Cleared skies over Tehran

The events Hamas's attack on Israel set in motion on October 7th 2023 have now entered a stage where the final eventline has begun. How the other two, Gaza and Lebanon, will end is still not finally settled but at this stage their possible outcomes have lessened considerably and heavily favor Israel. From the point where Israel gained air superiority over Tehran and large parts of Iran, so does this final eventline. You can imagine them as parallel lines running underneath each other, each at a different stage of conclusion.

In retrospect the combined timeline will seem unblurred and logical. It is now clear that only a few voices and plans are left. This means a few things:

Expect Israel to push as hard as it can for the preferable outcome of regime change in Iran, this even if Iran agrees not to enrich uranium.

At this point only three things can stop this push, two of them are highly unlikely.

• Israel’s current government falling out of power
• A third actor either enables Iran to seriously threaten Israel’s air assets or does so themselves.

The third and likely option is that the US stops the push. If regime change is assessed as unreachable this will sooner or later happen. The pressing question is at what point in time.

Expect the US to be in no rush to reach this point in time.

Iran does not have any good options. Among them some would be painful and others potentially disastrous. Whether and to what extent the US gets directly involved will depend on the options chosen.

Xi Jinping would conclude that we are now well into the decade of changes not seen in a century. One could argue the starting point of this “century”. I put it after the conclusion of World War II. Others put it at the end of the Cold War. One could also argue how long this tumultuous period will last. I assess that we are a couple of years in and that the total period will be over a decade but under one and a half.

One thing is clear. We are in a time period where more will happen geopolitically than in the following multiple decades.

Update 2025-06-24: Changed the word “event line” to “eventline” where it appeared.

Update 2025-06-24: Changed “One could argue the starting point. I put it at World War II” to “One could argue the starting point of this “century”. I put it after the conclusion of World War II”

Update 2026-08-25: Corrected grammar and spelling (going through old posts using a new tool). The content of the text was not changed in any way.