Al Jazeera:

By Mat Nashed

Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear and military sites mark a significant escalation in regional tensions, and may reshape Tehran’s nuclear calculus.

The coordinated strikes killed several senior military and security officials, including the head of Iran’s military Mohammad Bagheri, and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hossein Salami.

“One of the concerns in attacking the nuclear sites has been that setbacks could lead Iran to reconstitute their operations with a more determined effort to obtain a nuclear deterrent,” said Ali Vaez, an expert on Iran for the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Iran has long had an internal debate among reformers and hardliners about whether to reach an agreement with the United States on its nuclear programme.

“[The attacks] likely confirmed the position of hardliners and ultra hardliners who said that Iran was wasting its time to try and negotiate with the West … they said Iran can never negotiate from a position of weakness and appeasement,” said Reza H Akbari, an analyst on Iran and the Middle East and North Africa Programme Manager at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Talks between Iran and the US have suffered from a large trust deficit after President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the nuclear deal between Iran and several Western nations, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), during his first term in 2018.

The JCPOA was orchestrated by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama and endorsed by the United Nations Security Council in 2015.

It aimed to monitor Iran’s nuclear programme to ensure it did not approach weaponisation levels. In exchange, some sanctions were lifted from Iran.

While the deal was lauded as an achievement of diplomacy, Israel disapproved of the JCPOA. Ten years later, the US and Iran appeared interested in striking another similar deal.

The former ostensibly did not want to get dragged into a regional war as tensions mounted across the Middle East, while the latter was again looking for much-needed sanction relief.

But Israel’s strikes on Iran, which were reportedly planned months in advance and with US approval, have scuttled any diplomatic solution in the short term, said Akbari.

“It’s hard to imagine that someone in the shoes of Iran’s supreme leader [Ali Khamenei] is not taking the side of hardliners after this,” he told Al Jazeera.

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