Iran’s threat to strike “the heart of Tel Aviv" should the US attack Iran sounds less like confidence than fear. It resembles a terrified animal puffing itself up to appear larger than it is. Iran desperately needs the world to believe it remains dangerous.
Tehran’s deranged mullahs are weaker-militarily, economically, diplomatically, and internally-than they have been in years.
Israel’s stunning success in its 12-Day War with Iran in 2025 stripped away long-cultivated myths of Iranian invulnerability. Israel demonstrated that it could penetrate Iran’s largely Russian air-defense systems and identify and strike key targets almost at will.
Both Iran and Israel learned from that encounter, meaning a future war would look different. Israel learned that its air force could strike from extraordinary distances and that its intelligence had penetrated the clerical regime at almost every level. This enabled Israel to hit Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile infrastructure and, just as importantly, shattered Iran’s sense of invulnerability.
Israel also learned that Iran, despite its size and rhetoric, is not 10-feet tall. Its systems can be degraded; its actions are constrained as much by political fear as by military limits-fear of escalation it cannot control, fear of domestic instability (which proved justified), and fear of losing what little strategic ambiguity it still possesses.
Iran, for its part, absorbed the harsher lesson that its long-standing doctrine of shadow warfare-proxies, deniability, calibrated escalation-functions poorly against a state with superior intelligence, air power, and allied military and intelligence backing.
This haunts Tehran because the US military can unleash vastly more force than even the Israel Defense Forces. That fear is why the mullahs are making so much noise now.
Iran’s response to Israel’s humiliation-both through direct confrontation and Israel’s dismantling of Tehran’s proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria-has not been strategic innovation but overcompensation.
Unable to match Israel’s precision, Tehran has leaned into quantity: more missiles, more drones, more threats of swarms and saturation attacks. The logic-that if quality fails, volume will suffice-is crude. Yet it is not crazy. It is a truism in naval warfare that the side with the most ships, not the most advanced ones, prevails.
Yet the conditions under which saturation strategies succeed are narrow: static defenses, poor intelligence, and brittle interception systems. None apply to Israel, which operates layered, adaptive defenses integrated with American systems. Israel relies not on a single shield but on redundancy, prioritization, and rapid or even real-time adjustment.
Iran knows this, which is why it targets Israeli civilians rather than military infrastructure, much of which is in the desert. Tehran threatens cities, not air bases. It invokes Tel Aviv, not runways. This reeks of weakness because it is symbolic warfare, aimed at wounding rather than winning.
Israel, meanwhile, did not emerge complacent but sharpened. The last war reinforced a sober conclusion: even world-leading missile-defense systems are not impenetrable force fields. They are sieves-extraordinarily good sieves, but sieves nonetheless. Interception rates well above 95 percent still mean impacts if enough missiles are fired. No system can promise perfect protection.
So Israel’s response has not been blind faith in its defenses but an effort to shorten wars, front-load force, and prioritize degrading the enemy’s launch capacity early. The objective is not to absorb Iranian fire indefinitely but to narrow the window in which Iran can fire at all.
Crucially, both sides understand that civilian resilience, economic continuity, and psychological endurance will shape the outcome as much as battlefield exchanges. Israelis, despite fierce political divisions, unite when faced with existential threats, as they did after October 7. In Iran, by contrast, the regime is so detested that it must massacre its own civilians to remain in power. Yet this picture is less comforting than it appears from 40,000 feet. Iran’s weakness does not make war safe; just dangerous in a different way.
Weak regimes are often reckless ones. When decisive victory is unattainable, incentives shift. Victory becomes irrelevant and optics become paramount. Iran does not need to win, only to alter the political environment. It need only penetrate Israeli defenses enough times to demonstrate that it can land blows.
Some missiles will get through. Probability guarantees it. A single strike on a residential tower, hospital, port, or power node would not change the strategic balance, but it would immediately change lives, markets, and diplomatic pressure.
Intercepted missiles still generate fear, empty streets, rattle markets and get the international commentariat writing even more nonsense than usual (if that is possible.)
Iran understands this, which is why it threatens civilians. This is its final lever. In asymmetric conflict, pain need not be decisive to be effective.
This is why Iran talks so much: the volume of its rhetoric mirrors the contraction of its options. Tehran seeks deterrence through fear because it can no longer deter through credible threats and uncertainty. It names targets because it lacks the capacity to surprise.
Israel does not need to bluff. Iran does. Yet this distinction should not breed complacency. Deterrence dominance is not immunity, and superiority does not abolish risk. It only determines who bears it-and who can endure it.
Israel can endure.
Iran fears it cannot.
Western observers habitually misread moments like this. They mistake loud threats for rising power, restraint for weakness, and assume that because escalation would be costly, it is irrational. Such analyses often fail because regimes under internal strain routinely accept costs outsiders deem unthinkable.
Iran is not playing a Western game. It is a theocratic Islamist regime playing for survival, legitimacy, and relevance. In that game, a damaged Tel Aviv-even briefly-may be worth more to Tehran than restraint, even if it ultimately loses the war, which it will, with G-d's help.
If war does occur, as seems likely, Israel and its allies will strike Iran ferociously and early to limit the damage Iran can inflict.
Nachum Kaplan is a media consultant, journalist and commentator. He has 25 years international media experience and held senior international roles at Reuters and IFR. He holds a B.A. in Politics and Indonesian from Monash University.
Reposted with permission from Moral Clariiy newsletter: Truths in Politics and Culture.
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