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It’s kind of up to Iran. While there’s a lot of online rumor-mongering that the ‘Samson doctrine’ means that Israel will nuke third countries if Iran nukes it, the more commonly accepted version of it is just that it’s a second-strike trigger. So Iran nukes Israel, Israel nukes Iran, then what? For WW3, either Israel nukes another Arab country (increasingly unlikely as time goes on, at least for now, and even then the path of escalation is unclear), or Iran nukes Saudi Arabia (drawing Pakistan into the conflict, drawing India into the conflict, which is a more plausible route to a world war), which again, is far from a given and doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Will Iran strike first? I’m not sure. They might announce they have nukes and see what happens. At that point, the Israeli reasoning changes.
Given the current state of Israeli diplomacy with literally every other relevant state in the region, why would attacking a third nation make any sense there? They've mostly put out generally supportive statements and countered attacks. Kuwait also shot down some US fighters in a friendly fire incident, but was presumably thinking them Iranian.
Iran has done some of that recently: what did the Azeris do to them? At best they are either flailing around --- it'd be hilarious if Israel, Ukraine, or US intelligence caused them to inadvertently strike Chechnya --- or trying to appeal to the negative sum game of a more regional war.
It isn't 1991 and the other Gulf states demonstrably won't reflexively refuse to be on the same side of a conflict as Israel, and that gambit didn't even work then.
In pure utilitarian terms Iran can inflict more pain on the United States (and by extension Israel) by attacking parts of the world economy than it can by attacking Americans. In two weeks Americans as a whole have suffered more from gas prices jumping $.75 than they have from six or a dozen dead servicemen. Bombing other countries harms the world economy.
I also think the IRGC, just like every other bomb commander in the world, is under the impression that the enemy population in the Gulf is uniquely weak and cowardly and will surrender as the result of bombing. This despite knowing that brave Iranians will get angry and rally to the flag under enemy bombing.
The unique setup of the IRGC is unlike that of other Gulf countries. It’s an armed ideological and economic core operation designed specifically to rule over a hostile middle and upper class by design, it’s unlike other “militarized countries” where the army controls large amounts of the economy but is also very corrupt and ideologically disunited (Pakistan, Egypt) and it’s also unlike security states ruled by comparatively small intelligence communities like East Germany or arguably even modern Russia. The IRGC doesn’t need ordinary Iranians to rally to the cause, it just needs to avoid open revolution and to keep the public scared enough that nobody stands against them.
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Iran evidently warned their neighbors that in the event of a US attack they'd be hit (as part of a strategy to convince them to pressure the US into leaving them alone, though this may have backfired all by itself), and they also had a doctrine of devolving control to local commanders if the leadership was hit. So I suspect what happened is the leadership was hit, the local commanders followed their last orders (which may have been a bluff that was never intended to be followed, but there was no one to countermand them) and attacked everyone. Or maybe the Iranian leaders actually would have thought attacking everyone was a good strategy; we'll never know because they are dead. I guess the moral is if you have a deadman switch, don't make it stupid.
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