Israel and the US have dealt punishing blows to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. “Operation Rising Lion” and “Operation Midnight Hammer” have been portrayed as precision strikes that would stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in its tracks. However, whatever the bombings might have achieved tactically, they risk forfeiting strategically, as Iran is more convinced than ever that nuclear weapons are the only way to deter future aggression and ensure the regime’s survival.
Iran was once brought to the negotiating table through a carefully calibrated mix of pressure and incentives. Despite its imperfections, that approach worked. In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was agreed, with Iran agreeing to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and other concessions. However — at Israel’s urging and despite Iran’s apparent compliance — US President Donald Trump abandoned the JCPOA during his first term as president, destroying whatever mutual trust had been built over the course of 20 months of painstaking diplomacy.
Now, despite pursuing new nuclear negotiations with Iran, the US has joined Israel in abandoning strategic patience in favor of spasmodic force. Some argue that Iran invited the attacks by deceiving the international community, stoking regional conflicts and enriching uranium to levels well beyond those needed for any civilian application. These are legitimate complaints.
Even the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a report released just before Israel’s campaign began, raised concerns about Iran’s compliance with its international obligations. Indeed, an analysis of this report by the Institute for Science and International Security argued that “Iran can convert its current stock of 60 percent enriched uranium into 233kg of [weapon-grade uranium] in three weeks at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, enough for 9 nuclear weapons.” That conclusion might well have lit a fire under the Trump administration.
However, the IAEA also concluded that it had “no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear program” in Iran, while underscoring the urgency of reaching a nuclear deal.
The agency said that Iran “is the only non-nuclear-weapon state in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60%” — just a short technical step away from the 90 percent purity needed for weapons-grade material.
Even so, US and Israeli decisionmakers green-lit attacks on Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — facilities that are subject to IAEA safeguards and monitored under Iran’s Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitments. With that, they unraveled the legal and verification framework that exists precisely to prevent weaponization.
Beyond undermining the authority of the IAEA and its inspection regime, the attacks violated the NPT’s principle of peaceful nuclear use (Article IV) and breached international law, including the UN Charter. The US, a nuclear superpower with a record of catastrophic wars aimed at regime change, and Israel, a clandestine nuclear-armed state that refuses to sign the NPT, have thus sent an unmistakable message: Only the weak follow rules, and only the strong are safe. In fact, as long as you have nuclear weapons, you can violate international law at will.
This is true not only for major powers, but also for smaller states. For example, Pakistan nurtures cross-border terrorism and exports proxy war with impunity, threatening nuclear retaliation for anyone who crosses it. This poses a more acute threat to regional peace than Iran’s hypothetical bomb, but the US remains silent.
This hypocrisy is deeply rooted. It was the US, after all, that aided and abetted Pakistan’s covert pursuit of the bomb. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, successive US administrations ignored mounting evidence that Pakistan was secretly enriching uranium and building nuclear weapons — and continued funneling billions of dollars in aid to the country. The result is a fragile state armed with an “Islamic bomb.”
Today, with diplomacy derailed, inspections discredited, coercion normalized, and double standards embraced, what tools remain to convince Iran that remaining non-nuclear is wise and strategically viable? After years of debate over the value of a nuclear deterrent — with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even issuing religious edicts against nuclear weapons — Iranian decisionmakers are almost certain to decide that there is no other way to keep the country safe from attack.
Iran has every incentive to exit — or at least limit — the IAEA framework and race toward nuclear breakout. Just as former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein took his nuclear program underground following Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s IAEA-monitored Osirak reactor, Iran is likely to reject transparency and oversight. That would not be a dramatic act of defiance, but rather a rational response to a serious — even existential — threat.
It is not just Iran. If powerful states can bomb safeguarded nuclear facilities with impunity, why should any country put its faith in nonproliferation? Any government that wants to avoid the fate of Saddam’s Iraq or Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya (or, for that matter, democratic Ukraine), would seek to acquire the bomb — or at least come close enough to keep adversaries guessing.
The only viable path to nonproliferation is and always would be diplomacy, not destruction. Military strikes might slow down a nuclear program, but they cannot impose long-term restraint — especially when they are carried out by powers that flout the very rules they claim to be enforcing. In the end, Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer might be remembered not as pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear breakout, but as catalysts for it.
Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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