MADRID – In recent weeks, a new Israeli security narrative has been taking shape. Its object is not new, the Islamic Republic of Iran, but its central discursive axis has undergone a subtle yet significant shift. Where the nuclear program once occupied the primary place in the rhetoric of existential threat, the emphasis has now broadened and, in some discourses, shifted toward Iran’s ballistic missile program.

This move does not constitute a mere technical or military adjustment in intelligence assessments, but rather a deeper political rearticulation within Israeli security discourse. Analyzing this shift requires moving beyond conventional armaments logic and examining how these elements, the nuclear and the missile domains, are organized within a discursive framework whose structuring principle is not simply the notion of “threat,” but the capacity to shape international perceptions of Iranian sovereignty and autonomy.

For more than two decades, the dominant Western narrative on Iran was articulated around its alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon. This signifier, “the bomb,” functioned as a semantic void capable of condensing a wide range of fears, from regional catastrophe and proliferation to an irreversible shift in the balance of power. At its core, this was a narrative of potentiality, of a catastrophic future that had to be prevented. Diplomatic agreements such as the JCPOA were structured around containing and verifying that potential. Yet this framework contained an inherent paradox: by negotiating the nuclear issue, the international community tacitly recognized and delimited a sphere of Iranian technological sovereignty, namely the right to a civilian fuel cycle under supervision. It was a game played within the boundaries of state autonomy.

The failure to fully revive that agreement, due to the lack of U.S. responsibility and, crucially, the lessons drawn from the June conflict, has catalyzed a reordering of Israeli discourse. The twelve-day Israeli air campaign, presented as an operation to “neutralize threats,” succeeded in damaging infrastructure but also exposed the limits of that strategy, as none of its initial objectives were achieved. Iran, for its part, drew the same lesson in reverse. Its vast missile arsenal, deployed, tested, and regularly showcased in exercises in the Persian Gulf, has emerged as its most tangible shield. It was this missile ecosystem, dispersed, hardened, and mobile, that provided Tehran with its primary instrument of retaliation and asymmetric deterrence during and after the war.

It is here that the new signifier emerges in Israeli discourse. The “Iranian missile program” is no longer treated merely as an auxiliary component of the nuclear threat, but as the very embodiment of a resilient and expanded Iranian sovereignty deemed unacceptable. Official Israeli rhetoric now frames it as “the primary threat,” a lexical shift with profound consequences. Why? Because while the nuclear domain is by definition latent and, at least in theory, subject to international verification regimes, the missile arsenal is manifest and constitutive of Iran’s national self-defense. It is the material expression of what Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baqaei, stated without ambiguity: “Iran’s missile program was developed to defend Iranian territory… it is not a subject that can be discussed.”

By declaring this program the principal threat, Israeli discourse performs a double political operation. First, it externalizes and objectifies a capability that Iran considers a fundamental and non-negotiable pillar of its strategic autonomy. Second, and more decisively, it redefines the very concept of “deterrence.” Iranian deterrence, based on a doctrine of access denial and missile-based retaliation, is presented not as a legitimate defensive posture within the Westphalian order, but as a latent aggression. Its mere existence is recast as an offensive act against the security of other states, thereby undermining the sovereign premise that a nation has the right to determine the means of its own defense.

Within this framework, both missiles and nuclear capabilities acquire renewed meaning. They cease to function merely as technical-military categories and become discursive elements whose meaning is not intrinsic but relational. They operate as signifiers whose fixation depends on their anchoring to a specific nodal point: the need to weaken Iranian strategic agency. From this perspective, the missile program emerges as a condensed symbol of the country’s operational capacity and its determination to project power and preserve autonomy. Together, these elements form a discursive synergy that constructs Iran as an independent pole of power, situated outside the Western security umbrella and capable of challenging regional monopolies of force.

This narrative does not operate in a vacuum. It both feeds into and seeks to shape political dynamics in Washington. Reports indicating that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to present President Trump with options for joint military actions against the missile program in the post-conflict phase are illustrative. This is an effort to transfer the new signifier from Israeli security discourse to the core of the transatlantic security agenda. The goal is to have the United States internalize the premise that Iran’s missile capability, by virtue of its scale and sophistication, transcends the realm of legitimate national defense and becomes a problem of Western collective security that justifies “preventive” countermeasures, including military ones.

Israel’s insistence on interpreting routine Iranian military exercises, such as the recent ones in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, as potential “cover” for an attack, despite U.S. intelligence seeing no imminent indicators, is another key discursive symptom. It seeks to establish an equivalence between the demonstration of sovereign capacity, a national military exercise, and aggressive intent, thereby erasing the line between defensive and offensive acts. Within this logic, the mere maintenance and display of defensive autonomy becomes provocation. This rhetorical maneuver is essential to sustaining a permanent state of exception in threat assessment, where the burden of proof is reversed: Iran must continuously demonstrate that its actions are not offensive, while its preparedness is presumed malicious.

Iran’s response thus far has been an unequivocal rejection of this discursive reframing. By stating that its defense “is not a subject that can be discussed,” Tehran rejects the very premise that its autonomy in this domain is negotiable or can be placed on a bargaining table. For Iran, accepting dialogue on its missiles under external pressure would amount to an act of political self-negation, a surrender of the principle of self-determination in the sphere it considers most vital to its survival in a hostile environment. This position is not mere obstinacy; it reflects a historical reading in which concessions in defense matters lead inexorably to a spiral of demands culminating in strategic vulnerability. Iranian discourse therefore advances an alternative nodal point to the Israeli one: the preservation of autonomous capacity as the only guarantee of real security.

The architecture of autonomy: Beyond missiles

To grasp the depth of the challenge, it is necessary to situate the missile program within what can be described as the architecture of Iranian autonomy. This architecture is not reducible to military capabilities or material resources; it is an interlocking set of political, strategic, and symbolic arrangements designed to ensure that the country can act according to its own agenda, even under external pressure. It is a system in which each component, from defense doctrine to the organization of strategic decision-making, reinforces independent agency and preserves room for maneuver without reliance on external approval.

Missiles are the most visible manifestation of this architecture, but their significance lies as much in what they represent as in their destructive power: the assertion of a right to autonomous action and strategic defense. Targeting the missiles, in this logic, would not merely strike a military arsenal, but would seek to undermine a core political principle: Iran’s capacity to exercise full sovereignty over its strategic decisions. Israeli discourse, by focusing on the missile threat, attempts to isolate this component and present it as a standalone instrument rather than as the expression of an integrated and deliberately constructed system of autonomy.

From the Iranian perspective, this autonomy also includes the ability to engage in the regional environment with full independence. Missiles form part of a broader set of tools that ensure strategic, diplomatic, and defensive decisions can be taken sovereignly and with room for maneuver. In this sense, the architecture of autonomy does not merely guarantee defense but also political agency. It enables Iran to act and respond according to its own criteria, preserving space for independent maneuver within a complex international system. Attempts to restrict this capacity therefore aim to restore external control over strategic initiative, reducing sovereign decision-making. The central issue, ultimately, is the preservation of the ability to make strategic decisions autonomously at the regional level and beyond.

Fractures in the international discursive order

The effectiveness of this new Israeli narrative is far from complete and encounters resistance even within the Western political space it seeks to address. The caution reported by U.S. intelligence, which sees no signs of an imminent attack behind Iranian exercises, constitutes a significant fracture. It reveals divergent interpretations of the same signifier. For part of the U.S. security establishment, Iranian missiles remain primarily a matter of risk management and containment, one factor among many on the complex West Asian chessboard. For the hegemonic Israeli discourse, they represent the central problem requiring a definitive solution. This gap is the battleground where the struggle over meaning fixation unfolds. Netanyahu’s presentation of military “options” in Washington is not only about resources; it is about aligning interpretive frameworks and inducing the United States to view the situation through the same lens of existential urgency.

Beyond the West, the narrative encounters even stronger resistance. For powers such as Russia and China, the principles of non-interference and self-defense are pillars of their vision of international order. Attempts to delegitimize Iran’s missile program are perceived as a dangerous precedent that could later be applied to their own defensive capabilities or spheres of influence. Their refusal to endorse this reframing is not support for Iran per se, but a defense of a conception of sovereignty regarded as essential to a multipolar world.

The inherent danger of this new narrative lies in its potential to create an inescapable action-reaction trap. By defining Iranian self-defense as the primary threat, a permanent mandate for military action is established. Any Iranian effort to maintain, modernize, or develop its arsenal, a natural act for any state seeking to preserve defensive capacity, can be interpreted through this lens as a problematic gesture requiring response. Diplomacy is emptied of substance because the object of disagreement ceases to be a specific program and becomes the right to possess it. Dialogue becomes strained when one side demands the renunciation of a fundamental principle of the other as a precondition for talks.

The future of this confrontation will largely depend on whether other actors adopt or resist this discursive reframe. If the international community were to tacitly accept that Iran’s missile arsenal is, by its nature, a threat to be neutralized rather than a legitimate component of sovereign deterrence, a significant normative threshold would be crossed. It would legitimize the idea that the self-defense of certain states can itself become a cause for alarm, creating a category of “insecure sovereignty” applicable to any actor seeking to preserve strategic autonomy.

Ultimately, the focus on missiles reveals the deeper anatomy of the conflict. What is at stake is not only immediate security, but the very nature of the regional political order: whether it will be based on an imposed hierarchy of power, where strategic autonomy is a privilege reserved for a few, or whether it will allow space for independent poles of power with their own doctrines of defense and deterrence. The new signifier in Israeli discourse is, in this sense, an attempt to fix the interpretation of what constitutes legitimate defense and what constitutes an intolerable threat. Iran’s response has been clear: its sovereignty, embodied in its defensive capacity, is not for sale. The discursive battle precedes and shapes the material field of action. Words, missiles, threat, deterrence, sovereignty, are not mere descriptions; they are instruments through which interpretive frameworks are drawn, coalitions mobilized, and strategic decisions justified. In this contest of narratives, whoever succeeds in fixing the meaning of the missile will have won a decisive battle long before any projectile is deployed. The board is set, and words are the first pieces, and perhaps the most decisive, to move.