Looking back, Iran committed a major strategic blunder in April when it fired some 300 missiles and drones into Israel, only to see almost all of them shot down or fail. Tuesday’s barrage, smaller in number but more powerful, looks like another mistake.

Iranian leaders had hoped to restore lost deterrence in April after Israel attacked the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards were killed. Tehran’s response was aimed at demonstrating power without inflicting casualties that could trigger a potentially overwhelming Israeli retaliation.

The intended message was clear: we don’t want a real war, but if it comes to that, see what we can do. And yet the attack actually projected weakness. It showed Israel that Iran had neither the ability nor the willingness to hit back hard. The Israeli retaliation that followed – a single precision strike that destroyed air defense assets near an Iranian nuclear site – left no doubt about Israel’s capabilities or intentions.

Since then, Tehran clerics have had to watch as Israel beheaded and demoted Hezbollah, the most powerful asset in their so-called Axis of Resistance. While one Hezbollah commander after another was killed, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general was seriously injured and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed. while they are in Tehran, no less. Iranian leaders talked big about punishment, then sat on their hands.

But the attack on Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut, which killed the group’s charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and another top IRGC general, was too much to ignore. The alternative was to be dismissed as a paper tiger, not just in the Arab world – as was already happening – but among Axis customers and, worst of all, at home. For an unpopular, repressive regime that preaches revolution in the name of God, ridicule and perceived weakness can be fatal.

Early reports suggest that while many rockets were shot down again, this time more broke through Israeli air defenses, which is what you would expect; there were no days of extensive advance signaling, allowing Israel and its allies to prepare. The barrage also included an estimated 200 ballistic missiles, which are much faster than the cruise missiles and drones that predominated in April. According to an analysis by Fabian Hinz, a defense researcher at London’s Institute for International and Strategic Studies, the ballistic missiles used on Tuesday were also more modern and advanced models than before.

Yet Tuesday night’s volley seems likely to prove an even bigger mistake than April’s.

There were no immediate reports of fatalities, although two men armed with an assault rifle and a knife killed at least six innocent people in an apparently opportunistic terrorist attack in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. So if this Iranian effort was again aimed at restoring deterrence, without provoking the kind of war between states that it was unlikely to win, it was clearly a failure and a sign that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is not paying attention. .

The official Twitter feeds of the Israeli government, from the Foreign Ministry to the Israeli army, were quick to emphasize that the Iranian missiles targeted 10 million civilians. One photo of rockets flying high over Jerusalem’s holy sites suggested that these too were on Tehran’s hit list, even though their trajectory made it clear that this was not the case.

“Iran made a big mistake tonight and it will pay for it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to take revenge on our enemies.” What form that retaliation now takes will be crucial.

Israel has no choice but to respond, Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, told reporters once the barrage passed. This time he expected it to happen quickly, and on a much larger scale than in April. No one may have been killed in Tuesday’s ballistic missile attack, he said, “but this is not a video game.” Moreover, Iran’s second miscalculation presents Israel with an opportunity it is unlikely to resist.

The IDF may now impose an even more acute dilemma on the Iranian regime. A larger Israeli missile strike will destroy more assets and be much more publicly visible than April’s. Dismissing Israeli drones as toys, as regime officials did last time, will not work. Khamenei and his generals will have to decide whether to do nothing and lose even more credibility and deterrent power, or risk a potentially disastrous war that could attract even the US, by striking back.

Netanyahu has laid out his reasons for seizing this kind of opportunity. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week, he said that Israel must be supported as it seeks to positively transform the Middle East, and that the path is through the defeat of Iran’s clerics and their axis of allies.

He painted a convincing picture. Israel is clearly enjoying great military success at the moment, and the Iranian regime is undoubtedly a malign force for both its people and the region. The temptation to squeeze current benefits can prove overwhelming. Moreover, Nasrallah’s death has led to a chorus of support in Israel and among Washington hawks — if not President Joe Biden — to back him in his final crackdown on Iran.

And yet previous attempts to reform the Middle East have not gone well, including those that initially met with shock and awe military success; think back to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. This would be different, of course, because there would be no boots on the ground – at least not in Iran itself. But how a policy from escalation to de-escalation actually unfolds would still be difficult to monitor. “Reckless, just reckless,” is how Barbara Slavin, a skeptic and Middle East expert at the Washington-based Stimson Center, put it to me.

Reckless, Churchillian or both, the decisions that will determine both American actions and the direction of the Middle East now lie, as so often of late, squarely in the hands of Israel’s Netanyahu.