Two weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Wall Street Journal announced his administration’s plan to tighten sanctions along with the option of military strikes on Iran.
The report indicates that the new US administration plans to tighten sanctions on Iran as part of an aggressive effort to stop Tehran’s support for terrorist groups in the Middle East, as the Iranian regime continues to pose a threat to Washington’s allies, primarily Israel.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s team is considering additional steps, including air strikes, aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
According to this report, Iran has gone through a difficult year in 2024, and now, on the eve of the start of Donald Trump’s second term in 2025, a more difficult year has begun for Tehran.
The WSJ wrote that the “extraordinary weakening” of Iran’s military power in 2024 was caused by Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the extremist organization Hamas in Gaza, the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, and the destruction of a significant part of Iran’s air defense systems in direct Israeli attacks on Iran carried out in retaliation for Iranian missile launches at Israel.
Iran supported Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel after it took place, and then Hezbollah’s entry into the war against Israel, which was Tehran’s largest proxy arm in the region, but in the aftermath of that war, it faced conditions in which Israel successively destroyed Hamas and Hezbollah, including Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah, and Ismail Haniyeh.
Syria, whose place in Iran’s defense has been called “more important than Khuzestan” by some senior officials in the Islamic Republic of Iran, suddenly saw the flight last month of Bashar al-Assad; a ruler whose government Iran had spent tens of billions of dollars over decades to ensure its survival as the center of the “axis of resistance.”
The war, which began with the Hamas attack on Israel and escalated to the Israeli military operation in Gaza, changed course midway to direct attacks by Iran and Israel against each other, and the secret battles of the two governments, which had been going on for decades, became public.
According to the Wall Street Journal, despite heavy attacks on its allies, Tehran now relies on its proxy forces in Iraq and Yemen, whose ability to strike targets in Israel is limited by geographical distance.