The Israel-Iran Conflict

Israel calls its attack on Iran’s nuclear program a justified response to an existential threat: Benjamin Netanyahu argues that Iran’s leaders should be taken at their word when they say they wish to wipe his country off the map.

So Israel has spent the last several days razing Iran’s nuclear structures and killing the people in charge of them; more than 200 people have died, according to the Iranian health ministry. Iran has been shooting back, blowing up buildings in Tel Aviv; at least 24 people have died, according to Israel.

Why are these two nations in this mess? Iran watched the United States fell governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The government believes nuclear bombs (and the threat that it could use them) will protect it, just as they have protected North Korea.

Israel does not believe in the power of diplomacy to solve this existential threat. North Korea has been tolerated as a rogue regime with nuclear bombs because nations assume Kim Jong-un won’t use them. But Israel and its supporters treat Iran as uniquely irrational. Netanyahu saw a previous deal as vulnerable to cheating, and he struck Iran last week while President Trump was negotiating a new one.

But military intervention has its problems, too. Today’s newsletter is about that puzzle.

The talking cure

American presidents have chased a nuclear deal and asked Israel for restraint. The agreement struck in the last years of the Obama administration did not meet Netanyahu’s very high bar — the total elimination of Iran’s nuclear program — but it put inspectors on the ground to ensure Iran halted development. In exchange, Western nations loosened sanctions and unfroze Iran’s assets.

But even the most ardent proponents of Obama’s deal had to admit that it was a temporary measure to hold off Iranian nuclear ambitions for a decade, with the hope that something — anything — would follow. By most accounts, Iran was abiding by the terms, but Trump shredded the agreement in his first term, promising in this term that he would deliver something more secure.