With the pseudo-negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program going the way they are, President Joe Biden, of the Biden-Harris Presidency, is rapidly coming to the first of two moments of truth.
The first is whether Biden-Harris will fold in the talks—he is, after all, consigned by the Ayatollah to the kiddie table where he’s to be seen and not heard by the adults in the room—and give Khamenei everything he wants just so Biden-Harris can come home claiming a deal, however disastrous.
That, though, is a moment of lesser truth. The greater truth moment will come after. As Dubowitz and Kroenig put it in their op-ed at the link,
A nuclear-armed Iran would cause further proliferation as regional powers like Saudi Arabia build their own bombs.
But that’s a lesser truth, also, for all that it’s a greater one than the first. Dubowitz and Kroenig also have this:
It might take a year or two to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead that is deliverable on a missile, but once the clerical regime has enough weapons-grade material, the game is over.
The nuclear warhead doesn’t have to be delivered via missile, though. There are a variety of ways to…truck…such device into Israel.
In the event, too, Iran is likely to wait until it has four or five nuclear warheads, since that is what it will take—and all it will take—to destroy Israel as a polity and as a people. And Iran will strike the moment that fourth or fifth weapon becomes operational.
Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former President of Iran and then-Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, on World Al-Qods Day in 2001, as cited by the Middle East Media Research Institute:
If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.
And here is the greatest moment of truth for Biden-Harris. Will he, can he, make
the fateful choice between allowing the clerical regime to become a nuclear-weapons power and using military force to stop it.
Will he make the military strike that Dubowitz and Kroenig suggest will be necessary to prevent Iran’s getting nuclear weapons?
Sadly, Biden-Harris doesn’t have it in him to make the strike. The most we can hope for, and it’s a very thin reed given his and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s open hostility toward Israel, is that Biden-Harris will stay out of the way and let Israel and Saudi Arabia (the latter very sub rosa) conduct the strike.