Opportunity and threat for Tehran

Iran is at its weakest moment externally since the Iran-Iraq war.

- TOUQIR HUSSAIN

Iran is at its weakest moment externally since the Iran-Iraq war. Israel's aggression in Lebanon and Gaza has critically wounded Iran's allies Hezbollah and Hamas, while Yemen's Houthis are under intense pressure from massive US air strikes. And Bashar al-Assad's Syria, the linchpin of Iran's strategy of surrounding Israel with a 'ring of fire', has gone. Tehran's Axis of Resistance is virtually no more.

Israel's air strike on Iran on Oct 26 last year had damaged its missile production capabilities and knocked out the S-300 air defence systems. Prior to that, Iran's two drone and missile attacks on Israel had been largely ineffective, exposing the weakness of the former country's much-vaunted deterrence capabilities.

As Paul Salem wrote for the Middle East Institute recently, "For many years, Israel and Iran maintained an uneasy equilibrium of mutual deterrence and limited hostility", but that is over. US President Donald Trump is being pressured by Israel to target Iranian nuclear facilities at Tehran's moment of 'maximum vulnerability', or face the prospect of unilateral action.