Iran ‘Sleepwalked’ Into a War with Israel It Can’t Win

How Iranian ‘Hubris’ Led to a Devastating War with Israel

In January 2024, Iran was riding high. Its proxies and allies in the region were fighting a multi-front war against Israel. Hamas in Gaza had carried out the worst mass terror attack against Israel in history just three months prior. Hezbollah was targeting Israel daily from Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen were attacking ships and threatening to cut off Israel from the Red Sea. They were also attacking Israel with drones and missiles.

Iraqi militias, backed by Iran, were also targeting Israel with long-range drones. A year and a half later, Iran is reeling from Israel’s June 13 surprise attack. Iran’s air defenses have crumbled. Its ballistic missiles appear to be running out. How did it fail so badly to understand the changing situation?

Iran in History

The Iranian regime’s hubris has roots going back decades. The regime came to power in 1979 by overthrowing the Shah, whose army had the latest US-supplied arms and appeared to be secure in power. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned to Tehran to lead the revolution aboard a Boeing 747 from France. Soon, Iran’s new revolutionaries were storming the US embassy and taking hostages. The regime that came to power had no fear of the US or the Soviet Union. It felt it could do as it pleased. Even after Iran was invaded by Iraq in 1980, it was able to not only push back the Iraqi army but also launch offensives into Iraq. Iraq had the latest Soviet weapons, but Iran’s newly recruited young “revolutionary guards” were able to defeat Saddam Hussein’s legions.

The regime that resulted from this crucible of war believed it could beat the West and regional powers. It sent assassins to Europe to hunt down dissidents. It backed Hezbollah and other groups to kidnap and kill Americans in Lebanon. It unleashed terror in the Gulf.

By the early 2000s, the men who rose to power in Iran were all veterans of the war with Iraq. They felt there was very little that stood in their way on their march to regional dominance.

Iran got a boost in the lead-up to the Iran deal in 2015. With Saddam’s Iraq toppled and Iraq weakened, Iran felt it could now empower proxies to take over more countries. It invested in militias in Iraq and Yemen. When the Syrian civil war broke out, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members went to Damascus to back the Assad regime. IRGC Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani went to Russia and encouraged Moscow to intervene in Syria.

By the time of the Iran deal, Iran felt it had outplayed the US and US partners such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. In January 2016, Iran even captured ten US sailors and broadcast a video of them being humiliated.

Iran’s Hubris

This outlay is the source of the Iranian regime’s extreme hubris. It believed it could attack the US Navy, kill Americans in Iraq, and use proxies against Saudi Arabia and Israel, and face no consequences.

By 2019, the regime felt it was ready to confront Saudi Arabia directly. It used drones and cruise missiles to attack Abqaiq, a giant energy facility. Five years later, in January 2024, Iran was ready to show off its latest ballistic missiles. It launched the new Kheiber Shekan ballistic missile at a target in Syria.

Many widely interpreted this action to be a show of force whereby Iran was showing it could precision target sites in Israel. Iran also carried out a missile attack on Pakistan. In April and October, Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel. This volley was the peak of Iran’s sense that it could do anything it wanted in the region.

Why did Iran overestimate its capabilities and not see that Israel’s threats to strike its nuclear program might come true? Iran misread the regional chessboard as things changed in 2024. In November 2024, the Lebanese government and Israel agreed to a US-backed ceasefire. This accord clipped the wings of Hezbollah. Hezbollah had entered the conflict with Israel with some 150,000 missiles.

By the time of the ceasefire, Hezbollah’s commanders had been killed, and its missile arsenal was destroyed or depleted. Less than two weeks after the ceasefire, the Assad regime fell to Syrian opposition fighters.

By 2025, Iran had lost key parts of its regional alliance. Rather than Israel facing a multi-front war ringed by Iranian proxies, the situation had changed. Iran was now the weaker player. Iran doesn’t have a modern conventional army. It also doesn’t have a strong navy or air force. Iran has relied on its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to bolster its military capabilities. The IRGC has invested in drones and ballistic missiles.

However, drones and missiles don’t win wars. Russia has used drones and missiles against Ukraine since 2022, but Kyiv has not been beaten. Russia is much stronger than Iran, and Ukraine lacks the F-35s and modern military that Israel possesses. Iran didn’t learn from this. Instead, Iran’s regime continued its zombie-like sleepwalking into a war with Israel.

Iran spent the first months of 2025 expecting that it could browbeat the Trump administration into a new nuclear deal. It purposely slow-played the talks in Oman, demanding indirect talks. If Iran had read the chessboard correctly, it would know it should have run for the chance for a deal.

Instead, it failed to seize the day. On June 13, when Israel attacked, Iran’s military commanders were out in the open with no sense that they might be targeted. Men who had fought in the 1980s against Iraq had become complacent and arrogant. They didn’t realize the situation had changed.

This paved the way for Israel to pick apart Iran’s military capabilities in the first week of the war.

Seth Frantzman is the author of The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza (2024) and an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is a Senior Middle East Analyst for The Jerusalem Post. Seth is now a National Security Journal Contributing Editor.