Israel and Iran Seemed on the Brink of a Bigger War. What’s Holding Them Back?

So far, direct attacks between the two adversaries have been precise and calculated. Whether that lasts is another question.

It has been nearly a month since Israel sent more than 100 jets and drones to strike Iranian military bases, and the world is still waiting to see how Iran will respond.

It is a loaded pause in the high-risk conflict this year between the two Middle East powers. Israel’s counterattack came more than three weeks after Iran launched over 180 ballistic missiles — most of which were shot down — on Oct. 1 to avenge the killings of two top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders.

The first volley of strikes came in April, when Iran decided to avenge an attack on one of its diplomatic compounds by directly bombarding Israel with at least 300 missiles and drones. Even then, Israel waited days, not hours, to respond.

Not long ago, analysts might have predicted that any direct strike by Iran on Israel, or by Israel on Iran, would have prompted an immediate conflagration. But it has not played out that way.

Partly that is the result of frantic diplomacy behind the scenes by allies including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But the calculated, limited strikes also reflect the fact that the alternative — a war of “shock and awe” between Israel and Iran — could lead to dire consequences not just for the region but also much of the world.

“The nature of the attacks seem to speak to a shared acknowledgment of the acute risk of an even deeper regional war that both sides still probably want to avoid,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey, the Middle East director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

That does not mean there are not dangers to the current approach, he noted. “It’s an extremely precarious and likely unsustainable pathway that could quickly spin out of control,” he said. “There is also a possibility that Israel may be more deliberately working its way up the escalatory ladder with the intention of eventually doing something wider and more decisive.”

In a video message last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to warn that he could ratchet up the intensity of the conflict if Tehran were to strike again. “Every day, Israel gets stronger,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The world has seen but a fraction of our power.”

The Nature of War is Changing

The tit-for-tat strikes by Iran and Israel bear little resemblance to warfare known as shock and awe — the use of overwhelming firepower, superior technology and speed to destroy the enemy’s physical capabilities and its will to resist — that was first introduced as a concept in 1996 by two American military experts.

Perhaps its most memorable demonstration was the barrage of airstrikes that started the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which were followed by ground troops that sent Saddam Hussein into hiding. But its core tactics were deployed earlier, in the 1991 Gulf War, as well as in the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Shock and awe warfare would be difficult to carry out in this current Middle East conflict, where launching ground troops would likely require more land, air and sea assets than either Israel or Iran would want to deploy across the hundreds of miles that separate them.

There is also an ongoing debate in military circles as to whether a shock and awe offensive is still viable. Autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence are transforming warfare, argued the retired Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, and Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, in an August analysis for Foreign Affairs. “The era of ‘shock and awe’ campaigns — in which Washington could decimate its adversaries with overwhelming firepower — is finished,” they wrote.

Two analysts at Britain’s Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre countered last month that shock and awe warfare is evolving, not over, and pointed to Israel’s exploding pager and walkie-talkie attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dozens of people were killed, and thousands wounded, but the fear that the attacks created struck a psychological blow to the militant group. Two weeks later, Israeli airstrikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader.

“Far from being a thing of the past, shock and awe must be an integral part of our approach to multi-domain warfare,” they wrote.

These Strikes Are About Domestic Politics as Much as Deterrence

For decades, Iran and Israel were locked in a shadow war, with Israel carrying out covert attacks and Iran relying on proxy militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen as its front line forces.

All that changed on April 1. While almost all the missiles and drones that Iran aimed at Israel were intercepted, the airstrikes marked the first time that Tehran had directly attacked Israel from Iranian soil.

That put officials around the globe on alert for a broader regional war. Hours after the strikes, Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Iran had decided to create “a new equation” in its yearslong conflict with Israel.

But so far, the conflict has been carried out solely with deep precision missile strikes, mainly targeting military bases in the other’s country. Farzan Sabet, an analyst on Iran and Middle East politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, said the restrained volley of missile attacks appeared to signal a new kind of warfare.

“Deep precision strikes aren’t new, but their use on such scale as the centerpiece” of a conflict “is novel,” Mr. Sabet said.

Still, “we may not have seen the worst of it,” he said, noting that Tehran had recently signaled that it was prepared to strike Israel’s key energy sources — including gas fields, power plants and oil import terminals — if Iran’s civilian infrastructure was hit. “That would be a new element,” Mr. Sabet said.

He and other analysts said the airstrikes so far, combined with the public warnings that preceded them, were part of a deterrence campaign by both nations to try to keep the conflict from spiraling out of control.

“It’s ‘I slap, therefore you get slapped, so you understand, and so now you can decide whether you want to step down or you want to step up,’” said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general and defense strategist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The fact is that both parties are taking their time to calculate, to collaborate, to shape their own operations,” he added.

The Stakes Are High, and The Situation Could Still Explode.

While Israel has not used conventional shock and awe against Iran, it has been far less restrained in its attacks on Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, as the pager attacks demonstrated. And Hamas’s attack on Israel, which incited the ongoing wars on Oct. 7, 2023, was brutal and unconstrained.

Israel has since pounded Gaza with airstrikes that have killed more than 43,000 people, many of whom were women and children. In Lebanon, the United Nations estimates that more than 3,300 people have been killed by Israeli attacks since Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah joined the fight to show solidarity with Palestinians.

But Iran has been spared the scale of death and humanitarian disaster that Israel has exacted on its proxies. It has even sought to portray its own missile attacks against Israel as a resounding success.

Mr. Sabet said Tehran appeared to care as much about showing its public the number of “spectacular” strikes it was launching against Israel as about how many of them hit their targets. “Iran is trying to have the last word, in a sense,” he said. “It wants to show a response, and show its domestic and regional audiences that’s done something, but it doesn’t want to escalate the conflict.”

But, he added, “I’m just not sure that’ll work.”

Israel’s debilitating attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas, on which Iran has long relied for what it calls forward defense, are a blow to Tehran. And the re-election of President Donald J. Trump, a staunch ally of Mr. Netanyahu, changes the equation again.

One of Mr. Trump’s close advisers, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, met last week with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in what was described as an opening attempt to diffuse tensions between Tehran and the incoming American president.

But Mr. Trump is widely expected to make U.S. foreign policy more favorable to Israel, and is stacking his cabinet with Iran hawks. That could very well bring the war between Iran and Israel into new terrain.

Our Coverage of the Middle East Crisis

• Hostages in Gaza: As he resists pressure to reach a cease-fire that would release the captives, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is now offering a $5 million reward for their freedom.
• Lebanon’s Unlikely National Hero: Middle East Airlines has managed to fly through regional and civil wars since the 1960s. And it is still in the skies today.
• Aid Trucks Looted in Gaza: A large convoy of trucks carrying aid was “violently looted” in the enclave, the main United Nations agency that helps Palestinians said, calling it one of the worst such incidents of the war.
• Oct. 7 Leak Investigation: An Israeli judge revealed more details in a case involving an official in Netanyahu’s office and a military officer suspected of leaking and mishandling classified intelligence documents.
• Traces of Normalcy in Gaza: Most people in Gaza are struggling just to survive Israel’s assault on Hamas, and experts say famine is imminent. Yet a few pockets of ordinary life have bloomed in defiance of the war.