When Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Florida at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in a few days’ time, near the top of his agenda will be a sober accounting of Iranian military activity and what it may yet presage. He will brief the President on a sustained sequence of Iranian ballistic-missile drills conducted across multiple regions, the visible movement of missile units, launchers and support infrastructure by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Israel’s assessment that these actions serve a dual purpose. They resemble routine exercises in form, yet replicate with unnerving fidelity the preparations that would precede an actual strike. At the same time, they reflect a discernible Iranian shift toward conventional missile warfare as the principal instrument of pressure against Israel, at least for now, following damage to its nuclear programme and the partial degradation of its regional proxy network.

This moment belongs to a confrontation that has already spanned decades and shows no tendency toward conclusion. It is sustained less by events than by ideology, less by escalation than by adaptation. What gives this phase its urgency is that it demonstrates the nature of the regime driving it: an ideologically sealed system whose fixation on destroying Israel and eroding American power is so blinkered and compulsive that it persists even in the face of economic ruin, domestic collapse and the absence of any obligation felt toward the safety of its own population.

That fixation is institutionalised: in October 2025 the IRGC’s academic arm, Imam Hossein University, hosted its third international conference titled ‘The Decline of America: The New Global Era,’ presenting the erosion of US power and the elimination of Israel as an inevitable, divinely ordered project to be pursued over generations.

Iran’s nuclear project and proxy network may be in ruin, but its motivations remain intact. Its posture toward the new and old Middle East alike remains fixed. Its plans toward Israel remain undiluted. The most consequential........

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