Iran Hawks Want to Strike Now. They're Wrong.

John Bolton has called for Israel to respond to Iran’s massive, failed weekend missile barrage by destroying its nuclear fuel facilities. In one sense, that’s no surprise; the former US national security adviser has rarely seen a problem he didn’t think could be bombed into submission. Yet he’s far from alone in believing Tehran’s decision to openly attack Israel has presented a rare window for decisive action to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, and all that’s needed is the will to act. Ultra-right members of Israel’s Cabinet agree, as do some of the nation’s security services. If only it were just a matter of will.

Bolton is reckless, but there are several things that he and other Iran hawks get right, starting with the contention that by attacking Israel directly on Saturday night, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei changed rules of engagement. Before, the two countries had been fighting an undeclared war in the shadows. By making the attack direct and open, Khamenei has created new policy options for Israel.

The hawks are right, too, that Iran is preparing to produce a bomb despite its denials. Since former President Donald Trump said he was pulling the US out of a three-year-old nuclear deal with Tehran in 2018, Iranian stockpiles of enriched uranium have gone from virtually nothing to more than 5,000 kilograms (11,000 pounds), including increasingly significant amounts that are enriched to 20% and 60%, well above the 3.7% needed for civilian use, and ready for rapid further enrichment to weapons grade, at about 90%.

The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security now believes, based on an analysis of a February report by international inspectors, that Iran has stockpiled enough enriched uranium to produce “seven nuclear weapons in one month, nine in two months, eleven in three months, 12-13 in four months, and 13 in five months.” In other words, it is already a threshold nuclear power.

Equally correct is that Iran — as it proved again on Saturday — poses a potentially existential threat to Israel, both directly and via proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen. And few would deny that if Iran goes nuclear, other governments in this most volatile of regions will likely look at doing the same, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey. This is why concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has always been bipartisan in the US as well as in Israel. The dispute has been over best how to thwart them.

And here is where the hawks go wrong. Invariably, they argue Iran has gotten as close to having a bomb as it has due to the “weakness” of successive American presidents, excluding Donald Trump, of course, whose “maximum pressure” policy and decision to abandon the 2015 accords they celebrated. Bolton campaigned long and hard for that exit.

But Iran’s program doesn’t exist because of US feebleness. It exists because Iran’s leaders want it. They have been willing to sacrifice hundreds of billions of dollars the country can ill-afford to achieve it, and have worked hard to make it survivable. They believe a nuclear deterrent would make them better able to expand their regional power and agenda. Successive US — and Israeli — governments have failed to eliminate the program because that’s hard to achieve, and because they rightly feared that any failed once-and-for-all attempt would risk backfiring, badly. In fact, the result of Trump’s “maximum pressure” has been to produce maximum Iranian enrichment capacity and maximum stockpiles of enriched uranium.