News Analysis
Iran says Israel wants to trap it into a direct conflict by bombing Hezbollah, even as a new Iranian president tries outreach to the West.
Israel’s war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is another embarrassment for Iran and its new president, raising the pressure on him to strike back at Israel to defend an important ally.
Iran has so far refused to be goaded by Israel into a larger regional war that its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, clearly does not want, analysts say. Instead, President Masoud Pezeshkian is at the United Nations hoping to present a more moderate face to the world and meeting European diplomats in the hopes of restarting talks on Iran’s nuclear program that could lead to vital sanctions relief for its hobbled economy.
In New York this week, Mr. Pezeshkian was blunt. Israel was seeking to trap his country into a wider war, he said. “It is Israel that seeks to create this all-out conflict,” he said. “They are dragging us to a point where we do not wish to go.”
After a series of humiliations, heightened by Israel’s intensified attacks on Hezbollah, Iran faces clear dilemmas.
It wants to restore deterrence against Israel while avoiding a full-scale war between the two countries that could draw in the United States and, in combination, destroy the Islamic Republic at home.
It wants to preserve the proxies that provide what it calls forward defense against Israel — Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen — without going into battle on their behalf.
