“A warship is a powerful instrument, but even more dangerous is the weapon that can send that ship to the bottom of the sea.” Ali Khamenei, the Shiite cleric who has ruled the destiny of Iran since 1989, thus alluded to the Middle East on Tuesday in a speech in Tabriz, in northwest Iran. The Iranian supreme leader thus recalled that his country will respond to any military attack with everything it has, especially those missiles to which he referred when implicitly mentioning the American aircraft carriers. Khamenei later admitted that Iran has the most powerful army in the world in front of it, but he did so to reiterate that “there is no small enemy” with which the Islamic Republic tries to dissuade it from attacking the superpower.
The United States and its Israeli ally face Iran with overwhelming military superiority. In this context, the Islamic Republic is preparing at full speed for this war conflict that is announced as imminent and on which Donald Trump has given himself a period of between 10 and 15 days to decide. confirmed this Friday that to pressure that country to agree to an agreement on its nuclear program.
Israeli media affirm that there is already intelligence and defense coordination between Israel and the Pentagon with a view to this attack which, according to Israeli officials cited by the newspaper Haaretzit could indeed be triggered in days. Even before the deadline mentioned by Trump expires and the visit to Israel at the end of February, announced by Reuters, of the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, whose purpose is to address the Iranian issue with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Given this horizon, the Iranian defensive and/or deterrent strategy is declined into a battery of measures and threats, both conventional attacks and hybrid war. Among the first, the display of military muscle stands out through the deployment of forces, in recent days naval forces, to remind Washington that its enemy is not so irrelevant and to undermine the perception of weakness of the Iranian regime that the White House demonstrates to have. Among the hybrid threats, one stands out: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
On Monday, with the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and his battle group stationed nearby and the colossal USS Gerald R. Ford On the way, the naval force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard began maneuvers in that strait, which connects the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean. The next day, the semi-official Fars agency announced the partial closure for a few hours of maritime traffic through that vital artery, in theory to allow exercises with warships, helicopters, drones and missiles. This Thursday, the exercises moved to the Gulf of Oman and Russian ships participated.
Iran thus threatened with this possible blockade of the maritime artery through which a quarter of the world’s crude oil transits, , and . If closed, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait would lose their only way to export their black goldwhile the largest oil seller on the planet and a great ally of Trump—and of his family’s empire—, Saudi Arabia, would see the 10 million barrels it exports daily reduced by half.
However, such a closure—or the mining of Strait waters—would be for Iran to “shoot itself in the foot,” said Eldar Mamedov, a non-resident researcher at the Washington-based think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, by telephone. Hormuz is also the main route through which Tehran exports its oil, mainly to China, and that is the oxygen cylinder that keeps its economy alive.
The main conventional threat that the Islamic Republic can wield against its enemies is its arsenal of missiles and drones. Only the Iranian regime knows how many of them it has left after replying with part of them under the pretext of stopping the Iranian nuclear program, to which Washington added.
It is estimated that it has between a thousand and 2,000 medium-range ballistic missiles, capable of reaching Israel, according to different experts, and several thousand more short-range missiles with which it could attack US bases in the region, ships in the Strait of Hormuz and also the oil infrastructure of neighboring countries. But again, Mamedov reminds, that is a double-edged sword: Israel and Washington can respond by bombing Iranian refineries like the one in Bandar Abbas, which “would deal a death blow to Iran’s economy.”
Mosaic defense
In reality, preparations against a foreign attack are not recent. “Iran has been anticipating a US invasion for a long time,” explains military expert Jesús Pérez Triana via text messages. To foresee this possibility, “the defense of the country has been decentralized so that, in the event of loss of communication with the headquarters in Tehran (due to electronic interference, death or capture of leaders), each regional commander wage war on his own with the means at his disposal in a conflict that produces wear and tear on the invader,” says this specialist. It is the so-called “mosaic defense” that the Revolutionary Guard has now announced to be strengthening.
This model significantly complicates the aspiration that Eldar Mamedov believes is reflected in the impressive “army”—as Trump defined it—sent to the Middle East. The White House, the researcher believes, seeks to “achieve something more than what it obtained with the June attacks.” What Trump really aspires to now, he assures, is “a change of regime”—especially if Iran does not capitulate after that “selective attack” that the US president mentioned this Friday—something that “will not be easy.”
In Iran “it is not enough to eliminate the supreme leader or five or six other commanders,” says Mamedov. To achieve that end, “successive strata of power in the Islamic Republic would have to be eliminated, one after another,” which would probably “require a prolonged military campaign.”
Iran also has an advantage over Washington: motivation. For the Islamic Republic, what is at stake is survival, recently described the former Israeli military intelligence analyst on that country, Danny Citrinowicz. Like him, other experts believe that a regime that has massacred thousands of people to quell the latest protests—the exile NGO HRANA estimates more than 7,000, according to a provisional count—will do whatever it takes to survive.
Among the preparations for a possible attack is precisely maintaining that in order to avoid a resurgence of demonstrations if the military onslaught breaks out, something that Trump has declared he expects.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard this week established a hundred, according to its Tasnim press agency. Mass arrests continue, UN special rapporteur for Iran, and death sentences for protesters
There are other preparations. For months, satellite images have shown how the country is trying to rebuild military facilities damaged by the June bombings, such as the Shiraz missile base, in the south of its territory. It is also fortifying its nuclear facilities in anticipation of new attacks.
On Tuesday, the Institute for Science and International Security released satellite images showing that Tehran has built a concrete sarcophagus and covered the facility with earth at the Parchin military complex, 30 kilometers southeast of Tehran.
The same Washington-based think tank reported in early February that three access tunnels to the Isfahan nuclear facilities, in the center of the country, have been sealed with earth, offering them “significant protection against air attacks,” David Albright, the group’s founder, said in X. In the same message, Albright alluded to how the prolongation of the negotiations with Washington, for these preparations.
Not everyone in the Iranian regime fears enough this war that the Islamic Republic faces from a historical weakness, highlights Eldar Mamedov. While the pragmatic faction of the system, members of the hard wing, whose core is the Khamenei clique and the Revolutionary Guard, believe that if Iran responds to an attack and achieves tactical victories such as sinking an American ship, “Trump will back down because of the internal political cost,” analyzes the expert.
Those falcons They trust that this scenario will give Iran more strength to negotiate with Washington. This is a “big mistake,” which is based on the assumption that Trump “acts rationally,” the analyst emphasizes. The president, he concludes, “will never accept defeat” against Iran. Professor Vali Nasr, from the American Johns Hopkins University, agreed in an article in Financial Times this Thursday that a regime like the Iranian one “between a rock and a hard place is more prone to taking dangerous risks.”
