Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
The combined American and Israeli assault meant to preempt Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb marks the denouement of a decades-long effort to defang an enemy that has pledged to destroy Israel.
Whether or not Iran’s capacities were obliterated or only delayed, the strikes by American stealth B-2 bombers, flying impressively from midwestern Missouri to the Middle East and back, in tandem with Israel’s relentless fusillade and elimination of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, herald a new era of Israeli dominance in the Middle East backstopped by the unparalleled projection of power by the United States.
This joint action comes on the heels of the collapse and degradation of Iran’s long-time proxies: the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Any nation watching from the sidelines that would challenge the United States elsewhere, or Israel in the region, gets the message. Military planners in China, following every nuance of the war, are surely working to adapt their own posture to try to match capabilities — both in terms of intelligence prowess and armaments — revealed on the battlefield.
The question now is what will unfold in the months and years to come. As the assessments become clearer, we may discover that military might can achieve what diplomacy cannot — or perhaps the opposite. More likely, the demonstrated damage military action can wreak will force an agreement at the negotiating table to “finish the job.”
Defeat in a military conflict does not erase the enmity that drove the confrontation in the first place. If history is any guide, it amplifies it with the emotional rocket fuel of national humiliation that will drive any subsequent round of conflict, while inviting hubris in the victorious camp.
Rather than foment regime change, attacks by foreigners tend to consolidate rather than weaken the ruling powers, marginalizing rather than mobilizing dissident forces within.
The Father Of Israel’s Nuclear Bomb
Shimon Peres — variously president, prime minister and foreign minister of Israel over many decades before his death in 2016 — was one of the first, decades ago, to recognize the danger of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s incipient moves to create a nuclear bomb.
He saw more clearly than most the signs and deceits involved as the key figure who clandestinely shepherded the building of Israel’s own nuclear weapons capacity in the 1960s. While many associate Peres with the Oslo peace process and a Palestinian two-state solution, few these days remember he was “the father of Israel’s nuclear bomb.” Most intelligence agencies estimate that Israel’s present nuclear stockpile stands at about 90 warheads.
I discussed Iran and its nuclear program often over the years with the Israeli statesman. I recall one conversation with him in 1995, when he was foreign minister, published in the Italian paper La Stampa. Reviewing his comments two decades later reads like the target list for Israeli operations against Iran in recent weeks.
I asked him this back then: “It is estimated by some of the more alarmed analysts that Iran could possess nuclear capability within five years. As a man closely associated with the building of Israel’s own capability, do you see signs they are that close to building a bomb?”
Acknowledging Israel’s capability without saying so, he replied: “It depends on three things: how many scientists and engineers they can obtain formally and informally; how much nuclear material and equipment they can smuggle; and when they can build the reactors. When they build a gas centrifuge, they will have established capability.”
Suspicions that the Shah was pursuing a bomb before the 1979 revolution did not at the time set off any warning bells in Israel, which then had a wide swath of cooperation with Iran from joint construction projects to a significant flow of oil imports to meet its energy needs.
That all changed with the revolution. “The danger arises not from the possession of military arms, but the state of mind” of the regime possessing them, Peres said. “It is not an overstatement to say that after the collapse of communism, the kind of fundamentalism coming out of Iran is the greatest danger in our time. For the first time in history, a fanatic movement can get ahold of modern weapons.”
Though he could not then envision that extremist fanatics would one day run the show in his own country, the obvious implication of Peres’ remarks was that Israel alone could be trusted to responsibly break out of the non-proliferation regime that the rest of the world was being held to. The Americans have long accommodated that view.
But wasn’t harboring a nuclear arsenal at odds with pursuing a peace process in the Middle East? I asked.
“The U.S. and Israeli assault seeking to once and for all end Iran’s nuclear path has likely given the regime a new lease on life.”
“They are complementary,” Peres insisted. “First, it enables us to be more flexible on the territorial side because of the deterrent, or because we are considered to have a deterrent. Second, we can now say clearly that we can have a Middle East free of nuclear weapons — provided we have a belligerence-free Middle East.”
“It is like a two-story building,” he continued. “The first story is the end of belligerence; the second story is denuclearization. You cannot build the second story until you finish constructing the first.”
So, if Israel comes to terms with Arab states, would it still need a nuclear deterrent? “For many Arab states, though they wouldn’t want to admit it, our deterrent is the only guarantee of their security against Iran,” he asserted.
All these years later, Israel has not become “flexible on the territorial side,” but the opposite. Belligerence with key Arab states may have diminished as they inch toward the Abraham Accords, despite what former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert calls “war crimes” in Gaza. And now, for the moment, Iran’s nuclear capability appears to be dashed. Peres’ dream notwithstanding, denuclearization appears more than ever to be only for all other states in the Middle East.
America & Israel Keep The Ayatollahs In Power
Another figure I kept in touch with over the decades leading up to the present denouement was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic after the revolution.
Though he aligned with Ayatollah Khomeini to make what he believed would be an anti-imperialist and democratic revolution against the brutal and tyrannical Shah, he was sidelined in short order by anti-modern theocrats who gained the upper hand.
Bani-Sadr fled into exile in 1981 to Versailles, outside Paris, living in a spooky, sparsely furnished mansion always darkened by drawn curtains as a security precaution. He managed to evade several assassination attempts with the help of French intelligence and died in 2021 at the age of 88.
Bani-Sadr’s treacherous power struggle with the ayatollahs in the early days of the revolution left him with a deep and lasting understanding of how the manipulation of foreign hostility shapes Iran’s internal politics and keeps the radical theocrats and their Revolutionary Guard protectors in power.
Whenever an internal crisis weakened the regime, the ayatollahs would always turn to an international crisis to bolster their legitimacy. For Bani-Sadr, the regime is largely legitimized — both domestically and internationally — by its opposition to the U.S. and Israel. Thus, any normalizing of relations or lessening of tensions creates an identity crisis over its raison d’être.
Time and again, he argued, “the regime has prolonged a political crisis to the point of defeat. The first, of which I had first-hand knowledge, was the dangerous game played during the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran, the release of the hostages and the ‘October surprise’ that bolstered Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. president. The second was during the Iran–Iraq war, when the regime failed to end the war at a point of strength in 1981 and 1982 and instead ended it in defeat in 1988.”
Bani-Sadr believed the same was happening with the vise of sanctions and the protracted struggle to achieve a nuclear breakout. When we last spoke in 2019 on the 40th anniversary of the revolution, he sensed that the tried-and-true strategy of surviving through confrontations with the West was running out of steam because both Iranians themselves and the world more broadly had lost patience with the regime.
“Today, at long last,” he claimed, “the clergy’s legitimacy is in drastic decline. The majority of the clergy oppose and have distanced themselves from the ideology of the ruling regime. To maintain its fragile hold on power, the ruling clergy seeks to foment and sustain crises with foreign powers. The creation of such crises has become intrinsic to the nature of the Iranian regime since the days of Khomeini.
“Given the regime’s lack of public legitimacy and its determination not to recognize the rights of its own people, another round of crisis can be expected. It can only be prevented if Iran’s civil society enters into [the] political space and demands its rights.”
Whatever the reality of that assessment at the time, the U.S. and Israeli assault seeking to once and for all end Iran’s nuclear path has likely given the regime a new lease on life. When missiles rain down on the residents of Tehran, even those most discontented with the regime will close ranks.
If Bani-Sadr was right, the regime’s survival in defeat once again may finally be the beginning of its end. But because of the Shah-like repression of all political alternatives, only remnants of the defeated regime are, for now, left standing as defenders of the nation’s sovereignty.
If there is any lesson here, it is that in the cross-cutting complexity of historical and geo-civilizational conflict, you can’t kill two birds with one stone, or even a 30,000-pound bomb.
Although victory can be claimed in the near term, it is Pyrrhic to the extent that achieving one objective undermines the other. Even if the centrifuges have been disabled for now, the belligerence has been enriched to a highly combustible grade.
