January 6, 2022 | The Wall Street Journal
Biden’s Moment of Truth in Iran
With negotiations likely to fail, he’d better be prepared for a military strike.
January 6, 2022 | The Wall Street Journal
Biden’s Moment of Truth in Iran
With negotiations likely to fail, he’d better be prepared for a military strike.
Excerpt
Negotiations in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear program started this week and quickly stalled—and little wonder. Tehran is striding toward nuclear weapons and has little interest in a diplomatic breakthrough.
That makes it almost certain that President Biden will soon face the fateful choice between allowing the clerical regime to become a nuclear-weapons power and using military force to stop it. The red line for military action will come when Iran’s timeline to sprint to a nuclear weapon shrinks to less than the Pentagon’s response time. On the current trajectory, that could happen early this year. If and when it does, the president should order military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent Tehran from building the bomb.
The best possible resolution of this crisis would be a negotiated settlement that verifiably and permanently closes off all Iranian pathways to the bomb. But the 2015 nuclear deal failed to do that, and Tehran isn’t interested in any agreement that does.
Mr. Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Mr. Kroenig is a professor of government at Georgetown, director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and a former senior policy adviser at the Pentagon (2017-21). Follow Mark on Twitter @mdubowitz. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.