Israel-Iran

My perspective as a former arms control and counter-proliferation officer at the Pentagon

I’ve been getting a lot of questions/texts about what’s happening with Israel and Iran right now. For background, as an active duty Marine I spent my third tour at the Pentagon on the Joint Staff working counter-proliferation and arms control portfolios. The counter-proliferation work gave me significant insight into Iran’s proliferation efforts and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the JCPOA/2015 Iran nuclear deal) was in my arms control portfolio before we stopped participating in it.

With that background, these are my hot takes jammed out in 30 minutes on a Wednesday morning.

1. Iran has talked about the destruction of Israel for as long as I can remember and built or supported organizations that made it seem like they meant it (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis to some extent). So it’s no surprise that Israel wants to get rid of the current regime and weaken Iran’s military.

2. Iran is at the weakest it has been in a long time. It’s proxy network is absolutely decimated, Assad is gone in Syria, Russia is consumed by Ukraine, Israel knocked out a lot of their air defenses last October, and the economy has long been in shambles. It makes perfect sense militarily for Israel to strike right now, and probably makes great sense for Netanyahu politically and personally, so this isn’t surprising.

3. There was an opportunity to get a better deal than the JCPOA and we trashed it. The last point on Iran’s weakness, the state of the economy, was one of the reasons the JCPOA was accomplished and the reason that Iran (despite what hardliners in the US said) was following the JCPOA. Because they really needed sanctions lifted. Likewise, it’s the basis for my belief that Iran would have been open to a second round of negotiations beyond the JCPOA during the first Trump administration. They really wanted to lift the banking/money sanctions at the time because the JCPOA didn’t improve their economy the way they thought it would. We could tried to negotiate another deal, giving them more economic access for true guarantees and access to their facilities regarding nuclear weapons, but the administration chose to trash the deal instead and put us on this path.

4. Iran has long been a proliferator of missile technology and likely has nuclear weapon aspirations. Frankly, given our track record of taking out regimes that give up their WMD programs either by choice (see Muammar Gaddafi in Libya) or by circumstance (see Saddam Hussein in Iraq), and the security that Kim Jong Un has seemingly secured himself in North Korea, we have created every incentive for these regimes to build nuclear weapons.

5. That said, I don’t think they were super close and I think there were enough incentives in place to try to negotiate a deal, which we were apparently doing. There is a good chance that Israel was worried those negotiations might progress and decided to keep that from happening.

6. Netanyahu really doesn’t want the US to make a deal with Iran and, even more, wants to drag the US into this conflict. In his ideal world, he convinces the US to drop some bombs in Iran, Iran does something to one of the US bases in Iraq or the middle east that we are stupid and wasteful enough to still have their, maybe some US servicemembers die, and then we do the rest of Netanyahu’s work for him by toppling the Iranian regime. It wouldn’t be the first time. We actually overthrew Iran’s democratically elected regime in the 1950’s for British Petroleum when the Brits weren’t able to accomplish it themselves.

7. The biggest wildcard here is obviously Donald Trump. Will he continue to pretend to be anti-war (he has, in fact, been the opposite, basically the same as everyone else)? Will he see this as an opportunity to look tough? Will he see this as an opportunity to start a big enough war that he can use it as a pretext for positioning for that third term? There’s no telling, honestly. Like everyone else, I have no special insight into his mind, so I’ll just have to leave you with my expertise above and one last thing: Iran is huge, much bigger in population and size than Iraq and Afghanistan and we know what boots on the ground were like there and the lack of success there, both militarily and in the regime change. The Iranian people are deeply discontent with their government and most likely blame their government for what is happening right now. I would bet a large majority are even happy about some of their military leaders being killed. They want to move on and historically/culturally could easily align with the US some day if we don’t mess it up by killing a bunch of civilians or supporting their killing. We should be expressing extreme support for the people of Iran right now and backing that up with actions that show we care about them.

Lucas

PS- Sorry for any typos, no time to edit!