Hezbollah and Israel exchange strikes in wake of Khamenei's killing

The strategy of the Iranians seems to be, ‘We’re going to attack U.S. allies in the region, not just U.S. bases,’” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. The point of doing this is to “provoke these allies to push the Americans to stand out,” he said in a telephone interview today. But “this a really bizarre strategy,” he added, which only works as a threat. “Once you’ve already attacked,” he said, the bluff is over, and that could mean countries in the region lining up with the U.S. to stop getting attacked. "I think that’s going to backfire quite bad," he said. So far, Hellyer said, the regime appears to be intact despite President Donald Trump's calls for Iranians to overthrow their government amid the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “I think the system is fairly resilient at present,” he said. “You haven’t seen mass defections, you haven’t seen a complete breakdown in any in any shape or form.”