Our world is changing at a dizzying pace. Over the past weekend, the Iran/Israel/U.S. nuclear crisis morphed from a seeming two-week pause while the president pursued (one more time) a diplomatic resolution, to a devastating U.S. surprise attack on Iran’s three Uranium enrichment facilities, into post-strike briefings, and now both partisan recrimination and partisan praise.
I’ve no idea what will happen in the coming days, but already we’re seeing several enduring takeaways from this tumultuous event:
No Kings!
The president’s bold decision to use U.S. military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear program — without prior congressional concurrence — may seem like obvious fodder for the NO KINGS protesters, but I’d offer an alternative perspective. They’re right. U.S. voters last November were not seeking a king. They wanted a leader, a high-energy president with a bias for action, one who would act decisively even in the face of strong political headwinds. That’s exactly what we got, as his Saturday night attack demonstrates in spades.
Leadership can take many forms, and our president’s abrasive leadership style is off-putting to many. But what counts is action, not form.
The president made a sensible and timely — but not risk-free — decision. In my view, he was remiss in not explaining to the public in his remarks this past Saturday night why his actions were both necessary and urgent, and why it was proper for him to proceed without seeking prior congressional approval. But that’s a political communication matter, unrelated to the rightness or wrongness of his decision regarding military action.
The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran
We don’t know how close Iran was to producing a nuclear weapon. Based on assessments by U.S. intelligence and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), they were far down the track in achieving the uranium enrichment levels needed; however, even from that point, building a fully functional and deliverable nuclear warhead is no small matter.
But there’s no question at all about the direction and inevitable outcome of the regime’s elaborate nuclear project. Clearly, the mullahs intended to produce one or more nuclear weapons with missile systems able to deliver them to targets near or far. And based on the regime’s ugly history of terrorism, there is little doubt that they intended to deploy those nuclear weapons, targeting Israel and perhaps the U.S. The fanatical Iranian regime is quite serious about “death to America.”
A nuclear-armed Iran posed a lethal threat to both world stability and U.S. security, a threat that must be neutralized. Was that threat so urgent that it had to be neutralized this past Saturday? Perhaps not, we’ll never know — but it had to be done, and sooner rather than later.
Deterrence
The first objective of our nation’s entire defense apparatus is not to fight wars; it’s to prevent them. The administration’s catchphrase for that principle is “peace through strength.” We can all agree on that, but in a sense that simple three-word maxim does not go quite far enough. Our superior military strength only carries the day if our nation’s adversaries believe that we are willing to use that strength if need be.
The world is watching. Our nation’s prompt action to address the Iranian threat, the powerful blow inflicted on the enemy, and its flawless delivery spoke volumes, surely heard loud and clear by our prospective adversaries the world over. In the same vein, endless dithering, inconclusive negotiation, meaningless red lines, or poorly executed military action (Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal as a glaring example) would have sent precisely the opposite message.
While purely secondary to the necessity of dealing with the Iranian threat, the implicit message of last week’s U.S. action will pay dividends in confrontations with potential aggressors for years to come.
The much bigger picture
Our single-minded effort to derail Iran’s nuclear ambitions should serve as a stark reminder of the existential danger of a world packed with weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying life on this planet many times over.
Last week, we moved mountains — literally — to prevent one nation from acquiring a single nuclear weapon (or perhaps a few). Our motivation was entirely sensible; that one nation is Iran, ruled by a notorious terrorist regime, evidently willing to deploy nuclear weapons against the U.S. or our allies.
But at the same time, let’s keep in mind the broader reality — there are about 12,500 nuclear warheads in existence today worldwide, most vastly more powerful than the two primitive ones that crippled Japan in 1945, Deployment of any one of those warheads, by anyone and for any reason, would be catastrophic.
Most of the nuclear warheads are owned and controlled by just five nations (the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France), all of which — along with 186 other nations — are signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), thereby promising to maintain their nuclear arsenal for defensive purposes only and to gradually diminish their nuclear stockpiles.
But how trustworthy are those five? The NPT is a global nuclear governance agreement that grew out of the now quaint notion that if responsible world leaders would simply agree not to misuse their nuclear toys and submit to a modicum of international oversight, we’d all be safe. Do we still believe that?
Moreover, what about the other four nations (Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and India) that have nuclear weapons but refuse even to participate in the NPT? And more importantly, how many rogue nations or other entities (ISIS-like sects, for example) might be interested in buying or stealing leftover nukes and using them to hold others (us, for example) hostage? And, as the Iran nuclear initiative demonstrates, nations that choose to take advantage of relatively accessible existing technology can build their own nukes.
In short, the 60-year-old NPT affords increasingly diminished safety from misuse of nuclear weapons, and therefore, reliance on it is increasingly futile. There is nothing hypothetical about our collective vulnerability to mankind’s scientific and engineering success in unleashing the enormous energy of the atom. That genie is out of the bottle, will never go back in, and we must find a way to keep it from destroying civilization.
My hope is that our current monumental effort to keep Iran’s genie in the box will serve as an urgent prompt for our nation to lead the way in the global effort to regain control of nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
