The Mullahs’ Biggest Miscalculations

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The writer on foreign policy Alan Zeitlin has identified here what he considers to be the five greatest miscalculations by Iran: “The 5 Biggest Miscalculations the Iranian Regime Made,” by Alan Zeitlin, Algemeiner, June 23, 2025:

President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran surprised some. Here are the five main miscalculations the Iranian regime made that led to this point. The Iranian regime has seen its miscalculations surface in layers, like the peeling of an onion. Though no one can predict the future and some things remain unclear, it is important to examine five mistakes.

1. Iran’s leaders thought Trump was bluffing and wouldn’t attack directly.

President Trump was not lying when he said he didn’t want to start new wars. Perhaps military action could have been prevented if Iran’s leaders offered inspections, negotiated in good faith, and were ready to seriously constrict uranium enrichment.

Many news reports and podcasts made the regime think the isolationist wing of Trump’s power base had his ear, and the public would fear attacks on US servicemen in the region so much it would be too costly to attack. Trump did kill General Qassem Soleimani in his first term, but he didn’t go further. The stealth B-2 bombers that dropped the huge bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities cost more than $2 billion each, and the regime may have thought Trump would be risk averse to seeing them shot down. While it is extremely difficult to take down B-2 planes, seeing that no Israeli planes were shot down and Iran’s defenses were weakened likely emboldened Trump.

2. Iran’s leaders thought proxies and “allies” would make them bulletproof.

With the well-armed Hezbollah, the Houthis disrupting shipping routes, Hamas in Gaza, and Iranian proxy forces in Syria, Tehran thought Israel and the US would be too scared to attack it directly.

But by the time Trump was considering whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, all of Iran’s proxies in the region, save for the Houthis, had been so battered and weakened by the IDF as to be unable to offer any military help. Hamas in Gaza is clinging to life support, Hezbollah has seen 90% of its once-vast store of missiles and rockets destroyed by the IDF, Syria is now under new, Sunni management that is virulently anti-Iran for the help Tehran provided to Assad during the Syrian civil war. Only the Houthis, though they have been hit hard by IDF attacks on the port of Hodeidah and the airbase in Sanaa, still pose a most modest threat to Israel, by occasionally lobbing a missile or a drone at the Jewish state.

Iran never imagined Hezbollah’s power would be reduced so quickly, it did not expect the Syrian government to fall in the way that it did, and it did not expect to see Hamas and the Houthis so weakened. The Iranian regime, which assisted Russia in its war against Ukraine with drones, and provides a huge amount of oil to China, also imagined the potential threat of Russia or China coming to its aid might scare off any significant attack. There remains a possibility that China, North Korea, or Russia could get involved militarily — but it is unlikely. More likely the Houthis will resume firing missiles….

Neither Russia nor China was willing to risk their own military assets to rescue the Iranian regime. Russia is willing to buy Iranian drones and China to buy Iranian oil, but neither wanted to take part in what might well have become a direct clash with either the powerful IDF or, still more daunting, with the American military.

The October 7 attack by Hamas, in which 1,200 Israels were raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered, at once united Israel; all the political warfare over the issue of judicial reform that seemed before that date to be tearing the Israeli public apart, disappeared on October 7.

Yes, Mossad and Shin Bet made a terrible error in dismissing the threat of a mass cross-border attack by Hamas on October 7. But since then, the Mossad has recovered and demonstrated the power of what is clearly an immense intelligence network inside Iran, consisting both of Persian-speaking Mossad agents and of disaffected Iranians — of whom there are a great many — hoping to hasten the regime’s demise.

Mossad not only managed to smuggle drones into Iran, to be launched from launchers its local agents had hidden around the country, but also may have smuggled in the components for a drone factory. The Mossad detected the precise locations of fifteen of Iran’s most important nuclear scientists, as well as about twenty generals in both the IRGC and the regular Iranian army, and eliminated all of them.