Voices from the Arab press: US-Israel Iran war faces political limits

As the US and Israeli campaign against Iran continues, a key question is whether the war can proceed indefinitely without domestic political constraints in either country beginning to shape decision-making.

This helps explain his repeated insistence that the campaign is nearing its end, even as the use of force continues to expand and internal tensions appear to be growing between the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has a personal political interest in sustaining this posture until the next parliamentary elections, hoping to enter any electoral battle from a position of strength amid what is seen inside Israel as an unprecedented moment of national unity.

The continuing missile threat to Israeli skies reinforces the argument that the danger must be confronted decisively, not deferred to another gradual round of confrontation.

Iran, too, appears determined to reject de-escalation, raising the prospect of further escalation, including more assassinations of senior Iranian figures and perhaps even the targeting of the new supreme leader.

Yet Washington, unlike Israel, remains constrained by federal political deadlines, above all the upcoming midterm elections.

However little Trump may care about congressional criticism, he cannot entirely escape the domestic political consequences of a prolonged war – especially if Iran remains committed to open confrontation and the economic fallout begins to hit both American voters and the global economy.

As the war between Israel and the US on one side, and the Islamic Republic on the other enters its third week, two pressing questions dominate policy circles: how long will it last, and how might it end?

No one can answer the first with any precision, but five broad scenarios suggest themselves for the second.

The first is the Trump pattern: declaring victory and moving on.

That was easier to imagine when the campaign was expected to resemble last June’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, allowing Trump to showcase destroyed sites like Natanz and Isfahan.

But that path now looks far riskier, as Iran has many undeclared sites, and no one knows where its 400 kg. of enriched uranium are being stored.

Trump would struggle to claim victory without a clean nuclear bill of health from the IAEA, which could leave him in the same bind that trapped earlier US presidents when international inspectors refused to offer absolute certainty on Iraq or Iran.

The second scenario is for Trump to shift the focus to Iran’s missile arsenal and declare that it has been destroyed, thereby creating a rationale for ending the war.

But that too is precarious: a single missile or drone launched by Tehran days later would expose any such declaration as premature.

The third scenario, favored by some in Trump’s inner circle but reportedly detested by Netanyahu, is a “Venezuela model” in which the regime is decapitated but left to limp on under second-tier leadership.

Yet Iran is not Venezuela.

Venezuelan presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro did not seek to erase Israel, drive America from Latin America, build proxy networks in Washington’s backyard, or cultivate sleeping cells abroad.

More importantly, second- or third-tier Khomeinist figures in Tehran might be forced to adopt even more radical positions to preserve the regime’s remaining base.

Signs of this already emerged last week, when state propaganda circulated four conditions reportedly set by the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, for halting attacks on Iran’s neighbors: closing all US bases in the Middle East, forcing OPEC states to end economic relations with Washington and expel American companies, withdrawing Arab investment from the US, ending dollar pricing for regional oil in favor of a BRICS currency basket, and paying compensation for damage to Iran’s infrastructure.

Even a hypothetical Iranian version of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez would be more militant and less manageable.

Israel, meanwhile, is systematically eliminating potential figures who might fill such a role, most recently Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s National Security Council.

A fourth scenario is simply to keep bombing and wait for results.

But this, too, has limits.

Within a week or two, the US and Israel may begin to run out of military and dual-use targets, leaving artificial intelligence systems to recommend ever broader strikes that could generate millions of displaced civilians and transform Iran – one of the few countries where America and even Israel once enjoyed a relatively favorable image – into another vast market for anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment.

There is also the danger of overextension, likened here to the boxer Sonny Liston exhausting himself against Muhammad Ali. In this case, the depletion may be political, economic, and moral rather than purely military.

The fifth and most speculative scenario revolves around Trump’s postponed summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing next month.

Might that offer an opportunity to declare victory and end the war in exchange for a Chinese guarantee to keep the dying Khomeinist regime under tight control until Iranians themselves find a way out?

Far-fetched as that sounds, it remains one more possibility in a war whose end remains as uncertain as its duration.

The answer begins with the image of young Kuwaitis studying abroad: bright, ambitious students in places like Manchester, carrying with them the values that distinguish Kuwait – openness, civility, professionalism, and a deep desire to return home and serve their society.

Their conversations revolve around education, work, family, progress, and the future, not ideological struggle.

One hopes her son will become an ophthalmologist, another wants advanced technology for her children, a third talks about sports, while others plan to serve in public institutions before opening private practices.

After living in Kuwait for 31 years, and previously in London, France, and Lebanon, I present these young people as the clearest answer to the question of who hates Kuwait: those who cannot tolerate its model.

Kuwait places human beings first.

It is a society in which one educated generation hands the torch to another, where citizenship, unity, coexistence, and public service are cultivated as core values.

Those who hate Kuwait are therefore those who prefer exporting revolution and squandering wealth to importing knowledge and investing in people.

They are those unsettled by development, competent governance, and the use of national resources in the service of citizens, and those who turn sources of prosperity into instruments of destruction by backing militias that threaten stable societies in the name of regional expansion and confrontation with great powers.

They are those who despise social cohesion and a culture of life, and prefer instead the politics of death, instability, and cross-border militancy that damages both its host societies and its regional environment.

They are those who see a small country open its arms to anyone willing to live with dignity under law and economic contribution, yet choose instead to drive their own citizens into exile.

They are those who witness Kuwait under missile and drone attack, and at the same time see 138,000 people donate nearly $50 million in two days to help debtors who cannot repay what they owe.

They are those who watch thousands of Kuwaiti students excel in the world’s top universities and plan to continue building a national legacy rooted in solidarity and development, while elsewhere the next generation is raised on questions of how many recruits will join the Revolutionary Guard; who will train armed groups in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza; who is on the assassination list; and who is best suited to the next covert mission.

Hatred of Kuwait, therefore, is fueled by resentment of a successful governance and civic model, by the inability to match that model despite immense resources, and by the endurance of that model despite the obstacles placed in its way.

The mystery surrounding Iran’s new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is not preoccupying Western intelligence agencies alone.

According to Axios, the CIA, Mossad, and other services have been searching for signs of his whereabouts and whether he is truly exercising power after the killing of his father, Ali Khamenei, by the US and Israel on February 28.

But the question is also deeply consequential for Hezbollah, whose leadership – above all, Secretary-General Naim Qassem – has its own urgent reasons for trying to decipher what might be called the “Mojtaba puzzle.”

Hezbollah initially treated Mojtaba’s selection as a simple matter of dynastic continuity: the king is dead, long live the king.

But his two public messages between March 12 and 21 appear to have caused muted shock inside the party, even if Hezbollah-affiliated media only hinted at that unease reluctantly.

The party seems to have sensed, in the new leader’s first interventions, that something had changed in how what remains of Iran’s embattled leadership – now under relentless US and Israeli pressure – views Hezbollah.

Mojtaba’s first message after his selection as supreme leader thanked the fighters of the “axis of resistance,” described its states as Iran’s “best friends,” and praised Yemen, Hezbollah, and Iraqi factions for supporting the Islamic Republic despite the obstacles.

Yet Hezbollah media gave the message only limited attention.

The ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah, which began on March 2 and has inflicted severe damage on Lebanon after Hezbollah opened the front despite domestic opposition, may have provided an excuse for the subdued response.

Still, that explanation seems weak in a matter tied so directly to the leadership of the Iranian regime, which – if it survives – will continue to dictate Hezbollah’s direction at every level.

Analysts noted in particular that Mojtaba’s message made no meaningful reference to the war Hezbollah had entered by Iranian decision, effectively relegating it behind Iran’s own war since late February.

That made the line praising how Hezbollah had “supported the Islamic Republic despite all obstacles” especially disappointing from the party’s perspective.

His second message, issued Friday on the occasion of the Persian New Year and Eid al-Fitr, was even more telling.

As Al-Manar reported, Mojtaba merely congratulated the Iranian people on the coincidence of the “spring of spirituality” with the “spring of nature.”

Hezbollah’s media found little more to highlight than that rhetorical overlap.

Before those two messages, Hezbollah-affiliated outlets had searched Mojtaba’s past for evidence of ties to Iran’s regional proxy strategy, of which Hezbollah is widely seen as Tehran’s strongest external arm.

That search appears to have yielded little beyond a single photograph of Mojtaba with former Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, from which party media tried to construct the idea of a good relationship between Mojtaba and Hassan Nasrallah.

This raises a deeper question: where does Hezbollah, still very much alive but badly damaged, now stand in relation to Iran’s new leadership?

And where does that leave Qassem, who presides over a party long subordinated to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards?

In the absence of clear answers, even small signals matter.

One such signal came from Hezbollah’s own media, which published only excerpts from Mojtaba’s second message – something rare and virtually unprecedented in how it handles statements from Iran’s supreme leader.

Axios, meanwhile, reported that during Nowruz, the Persian new year, celebrated last Friday, US and Israeli intelligence agencies watched closely to see whether Mojtaba would follow his father’s tradition of delivering a new year’s address.

He did not appear.

According to the report, both Washington and Jerusalem have intelligence suggesting that Mojtaba is still alive, including evidence of attempts by Iranian officials to arrange face-to-face meetings with him that failed for security reasons.

The question of who is actually running Tehran has reportedly come up repeatedly in intelligence briefings for US President Donald Trump.

One Israeli official told Axios there is no proof that Mojtaba is truly issuing orders, calling the situation “very strange.”

An American official likewise noted that although Mojtaba was announced as supreme leader on March 9 after hardliners rallied behind him, his public response has been limited to a written Telegram statement issued three days later, fueling speculation that he may have been seriously wounded in an Israeli strike on his father’s residence.

While that mystery remains unresolved, Axios also reported that the Trump team is preparing for possible peace talks with Iran after three weeks of war.

Envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are said to be involved in discussions over potential diplomacy, and any deal would have to include reopening the Strait of Hormuz, addressing Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and securing a long-term agreement on its nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and regional proxies.

One American official said Washington wants six commitments from Tehran, including ending financial support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza.

Lebanon, meanwhile, waits for the outcome of a war caused by Iran.