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By all appearances, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in New York Sunday in a state of near desperation over Iran. By his reckoning, the Iranians are now within arm’s reach — a few months or even just weeks short — of having a stockpile of enriched uranium that, if re-enriched, would be enough for a nuclear bomb. Reports in Israeli media even quote an unnamed government official claiming that Iran already has a bomb. And Netanyahu — who addresses the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday a day after visiting the White House — believes the Obama administration is falling for an Iranian ruse fronted by President Hassan Rouhani to get the West to drop sanctions in return for a deceitful demonstration of nuclear innocence.
But if the Israeli leader is feeling desperate, don’t expect him to show it in his U.N. speech; that, after all, is what his opponents expect. There will likely be no over-the-top gimmicks this time, no cartoon bomb audio-visuals. Neither should anyone wait for explicit, drawn-out analogies to the Holocaust. Instead, Netanyahu is likely to speak very quietly and starkly as he lays out his case that it’s too late to slow Iran’s advance to nuclear capability, that the only remaining choice for the world’s leaders is to force Iran to relinquish its capability to build nuclear weapons, or live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran.
Related: Obama reassures Israel over Iran nuclear talks
The United States reserves the right to keep all options, including military action, on the table with regards to engaging with Iran, President Barack Obama said after holding talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday.
Netanyahu’s dilemma is this: Not only does he have no trust in Tehran’s peaceful declarations, he is not confident that the U.S. and Europe are willing to escalate a confrontation in order to force Iran to give up its enriched uranium and dismantle its key nuclear facilities. It is not sufficient for Netanyahu for Iran to accept caps on its enrichment levels, because it’s nuclear infrastructure puts it within “a turn of the screwdriver” of weaponization if it followed North Korea’s example and broke out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Israeli leader believes the only acceptable scenario is for Iran to be presented with the choice of either dismantling its nuclear program or seeing it bombed to ruins — and that’s not a likely outcome of renewed negotiations between the West and Iran, which are focused on limiting but not entirely eliminating Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium.
If Netanyahu ever had any trust in Obama’s pledge that the option of military action remains “on the table” for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, he lost it during the Syria crisis when the U.S. president did not make good on his pledge to punish the Assad regime for crossing the president’s chemical-weapons “red line.” “Iran is watching,” Netanyahu said repeatedly in the days after the massive Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack, and he is convinced Iran’s conclusion from that episode is that for the U.S., the military option is in fact off the table. Such a calculation would, Netanyahu believes, give Iran confidence that it can escape the sanctions chokehold with a few concessions to the West, and emerge as a nuclear or “nuclear-threshold” power (like Japan, a country with the means to rapidly assemble a nuclear weapon if it chose to) with a revived economy to boot. Thus Netanyahu’s alarm over renewed Western engagement with Tehran. Though he’ll press his case to the White House and United Nations to tighten the screws on Iran, he’ll largely be going through the motions; words, as far as he’s concerned, have failed, including his own.
For Netanyahu, that leaves the option of solo Israeli military action, which he insists is still on the table. Last summer he and his defense minister at the time, Ehud Barak, were widely thought to be planning an attack on Iran sometime before the U.S. presidential election in November. They were stymied by the opposition of Israel’s military-intelligence establishment, led by army chief Gen. Benny Gantz. The brass did not want to attack Iran over the objections of the Obama administration, not for the sake of delaying the Iranians’ nuclear plans for at most a year or two, and not with the military and political blowback that would follow.
Still, Israel’s military-intelligence establishment agrees with Netanyahu that a nuclear-armed Iran is simply unacceptable, and that a military attack would be necessary as a last resort if all other means failed. After Obama’s response to the chemical attack in Syria and to Rouhani’s so-called charm offensive, the Israeli brass may be more amenable now to Netanyahu’s argument that if Israel doesn’t attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, and pretty soon, the Iranians will get the bomb because nobody else will stop them.
So while Netanyahu is extremely unlikely to threaten such an attack during conversations with President Obama or at the U.N., he’ll nonetheless present Iran as an imminent, existential danger to which Israel reserves the right to respond with force. And if that implied threat were to increase Obama’s leverage over Iran while also increasing Iran’s fear, so much the better.
The problem, of course, is that Netanyahu and his generals are not at all enthusiastic about striking Iran when the United States and the other world powers are concentrated fully on removing the nuclear threat peacefully, through negotiations. It may well be that for the duration of the planned talks, Netanyahu will have no choice but to take the military option off the table.
But the Israeli leader’s bottom line is that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons on his watch. He should be believed when he says he considers that the equivalent of a nuclear-armed Nazi Germany, and it should be understood that he could never sit back and watch that happen, whatever the risk.
However, a different dilemma may be shaping up for this ideological yet practical Israeli leader, one that does not have an easy answer: Could Netanyahu sit back and watch while Iran becomes a nuclear-threshold power, acquiring the means to build nuclear weapons but not actually building them? And if he couldn’t live with that, could his generals?
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