For Iran, all this is a terrible humiliation. As such, if these defeats are left unanswered by the Iranian regime, the regime’s weakness will be exposed in full. In turn, the Iranian people—who long ago divorced themselves from their rulers—will smell fear and impotence. That is how repressive regimes fall. 

So, the mullahs of Tehran have to act and sink more into their investment of destroying Israel. But the more they do and the more Israel deals them yet further defeats and humiliations, the more Israel strengthens, seizes strategic momentum and emerges as the strong horse of the region. This steadily whittles away or outright demolishes Iran’s assets, real strength and reputation. 

The only thing that can save the regime in Tehran is an imposed ceasefire, which it might try to claim hampered it from its inevitable victory, now receding faster than Yul Brenner’s hairline.

But the mullahs cannot accept a ceasefire that leaves their most recent humiliations without retaliation, to which Israel is waiting to respond, likely in devastating ways, against Iran itself. So the mullahs face a Hobson’s choice with no good path forward.

Moreover, the Iranians have always managed to survive and strategically win by being far more sophisticated in the arts of manipulation and seduction than their opponents. They are the masters of playing strategic chess; unrivaled by any on the face of the Earth.

But all strategies anchored to manipulation depend on an opponent who is predictable, sane and rational. Israel’s strategic behavior is increasingly possessed and thus unpredictable, wild, dangerous and impossible to manipulate.

In such a situation, the normally strategically sophisticated and supremely controlling Iranian strategy leads to outright paralysis. Iran has been forced to fall back on the pattern of what has worked before. But that is precisely what Israel’s possession has rendered useless.