Scofield Biblical Institute and Theological Seminary

OCTOBER 17, 2025 13:58

‘Israel,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said four years ago, “is a cancerous tumor” that “will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”

As subsequent events proved, he meant what he said. The turbaned cleric and his regime were major players in the war that Hamas’s October 7 massacre sparked. Now, as the war draws to a close, three questions arise:

How much was this war Iran’s doing; what is Iran’s cost-benefit balance in its aftermath; and what should the world do about Iran?

Iran reportedly helped plan the attack and also green-lighted it at a meeting with Hamas officials in Beirut on October 2 (“Iran helped plot attack on Israel over several weeks,” The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2023). Whatever its micro-involvement in the massacre, Tehran’s inspirational culpability and logistical assistance are beyond doubt.

Iranian flags fly as fire and smoke from an Israeli attack on Sharan Oil depot rise, following Israeli strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, June 15, 2025. (credit: MAJID ASGARIPOUR/WANA/REUTERS)

Statements like Khamenei’s calls for Israel’s disappearance lent any attack on Israel Islamist legitimacy and diplomatic encouragement. Regular shipments to Gaza of Iranian cash and arms turned bellicose words into military deeds. Hamas became a link in the chain of jihadist proxies that Tehran stretched across the Middle East.

It follows that the war Israel has just endured was an Iranian project, even before one considers its eventual arrival on Iranian soil, and the role played in it by Iran’s Lebanese arm, Hezbollah. Now, considering the blows Iran was dealt in this war, directly and indirectly, it is tempting to lump together Hezbollah’s decisive defeat with Iran’s situation and to define the blows Tehran sustained as a knockout. That would be a grave mistake.

Iran was the main loser of the war

IRAN SURE was a loser in this war. Its Lebanese militia was dismembered and its Syrian outpost collapsed. Worse, its Syrian protégé was elbowed by the Syrian Sunnis, who Iran helped slaughter and displace.

Most embarrassingly, the Afghan, Pakistani, and other non-Arab mercenaries that Tehran had deployed, fled the battle once surprised by the anti-Assad assault. Iran’s imperial project thus lost not only its clout but also its credibility.

This is besides what happened when the war reached Iran itself.

The Israel Air Force’s successful breach of Iran’s air defense, and the consequent attacks on its nuclear installations, missile plants, military bases, senior commanders, and nuclear scientists – were massive blows for the regime.

Worse, as the warring unfolded, Iran learned that its major diplomatic supporters, China and Russia, are not really with it. While fire and brimstone befell the Islamist Republic, Moscow and Beijing issued faint declarations in praise of peace, but failed to criticize Israel’s cause.

The two anti-democratic superpowers seemed impressed by Israel’s guts, underwhelmed by Iran’s military performance, and annoyed by its jihadist zeal. This geopolitical cold shoulder underscored the collapse of Iran’s grand ambition to impose itself on the Middle East by bullying its Sunni Arabs and molesting the Jewish state.

Lastly, the war that Iran kindled cost its people big money. Tehran reportedly invested at least $30 billion in the Syrian civil war, besides an annual $700 million transferred to Hezbollah, in addition to an annual $100 million to Hamas, which this decade rose to $350 million, and an unknown, but clearly higher sum, to Yemen’s Houthis.

Iran’s losses in the war it brought on itself were thus multi-layered and exorbitant. Militarily, it emerged crippled, diplomatically it became isolated, and economically it is now strapped.

Still, the victory Israel and the US achieved in this part of the war is woefully incomplete.

UNLIKE HEZBOLLAH, which at the end of the day represented but one portion of a Lilliputian land, Iran is home to 85 million people and owns the world’s third-largest oil reserves.

Moreover, the regime that presided over Tehran’s debacle in this war emerged from it fully intact. So did Iran’s security forces. No one knows what the Iranian government’s conclusions from the war are today, much less what they will be in the future, but the world cannot afford to assume that Tehran will now abandon its jihadist ideology and schemes.

The working assumption must be that Iran will strive to renew its nuclear program, resume its regional meddling, and repair the military that failed in front of a bewildered world’s eyes.

Postwar-Tehran’s first aim will likely be to build a modern air force. The natural candidates for sponsoring such an effort, Russia and China, will expect cash that Iran may currently lack. However, neither will have any moral inhibitions about supplying the ayatollahs the kind of modern fighter jets they so glaringly lacked when they needed them last June.

The working assumption must also be that the ayatollahs will work hard to replenish and upgrade their missile arsenal. Worse, Tehran emerges from its misadventure only further motivated to attack Israeli and Jewish targets worldwide. And worst of all, as momentum to expand the Abraham Accords once again gathers, Tehran remains equipped and doubly motivated to sabotage peace between the Muslim world and the Jewish state.

It follows that Tehran has not been defeated as long as its regime has not been toppled.

Sadly, the war displayed the non-existence of an underground movement in Iran. The mass arrests and killings that followed the 2009 demonstrations were effective.

That Iranians are fed up with the leadership that robbed Iran’s riches, impoverished its people, and destroyed their freedoms is well known. Clearly, there are in their midst potential leaders and fighters. However, without organization, money, and arms, their potential will never be realized.

The creation of a popular threat to the Iranian regime should therefore be a supreme goal for the rest of mankind. In its absence, the next Iranian-inspired October 7 somewhere around the world is only a matter of time.

Third in a 5-part serieswww.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.

The date for a planned Moscow summit on Arab politics came and went on Wednesday, after the Kremlin pushed off the event reportedly due to a paucity of commitments from Mideast leaders to attend it.

The failure to rally Arab leaders marked a decline in Russia’s influence in the region, amid a larger hit to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s clout following his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

When calling off the meeting, Putin cited Monday’s confab in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on a postwar governance plan for the battered Gaza Strip.

“I did this because I don’t want to interfere with the process that, as we hope, has now been set in motion,” he said on Friday, referring to the then-upcoming peace summit.

The conference in Egypt drew scores of leaders from the Arab and Muslim worlds and Europe, as well as US President Donald Trump.

Put together on short notice, the Egypt summit contrasted with Putin’s effort, which failed to secure the pledged attendance of more than a smattering of Arab heads of state.

US President Donald Trump (C) speaks during the Sharm El-Sheikh Peace Summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on October 13, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP)

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa had confirmed he’d participate, as had the head of the Arab League. But the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt still had not signed on as of Tuesday, October 7, Bloomberg reported.

Sharaa traveled to Moscow on Wednesday anyway to meet with Putin, who secured significant influence in the Middle East through his 2015 intervention in the Syrian civil war. Russia supported longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was overthrown last December by insurgents led by Sharaa’s Islamist forces.

Though the Assad regime has been toppled, Russia maintains military bases in Syria.

The resources Russia used to entrench its influence there, however, have been strained since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, starting a bloody ongoing war that has brought condemnations and sanctions from the West.

It’s also weakened close diplomatic ties with countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus, which distanced themselves from Russia after the Ukraine invasion, amid concerns over their own security going forward.

In this handout photograph taken by the press service of the 24th Mechanized Brigade of Ukrainian Armed Forces on October 12, 2025 and released on October 14, 2025, a Ukrainian serviceman stands among the rubble in the courtyard of destroyed residential buildings in the frontline town of Kostyantynivka, Donetsk region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (OLEG PETRASIUK / 24th Mechanized Brigade of Ukrainian Armed Forces / AFP)

Russia may yet hold the Arab summit, which the Kremlin described as postponed rather than canceled and indicated may be held in November instead.

The delay also came as Trump appears to be losing patience with Moscow over the war in Ukraine and is renewing efforts to end that conflict now that he’s secured a ceasefire in Gaza and the return of the living hostages to Israel.

“Interestingly we made progress [on Ukraine] today, because of what’s happened in the Middle East,” Trump said Wednesday evening.

On Friday, the US leader is scheduled to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In advance of the meeting, Trump has suggested the US may finally sell Kyiv Tomahawk missiles, which would allow Ukraine to strike deeper into Russian territory than it’s been able to so far.

US President Donald Trump (right) holds a bilateral meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 23, 2025. (Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)

Trump also said on Wednesday that he’d convinced Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stop buying Russian oil, though India itself neither confirmed nor denied the White House claim.

The US had levied a 25 percent tariff on Indian goods — in addition to another 25% tariff — as a punitive measure for New Delhi’s support of the Russian economy.

“Now I’ve got to get China to do the same thing,” Trump said, of India’s purported plan to stop buying Russian crude.

Agencies contributed to this report.

Trump says he expects expansion of Abraham accords soon, hopes Saudi Arabia joins

US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he hopes Saudi Arabia, alongside other Arab nations, will join the Abraham Accords soon.

Iran’s role in October 7 transforms it into a threat not only to Israel, but to the world – opinion

Iran was the main loser of the war

Russia postpones its Arab summit, in sign of declining Mideast influence

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