Something is changing in the assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat among Israel’s military brass. Evidence is growing that members of the IDF General Staff and Mossad are beginning to realize that the United States doesn’t share Israel’s goal of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
Last week, for instance, Michael Makovsky, head of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), a Washington-based group that cultivates ties between Israeli and U.S. generals, published an article in the New York Post in which he described their rude awakening.
Makovsky wrote, “Recent meetings with senior defense officials from our closest Middle East ally, Israel, were the most pessimistic I can recall. They perceive America as checked out, adrift, pusillanimous, unfeared and desperate to avoid military confrontation, and Iran as emboldened and nearing the nuclear weapons threshold.”
Makovsky said that all his interlocutors had raised the same three points: The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan showed that the Biden administration is comfortable betraying U.S. allies. The administration’s decision not to respond to the Oct. 20 Iranian attack on its airbase in Tanf, Syria, showed that the United States is willing to allow Iran to attack it with impunity. And the administration’s willingness to be humiliated by the Iranians at the nuclear talks in Vienna shows that the only thing the administration wants is to reach a deal—any deal—with Iran.
By Makovsky’s telling, the Israelis are divided on what the Iranians want, and still haven’t completely given up hope that the Americans will come through, somehow. He ended his article by arguing that the United States should provide Israel with the equipment and weapons platforms it requires to successfully strike Iran’s nuclear installations on its own. But it was clear from his description of the disposition of Israel’s security brass that their belief the United States will actually follow through on its pledge to block Iran from becoming a nuclear power has waned significantly.
It is beginning to dawn on them that in the fight against Iran, Israel is alone.
Since former President Barack Obama entered office in January 2009, the United States has had two policies for contending with Iran’s nuclear program. The first is the Obama-Biden policy. The second is the Donald Trump policy.
The Obama-Biden policy is to engage in diplomacy with Iran that will enable Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, with the backing of the United Nations Security Council, and then to call the outcome “peace.”
For all the differences between them, the Obama-Biden policy on the one hand and the Trump policy on the other shared a common denominator: Both ruled out a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations.
This common reality was never hard to see. Anyone willing to really listen to what the Americans were saying and watch what they were doing could have figured out that the United States had no intention of attacking Iran’s nuclear installations. The only party that could possibly be expected to attack Iran’s nuclear sites—if it were to be done at all—was Israel.
The one person who understood and acted on the basis of reality from the outset of the Obama administration was then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu saw that Iran was galloping ahead as quickly as it could with its nuclear program and that the United States had no intention of using force to block its advance. When the chorus began chanting in unison that the JCPOA slowed Iran’s nuclear progress, Netanyahu rightly rejected their contention as absurd.
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