America and Israel have no Iran strategy.
This is my conclusion after meeting with members of Congress and their staff, State Department workers, and Israeli political, intelligence, defense and think tank leaders this month. The U.S. cannot deal with the gravity of the threat, and Israel has been waiting for the U.S. to take the lead.
America needs an Iran strategy because a nuclear Iran will lead to a regional nuclear arms race, in which every nation — from the Muslim Brotherhood oriented Turks to Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Iranian-controlled Iraq — will want and find a way to get apocalyptic weapons.
And the U.S. will definitely be drawn into any resulting war. If one of those weapons falls into the hands of a terrorist organization, it will be used to intimidate American political leaders. Terrorists do not need a ballistic missiles. They can put nukes on container ships headed for the port of Baltimore, New York, New Orleans, Seattle, Miami or Los Angeles, then set them off it in international waters, shutting down the electrical grid for months (to say nothing of the supply chain) and terrorizing the whole country.
Perhaps this is an overreaction, but it is a genuine possibility. Yet we choose to ignore the zealotry of jihadists in Tehran, in bunkers in Gaza, in Beirut, and in the hideouts of al-Qaeda and ISIS leaders in Syria, Iraq and Pakistan.
Iran is on the verge of weaponizing a nuclear device. The U.S. director of National Intelligence could not confirm in her most recent report that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon, a significant change from years of previous reporting to Congress. If not for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) forcing intelligence agencies to make the information public, Americans would still be in the dark about this.
To the average American, the idea the U.S. or Israel does not have a national strategy to confront the Islamic Republic’s ambitions seems inconceivably negligent, especially with Iran constantly in the headlines. But political leaders talking about Iran without an effective strategy for their nefarious activities throughout the Middle East and support of radical proxies that have killed many American and Israeli civilians and soldiers for decades is insufficient.
The Iranian strategy is to chase America out of the Middle East, which for isolationists and pro-Hamas protesters is just fine. However, they ignore that the Iranian goal over time is not just to wipe Israel off the map, but also expand their jihadist ideology to our shores once they are able. The American mind cannot fathom in the 21st century that there are people so driven with Islamist revolutionary zeal that they would even contemplate using nuclear weapons in the name of Islam.
America needs to support the Iranian people, which means allowing them to take charge of their lives, ending rape in their notorious Evin prison for dissidents, ending the misogyny endemic in their society and the routine hanging and persecution of gay Iranians. We need to support the Iranian people who have taken to the streets in the hundreds of thousands over the last 15 years to change their government.
Which brings us to developing a strategy to deal with Iran. Iran is a weak and vulnerable nation despite its bravado and aggressiveness. It is happy to fight until the last drop of its Arab proxy blood.
According to Mark Dubowitz and Orde Kittre, the U.S. should use the Reagan playbook that fostered the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Economic warfare…strengthening the pro-democracy forces in Iran…and an all-out offensive against the regime’s ideological legitimacy…[as it is] susceptible to collapse.”
This means enforcing our sanctions on the books that the Biden administration has ignored. We need to demand snapback sanctions in the U.N. Security Council under UNSCR 2231, which do not require Chinese or Russian assent. The ability to reinstate snapback sanctions ends in October 2025.
We need to institute and enforce secondary sanctions against nations who ignore primary sanctions, like America’s nemesis China, and end any waivers for Iraqi electricity payments of billions of dollars a year to Iran. Starving the regime will help create the conditions for the Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands.
Perhaps Elon Musk can give his Starlink system to dissidents so they can communicate and coordinate their opposition. Is this provocative? Not when you consider that Iranian-directed militias in Syria and Iraq have targeted our soldiers for years, leaving numerous deaths and traumatic brain injuries.
Importantly, this does not mean American boots on the ground. Iran’s Supreme Leader and his terrorist henchmen in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should never get a nuclear weapon, but they are on the threshold of doing so. Iranians oriented toward peaceful coexistence can be trusted with safeguards for a civilian nuclear program, if they desire.
What does Iran’s current weaponization entail? It involves creating the uranium metals for an atomic warhead, developing the neutron initiators to ignite the bomb, and doing the computer modeling for it all to work. The bombs they are developing dwarf the power of those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But time is short. Iran is on the cusp of an irreversible nuclear weaponization program, and America and Israel lack a joint strategy.
This article originally appeared in The Hill on August 29, 2024.
Eric R. Mandel is the director of the Middle East Political Information Network and senior security editor for the Jerusalem Post‘s Jerusalem Report.