Between the formal Japanese surrender to the US on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945 and the chaotic fall of Saigon in April 1975, with the last US Marine dangling from the final departing helicopter, lies a vast expanse.
Likewise, there is an equally large distance between the stunning and unequivocal Israeli victory in the Six Day War and the quagmire of the First Lebanon War, which culminated in the eventual withdrawal of all Israeli troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, as Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah crowed.
Absolute victory and ignominious defeat sit at opposite poles. In between – though closer to the former than the latter – lies the ceasefire US President Donald Trump declared on Thursday morning, forestalling the attack he had warned would send Iran back to the “stone ages.”
The bottom line for Israel is this: the country faces fewer significant threats after Operation Roaring Lion – far fewer – than it did before. Iran, in turn, is weaker, considerably weaker, than it was.
The rest is commentary. And that commentary is heavily colored by political predilection.
Those who lionize Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will portray the operation as an unmitigated success; those who loathe them will dismiss it as a total failure. The sober truth lies in between.
While not all of the war’s aims were achieved – most notably the removal of the roughly 460 kilograms of enriched uranium still believed to be buried beneath an Iranian mountain – enough was accomplished to significantly improve Israel’s strategic position and security.
To properly assess those achievements, the lens must be widened. What took place over the past six weeks should not be viewed as a separate war. This was not a new war with Iran, but rather the latest battle – perhaps the last major one – in a war that began on October 7, 2023.
Just as the War of Independence was a long war that stretched from November 1947 to July 1949, punctuated by intermittent ceasefires and large campaigns on different fronts, so too is the war that began on October 7. It has been a long war with intense battles fought on multiple fronts: in Gaza against Hamas, in Lebanon against Hezbollah, in Yemen against the Houthis, and directly against Iran – twice.
And just as the War of Independence did not end with all of Israel’s aspirations fulfilled – most notably, the Old City of Jerusalem remained outside Israeli control – so too the current war, whatever name it will eventually be known by, has not delivered a complete fulfillment of Israel’s objectives.
But neither the failure in 1948 to retain the Old City, nor today’s inability to locate and remove all the enriched uranium, nor bring a conclusive end to the rule of the clerical regime in Tehran, means that the war has not fundamentally changed the regional reality. It has, and that needs to be clearly acknowledged.
Before the War of Independence, the Jews did not have a state; afterward, they did. Did that mean everything was rosy? Hardly. Some 6,000 people – out of a Jewish population of roughly 600,000 – were killed. There was no peace, only armistice agreements. The economy was in shambles. Yet the fundamental reality had changed.
Something similar is transpiring today.
Before October 7, Iran was steadily advancing toward nuclear capability, building ballistic missiles at a fast clip, actively preparing and prepping its proxies for Israel’s destruction.
Hezbollah, with an arsenal of some 150,000 rockets, effectively dominated Lebanon while positioning itself directly along Israel’s northern border, threatening an incursion into the Galilee. Hamas controlled Gaza, building a formidable terror army, a labyrinthine tunnel network, and a rocket arsenal capable of disrupting daily life across much of the country.
And Iran was on the march, tightening its grip across Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. It had effectively encircled Israel, its tentacles coiling around the country’s neck.
Today, those tentacles have been cut back sharply – though not entirely – and the proverbial head of the octopus is stunned, battered, and disoriented.
Is it everything Israel sought? No. Is it a complete victory over every one of those arms? No. But is it significant? Unquestionably.
Things have changed in the wake of Israel's wars
Those arguing that nothing was achieved are, in effect, arguing that each of those tentacles – and the head itself – can regenerate, that Hamas will rebuild, that Hezbollah will reconstitute itself in Lebanon, and that Iran will do the same.
They are arguing that once sanctions are lifted, and money flows back into the country, Iran will rebuild its infrastructure and, with what remains, rearm Hezbollah and Hamas as well.
That argument rests on a critical assumption: that nothing has changed, that Israel, the US, and the world will simply sit back and allow that to happen. But that assumption is flawed.
First, Israel has changed.
One of the key lessons of October 7 – perhaps the key lesson – is that deterrence alone is not sufficient. It is no longer possible to assume that those who openly declare their intent to destroy you will ultimately be restrained by your power. They will not, because their calculus is often shaped by factors – ideological, religious, even messianic – that lie outside conventional logic.
As a result, Israel’s doctrine is shifting – from deterrence to prevention. Not merely discouraging the enemy from building capabilities, but actively preventing it from doing so.
This is not entirely new. In the long campaign known as the “war between the wars” in Syria, Israel acted consistently to prevent Iran from establishing the kind of entrenched front it built in Lebanon. The preventive capability exists. What October 7 reinforced is the need to use it more broadly.
The same logic applies to Iran itself. Some argue that the war will only intensify Iran’s drive for a nuclear program. That may be so. But Israel, the US, and regional actors such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia now have an even stronger incentive – having seen how indiscriminately Iran waged this war – to prevent it from doing so. Iran can rebuild its nuclear, military, and industrial capacities only if they allow it. After all that has transpired, it is reasonable to assume that they will not.
The argument that Iran can simply rebuild, too, assumes that nothing has changed internally within Iran – that the population will simply acquiesce to whatever the regime demands, even as national resources are once again diverted to proxies and nuclear ambitions.
One of the implicit – if not always stated – goals of this campaign was regime change. Since that has not happened, some argue, it must be judged a failure.
But that does not necessarily follow.
The fact that the Shia clerical leadership remains in place does not mean it will remain so. Opposition head Yair Lapid argued that replacing an 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a 56-year-old one would make little difference.
It might, however. The younger Khamenei, whatever his current state of health, does not command the same stature, authority, or unflinching obedience as his father. With the killing of so many of Iran’s top political, military, and internal security leaders, the regime’s internal balance may not be as stable as it appears.
It took months following the 12-day battle with Iran last June – Operation Rising Lion – before millions of Iranians took to the streets. But they did – not because of outside prompting, but because the regime was failing to meet basic needs.
Following the damage inflicted over the past six weeks, the regime’s ability to meet those needs now will be even more constrained.
The absence of immediate unrest does not mean unrest will not come, nor does it mean that forces are not already working to bring it about. And if protests do reemerge, the regime may be less capable of withstanding them than before, though – and this is the fear – it may also be as ruthless.
Some authoritarian systems collapse suddenly – leader Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Others erode gradually – the Soviet Union, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile – worn down by sustained internal and external pressure. Iran may well prove to be the latter.
A new war of narratives
In any event, with the ceasefire now in place, what we are currently witnessing is another battle – a war of narratives – with each side claiming historic victory.
Iran’s claim of victory despite its tremendous losses is reminiscent of Egypt’s victory claim after the 1973 Yom Kippur War – a war in which, by most objective military measures, Egypt lost, even if it achieved surprise in the opening stages. That “victory,” however, had a lasting consequence: it was the last time a conventional Arab army waged full-scale war against Israel, having internalized the limits of what could be achieved militarily.
Ironically, some Israeli opposition leaders are now echoing, in a different register, that same narrative of Israeli failure. Not military failure, but diplomatic failure – a “strategic debacle,” in Lapid’s words.
Why? Because the end of the war marks the beginning of the political campaign. And the last thing Lapid or Naftali Bennett wants etched into the public consciousness seven months before the election is the perception that this war altered Israel’s trajectory in a positive direction – that Netanyahu managed, in the end, to extract victory following the humiliation of October 7.
Instead, they seek to reinforce the opposite narrative: that since October 7, failure has followed failure, and that this government is incapable of delivering victory or success.
Netanyahu and Trump, for their part, are framing the outcome in precisely the opposite terms – as a historic achievement.
Israelis have reason to be wary of such triumphant declarations. They have heard them before – after operations in Lebanon, after campaigns in Gaza, after assurances that deterrence had been restored. Too often, those claims did not hold up over time.
Skepticism, therefore, is warranted.
But skepticism should not be selective. It should apply not only to claims of sweeping victory, but also to claims of resounding failure.
Last week, Jews around the world gathered around the Seder table and sang “Dayenu” – a song built on a different logic.
At each stage of the Exodus – leaving Egypt, crossing the sea, receiving the Torah – the refrain is the same: it would have been enough. Not because the journey was complete, but because each step advanced it in some meaningful way.
But that is not how everyone is reading the current moment. For some, the refrain is the opposite of “Dayenu”: taking out senior Iranian military leadership is not enough. Pulverizing elements of its military-industrial complex is not enough. Further damaging its nuclear program is not enough.
Why? Because it was not complete. Because capabilities remain. Because threats endure.
But that standard – all or nothing, total victory or total failure – is a false one. Much was achieved. Much remains unresolved. Ignoring either is simply not serious.