Missile attack on Israel signals that widely feared regional conflict has ignited

The sight of missiles descending on Tel Aviv on Tuesday night was the clearest sign imaginable that the regional conflict so widely feared over the past year may finally have ignited.

This is the second Iranian aerial attack on Israel in less than six months, but last time there was several days’ notice; the much slower drones and cruise missiles arrived first, and the principal target was a military base in the underpopulated Negev desert.

This time, the ballistic missiles arrived first at the end of a 12-minute flight time and the targets appear to have included dense urban areas. In the local press, Israeli officials were being quoted as describing the assault as an Iranian declaration of war.

Despite the fact that there were no casualties, the fact that cities were targeted will be critical to Israel’s response. After Iran’s April attack, the reprisal was largely performative. The only target hit inside Iran was an air defence outpost on a military base near Isfahan.

After Israeli citizens were so clearly threatened on Tuesday night, Benjamin Netanyahu can be expected to respond in a far more comprehensive manner. The options will already have been drawn up, ready for the war cabinet to select, and the target list can be expected to be substantial. It could include Iran’s nuclear facilities.

On Tuesday, it was the White House which first raised the alert of the imminent Iranian missile launch, presumably with the aim of robbing the attack of its element of surprise, and with the faint hope of deterring it. That having failed, the US briefing to journalists before the launch had the residual political benefit of showing that Washington had at least not been taken by surprise.

For all the dangers this attack poses for the Middle East, it also threatens to have a significant impact on US politics, five weeks before a knife-edge presidential election, one in which Donald Trump has been seeking to paint the administration led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as haplessly out of its depth on the world stage.

The US has failed over many months to broker a hostages-for-peace deal in Gaza, and its efforts with France to negotiate a ceasefire in Lebanon over the course of the UN general assembly last week also fell flat, to say the least. Israel’s response came on Friday, soon after Netanyahu addressed the UN from New York, with the airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader and Iran’s leading partner in the region, Hassan Nasrallah. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said Tuesday night’s missile attack was a reprisal for Nasrallah’s death, and for the assassination at the end of July of the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was a guest in Tehran.

Since the outbreak of the Gaza war on 7 October last year, Biden officials have claimed credit for preventing the violence from becoming a regional conflict. That claim no longer carries weight.

After the last Iranian missile attack on Israel in April, the administration urged restraint on Israel in its response, using the leverage of US air defence assistance to persuade Netanyahu to “take the win” of shooting down nearly all the incoming projectiles. This time, the US had reportedly signalled to Tehran that in the event of a second Iranian attack, it would not and could not be a restraining influence.

The forces of restraint in the Middle East are weakening with every passing day. Politically speaking, the Biden administration cannot be seen as tying Israel’s hands in the face of an Iranian attack on Israeli cities. The Iranian regime (the IRGC in particular) is feeling the pressure to show its regional proxies and allies, from Hezbollah to the Houthis in Yemen, that it is not a weakling but a regional power of substance, the leader of the “axis of resistance”.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has a freer hand. With Iranian missiles over Tel Aviv, it is far harder for Washington to try to influence his actions, and much tougher for the prime minister’s opponents to call for his ousting.

Today, Netanyahu is also significantly closer to his longstanding ambition: to involve the US in a war on Iran which will destroy its nuclear programme, now close to the capacity to make a weapon after the collapse of the 2015 multilateral agreement, the JCPOA, which kept the programme within limits.

According to the latest reports on Tuesday night, Iran’s missiles had caused minimal injuries, but raised the spectre of what might be to come in the next few years: missiles 12 minutes from Israel, carrying nuclear warheads.

Israel’s wars of destruction against its regional enemies, first Hamas and then Hezbollah, are bound to add urgency to arguments from Iranian hawks that only a nuclear weapon can keep the country safe and powerful. In turn, the fear that those arguments might carry the day in Tehran will fuel calls in Israel for a pre-emptive war.

Related: Iran calls missile attack on Israel ‘legal, rational and legitimate’

In such dangerous times, the region has historically looked to Washington to contain and reverse the logic of escalation. But the man currently inhabiting the Oval Office is a lame duck president who has been ignored to the point of humiliation in recent months by the US’s closest ally in the Middle East.

There have long been voices in the US defence establishment calling for the US to act preemptively against the Iranian nuclear programme. Those will now increase in an effort to influence a president who has vowed to defend Israel against the Iranian threat.

Biden’s administration has generally been cautious when it comes to military ventures abroad, and Harris is expected to follow a similar path, with less of a sentimental attachment to Israel. But the escalating violence in the Middle East will damage her chances of succeeding Biden in the White House, and bring closer the prospect of the return of the greatest wild card of all, Donald Trump.