s drones and fire them at Ukrainian cities, but there is zero chance that he will risk war with the US for the sake of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime.
Whatever else he is in Moscow for, Mr Araghchi will not be expecting any material help from Russia. The same applies to China, no matter how publicly critical Xi Jinping, the country’s president, might be of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran.
Beijing called the strikes a “violation of international law”. China was always willing to import Iran’s sanctioned oil at a knock-down price, but Mr Xi is not going to fight America to save the Ayatollahs in Tehran.
Khamenei has always known that Iran has no real friends among the nations – hence his great project was to build his own axis of non-state allies by arming and funding terrorist groups across the Middle East.
The plan was that Iran would be able to mobilise so many armed movements that no American president would risk starting a war.
The Revolutionary Guard would supply these groups with enough missiles to mete out instant and overwhelming retribution, targeting first Israel and then US allies and bases across the Middle East.
Now American bombs are falling on Iran – yet remarkably little of the above has so far happened. Missiles fired from Iran have inflicted significant physical destruction on Israel, killing 24 people.
But Khamenei’s plan was for Hezbollah in Lebanon to let fly with 100,000 Iranian-supplied missiles, pulverising Tel Aviv and forcing all Israelis to live underground for weeks on end.
Shia militias in Iraq and Syria were supposed to join in the bombardment, along with Hamas in Gaza and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Together, they comprised Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, ready to strike at Khamenei’s command.
Yet this plan had one great flaw – everyone knew about it. Long before Mr Trump ordered US bombers into action, Israel had been systematically destroying or degrading every single member of the axis.
Hezbollah was eviscerated by last year’s Israeli offensive, which eliminated its leadership and thousands of footsoldiers. This in turn triggered the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, depriving that country’s Shia militias of their protector.
The armed groups in Iraq are lying low, and the Houthis in Yemen, having suffered both Israeli and US air strikes, are not leaping to Iran’s defence.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, carefully deprived Iran of the means to retaliate.
Under this pressure, the Axis of Resistance turned out to be “weaker than a spider’s web”, to adopt the phrase used about Israel by Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah, before he was killed by Israeli bombs.
Today, the risk of escalation has to be set against the reality of a gravely weakened Iran, whose plans for hitting back lie in ruins.
More missiles will probably be fired at Israel, and possibly other countries in the region. But the breaking of the Axis of Resistance, and Iran’s isolation, helps explain why Mr Trump was confident enough to strike.
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