MADRID – Few disclosures in West Asia carry as much weight as an admission of intelligence failure, particularly when it comes from an apparatus long celebrated for its carefully cultivated aura of omniscience. 

This week’s reports, widely amplified by the international press, suggesting that Israel has significantly revised downward its assessment of the impact of its strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile program during last June’s so-called “12-day war,” represent far more than a mere technical correction.

It is, instead, a moment of strategic clarity. The revision reveals, perhaps unintentionally, that the ultimate aim of the campaign was less the material degradation of specific military capabilities and more the imposition of a broader and more enduring form of pressure, namely the gradual erosion of Iran’s national sovereignty and the constraint of its legitimate right to self-defense. The real significance of the episode lies in this shift from kinetic strikes to structural objectives.

According to multiple reports, Shlomi Binder, the head of Israeli military intelligence, informed U.S. envoy Mike Waltz that Iran possesses approximately 2,000 heavy ballistic missiles—an amount nearly identical to its pre-conflict arsenal. Regardless of the actual number of ballistic missiles Iran has, what matters is that this admission was accompanied by a renewed call for Washington to take action against Tehran.

The familiar narrative is quickly revived. The threat is presented as persistent, danger framed as imminent, and action, preferably outsourced, is portrayed as inevitable. Yet this revision is hardly an exercise in analytical honesty. It is more accurately understood as the latest move in a long-term strategy designed to delegitimize and ultimately neutralize any deterrence architecture developed by states on Israel’s strategic periphery to protect their territorial integrity and political autonomy. The ultimate objective is not missile silos or assembly facilities; it is the very principle of effective sovereignty.

The 12-day war: Strategic mirage and miscalculation

The June 2025 conflict, brief but intense, was presented by Tel Aviv and its main Western allies as a defensive and surgical operation intended to significantly degrade Iran’s military capacity, a necessary response to a supposed threat. Initial statements, marked by a triumphalist tone and now revised by their own authors, claimed substantial damage and a setback of several years to Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Subsequent assessments suggest a reality less convenient for that narrative. Either prior intelligence estimates were profoundly flawed, or the operational effectiveness of the strikes was limited, or both. In any case, the episode exposes the limitations of a doctrine that assumes technology and preventive action alone are sufficient to produce lasting strategic results against states whose historical experience has been shaped precisely by the need to resist and adapt to external coercion.

Beyond the immediate damage assessments, the 12-day war reveals the structural limits of selective airstrikes as a tool for reshaping the political will and material capacity of a nation-state with a deeply entrenched industrial, scientific, and strategic base. The challenge lies not only in the technical resilience of Iran’s program but also in the persistence of a strategic framework that reduces non-Western actors to tactical problems, underestimating their historical, institutional, and civilizational depth.

Iran is neither a fragmented militia nor an improvised infrastructure. It is a state with historical depth, consolidated institutional capacity, and a long record of adaptation to invasions, economic isolation, and sustained strategic pressure. Its ballistic missile program, developed during the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, emerged from an existential imperative: to ensure a minimal deterrent against adversaries with far superior access to advanced military technologies.

From this perspective, the missiles form the core of an asymmetric defense doctrine designed to compensate for decades of economic sanctions and external constraints. Attacking this component is not a neutral act of arms control or non-proliferation. Strategically, it represents an attempt to weaken Iran’s self-defense capacity and restrict its autonomy, a right recognized under international law.

Israel’s own correction confirms the robustness of this structural resilience. Yet rather than prompting reflection on the limits of military escalation and the real efficacy of coercion, the dominant response has been to intensify diplomatic pressure for deeper U.S. involvement. This shift from strategic initiative to delegated action signals a persistent difficulty in recognizing that certain regional equilibria cannot be reshaped solely through repeated application of force.

Comprehensive sovereignty: The true ‘Iranian objective’

Understanding Israel’s fixation on Iranian missiles—and by extension its civil nuclear program, often insinuated as military—requires moving beyond the conventional rhetoric of an “existential threat.” What truly unsettles strategists in Tel Aviv, and to a significant degree in Washington, is not the speculative possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon, repeatedly dismissed by U.S. intelligence agencies until 2025, but the prospect of a fully autonomous, sovereign Iran capable of resisting external coercion.

Sovereignty, in the operational language of power politics, is not merely a legal category. It is the effective capacity of a state to make independent decisions about its security, economy, and international alignment without subordination to external pressures. Despite decades of sanctions and pressure, Iran has built a deterrence ecosystem that provides precisely this autonomy. Its ballistic and cruise missiles, unmanned systems, asymmetric naval capabilities in the Persian Gulf, and mastery of the civilian nuclear cycle, regardless of military application, constitute the pillars of comprehensive sovereignty. Together, they present a strategic dilemma to any potential aggressor, making the costs of military action prohibitive not only militarily but politically and economically.

Since its founding, Israel has structured its security doctrine around maintaining unassailable qualitative military superiority and systematically denying credible deterrence capabilities to its neighbors. This approach has been historically consistent: the strikes on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and the alleged Syrian reactor in 2007 were not mere non-proliferation operations, but direct interventions against the energy and defense sovereignty of those states. Similarly, sustained campaigns against infrastructure and convoys in Syria under Bashar al-Assad, often attributed to Israel, were not only aimed at disrupting arms transfers to Hezbollah but at perpetuating structural vulnerability that prevented Damascus from reasserting full sovereign control.

The case of southern Lebanon illustrates this pattern with particular clarity. For decades, Israel has repeatedly violated Lebanese sovereignty through air, land, and maritime incursions. While the stated target is Hezbollah, the cumulative effect has been to hollow out the Lebanese state’s sovereignty, demonstrating the inability of its government to control its airspace, borders, or core security decisions. Formally recognized, yet materially eroded, this sovereignty has become a controlled vulnerability.

Applied to Iran, the objective appears to be a scaled-up version of the same model. It does not aim for territorial occupation, impractical in reality, but for sustained erosion of the attributes that make effective sovereignty possible. Neutralizing its deterrent capacity is the first step. Without credible missiles, the threat of retaliation diminishes; without an advanced civil nuclear program and the strategic ambiguity it affords, the risk of uncontrolled escalation fades. The result would be a structurally vulnerable Iran, exposed to continuous pressure and forced to subordinate its foreign and security policies to the limits set by Washington and Tel Aviv. The recent correction on the actual damage to its missile arsenal suggests this core objective has not been achieved, explaining the renewed urgency to enlist U.S. support as Washington calibrates its regional strategy, as reflected in its newly released National Security document.

The role of the United States: From guarantor to subcontractor of destabilization

The report notes that the correction was communicated to a senior U.S. official with an explicit message: “Israel cannot accept this threat for long” and the need to “coordinate red lines and actions with the Americans.” This is a familiar script. Israel frequently acts unilaterally and precipitously, creating facts on the ground. When confronted with its own limitations or the resilience of its adversary, it turns to its global patron to complete the task, transferring political and economic costs that Tel Aviv cannot or will not bear alone.

Washington, caught in its own narrative of “unwavering commitment” and under the influence of a powerful pro-Israel lobby, has become the subcontractor for a regional destabilization strategy. It applauds illegal Israeli strikes, imposes economic sanctions tantamount to non-kinetic warfare, and provides diplomatic cover in international forums. In doing so, the United States not only undermines its credibility and becomes entangled in protracted conflicts but also acts as the executing arm of a strategic vision that prioritizes the hegemony of a single ally over regional stability and international law.

Sanctions, presented as tools to bring Iran to the negotiating table, in reality aim to strangle the Iranian economy, generate social unrest, and create conditions for “regime change”—or at least a government so weakened that it negotiates from a position of surrender. This is a direct assault on economic sovereignty, another cornerstone of national independence. The current push on the U.S. administration to “act” in response to Israel’s correction is a predictable extension of this script: if the missiles survived, pressure must be intensified across all fronts.

Beyond missiles, the battle for self-determination

The revelation that Iran’s missile program remains largely intact should invite serious reflection. It raises the question of why, despite decades of isolation, sabotage, and direct attacks, Iran has maintained and even advanced its defensive capabilities. The answer is that these capabilities enjoy broad domestic support, transcending internal political divisions, because they are seen as guarantees of survival against tangible and explicit external threats.

Instead, Israel’s security establishment and its Washington allies interpret the news as a call to arms. This confirms that the real issue was never the “danger” of an unprovoked Iranian attack—a narrative lacking credibility—but the mere existence of a capacity for Iran to set the terms of any future confrontation.

The struggle, therefore, is not about missiles or centrifuges. It is about whether a country like Iran—or any state in the Global South seeking autonomy—has the right to build its own defensive shield and chart its own political course free from external interference. The model applied in Lebanon—the systematic denial of sovereignty through coercion and violence—is the one intended for Iran. Israel’s correction shows that this project has encountered firmer foundations than anticipated.

Yet it also serves as a warning: those who seek to subordinate others rarely stop at an intelligence setback. They adjust objectives, escalate pressure, and demand more resources. The cycle of violence and destabilization, regrettably, continues. The responsibility to interrupt it falls on those who understand that deterrence is not a threat but the basis of a more stable balance of power, and that sovereignty is not a privilege reserved for certain Western actors but a universal right.