The Return of Strongman Diplomacy: Operation Rising Lion and Its Consequences for the Middle East and Beyond

The long-feared open exchange of hostilities between long-time regional rivals, Iran and Israel, ended almost as abruptly as it began – at least for now. Operation Rising Lion is the culmination of years of Israeli planning and preparation for complete regional dominance in the Middle East. After a meticulously planned operation damaged Iran’s uranium enrichment sites, and a joint operation involving both Israel’s elite F-35 fighter jets and Mossad agents embedded within Iran crippled the Mullah regime’s capacity to respond effectively, the outcome was already clear a few hours after Operation Rising Lion began in the early hours of 13 June. With US President Donald Trump’s decision to join hostilities, targeting the damaged but not destroyed nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz – and openly joining calls for regime change via social media – the signal to Iran’s regime was clear: accept defeat, or face the combined might of US and Israeli forces. 

While Rising Lion was an operational success, severely weakening Iran’s capabilities to threaten Israel conventionally and severely degrading the Mullah regime’s top military echelons, Israel’s true goal, toppling Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime outright, remains, as of now, elusive. Iran’s nuclear programme has been set back, but intelligence suggests none of the key enrichment sites were fully destroyed. The diplomatic and geopolitical fallout of the joint Israeli-US mission, however, will have lasting effects on global stability in the Middle East and beyond it for years to come. After almost two years of testing the international community’s tolerance for military conduct beyond the set limits of international law in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu’s surprise attack on Iran’s leadership will put the continued relevance of international wartime diplomacy to its biggest test yet. While an armed attack on a sovereign state’s military – and the outright assassination of its highest military officers – would normally quite unmistakably constitute an act of war entailing international condemnation, Rising Lion and the reactions to it signal the further blurring of international diplomatic norms and the growing irrelevance of the laws of armed conflict. A renewed, global era of strongman diplomacy is dawning: one where international law becomes more annoyance than proscription, geopolitical rivalries are once again settled by force and fomenting regime change and assassinating leaders again becomes an active component of even Western liberal diplomatic playbooks.

Operation Rising Lion: a precise attack with unclear consequences

In the early hours of 13 June, Israel launched a military operation dwarfing all those that preceded it in both scale and intensity. It began with an unclear number of Mossad agents, who had infiltrated Iran up to eight months preceding the attack, launching their hidden, pre-positioned stash of guided munitions and drones targeting and severely damaging Iran’s air defence and communications networks – another stunning example of how drone weapons systems are bringing an end to strategic distance in theatres from Ukraine to the Middle East. With air defences crippled, Israel was clear to launch some 200 aircraft, spearheaded by Israel’s state-of-the-art fleet of 5th generation F-35I stealth fighters, taking out the remainder of Iran’s response force and severely depleting its ballistic missile launch capabilities. With the skies over Iran clear, Israel launched its strike craft, including F-15 and F-16 systems, setting its sights on the avowed target of Rising Lion’s daring raid: the uranium enrichment facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, significantly damaging, but not destroying them.

Within three days, Israeli forces had secured complete airspace dominance over Iran; within a week, it had hit over 900 military targets deep in Iranian territory, including air bases, destroyed some 30% of Iran’s surface-to-surface missile launch sites, hit oil and gas storage facilities and refineries, airfields and airports, and the Iranian Ministries of Defence, Justice and Foreign Relations. The strikes continued almost unabated for ten days, from the onset of the Operation on 13 June all the way to the first agreed ceasefire date on 23 June. On the ground, some 14 of Iran’s top nuclear scientists and engineers, including Fereydoun Abbasi, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, president of Islamic Azad University and Iran’s top nuclear specialist, were killed either by Mossad agents on the ground, some with the use of car bombs, or by precision munitions. While clearly a priority, Israel did not limit its offensive to Iran’s nuclear programme: through precise assassinations of key military and government officials, including Iran’s general of the army, Mohammed Bagheri, and the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami, as well as an attempt on the former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and close adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, Ali Shamkhani – who survived heavily injured – Israel dealt a potentially fatal blow to Iran’s regime and its capacity to retaliate in the short term. 

Following the Mossad ground operation and the volleys of airstrikes, the third act of the war began over a week later, on the night of 22 June. After intelligence revealed the damage to Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow and Isfahan to be limited, the United States military joined the fray in Operation Midnight Hammer, targeting the already damaged sites of Fordow and Isfahan, as well as the subterranean complex at Natanz, with submarine-fired Tomahawk missiles and 30,000-pound ‘bunker buster’ bombs dropped from the US’s elite arsenal of B-2 stealth bombers, dealing extensive damage to all three. Midnight Hammer, too, was tactically impressive, with the US B-2 fleet–in the air continuously for 37 hours – supported by some 52 refuelling aircraft and escorted by several wings of F-35 and F-22 strike craft. In total, some 125 US aircraft were involved in the engagement. Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites marks the first instance of a large-scale conventional engagement of Iran by the United States military, which had so far limited operations to more opaque methods like the cyber attack on Natanz, codenamed Stuxnet, or the drone-strike assassination of Quds Force commander Suleimani in 2020. 

Israel’s shock-and-awe operation clearly took Iranian leadership by surprise: the months-long presence of a large number of Mossad operatives – armed with FPV drones and guided munitions – signals a catastrophic Iranian intelligence failure; the location and execution of top military and government brass indicates Iran was not expecting an escalation of this magnitude. Meanwhile, Israel’s strategic conduct, taking out communication lines, electricity grids and air defence networks – akin to the preamble to a full-scale invasion – severely limited Iran’s capacity to both defend the attack, and conduct a retaliatory strike large enough to deter further action. Its initial retaliatory response, some 100 Shahed drones, did not come close to the scale of previous attacks like Operation True Promise in 2024; the ballistic strikes in the following days were numerous and did eventually saturate Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ defence system, though the majority of the roughly 550 ballistic missiles and 1000 drones were intercepted. 28 Israelis are reported to have lost their lives, while Iran reported over 900 dead over the course of the 12-day war. The final act, Iran’s attack on the USAF Al-Udeid Base in Qatar, sums up the lacklustre Iranian response: codenamed “Operation Annunciation of Victory”, it was anything but, with Iran firing 19 ballistic missiles at the US base while reportedly formally notifying US officials beforehand, an internationally recognised signal for de-escalation. The base was evacuated, and all missiles intercepted. Although both Israel and, shortly thereafter, Iran violated the first ceasefire on 23 June, the 24 June ceasefire has held so far. 

“Daddy” decides: US-Israeli decision-making and international law

It seems clear that Operation Rising Lion, though meticulously planned and executed, did not achieve all its objectives: for one, while damage to Iranian nuclear facilities was widespread and extensive, no single uranium enrichment site was destroyed; even enthusiastic Pentagon estimates suggest that Iran’s nuclear programme was set back by two years following joint Israeli-US strikes. More concretely, however, the scale, scope and intensity of the Israeli offensive seems to indicate that the true goal of Rising Lion was a grander one: the full-scale decapitation of the Iranian regime. One indication is the extensive damage by Israeli strikes not only to military and nuclear targets, but also economic ones, like oil and gas fields and refineries; a more obvious indication is Jerusalem’s decision to cross international red lines and assassinate top military and government officials. Notably, US officials have told Reuters that Israeli operatives knew the whereabouts of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei for days leading up to and during Rising Lion – but the go-ahead for his assassination was vetoed by US President Trump. 

While the true extent of US knowledge of Rising Lion is unclear – with some commentators arguing Israel acted on its own, as initially stated by US Secretary of State Rubio, and others speculating Trump’s de-escalatory tones prior to June 13 were a coordinated feint – Trump for his part, although eventually joining the war on Israel’s side, was somewhat surprisingly a moderating force in the conflict, maintaining back channels with Iran, keeping Israeli escalation within acceptable bounds and eventually coordinating a ceasefire that has, with one exception, held until now. Whether the US was as closely involved as some Israeli officials have claimed, or Trump’s hand was forced by Netanyahu’s unilateral actions, one thing seems more and more clear: Rising Lion may come to be seen as a watershed moment in international warfare, not just as a best-practice example of the integrated, coordinated use of special operations, surveillance, intelligence and autonomous drones, together with modern conventional technologies like surface-to-surface missiles and advanced strike craft; but, far more critically, in marking the continued degradation and rapidly growing irrelevance for international law and accepted norms of warfare that have defined the era of relative global peace over the past five decades.  

Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 has certainly already put massive strain on those very norms – with an overwhelming international consensus forming on the Netanyahu government’s continued, systematic violations of international and humanitarian law regarding the targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves, the use of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement as a tactic, and the use of systematised violence against non-combatants, including targeting aid seekers with tank shells. With Rising Lion, too, Israel is not treading categorically new ground – the use of armed force in “anticipatory self-defence” has been Israeli doctrine at least since the 1981 attack against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility. The scale of Rising Lion, and the methods employed, however, signify by far the most severe escalation of the degree to which Israel is prepared to exact this doctrine. Notably, that strike on Iraq was unanimously condemned by UN Security Council Resolution 478 as a “clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct”; such international condemnation, let alone a UNSC consensus, seems unimaginable today – while the scale and intensity of Rising Lion is incomparably greater than that of the 1981 Operation Opera. In today’s era of strongman diplomacy, even Western liberal democratic leaders, like Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz, express contentment at a nation-state’s unilateral military action against another, describing it as Israel “doing the dirty work for us”. 

Operation Rising Lion has restarted a lively debate on the legality of pre-emptive strikes. For a pre-emptive self-defence operation to be lawful under international law, two conditions must be met: proportionality and necessity. Beginning with proportionality, while the assassination of civilian scientists is, according to Professor Marko Milanovic, editor of the European Journal of International Law, a contravention of jus in bellum, several legal scholars have noted that Israel’s military strikes, including the ‘decapitation strikes’ against military leaders, are within the proportionality criterion of international law. The case for necessity, on the other hand, is harder to make. While it is important to note that the IAEA concluded on June 12, hours before Operation Rising Lion began, that Iran was in non-compliance with the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, it is equally important to note that negotiations with the United States, though interrupted, remained scheduled for a sixth round in mid-June, two days after Operation Rising Lion began. Furthermore, the US’s very own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, concluded mere days before the offensive that “the IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003” – a statement that Trump assessed as “wrong” some days later, without providing evidence. According to Professor Milanovic, the conditions for the necessity of a pre-emptive strike were thus not given: “even if the broadest possible (legally plausible) understanding of anticipatory self-defence was taken as a correct, Israel’s use of force against Iran would be illegal.”

Beyond jus ad bellum: Rising Lion as the gravedigger of international diplomacy

Leaving the legal considerations to scholars better-suited for such debates, the geopolitical and diplomatic consequences of Rising Lion are nonetheless dire. Neither the hostilities between Israel and Iran, nor the debate around the latter’s nuclear programme, began on June 13; both, indeed, date back decades. It must be remembered that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the landmark 2015 agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities in exchange for sanctions relief, resoundingly succeeded in reducing Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium to below 300kg, with Iran allowing a cumulative 3,000 calendar days of IAEA inspections of their nuclear facilities in 2018 alone. Hailed as a historic achievement and perhaps President Obama’s greatest foreign policy success, the JCPOA was not popular with everyone, above all the Israeli government. The Netanyahu government lobbied against the creation of the deal, was critical of it while in place, and successfully convinced Trump to rescind it, which he did in his first term in office in 2018, leading to Iran restarting its enrichment programme – and surpassing pre-JCPOA levels of enriched uranium this year (see graphic below).

Even in the best-case scenario, then – assuming, in other words, that Rising Lion was a decision that had to be taken as Iranian nuclear bomb development was truly imminent – such a crisis would be a thoroughly self-created problem by the Trump-Netanyahu coalition. Considering both the conclusions of the US intelligence community prior to the offensive and the fact that Israel has to this day not revealed any concrete sources or data to support its assessment that an Iranian nuke was imminent, the latter assumption seems far-fetched. 

The international consensus that Israel was, on the whole, safer with an Iranian regime in full compliance with a deal that drastically reduced their uranium stockpile and allowed thorough international control and inspection is clear. One is left with the impression that the recurring issue of an almost-nuclear-armed Iran has clearly benefitted for Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Trump, at an opportune time where both leaders were facing increasing backlash at home: for Netanyahu, Operation Rising Lion re-establishes the impression that Israel is facing an existential threat, while silencing domestic detractors criticizing him for his unwillingness to secure a deal with Hamas that brings the remaining Israeli hostages home. One must also remember that the Israeli Prime Minister is not only facing an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for IDF actions in Gaza, but also faces a serious corruption trial at home – a trial that has been repeatedly delayed due to the state of exception that has been in place since October 7, 2023. Claims that Netanyahu has not only prolonged but escalated military action, not only in Gaza but also Lebanon and Syria, at strategically chosen moments to further delay his trial, are openly discussed in Israel, and have recently been amplified by a bombshell New York Times investigation, which concluded that “Netanyahu slowed down cease-fire negotiations at crucial moments, (...) pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing, (...) and when an extended cease-fire was finally forged in January, he broke the truce in March in part to keep his coalition intact.”

As for Trump, US involvement in the crisis also provided him an opportunity to change the US narrative that, at the time, had centred around his feud with Elon Musk, formerly of DOGE. Musk, increasingly positioning himself as a challenger to Trump in GOP circles, had heavily criticised Trump’s deficit-exploding “Big, Beautiful Bill” and, in a crescendo of falling-out, suggested in a since-deleted tweet that Trump had been a client of the known child sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. In both Netanyahu and Trump’s cases, it is evident that Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer served – at least in their subjective assessments – national political goals of displaying their military prowess, bullying a weaker state into submission, and quelling domestic criticism by ‘handling’ a crisis – one they worked hard to create in the first place. The stability of the global community, the consequences of the offensive on global international law, and the safety of Iranians – and indeed Israelis – was seemingly a secondary consideration. 

Seen long-term, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Netanyahu’s and Trump’s strongman diplomacy doctrine is at least as great a source of instability and risk, in the Middle East and beyond, as any Islamist regime. In political science literature, the ‘auto-construction of crises’ is a well-established tactic used by authoritarians and populists to control the narrative and justify increasingly harsh crackdowns on political adversaries while avoiding judicial scrutiny. And, while Rising Lion (and, to a lesser degree, Midnight Hammer) are certainly not the first instances of global powers using military action to distract from domestic problems, the scale and intensity of both nonetheless point to the growing irrelevance of international law and the accepted laws of armed conflict. The regime of global security cooperation and diplomacy that has prevailed over the past half-century was designed to prevent unilateral actions like Rising Lion; indeed, the JCPOA – generally hailed as the last, big international agreement of this kind – arguably succeeded in this very goal of de-escalating the threat of a nuclear-armed Iranian regime. The safety the deal afforded to Israel, the United States and the international community, however, was seemingly outweighed by the domestic benefits to Netanyahu and, to a lesser extent, Trump, that an Iranian regime on the perennial brink of developing a nuclear weapon provided – a threat that Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have repeatedly and consistently expressed on the international stage since at least 1992. 

From a global cooperation standpoint, the impression Rising Lion leaves behind is a devastating one. Gone are the days when the international community would address key sources of risk through diplomacy and deal-making; not only that, but we have entered an era where global leaders are openly and actively undermining such agreements, with no identifiable goal other than to sow the seeds for future military confrontation when the timing is opportune. Not only is the international community today loath to condemn contraventions of international law and the commitment of war crimes, but the new regime of strongman diplomacy is indeed now being accepted as the new normal. US and Israeli unilateral action is described as “doing the dirty work”, even when it constitutes a dangerous escalation in a volatile region, in a clear breach of international law. These effects are already being felt beyond Iran: in looking out for his coalition partner, Trump has placed a second round of sanctions on ICC prosecutors for issuing a warrant for Netanyahu. As our colleagues at CEPA note, fewer and fewer states are protesting these developments, with less than half of ICC signatories joining a letter of protest against the second round of sanctions in July. This signals a quiet acquiescence to Trump’s brand of diplomacy at the highest levels: in the now-infamous words of NATO Secretary General Rutte, “daddy has to sometimes use strong language”.

Together, Trump and Netanyahu have undermined global diplomacy and trust in international institutions far beyond the damage that the murky claims surrounding Iraqi WMDs caused in the early 2000s. Once again, direct and serious military action is accepted as subordinate to, and in service of, domestic political considerations. In replacing the dominant regime of the international rules-based order, the strongman diplomacy of Trump and Netanyahu signals that global politics are once more dominated – openly – by a “rules for thee but not for me” ethos, backed more by military strength than any commitment to a global liberal humanism. Together, Trump and Netanyahu have re-opened a Pandora’s box of military tactics of a bygone age, using assassination and overwhelming military might to induce regime change in a state with over 90 million inhabitants, without feeling the need to support their decisions with grounded and incontrovertible intelligence analysis. This hypocrisy becomes even more starkly evident when one takes into account the fact that it is indeed Israel that, today, has an undisclosed number of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons (estimates range between 90 and several hundred), built by a secretive nuclear programme that has been continuously withheld from IAEA inspection since the 1960s, and an avowed military doctrine, the so-called Samson Option, detailing massive nuclear retaliation against states who engage in war against Israel. 

Rising Lion marks the culmination of the Netanyahu government’s decades-long campaign to undermine international norms of diplomacy and destabilise the Middle East by, in fact, maintaining, rather than deterring, Iran as a perennial nuclear threat. Indeed, today one struggles to escape the question whether Rising Lion did indeed fail in its goals – toppling the Iranian regime and fully destroying its nuclear programme – or whether the renewed solidarity and temporary consolidation of the Ayatollah’s regime and the only temporary setback of the eternal threat of an Iranian nuke was indeed part of the plan all along, sustaining Iran’s regime as a readily available bogeyman for future interventions. It is a key marker of the cynicism of our times that such questions are now posed in foreign policy analysis pieces rather than relegated to the backwater pages of some conspiratorial online forum. Netanyahu has justified the scale and timing of Rising Lion as “defending the free world from terrorism and barbarism that Iran fosters and exports across the globe.” It is high time for the international community to ask itself whether this brand of strongman diplomacy actually makes the world a safer, juster place or not. If even the self-purported bastions of liberal democratic, free-world “civilisation” are willing to engage in such means to achieve their solipsistically defined goals, the global rules-based order will soon be confined to the pages of history.