WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stepped into the ongoing debate over America’s military campaign against Iran this week with a measured but pointed assessment: the conflict has left behind a “weaker, more confused” Iranian regime, drawn U.S. allies in the region closer together, and created a genuine opening for a more stable Middle East — if Washington has the patience and resolve to see it through. Writing in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Rice praised the broad contours of U.S. strategy while urging continued vigilance and calling out European allies for falling short at a critical moment.

Rice, who served as the 66th U.S. Secretary of State under President George W. Bush and is now Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, acknowledged that the conflict is “inconclusive” by conventional measures. Iran’s regime has not fallen. Its nuclear ambitions have not been formally renounced. The Strait of Hormuz remains a flashpoint. Yet her argument is that the accumulation of what has been achieved — degraded Iranian capabilities, tighter U.S.-Gulf-Israel alignment, and a regime visibly rattled — already represents a strategic inflection point of historical significance.

At the heart of Rice’s assessment is a claim about the nature of Iranian vulnerability. The regime’s leaders, she wrote, are “physically vulnerable to U.S. military power and allied intelligence” — a pointed observation about what the campaign demonstrated regarding the reach and precision of American and Israeli capabilities. That exposure, Rice argued, means that the U.S. naval blockade and continued presence in the closed Strait of Hormuz can deliver “severe economic damage in return” for Iranian adventurism.

The claim that internal fractures may be opening within the Iranian leadership is among Rice’s more consequential observations. The absence of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei from public view since his installation represents an information vacuum that, in the context of an economically battered and militarily embarrassed regime, could signal genuine instability at the top. Rice is careful not to overstate this — she notes that Tehran has always been capable of crushing street-level dissent — but the suggestion of elite-level fracturing is significant and tracks with reporting from analysts monitoring internal Iranian dynamics.

For Rice, one of the clearest strategic dividends of the campaign is the transformation of Israel’s regional standing. The conflict, she argued, has brought the United States, Israel, and the Persian Gulf states “closer together through defense cooperation and intelligence sharing” in ways that would have seemed improbable just years ago. And in her judgment, Israel has never been “more secure.”

The observation tracks with a years-long shift in the Arab world’s posture toward Israel — one that accelerated dramatically with the Abraham Accords and has continued through the current confrontation. Rice’s framing is notably unsentimental: it is not idealism driving Arab-Israeli normalization, but pragmatism. Arab governments seeking technological advancement, economic modernization, and security cooperation have found in Israel a partner that delivers results. The Iran threat has accelerated a realignment that was already underway.

Rice’s sharpest language was reserved not for Tehran but for Washington’s traditional European allies. As the United States and Israel dealt with “growing Iranian capabilities” and Iran attacked regional powers, Europe’s leaders, Rice wrote bluntly, “behaved shamefully.” She called on them to “re-engage with us,” framing the Iranian challenge as a collective Western responsibility, not a purely American or Israeli burden to bear.

The indictment reflects a frustration shared across Washington’s foreign policy community: European capitals that maintained diplomatic and economic ties with Tehran even as Iran’s ballistic missile program, proxy network, and nuclear ambitions advanced, and that offered little beyond rhetorical concern when the confrontation turned military. Rice’s call for European re-engagement is both a reproach and a strategic argument — a durable settlement with Iran will require sustained multilateral pressure, and that pressure will be insufficient without European participation.

Rice’s op-ed lands at a moment of genuine diplomatic uncertainty. The world is watching to see whether President Trump and Iranian leaders will finalize a tentative agreement to extend the ceasefire for 60 days and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The harder question — whether any framework will address Iran’s nuclear program, the central U.S. casus belli throughout the conflict — remains unresolved and, for many analysts, is the test of whether the campaign has delivered lasting change or merely a pause.

Rice’s answer to that uncertainty is patience grounded in confidence. “No American president has had a better chance to build a different and more stable region,” she concluded. “It may just take a little more time.” It is a deliberately unhurried conclusion from a former official who has seen enough of the Middle East to distrust both euphoria and despair. The new day she describes is real, in her telling — but it is a dawn with clouds still visible on the horizon, and the sun has not yet fully risen.