Israel’s June 2025 attack on Iran: preemptive or preventive?
Here’s how to understand Israel’s decision.
STACIE GODDARD
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched a wave of air strikes aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear program. Later on Friday afternoon, the Israeli attacks continued. The Israeli military said it had struck Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz, hitting an underground compound housing centrifuges. Israel also targeted key military officials and scientists, striking six military bases around the capital of Tehran as well as several residences.
Media reported that the attacks early on Friday morning killed several senior Iranian military leaders, including Major General Hossein Salami, head of the elite Revolutionary Guards; and Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces. Iran’s foreign minister called Israel’s moves a “declaration of war.” Others, including U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, worried that Israel’s actions threatened stability and peace, and called for restraint in the region.
What happens now?
Israel’s attacks come as U.S. and Iranian officials were preparing to meet on Sunday for a sixth round of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. On Thursday, President Donald Trump said that Washington and Tehran were “fairly close to a pretty good agreement.” Trump added that he did not want Israel to attack Iran because it could “blow” the chances of a nuclear deal. After the attacks, he took to his social media platform Truth Social, calling for Iran to “make a deal” over its nuclear program “before there is nothing left.”
What is driving Israel’s attacks against Iran’s nuclear program? Are these strikes likely to be successful – or do they risk a major war in a region already wrecked with instability? Here’s what we know. This analysis also draws on my September 2024 “Good to Know: Preemptive strikes” article.
Preemptive strikes: using offense for defense
For Israel, these latest offensive attacks have a defensive logic. Israel’s leadership had dismissed the U.S talks with Iran as a delaying tactic, a way for Tehran to buy the few weeks it needs to enrich enough nuclear material to make a nuclear weapon possible. Israel was not alone in its assessment. The U.N. atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared on Thursday that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations, its first such charge in two decades. “That is why we have no choice but to act and act now,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement.
Israel reportedly felt compelled to launch a “preemptive strike” against a “threat to Israel’s very survival,” according to Netanyahu. This is not the first time Israel has gone on the offensive against nuclear programs. Israel’s 1981 decision to strike Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, as well as the 2007 attack against a Syrian reactor, were aimed at preventing both countries from obtaining the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Israeli leaders have argued for an offensive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities for decades, often over U.S. objections.
Preemptive versus preventive strikes
While Israel’s leaders are calling its offensives a preemptive strike, these attacks seem to align more closely with the definition of a preventive strike. Political scientists define preemptive strikes as offensive strategies designed to thwart or at least diminish the damage of an opponent’s imminent attack. There are two key components to this definition. First, while preemptive operations are offensive, the intentions driving them are defensive – these operations aim to protect a country from harm. Second, the feared attack must be imminent; preemptive strikes aren’t a way to respond to a generalized fear of war in the future. For a strike to be preemptive, leaders must believe that their enemies are planning an attack. And, while it is often difficult to entirely prove those suspicions, those perceptions should have some basis in fact.
During the height of the July Crisis in 1914, for example, Germany launched a preemptive strike against France, which itself was mobilized for an offensive. Germany was hoping that its sweeping offensive – the Schlieffen Plan – would encircle and defeat the French military mobilized along its borders. In 1967, Israel launched preemptive strikes against Egyptian airfields, in an attempt to blunt that nation’s offensive power in the midst of a crisis.
In a preventive strike, a country’s military launches an offensive when it (a) believes that war is likely to occur in the future and (b) that having a war now is better than war later. This might sound similar to preemptive war, but there are significant differences. With a preventive war, the threat is not imminent – there is no sign that an enemy is about to attack. Second, the aim of preventive war is less about blunting the effects of an attack (since none is planned), and more about choosing the time and place that war will occur.
If this sounds complicated, it is! Indeed, it can be difficult to distinguish preemptive strikes from preventive ones. The United States called its 2003 offensive against Iraq a “preemptive strike” even though there was no sign that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was planning to attack in the near future. In hindsight, many analysts now characterize the Iraq strike as preventive. Neoconservatives in particular believed that war with Iraq was inevitable. Their logic was that it was better to fight it in the present – when the U.S. was far more powerful and Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. The concern was that in the future, Hussein could threaten the U.S. with a “mushroom cloud.”
Distinguishing preemptive from preventive strikes is even more difficult in the midst of an ongoing conflict. Given intensifying hostilities, all sides can make credible claims that an attack is imminent. At the same time, when we apply the imminent attack standard, Israel’s June 13, 2025 operations appear more preventive than preemptive, despite the language and justification Israeli officials rely on to describe these decisions.
Even if it was the case that Iran could readily produce the fissile material to fuel a weapon of mass destruction, this is not the same thing as building a weapon itself – that process could take years. Nor was there any sign that Iran’s leaders were contemplating an imminent strike against Israel. To the contrary, Israel seemed to have effectively hobbled Hezbollah in Lebanon in recent months. And Israel’s ongoing operations against Hamas and the Houthis also appeared to have weakened Iran considerably.
It’s a distinction with a difference
It may be challenging to distinguish preemptive from preventive strikes, but the distinction is important for at least two reasons. First, research suggests that the causal mechanisms driving preemptive and preventive strikes are different. In preemptive attacks, uncertainty, fear, and a lack of information typically lead one side to go on the offensive against another. In contrast, a shift in material power among countries often drives preventive wars. Returning to the example of 1914 Germany, some argue that Germany’s motives were as much preventive as preemptive, as it attempted to strike France while Germany was still among the most powerful countries on the European continent.
Second, while preemptive wars are legal, preventive wars are not. According to international law governing warfare, offensive attacks are only justified in the name of self-defense. Any claims of self-defense must be immediate – and rooted in fact. Even if Israel sees itself as facing a significant threat in the future – say, a threat from a nuclear Iran – striking that country is considered a preventive act. Going back to 2003, some scholars maintain that the U.S. framing of its war with Iraq as “preemptive” was not a simple mistake in jargon. Instead, the U.S. invasion was designed to legitimate a preventive war as a preemptive one, in an effort to portray the war as legal.
Why do militaries use preemptive and preventive strikes?
Scholarship provides several explanations for why a military might turn to preemptive or preventive strikes. There’s a straightforward costs/benefit model – a military will use an offensive strategy against an opponent when it believes that these strategies have an advantage over defending against an attack. This logic, known as the offense-defense balance, might lead even defensively inclined leaders to choose to strike first.
But a country’s military leaders might opt to launch preemptive and preventive strikes for other, more parochial reasons. Some scholarship suggests that officers, in general, prefer offensive strategies because this approach provides the military with more autonomy, more material resources, and more prestige than going on the defense. Germany’s Schlieffen Plan was both expensive and complicated. That allowed the German army not only to demand more investment, but also kept bewildered civilians at arms’ length.
Other evidence suggests that a military’s organizational culture can push its leaders towards preemptive or preventive strikes. In this argument, military leaders come to see striking first as part of the identity and practice of their organization. Thus, they see the strike as a preference embedded in historical practices – and less as a rational response to current strategic circumstances.
The strategic studies literature suggests that several of these factors guide Israel’s proclivity for preemptive and preventive strikes. Before 1967, Israel relied on a very “offensive, though unofficial, military doctrine based on the assumption that the country was too small and vulnerable to risk a war to be fought on its own territory.” After that particular war, Israel shifted to a more defensive position. But the shock of the Egyptian and Syrian surprise 1973 attack during Yom Kippur cast doubt on the wisdom of abandoning offensive strikes. And many argue that preemptive and preventive strikes are also part of Israel’s strategic culture, driving its earlier strikes against Osirak and Syria.
Risking expansion or deterring escalation?
What happens next is unclear. The research is mixed on whether preventive strikes against nuclear programs can be successful on their own. While Israel’s attacks this week will no doubt slow Iran’s program, the full extent of the damage remains unknown. Some reports claim the Natanz enrichment facility has been destroyed. Yet others report that the site was not breached. If Natanz is out of operations, Iran still has considerable enrichment capability at Fordow, which is positioned on an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base, and buried a half-mile deep within a mountain.
And even if Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons has been diminished, Tehran’s motivation may likely increase. Even before Israel’s strikes, Iran had responded to the IAEA’s censure with a promise to build an additional enrichment facility.
In the short term, the big question is whether Israel’s strikes will escalate the conflict, or force Iran to abandon its nuclear program. Worries about escalation are based on the spiral model of deterrence (see our Good to Know analysis on this topic). Here the concern is that Israeli offensive strikes will unnecessarily drive escalation, leading to an all-out war with Iran. Research suggests that preemptive wars are rare. Retaliation may happen, but countries – including Iran – tend to think twice before escalating towards all-out war. Iran has reportedly sent over 100 drones to strike Israel, but it’s not clear what additional action it may take.
Of course, it’s possible that Israel’s offensive will reinforce negotiations, demonstrating to Iran’s leaders that further nuclear efforts will only result in ruin. This seems to be Trump’s hope. As he writes, “Two months ago I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to ‘make a deal.’ They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!”