I’ll leave it to military and intelligence experts to offer more comprehensive and detailed analyses of the still-underway U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran’s regime, but two breathtaking realities have become unavoidably clear, even to relatively casual observers. First, the United States and Israel have achieved exquisite and deep intelligence penetration of the regime. Second, the regime is dying alone, suffering global isolation.

The former point should have been undeniable after Israel’s incredible 2024 assassination of a top Hamas leader within Iran’s capital city. Ismail Haniyeh was killed inside an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “safe house” by a bomb the Israelis had planted there approximately two months prior, according to reports. This masterstroke did not resonate the way that it should have. It showed that the Jewish state’s intelligence services were not just operating in Tehran to a stunning extent, but they were doing so with significant high-level inside help. And it wasn’t just any element of the regime that had been compromised — it was the vaunted Guard.