10 Years After the Deal, Iran is a Nuclear Threshold State

SHAPIRO: That was a pretty strong message to the Iranians, that I thought had a chance to keep them on the back foot. And it did draw them into the negotiations, I think, much faster than might have otherwise been expected.

DUBOWITZ: Welcome back to “The Iran Breakdown.” In 2015, Dan Shapiro and I were on opposite sides of the Iran nuclear deal. As U.S. Ambassador Israel under President Obama, Dan defended the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]. I fought to stop it. Ten years later, the facts have changed – and so have we. Dan has served in the Senate, the White House, as ambassador, and as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East under President Biden. Few people understand the diplomatic and military chessboard like Dan does. Today, we look back at where we started, where we are now, what we agree on, what we disagree on, and what has to happen next to stop Iran from going nuclear.

I’m Mark Dubowitz and this is “The Iran Breakdown.” So let’s break it down.

DUBOWITZ: Good. Dan, welcome to “The Iran Breakdown.”

SHAPIRO: Thanks Mark. Thanks for having me.

DUBOWITZ: No, it’s wonderful to have you. And we’ve been friends for I think over 20 years now, been discussing Iran for over 20 years now. Dan, I actually remember when we first got to know each other, you were a Senate adviser to Senator Bill Nelson as I remember, and we worked on a project to designate Hezbollah’s TV Station Al-Manar as a terrorist organization.

SHAPIRO: We did indeed.

DUBOWITZ: And that goes back over two decades. So I actually want to start just a little bit with your personal story. You’ve served in a number of administrations at the highest levels. How did this kid from Illinois end up at the highest echelon of the US government?

SHAPIRO: Well, thanks again for having me. I thought I was going to be an academic. I started my graduate studies at Harvard in 1991.

DUBOWITZ: When Harvard was a good university.

SHAPIRO: Well, it was a good university. I think it’s still got good things, but it’s got problems too. To get a Middle East Studies, a master’s degree in history but leading to a PhD. And I’d spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I’d been there as a child with my family. We were actually in Israel in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. That was a very foundational experience for us, connected us very much to what was going on in the region. I spent more time there as a student after high school and in college. But what turned things for me was doing an internship at the State Department after the first year of graduate school. I went to the United Arab Emirates. I was the intern at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, and the Consulate General in Dubai, which were very small missions at the time.

So when the political officer goes on summer vacation, the graduate intern is actually the acting political officer. So I did serious diplomacy, and this was a year after the first Gulf War. There were a lot of very, really fascinating Gulf security issues, including a conflict between Iran and the UAE over the islands in the Gulf, which persists to this day. And I did a lot of work on that. And when I finished the summer, I realized I was much more cut out to do diplomacy and policymaking than I was to do the academic track. So, I changed the degree into a Middle East diplomacy and U.S. foreign policy master’s degree. Hightailed it to Washington, got here early ’93, just before the Oslo Accords were announced, and then started my way in government on Capitol Hill, eventually in the Clinton administration, back on the Hill.

And then found my way into then-Senator Obama’s orbit when he was elected to the Senate. I’m from Illinois, so we had some connections. And that led to working on his campaign, and NSC [National Security Council], the Ambassadorship, and all the rest is history. So it wasn’t really the plan, but sometimes you take a chance on a new experience and it leads you down a totally different path. But this has been my passion, the U.S.-Israel partnership, U.S. interests in the region, how to try to build a more secure, more peaceful Middle East for our benefit, for the benefit of our friends and partners. That’s continued all the way through my current roles, more recent and current roles in the era of the Abraham Accords, obviously in the post-October 7th era as well.

DUBOWITZ: Well, certainly America’s better for it that you decided to come to Washington and join the policy world and not go into academia. So good career choice. All right, Dan, let’s jump into this. So let’s start with the obvious. Again, back in 2015, you were a strong supporter of President Obama’s JCPOA nuclear deal. I was a fierce critic of it. And tell us, what has changed for you since then?

SHAPIRO: Well, let me go back to that time. So I was the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. I’d spent the first two and a half years of the Obama administration at the National Security Council. I was the senior director for Middle East and North Africa, very much responsible for the bilateral U.S.-Israel relationship and a number of other bilateral relationships, but not a primary lead on Iran policy. Obviously those connect. And so I worked very closely with those who led that team. And then when I was appointed ambassador in 2011, continued, again not as a participant, in negotiations with Iran. I was never in those rooms, but as always a participant in the discussions with Israel, with the senior Israeli officials about the Iran issue.

So I have that particular perspective, but I never sat at the negotiating table across Iranians. But what President Obama set out to do from the beginning of the administration, was to find a way to ensure that Iran could never get a nuclear weapon on his watch, and hopefully much longer than that. And that led to a series of sanctions in the early years of the Obama administration. It led to, really, the development of a military option that we didn’t have coming out of the Bush administration. It led to ultimately negotiations, and how those negotiations got started I wasn’t always fully in the picture. For example, the famous meetings in Oman by Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns, the U.S. Ambassador of Israel, was not given a heads-up about that. I actually learned about that later. I think we probably could have done better in terms of coordinating with the Israelis ahead of that meeting. Leave that aside.

Then I was really in conversation with the Israelis about the two agreements that followed, the Joint Plan of Action, JPOA, and then the Joint Comprehensive Plan, JCPOA, in 2015. And obviously sitting in Israel and talking all the time with Prime Minister Netanyahu, with the IDF, with the Mossad, with the most senior Israeli leaders, I was well-tuned to their concerns and I considered all their concerns legitimate. None of the criticisms of Iran as a deeply hostile, anti-Semitic, terror-sponsoring regime calling for Israel’s destruction, trying to ensure it has the capability that it might be able to actually carry out that terrible vision, threatening US and U.S. partners all over the region through terrorist proxies. I didn’t disagree then, and I don’t disagree now that that is the character of this regime.

What I ultimately concluded about the JCPOA was that it was the best available, or maybe you could say the least-bad available, option at the time. Iran had advanced its enrichment of uranium to the point where it stood a short period of time from the ability to break out to achieve a weapons worth of highly enriched uranium. What that deal did was it pushed that threat out 10 to 15 years, and could keep it about at a year distance from that threat for about that period of time, 10 to 15 years.

It did so at the cost, you could say, of sanctions relief, funds that would go back into the Iranian budget, and economy, and things that could help finance their other very dangerous and really destructive activities in the region. It did it with some risk of sunsets. That was clearly a late decision in those negotiations that were conducted by Secretary of State Kerry. That meant that at a certain point, starting at the ten-year mark and then over the next five years, various restrictions under the JCPOA would come off. And the criticism that was lodged was that at the end of this Iran will be well positioned to break out with a much larger industrial-scale enrichment and nuclear capability.

DUBOWITZ: Right, after collecting, I think we had estimated about $1 trillion in sanctions relief over the life of the JCPOA.

SHAPIRO: Right. So I didn’t disagree with that concern. What I argued to my Israeli friends and counterparts was, this buys time. It doesn’t do more than that. It doesn’t solve the problem. It buys time. Buying time has value, and at some point you’re going to have to come back and revisit that. And I think there were different views within the Obama administration. My view, and I wasn’t alone, but my view was always that we would eventually have to return to this issue. It would be a different administration, but would have to return to this issue with revisiting, or extending, or renegotiating the terms. Or potentially putting a military option on the table to ensure that post-JCPOA they didn’t do the thing that Israelis were rightly concerned they might be able to do, under the terms of that agreement.

DUBOWITZ: Dan, let me ask you something, something that’s always puzzled me. Maybe you can clarify this. I was obviously involved in that debate. I was on the other side of the debate making the case that this was a fatally flawed agreement, that it would give patient pathways to Iran to achieve nuclear weapons, and they’ll get massive sanctions relief to build and fortify their “axis of resistance,” as we call it on the show, their axis of misery. And then that might trickle down to the Iranian people, and this would be a brutally repressive regime that at some point, as you said, would have an industrial-sized nuclear capability.

Why did the Obama administration never make the public argument that, look, this is a temporary deal, but we’re going to have to negotiate a follow-on deal? We understand that the sunsets are a flaw. We understand these restrictions are all coming back. We understand that we’ve given up enrichment despite the fact there were five UN Security Council resolutions prohibiting enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. We understand all of the criticisms that you all have of this deal, but our plan going forward is we are going to negotiate a follow-on agreement, that extends the sunsets and addresses some of the fundamental flaws with respect to inspections, and other issues that people contended with. Why was that argument never made publicly?

SHAPIRO: So again, that was very much the kind of conversation I was having in Israel. Well, look, I don’t want to speak for how other decisions were made, other than to say it was the final year, or the final 15 months or so of an administration. It was a long-running project which the administration wanted to highlight as a significant achievement. And it was an achievement of diplomacy, which President Obama had argued was a tool that should be available for these kinds of problems. And so it was captured as the achievement and the description of what would have to follow that you just laid out, would clearly take place under at least one, if not two administrations in the future. So how much you can actually predict, guarantee, promise on behalf of future administrations?

DUBOWITZ: Yeah, but we’re Democrats, we want to be in power again. We want to be in power forever. That’s certainly every American political party’s desire. And it just seems to me it would’ve been a very potent argument against the critics to have said, “When there is another Democratic president, it won’t be President Obama, but maybe it’ll be President Biden. We will negotiate an extension to this agreement and we will address the fatal flaws of the agreement.” That never came out publicly in the entire debate as I recall.

SHAPIRO: Look, I don’t know, again, since I wasn’t a participant in those negotiations, what assurances were given to the Iranians in the negotiations about how this would be presented publicly, whether it would somehow have undercut the ability to get the agreement signed and implemented if we had been essentially publicly saying “this is temporary and we’re going to have to revisit it.” I always knew we were going to have to revisit it. It was very clear to me.

Now let’s fast-forward a little bit further just to get to where you really want to take this conversation. So in 2018, of course, President Trump made the decision to withdraw from the agreement. You and I were in discussion at the time about the wisdom of fixing it versus nixing it, and I was on the side that said, look, you can describe your own views. But that already, I understood, as I said, even from 2015, that there were ways this agreement could be strengthened, lengthened, improved, take away some of the risk that was associated with the sunsets.

President Trump made a different decision, which was to do away with the agreement, not well coordinated with partners and allies. So that was a problem that kind of put the United States out there by ourselves. And it also then opened up the space for Iran to start to violate the agreement. Now you’ve been, I think, very persuasive in saying the most significant violations in terms of exceeding enrichment limitations in the agreement occurred not in the remaining two and a half years of the Trump administration, although they started then, but they accelerated much more during the Biden administration. So in the early years of the Biden administration, I was giving some advice. I was an outside adviser role, well not outside advisor, a special government employee adviser to Rob Malley when he was the special envoy for Iran during COVID, when he wasn’t able to travel to Israel and I was living in Israel.

So I was able to be in much closer dialogue with the Israelis than he was able to do. And that was in the period when the indirect negotiations that the Biden administration was pursuing with Iran to try to return to the JCPOA were underway. But it was pretty clear at that point that the Iranians were not eager to return to the limitations that the JCPOA had imposed on them, that they wanted to be compensated in some way, that they were asking for really unrealistic reversals of even where President Trump had arrived. I thought withdrawing from the agreement was a mistake, but I didn’t also think you could go back into the same agreement from a point three or four years later.

DUBOWITZ: Right. To be fair, President Biden, and Secretary Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, others were making the case that this should be a longer, stronger, and broader agreement.

SHAPIRO: They did.

DUBOWITZ: There was an acknowledgement at the time under President Biden that this was a flawed agreement and we needed to make it longer. We needed to extend the sunsets.

SHAPIRO: They did.

DUBOWITZ: We needed to make it stronger, and we made it make it broader in the sense that we need to cover other areas of malign activities. I think the argument that I made in really the first week of the Biden administration, including with some of those senior officials, is, if you want to get back into any kind of agreement that is longer, stronger, and broader, even if you want to get back in the original agreement, you’ve got to use pressure. You’ve got to build leverage, and you’ve got to build not only economic leverage, but the Iranians are not afraid of the Biden administration. They’re not afraid that we’re going to use military force, and they think that we are going to block the Israelis from using their own military power. So you’re not going to get it back into this agreement or a better one. If anything, Iran is going to massively expand their nuclear program on your watch because they don’t fear American consequences. And that’s exactly what happened.

SHAPIRO: So sanctions remain in place, but there wasn’t the same enforcement, I acknowledge, of particularly the oil sanctions. And it allowed China to significantly increase its purchases of Iranian oil. Again, during that first year, year and a half, when the negotiations were actually occurring, that was the description of what the goal was on the U.S. side, longer, and broader and stronger. And meanwhile, Iran continued to advance the program and violate and expand on its violations of the original obligations. After the negotiations more or less broke down, and we get into the mid-2022 and early-2023 period, there were some different signals coming from the Biden administration. For example, when President Biden traveled to Israel in the summer of 2022 and signed the Jerusalem Declaration with then-Prime Minister Lapid. It talks about a U.S. commitment to ensure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon and to use all elements of national power to ensure that that never happens.

In January of 2023, the United States and Israel conducted the largest ever military exercise, Juniper Oak, with thousands of U.S. troops, hundreds of aircraft, live fire exercises, long-range strike rehearsals, suppression of enemy air defense rehearsals, clearly messaged and very effectively messaged to the Iranians that this was about them. That if and when required, to ensure that that commitment that Iran never get a nuclear weapon was put in question, the United States would have a military option and would be prepared to do it and possibly do it with Israel. So those were situations we had just going into – then the world changed on October 7th, 2023.

What we saw then in the year and a half, I guess, that followed, but particularly in the year that followed, was of course an obviously tragic, and dramatic, and existential crisis for Israel, which it had to respond to against Hamas in Gaza. But very quickly it became clear that Iran, which may not have known about that attack before it happened, but had been the long-standing funder, and trainer, and supporter of Hamas, was going to use its other proxy tools to try to increase pressure on Israel and on the United States. So Hezbollah started on October 8th with cross-border missiles and rockets fired against Israel. By the time I got to the Pentagon in January we were in the midst of dozens, that turned into a couple of hundreds, against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria by Iranian Shia militia proxy groups in those two countries, many of them also firing at Israel.

Of course, the Houthis became a major factor in freedom of navigation, firing against Israel, ultimately firing against U.S. naval vessels as well. And then what was something we had never seen before was the Iranian leadership shedding a caution about not wanting to get into a direct confrontation either with Israel or the United States, always preferring to conduct these attacks via proxy. When on April 13th, Iran fired 300 missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones at Israel. And of course the United States helped with a big coalition, execute a very dramatic and very successful defense of Israel. But that was a seat change in terms of Iranian recklessness, Iranian aggression, Iranian willingness to have a direct confrontation with Israel and perhaps in some ways with the United States. And then of course they repeated that again on October 1st with another salvo.

So we’ve seen a change in the Iranian leadership’s willingness to take those risks. And of course the defenses against them were successful. We can talk a little bit about the Israeli response to the October strikes, but that I think has to factor very heavily into how one calculates what Iran might be able or willing to do if it has – it’s within reach of a nuclear weapon. And of course, during the same period it advanced its enrichment to the point of six weapons worth of weapons grade, or nearly weapons grade, 60% enriched uranium, which in a week or two, everyone acknowledges they’re that close to the ability to break out. I think the most recent IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] report now says they’re up to 10 weapons worth. So we’re really sitting with Iran as a threshold state, as a nuclear threshold state.

I don’t think there’s any other way to define it. They haven’t crossed that threshold, but they could at a time of their choosing, and they have shown a new degree of brazenness and recklessness and whatever the opposite of risk aversion is, risk tolerance, to confront Israel directly, maybe make good on that longstanding ideological commitment to destroy Israel, to wipe it from the map, and even to potentially have a confrontation with the United States.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. So what I want to talk to you about is not Dan the diplomat, but Dan from the Defense Department, because you obviously had a incredible perch to see what U.S.-Israel military coordination was like, what its potential was, and certainly you were there during this most important time where Iran was firing directly on Israel and the Israelis responded in quite impressive ways, not only against Hezbollah, but also against Iran directly.

So, let’s talk a little bit. Take me back just in terms of the historical view. Back in, you’re ambassador to Israel, it’s 2011, 2012, the United States has started these backchannel negotiations with the Omanis over a deal, but there’s a fierce debate going on in Jerusalem and in Washington at the time over an Israeli strike, and a big dispute between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, and, I assume, between top officials on both sides about the wisdom of an Israeli strike around 2012.

SHAPIRO: Early 2012.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah. Give us a little bit of history on that because I want to get to the most recent year, year and a half, on the whole issue of U.S.-Israel military coordination, cooperation, as well as the potential for a US and or Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

SHAPIRO: So in that period, 2011, 2012, the Israelis were concerned that Iran’s program could advance to a point and be hardened to a point that Israel might lose its own window of opportunity. This is what I think then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak described as a “zone of immunity” that particularly it was related to Fordow, the underground enrichment facility which was still being developed and built out, but that once they had that capability to do high-level enrichment at a facility that Israel might not be able to reach and might not be able to target effectively, that Israel would lose its window. It wouldn’t necessarily mean that Iran was at the point of actual breakout, but that it would then be dependent on the United States to have to make that decision. And that’s not a position Israeli leaders feel comfortable with, Israel wants to be able to defend itself by itself, not depend on anybody else to make that decision.

So that was why that debate, in that particular period of time, was very intense. It was also the case that the United States and Israel threw some actually excellent coordination at very high level, some of the really most intense and ongoing and successful, and I think it’s really become a model that has carried through since those years through Obama, Trump, Biden, and I think now still again in the second Trump administration, of these high level interagency on both sides, conversations where you get diplomats, and military people, and intelligence people, and technical experts all around one table to really evaluate and make sure we’re looking at the same thing. And what those had produced in the 2009, ’10, ’11 period was a common strategy, it was a strategy of using increased sanctions, using an increased U.S. military threat to try to draw Iran into negotiations and to set out certain conditions for what those negotiations would try to achieve.

And we were still early on the path, those sanctions were having an effect, Iran was starting to talk about negotiations, trying to remember exactly when the first meetings in Oman were. That may not have occurred yet, but there were already discussions about how those negotiations would take place. And so in fairness, the Obama administration’s position was, let’s give ourselves time to play out the strategy that we’ve agreed upon. Of course, it was nearing the end of the first term, and no one knew if Obama would be reelected or not, that creates additional uncertainty, and that may have also borne on the Israeli–

DUBOWITZ: But to be fair, it came out in 2011. When it did come out, and as you alluded to, the Israelis were kept in the dark about these secret negotiations between the United States and Iran. But it had come out publicly, I remember at the time, that the Obama administration had conceded on enrichment that whatever this deal was going to look like, this deal would give enrichment capability to Iran, constrained, 500 centrifuges above ground, this is going to be highly limited. But at the end of the day, I think the message to the Israelis was, okay, we see where the diplomatic trajectory is going. However this ends up, it’s going to end up in a deal where Iran will retain its enrichment capability in some form or the other.

SHAPIRO: Right, so that was the disagreement for sure, and that was a disagreement that persisted all the way through the actual agreements being reached, and of course the terms change, right? We said 500, maybe we said a thousand at one point, centrifuges, it ended up being 5,000 and change. It ended up being within the realm that the US had set as a goal and which Israeli experts agreed was achieved of keeping them a year from a breakout, even though the number of centrifuges was higher. But yes, that disagreement–

DUBOWITZ: Well, until restrictions sunsetted.

SHAPIRO: Until it sunsetted.

DUBOWITZ: Because I remember Khamenei very thundering, publicly, I guess it was on Twitter at the time, that he wanted 100,000 special work units, which is a way of measuring the capacity and the efficiency of a centrifuge. It’s essentially 100,000 first generation centrifuges. It would be a lower number of advanced centrifuges but of course, advanced centrifuges are much more powerful, you need fewer numbers, and they’re easy to hide in clandestine facilities. So JCPOA ended up giving Khamenei greater than 100,000 special work units or more than 100,000 centrifuges.

SHAPIRO: Once the sunsets were-

DUBOWITZ: Once the sunsets kicked in.

SHAPIRO: So that disagreement, again, was present from even before negotiations began and then all the way through the time of the agreement. But the question of whether or not to give time for negotiations rather than go at that stage, 2011, 2012, to military options was, I guess that’s the answer to your question. Now we face very different decisions right now with Iran now at this point of one week, two weeks from breakout capability, with now up to 10 weapons worth of 60% enriched uranium.

DUBOWITZ: So looking back, Dan, I know this is all counterfactual history, but knowing what you know now, would the 2011, 2012 Dan have said to President Obama and his senior advisors, give the Israeli the green light, let them go?

SHAPIRO: I think the plan that had been agreed upon was to try to use negotiations to buy time. Again, this is all I ever claimed that JCPOA did, was buy time, was still worth pursuing at that point. But I’ll have to think about over time.

DUBOWITZ: Because it was a much smaller program.

SHAPIRO: It was.

DUBOWITZ: And obviously Israeli capabilities have developed extensively since 2012, so their capabilities have expanded as the program on the nuclear side has expanded. But given where we are today with this entire history of what’s happened, obviously the military option today is more difficult than it was in 2020.

SHAPIRO: Yeah, right. Look, that’s one counterfactual we could debate till the end of time, and we could also debate–

DUBOWITZ: And you and I will.

SHAPIRO: We probably will. And we could also debate President Trump’s withdrawal from 2018, because if he hadn’t withdrawn and if Iran had remained within the bounds of the agreement, at least until now, the sunsets would only be starting to kick in in this period. They wouldn’t have the same level of highly enriched uranium that they have today.

DUBOWITZ: But they would in five years.

SHAPIRO: They might be able to in five years, correct.

DUBOWITZ: I mean, they would legally be able to do that.

SHAPIRO: So we gave back some of the time that the JCPOA had provided and moved up the point of crisis we’re at now to an earlier period.

DUBOWITZ: But it’s worth remembering and I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that when those restrictions go away after 2030, Iran could actually expand to industrial size nuclear capability, can enrich to any level of uranium. It can install unlimited number of centrifuges, it can open up unlimited number of enrichment facilities legally under the deal.

SHAPIRO: Which is why we were always going to have to come back and revisit this before the end of the JCPOA or earlier.

DUBOWITZ: Right, which is why that would’ve been a good argument. But I want to ask on the military side because, okay, so 2012 debate, a fierce debate, and by the way, it’s also worth pointing out, it was a fierce debate within the Israeli cabinet.

SHAPIRO: It was.

DUBOWITZ: They were not united. I remember at the time–

SHAPIRO: Split down the middle.

DUBOWITZ: Split down middle. Even the famous head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, who wouldn’t be described as a shrinking violet, was somebody who actually opposed Netanyahu on a military strike. I remember him saying very colorfully, “We don’t strike militarily until the knife is at our throat and it’s cutting into the flesh.”

SHAPIRO: Correct. Most of the senior military and security establishment were against it at that time.

DUBOWITZ: So I think to be fair to the Obama administration, I think it’s worth pointing that out. But in terms of where we are today, obviously you’ve talked about U.S.-Israeli military coordination and that it began under President Obama, continued under President Trump, President Biden, very strong today, great relationship between the IDF and the U.S. military. CENTCOM is very closely coordinating with the IDF. What does that coordination look like today beyond just the press reports?

SHAPIRO: So this is a long trajectory. When I was ambassador at the time, Israel was in EUCOM of course, and so it was a different form. There were excellent exercises, excellent exchanges, mostly around missile defense, mostly how the United States could come and help defend Israel if it were under attack.

DUBOWITZ: Which happened last year.

SHAPIRO: Which did ultimately happen last year. But it was much less – I guess the EUCOM leadership by definition is going to be focused mostly on things happening in Europe and things happening in Russia and NATO, and as they can, maintain good partnerships with their Israeli counterparts, and they did, and we did those types of exercises. But Israel’s entry into CENTCOM, which I guess was approved at the end of the Trump administration following the Abraham Accords, really executed right at the beginning of the Biden administration, really changed the nature of U.S. military and IDF coordination.

So one example of that is that Juniper Oak exercise I mentioned in 2023. That was a different kind of exercise, it was an exercise that integrated not just defensive capabilities to help protect Israel if it were under attack, but actual offensive strike capabilities in the case of the United States and Israel had to act together against a particular threat, and again, it was messaged pretty clearly what threat they were talking about when they were doing those rehearsals. So by the time I got to the Pentagon, this was already two or three years into the CENTCOM, three years I guess into the CENTCOM-IDF relationship, the level of coordination at the highest level, literally General Kurilla to Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, was happening on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times daily basis, and at every other level within their J3s and their J5s and from generals down to colonels, down to majors, through intelligence sharing, a really extraordinarily intimate trusting relationship at all of those levels.

Now, this was of course during a period when Israel was actively kinetically involved in trying to defeat Hamas, in trying to defend itself, and us needing to defend ourselves and others from the Houthis, from Hezbollah, from the Iraqi and Syrian Shia militias. So we were together fighting essentially the same enemies, and that meant a different kind of coordination and different kind of exchange of information, and a different kind of, even when necessary, deconfliction, because we might literally be operating in the same airspace. We would be conducting our strikes against the Houthis starting in January of 2024, and multiple times during the course of that year, actually, almost daily we were conducting self-defense strikes and then several rounds of more deliberate strikes. But then when Houthi missiles actually broke through and got into Israel, Israel would also strike against the Houthis. So obviously that requires a kind of deconfliction and coordination unlike anything IDF and EUCOM ever had to do or ever could have done, because they wouldn’t be operating in the same space.

This really, I think, reached its zenith in April. So, when Israel struck an IRGC commander in Damascus on April 1st and allegedly grazed an Iranian diplomatic facility in the strike. It became pretty clear pretty quickly, and we had excellent intelligence together, shared between the two countries, that Iran was planning to retaliate directly against Israel for the first time from Iranian soil. And what started with what looked like 10 or a dozen, maybe 20 ballistic missiles gradually expanded over the next 10 or 12 days until we actually had a pretty good sense of what was coming, and it turned into over 300 munitions, ballistic missiles, over 100 of those, cruise missiles, and drones.

And during that window of time, so about 13 days, from April 1st to April 13th, CENTCOM took the lead, and this was really General Kurilla’s initiative, and I just give him and his team enormous credit for what they did during that period of time to build a coalition, to surge the U.S. capabilities so that we could do what we had been drilling for years with Israel, how to defend itself when it was under attack, although in this case, an attack of magnitude and variety unlike anything we’d ever drilled for. We hadn’t drilled for 150 UAVs coming over that required interceptions by fighter aircraft, not by ballistic missile defense batteries. And then to draw in other forces, so to coordinate the U.S.-Israeli element, to draw in other countries, the British and the French participated and contributed, and to coordinate with a number of other countries in CENTCOM, and I’m not going to name them, but other countries in CENTCOM contributed in various ways through information, through operations, through airspace availability, to enable us to almost completely defeat that Iranian attack.

So that fused U.S. military and IDF planners and operators in a way that nothing until you actually execute something like that could have done and shows really what’s possible. Fast-forward to October when Iran attacked again in October 1st, and this time it was only with ballistic missiles, although it nearly doubled the number, and this time it didn’t require the exact same coalition coordination, although by then many more countries in the region were taking part in the sense of sharing information and wanting to understand what the threat was, how they could contribute, how they could participate, how they could be protected if the threat came in their direction. But it was mostly a U.S.-Israel ballistic missile defense operation using Arrow, using THAAD, which had been deployed to Israel a couple of weeks earlier, and using our offshore ballistic missile defense cruisers and destroyers.

So we largely successfully defeated that attack again. But then when Israel made clear quite justifiably that they were going to need to retaliate against Iran, after the second attack directly from Iran on Israel, first a discussion at the political level took place. What would be the types of targets that Israel would hit? And what was agreed upon was the sophisticated air defenses, particularly the Russian S300 batteries, ballistic missile production capabilities, and perhaps a few others, but not others, that was a political level discussion. Once that was agreed upon, and it became clear, and then the THAAD was deployed to help provide protection Israel from any further retaliation, Israel conducted that strike, a very successful strike on October 25th, 26th, which significantly damaged Iran’s air defenses, which significantly damaged Iran’s ballistic missile production capability, which left a very clear impression in Iran’s mind that there was more where that came from and that there were things that they didn’t hit that they would have the capability to hit if there were a need to continue that round of exchanges.

Now, that was an Israeli strike, and I don’t want to say more than I can about how the IDF coordinated with CENTCOM as it conducted that strike, but let’s state the obvious, the U.S. military is present in Syria, U.S. military is present in Iraq. This is to state the obvious, just look at a map airspace that Israel has to traverse or operate in.

DUBOWITZ: It’s not a bullet out of the blue.

SHAPIRO: Right. So there’s no surprises and there are various ways of coordinating, assisting, you can put that word in quotes, being available in contingencies. But the thing that tells me by the way that if Israel ever did want to strike in Iran, they wouldn’t be doing it by surprise. You can’t have the kind of intimate coordination and operate in the same airspace and other space that the United States, CENTCOM, and IDF do without that coordination and de-confliction, so I’d expect that would be true for any future operation as well.

DUBOWITZ: So, Dan, let me just point a fact. You mentioned that this all began, this chain of events, when Israel decided to take out that senior IRGC commander in Damascus. Of course, worth reminding our listeners that that senior IRGC commander in Damascus was coordinating attacks against Israel, Hezbollah–

SHAPIRO: Of course.

DUBOWITZ: Hezbollah, Hamas in Syria.

SHAPIRO: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

SHAPIRO: Absolutely. That was not the beginning of the story, that was just the approximate cause of the events that followed, but of course, he was a man with a lot of Israeli and Arab blood on his hands and it was fully legitimate to target him.

DUBOWITZ: So knowing what you know now, I’m going to keep doing this to you because I think counterfactual history is always interesting, especially with someone like you who’s so experienced in the details and so thoughtful about this. When President Biden decided on a acceptable target set that the Israelis could go after, after they were attacked in April and October and took a number of targets off the table, leaving the targets that you described, air defenses, ballistic missile production capability, some equipment at Parchin that the Iranians were using potentially for weaponization, though they were denying of course that it was a nuclear site, a set of targets, which I think actually demonstrated Israeli capabilities, did some significant damage, but clearly the Israeli Air Force could have done much more damage in October of last year. Looking back, was it a mistake to take that many targets off the table? Should we have green-lighted the Israelis at that point to have gone after Iran’s nuclear facilities, and I’ll throw in for the mix and maybe even leadership assets?

SHAPIRO: Look, it’s a debatable point but I would say this, first of all, the question of whether Israel would be able to fully eliminate Iran’s nuclear sites is one that’s still present today.

DUBOWITZ: Well, I’d love you to address that because people often ask me this, and you may actually give the answer, I’m going to give you the opportunity to escape my question. But they ask me, and I say, “Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know.” And of course, the biggest question is, does Israel have the capabilities to independently destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities? Are you going to be the guy who knows and doesn’t say, or are you going to be the guy who says and knows?

SHAPIRO: There’s going to be stuff I won’t say, but I will say this. I say, Israel could do damage and meaningful damage to Iranian nuclear facilities if it so chose, and if it was, let’s say, call it green lighted, or maybe even facilitated in some way, like the strikes last October by the United States without U.S. direct participation. There are capabilities the United States has that Israel does not have and certain destructive capabilities United States could bring to bear that Israel doesn’t, but Israel might bring surprises and bring other–

DUBOWITZ: Does Israel have capabilities that would surprise us? I mean, we were surprised by the Mossad pager and walkie-talkie operation.

SHAPIRO: I never rule out that Israel would have surprises that would allow it to do more than people might think it would in a given situation. I do know that there are certain capabilities the United States has that Israel does not have.

DUBOWITZ: Right.

SHAPIRO: I’m not going to go into all the details, but–

DUBOWITZ: Well, we know a 30,000-pound bunker busters, for example, they don’t have B-2’s, they don’t have B-52’s, they don’t have strategic bombers. I mean, they don’t have, clearly what’s been reported widely, the ability to drop that kind of ordinance on Fordow and deeply penetrate that enrichment facility.

SHAPIRO: Right. So those are capabilities the United States has that Israel does not have. So that’s a question, right? So if you were coming up against that decision point last October, you know, would they be justified because of the direct attacks by Iran? Arguably yes. Would they be able to fully achieve those objectives? Somewhat in question without U.S. participation. But then there’s the broader question. We were a year into the war at this point, and the Biden administration for good reasons had tried to, throughout that period–

DUBOWITZ: To de-escalate.

SHAPIRO: –support Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas, and defend itself obviously against all the other threats, but also to prevent the war from broadening into a regional, a regional–

DUBOWITZ: To de-escalate.

SHAPIRO: Well de-escalate, not sure I’ll even use that word, but certainly prevent the broadening of the war into a full-scale regional conflict.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: And so obviously you’d run a higher risk of that with a more extensive Israeli set of targets against Iran in October than the ones that they ultimately did.

DUBOWITZ: But is it – Yeah.

SHAPIRO: Which in the end actually helped produce some of that lowering of the Iranian sort of appetite for additional rounds of exchanges. I mean, there was some question, would Iran respond after that? And they didn’t. They actually, you know, there were those two strikes in April and October were so out of character in some way for Khamenei who’s really been very risk-averse about this type of thing through most of his career. And I’ve still struggled to understand exactly what changed about that.

Subsequent to that, starting in November, December, of course we’re into a U.S. transition, which might be part of this. But then when Trump came in as well, you started to hear a lot of the same kinds of, or more familiar kinds of, cautionary words out of the Iranian leadership that we should be open to diplomacy even if we aren’t sure if it’s going to work, and we shouldn’t do anything that tries to provoke additional strikes against us. I think that’s more familiar to me, and it’s the game they’re playing actually now as they get into these negotiations by sort of lowering their head, at least in the overt, immediate aggressive form, they believe they can maybe achieve some of their goals through diplomacy rather than run the risk that they would run if they got into a series of military exchanges.

DUBOWITZ: Well, so contend with this argument. So in understanding Khamenei and his calculations, one could argue that he sees the Biden administration coming in desperate to go back into a deal and negotiate a longer, stronger, and broader deal. He sees the Biden administration keeping sanctions in place, but not aggressively enforcing them. He doesn’t believe the Biden administration is prepared to use military force.

We move into October 7th, he invades Israel. It’s a huge shock for the Israeli security and intelligence defense establishment. Khamenei then green lights Nasrallah to start launching missiles and rockets at Israel. And he feels like he’s doing pretty well. By the way, he’s also now starting to significantly expand his nuclear program because he sensed that there won’t be an American reaction to that. And then the Israelis whack the IRGC commander in Damascus and take out this very senior guy, and he decides, you know what, in this context, I’m not afraid of an Israeli reaction. I got them tied down in Gaza, I got them tied down in the West Bank, and Nasrallah continues to fire rockets and missiles at them. This is our opportunity to respond and to show not only the Israelis, but show the Americans we mean business. That’s April of last year.

The Biden administration in April of last year talks down the Israelis. Very limited response. They take out one radar of one air defense system in the country. And now Khamenei is feeling, I was right, and the IRGC is telling him, we were right. “Americans and the Israelis are not going to do a thing,” to quote Ayatollah Khomeini, who said that about the Americans many decades before. And then there’s continued operations, continued military tension, and then comes October. And he fires in those ballistic missiles. And again, president Biden says to the Israelis, here’s a limited target set that you’re allowed to hit, but you’re not allowed to hit nuclear sites, you’re not allowed to go after leadership assets, and certainly you can’t go after economic assets. The Israelis come in and I think they surprise Khamenei and the IRGC with how effective they are, right? I think that becomes a surprise. And he stands down. They no longer have the appetite. And by the way, what’s happened in that period of time?

SHAPIRO: Hezbollah has been destroyed.

DUBOWITZ: Hezbollah has been destroyed. Hezbollah has been destroyed in an absolutely shocking way, I think, for Nasrallah, certainly, for Khamenei and for even us given Israeli capabilities.

SHAPIRO: Right.

DUBOWITZ: And so I think it’s a lesson that when Khamenei is facing overwhelming Israeli power, the credible threat of overwhelming U.S. military power, what does he always do? He shows, quote, “Heroic flexibility,” as he calls it, and he finds a diplomatic off-ramp.

SHAPIRO: Right.

DUBOWITZ: And that’s what he’s done right now with the Trump administration and the Israelis. He’s moved into this diplomatic off-ramp to see if he can negotiate his way out of this predicament.

SHAPIRO: Absolutely. First of all, so I don’t disagree with the trajectory of events you described. I would just say it proved to be a huge miscalculation, right? Thinking that they could allow his Hezbollah to dribble, let’s say, that’s obviously much more dangerous–

DUBOWITZ: Thousands. Thousands of rockets in themselves, but still, right.

SHAPIRO: Thousands of rockets and missiles, but not the full strike. And that ultimately Israel would just absorb that rather than do what they eventually did first with the pagers and well, there were some other strikes too, but the pagers and the beepers, and then ultimately taking out the leadership and most of Hezbollah’s strategic weapons capability.

DUBOWITZ: So, the Israelis actually escalated to de-escalate.

SHAPIRO: Sure. Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: And it worked.

SHAPIRO: And it worked. That was a big miscalculation.

DUBOWITZ: On his part.

SHAPIRO: On his part. And again, in October when he lost his strategic air defenses and much of his ballistic missile production capability and clearly was exposed as vulnerable to additional strikes if he were to continue, that was a, I think, a big miscalculation. And so you come to the end of the Biden administration because of that period, and Israeli actions, some many which were highly coordinated with the United States, and you really have Iran on the back foot, finally.

And so I thought that was a real opportunity for President Trump coming in to keep Iran on the back foot. And so I think in the first months of the Trump administration, particularly as President Trump decided to launch his own strikes against the Houthis, which I supported and believed was necessary and probably will continue to be necessary at some period of time because the Houthis’ threat to freedom of navigation, to other shippers, to our forces, and obviously also to Israel has not gone away.

And then the continued, well, I should say the enhancement of an already robust U.S. military posture in the region with a second aircraft carrier with B-2’s parked at Diego Garcia. They can operate from the United States, but there’s a strong message when they’re there, and they were being used also against the Houthis with additional air defense assets brought to the region. That was a pretty strong message to the Iranians that I thought had a chance to help keep them on the back foot, and it did draw them into the negotiations, I think, much faster than might’ve otherwise been expected. The Iranians are very adept at playing for time at dragging things out: no, these will be indirect talks. You know, we will argue about the city we’re going to meet in for two months.

DUBOWITZ: Oh, yeah, they wear you down, right?

SHAPIRO: Right. But I think in part because of that very sort of powerful demonstration of U.S. posture and commitment, it focused their mind on the risk if they were to just drag this out and it got them into the talks much faster than I would’ve expected already in April, there were talks in Oman and basically direct talks, even if they sit on two rooms opposite across the hallway. And so I thought that was a real opportunity.

What has concerned me since the negotiations have really gotten underway has been – what I think is lacking is A, a clear and consistent message and B, maybe connected to that, the message that the United States is committed to end Iran’s enrichment of uranium and really to dismantle its program. And we will either pursue that through diplomacy, the preferred way, or if that’s not possible, it’s prepared to use a military option as well.

And when that is not messaged consistently, and it hasn’t been since the talks have been underway, Iran, to your earlier point, sort of believes it can get by with sort of the lowest version of the diplomatic off-ramp. And I’m concerned there are ways we can talk about them that, and I wrote about them in Defense One recently, that the United States could focus the Iranian mind on the risk that they face of the US, and maybe US or Israeli, it could be one or it could be both, strikes as a way of motivating them to be more flexible in the diplomacy.

DUBOWITZ: All right, before we get to Trump administration diplomacy, I think where you and I agree on a lot, I want to just go back to this question of the opportunities that the United States and or Israel had to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

SHAPIRO: You just want to keep picking at the disagreements.

DUBOWITZ: I want to examine them because I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned.

SHAPIRO: Okay, fair.

DUBOWITZ: As we look forward to the Trump administration, the mistakes they’re already making, and hopefully the mistakes they’ll avoid. Because 2012, there was this opportunity the Israelis wanted to go though, where there was divisions in the cabinet. The Obama administration was saying, “No, no, no, don’t go. Give us time. We want to do a diplomatic deal.” Let’s not forget there was Trump administration where there was maximum pressure, but it really consisted of economic sanctions, and it ran about two years with significant economic damage to the regime. But with the exception of Trump’s decision to kill Qasem Soleimani, a big exception, the Trump administration at the time didn’t really have any – show any enthusiasm for using U.S. military force or green-lighting Israeli military force against Iran’s nuclear facilities. This is the idea is that we’re going to run the maximum pressure campaign we’re going to bring the regime to its knees, and it’s either going to cry uncle and do a deal, or if it doesn’t, then we’ll consider military force.

But we get through the Trump administration. There’s no use of Israeli military power or American military power specifically against Iran’s nuclear facilities. We get into the Biden administration, we’ve talked a lot about it. I want to ask you on this question of the transition period, because I remember during the transition period that folks in the Biden administration were very concerned that Iran was going to use the transition to advance this nuclear program even further. Maybe go to 90% weapons-grade uranium, go to breakout, start or expand weaponization. We can have a discussion about the conflicting perspectives on weaponization between the United States and Israel.

Was it a mistake after the Israelis had demonstrated such capability against Hezbollah, against Iran, such coordinated activity with the United States and CENTCOM, do you think it was a mistake not to have bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities or at least green-lighted Israeli military strikes during the transition when by the way, the Israelis wanted to go? Unlike in 2012 when there was a division in the cabinet and a division in the security establishment, certainly by transition time between Biden and Trump, the Israelis wanted to go. They sensed Iran was extremely weak. Hezbollah had been severely degraded. The air defense is severely degraded, as you said, ballistic missile production capability. Right, we all know the talking points. It was the time to go from a military perspective, should the Biden administration set to their Israeli counterparts, “Now’s the time before President Trump comes in.”

SHAPIRO: Even before October and those exchanges, the Biden administration was focused on the transition period as a potentially dangerous period when Iran might see it had an advantage or an opportunity to do a breakout of some kind, whether it’s weaponization, or 90%, and needed to be prepared. We understood we need to be prepared for that and make sure that our plans to do what President Biden said he would do, which is use all elements of national power to prevent them achieving that breakout were available and possible. And so that had taken place, that was taking place throughout a period of time. I’m not going to be more specific than that, but it preceded the strikes in October. But you know, the decision on whether or not to execute that, and by the way, that could have been true had Kamala Harris won just as much as if Donald Trump had won.

But the decision on whether to execute that, obviously it’s a big decision for a president to make, it’s particularly, well, it’s a big decision for a president to make during a transition, an outgoing president. And I think it’s understandable that there has to be a trigger for it, right, an Iranian action. If Iran, if you establish yourself that you’re going to be prepared to do something like that to prevent a breakout if you see them making the move to break out, but then you don’t see them make the move to break out, it’s a question about whether or not the trigger has been met.

DUBOWITZ: But you acknowledge going to 90% at this point is sort of technically academic. I mean, they are 97% of the way to 90%. They’re producing 10 bombs worth of 60% as you referred to earlier in the conversation. There were initial weaponization activities that had begun computer modeling, some metallurgy work, by the way, all of which were defined as weaponization activities by the JCPOA Section T. So that there was enough evidence and a predicate to go if you were prepared to go. There was also, of course, you could once again punt by saying, “Well, they’re not quite at 90% and they haven’t built a warhead yet.”

SHAPIRO: So I think if you’re looking for the trigger, I think that justifies a major decision like that. It’s debatable, but arguably it did not ever occur. And to your point about where the Israelis were during that period of time, yes, post October 26th when they saw the success they’d had operating and certainly eliminating the air defenses, there was some interest and some appetite in what else could be done. But also after the election, there was a lot of focus on maybe we would be better off working with the Trump administration once they knew–

DUBOWITZ: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think there was some senior people saying, “We’ll be better off with Trump because there’s an 80% chance Trump will bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. We don’t have to.”

SHAPIRO: Right. So it was not my experience during the transition that we had Israelis breaking down our door saying, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” There was a question, there was a discussion. What are the pros and cons? What are we watching in terms of Iranian actions that might become a triggering event? But it wasn’t, in my experience, the case that the Israelis were demanding. We must follow up on our October strikes in November, December, to take out the nuclear facilities.

DUBOWITZ: So, Dan, I revisit all of this, not because I have a Obama-Biden guy in the chair, and these are interesting debating points. I revisit all of this history because I think it’s very important for the way forward. And I want to spend the last part of this conversation speaking about the way forward, about some of the mistakes that the Trump team may already be making. Similar mistakes that maybe were made in the past, but really thinking through how do we actually fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear program? How do we ensure that the Iranians are left with no enrichment and reprocessing capability that they can turn into a weapon? Give me your assessment of where things stand today, and based on your over two and a half decades of working on this issue, what should the Trump administration do and what are the mistakes they should avoid?

SHAPIRO: So I think it’s completely legitimate for them to attempt a diplomatic solution to this problem. That’s always preferable, right? And they said that from the beginning that that would be their effort. But they set at the initially a clear goal of full dismantlement of the program, no enrichment. And then there was some, after the initial meeting, some kind of confusion and some wobbling on that. We heard different statements.

DUBOWITZ: Well, Witkoff came out three times and basically conceded enrichment to Iran publicly.

SHAPIRO: Correct.

DUBOWITZ: So you imagine he had conceded it privately to Iranian negotiator, Araghchi.

SHAPIRO: According to reports this week in Axios and elsewhere, the current proposal on the table from the US involves some degree of Iranian enrichment, perhaps as part of an interim deal, low-level enrichment, and then as part of a consortium with other countries. A lot of details we don’t know, but it sounds like that’s in the discussion already, notwithstanding President Trump’s then Truth Social post where he said no enrichment. There’s a lot of confusion about what the actual goal is.

At the same time, there have been, as I said, some positive use of military force in the region to sort of focus the Iranians’ minds that got them into the talks. But almost as soon as the talks started, you saw a shift away from that, right? All the leaks coming out about U.S.-Israeli discussions are about a U.S. red light telling the Israelis don’t strike.

DUBOWITZ: We’ve seen this movie before. I mean, to be fair, we saw this in the Obama administration where there were leaks coming out of the Obama White House.

SHAPIRO: We have.

DUBOWITZ: Also trying to stop the Israelis.

SHAPIRO: We have; we have. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for President Trump to say to Prime Minister Netanyahu, “I need some time to try to run this diplomatic play.”

DUBOWITZ: As Obama said to Netanyahu.

SHAPIRO: As Obama said to Netanyahu, but it’s better if the Iranians don’t perceive that as a U.S. restraint. Rather, it’s better for the U.S. diplomatic leverage if the Iranians have to be concerned that there might come a point when there would be a green light.

DUBOWITZ: It’s hard to play good cop, bad cop when you shoot the bad cop in the knees.

SHAPIRO: Right. So then you’ve got very influential voices in and around the Trump administration. I’m thinking about Tucker Carlson, you know, who’s not in the administration, but is clearly a voice that has influence and resonates talking about how a war with Iran would be the worst thing ever. We must never do it. We’d lose- we’d lose thousands of Americans. That voice seems to resonate, and I think the sort of factions within the administration that are closer to that way of thinking seem to be more ascendant.

DUBOWITZ: Which by the way, I mean Tucker seems to be echoing many of the same arguments that the quote, “Iran Echo Chamber” that Ben Rhodes ran in 2015 made: “This deal or war. If there is not this deal, there will be a major war. When there’s a major war, thousands of Americans will get killed.” These are not new arguments.

SHAPIRO: And there’s risk in military action.

DUBOWITZ: This time it’s coming from the right, not the left.

SHAPIRO: Right. And there’s risk in military action, and no one should go into anything like that thinking that it’s risk-free, but to advertise your own deterrence of yourself, weakens your hand in the diplomatic negotiations.

DUBOWITZ: And by the way, undermines President Trump.

SHAPIRO: Undermines President Trump. And I think we’ve seen the more hawkish voices within the administration either pushed out, like Mike Waltz, or somewhat stifle their long-standing positions, like Secretary Rubio. And you’ve seen Vice President Vance, who’s I think closer to that Tucker Carlson mindset, about not having U.S. military action–

DUBOWITZ: But to be fair–

SHAPIRO: –are ascendant in the administration.

DUBOWITZ: You’re right, but to be fair, all of them, all of them, have been on the record now saying, “Zero enrichment, full dismantle.”

SHAPIRO: Right.

DUBOWITZ: So, that seems to be the unified Trump administration policy.

SHAPIRO: Right.

DUBOWITZ: By the way, backed by 52 GOP senators–

SHAPIRO: Yes.

DUBOWITZ: And 177–

SHAPIRO: Yes.

DUBOWITZ: –house GOP members. I’d love to see Democrats on a similar letter, but we can talk about that.

SHAPIRO: They’ve all said that, and then again, reports this week suggest something else is being proposed in the room. But what I think is missing also is that focusing of the mind of the Iranians mind, on the possibility of a military option.

So, one way you do that is through the clear messaging in the room and out of the room. Another way you do that is to actually demonstrate more coordination with Israel, not less. General Kurilla, still CENTCOM commander for a couple more months, travels to the region frequently. My judgment, he should go, obviously authorized by the administration, but go in a very publicized way for high visibility consultations with the IDF brass, making very clear what’s being discussed.

That doesn’t mean that’s a decision or a trigger or a green light or anything, but it certainly shows coordination and preparation. I think there would be ways of reviving the kinds of Juniper Oak-style exercises, joint exercises between the United States and Israel. It takes a long time to plan a big massive one like that, and Israel’s still very active operationally, because of the various conflicts it’s still dealing with, but you could on a shorter timeline do a modified version of that type of exercise that is messaged to make clear that what is being rehearsed relates to Iranian nuclear sites. I think that should be in the public–

DUBOWITZ: Because Dan, what’s interesting, I don’t know if it was Araghchi or someone else, a few days ago came out publicly and said, “The Americans are desperate for a deal and the Israelis need a deal too, because they can’t do anything militarily against our program.”

SHAPIRO: Right.

DUBOWITZ: I imagine the regime knows that’s not true about America.

SHAPIRO: They must know that’s not true about America.

DUBOWITZ: But I think the problem is, is they also think President Trump, because rhetorically he has said he’s not interested in war, that this would probably be an Israeli strike. And they also believe that the Israelis are not capable of doing this alone. So, I think this just reinforces your point, that if that’s how the regime perceives the credibility of a military strike, then they’re not worried about it.

SHAPIRO: Right, so you have to make them doubt that. And I’ve mentioned a couple of ways of, look, the Pentagon has certainly been updating the war plans. I’m familiar with the ones I was familiar with until I left, but obviously they’re constantly updated in light of the degrading of the Iranian air defenses.

DUBOWITZ: Did those war plans assume that the Israelis could do to Iran’s air defenses what they ended up doing? I feel like I’ve sat through all of these discussions, you’ve done it at a much more detailed level for almost 20 years now, assuming that if the Israelis went in there would be Israeli planes shot out of the air, pilots taken hostage. Those S-300 Russian air defenses were so effective. Israel could not never have done what it actually did in October.

SHAPIRO: Right. Again, I think there’s appropriate caution when doing any kind of military planning and scenario evaluation, but that doesn’t mean the worst scenario is always going to come to pass. But another way you can demonstrate to Iran the seriousness of the possibility is to show the preparations that the United States makes for shortening timelines so that it could, if it became necessary, to do what President Trump has said, periodically in a kind of blustery way, there will be bombing. You have to protect U.S. forces in the Gulf, which are the most likely points of retaliation by the Iranians with their short-range ballistic missiles. And so, there are ways of preparing to protect those forces.

And by demonstrating, and it’s visible, so that’s actually a good thing because it shows seriousness to the Iranians that you’re doing that, by briefing in the ways one can about military plans being updated, not revealing what shouldn’t be revealed, by sending senior military leaders to consult with Israel by doing exercises that show that this option is being updated and being readied for use if necessary.

To me, that is the way that maximizes the leverage that President Trump needs to get what he says he wants, which is a no enrichment, full dismantlement deal. The way you make it most likely not to have to use a military threat, because you achieve your goals in diplomacy, is by making that military threat credible. And so, that is the purpose of the steps that I’ve outlined in this article and what I would like to see and hope to see more of from the Trump administration in the days and weeks ahead.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah, I think it was George Shultz who was Reagan’s Secretary of State who said, “You need to cast a shadow of power across the negotiating table.” Right? I worry, I think you worry too, that when Khamenei sits today he doesn’t see that shadow of power being cast across the negotiating table. Then he thinks he’s got time to rope-a-dope us, to play it out, to sit there and just say “no, no, no” to our proposals, and we’ll come back with revised proposals and better proposals, and he did that successfully in–

SHAPIRO: To some degree in the JCPOA negotiations, and there’s a real risk he could find himself doing that again. Now, in the next three to four months, we might reach a decision point. If those negotiations go in the direction you described, where the Iranians give very little, the U.S. side has to keep sweetening its proposals, and therefore there we’re looking at some sort of long-term interim proposal where Iran will maintain enrichment capability, kicks the can down the road, but doesn’t really solve anything.

DUBOWITZ: Iran won’t get a nuclear weapon on my watch.

SHAPIRO: And maybe that’s how it will be described.

DUBOWITZ: Right?

SHAPIRO: Or this consortium idea, which I think is kind of fantastical, certainly would take a very, very long time to negotiate. It might never happen, and then you might get stuck in the interim phase, where they maintain the enrichment, which they can then ramp up at a time of their choosing.

So, that’s the one risk. But if over the next three or four months these negotiations are basically fruitless, because the Iranians really aren’t giving, and maybe in part because they don’t perceive that they do face the risk of a military action, then we’ll maybe hit the crisis point, which is October, when the Europeans would be most likely to trigger the snapback sanctions available under the JCPOA, because Iran’s in deep violation of their obligations. Iran has threatened to respond to that by withdrawing from the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons], by expelling inspectors or maybe other steps toward a breakout or weaponization, and that could be the decision point for US or Israeli military action.

I think that’s still a fairly likely scenario of where we could end up by this fall, based on how little the Iranians are showing– how little flexibility they’re showing in the negotiations until now. But even to get to a successful negotiation, you probably have to pass through a moment of crisis. You probably have to pass through a moment of crisis when Iran is faced with the reality of what they could face if these negotiations fail. And only under those circumstances might they make their concessions that we’re actually demanding of them, which is really putting this program in a box that they don’t have the ability to break out at time of their choosing.

DUBOWITZ: Well, President Trump has said over and over again, “If you want to get a good deal, you got to be prepared to walk away from the table.” And I think unfortunately, American negotiators have never been prepared to walk away from the table. Khamenei always seems he’s prepared.

DUBOWITZ: All right. All right, Dan, let me ask you this. You’ve talked about the credibility of U.S. military power, you’ve talked about Israeli credibility and Israeli capabilities. I have an idea about how to marry American capabilities with Israeli will, because I think that Khamenei is questioning both. He knows we have the capabilities, but we don’t have the will, he thinks. He thinks the Israelis have the will, but may not necessarily have the capabilities.

What about this idea? Have the Israeli Air Force send a half a dozen pilots to Missouri, train them up on the B-2 bomber, stick them in the cockpit of the B-2, load the B-2 with 30,000 pound massive ordnance penetrators, call a press conference and have Donald Trump say to Ali Khamenei “Mr. Khamenei, right now there are six Israeli pilots ready to fly B-2 bombers and drop them on Fordow and blow your nuclear facilities to smithereens. Either we negotiate a deal that’s acceptable to the United States, a full dismantlement or zero enrichment, or I will green light that operation.”

Would that be not a Trump flex move that could actually establish or strengthen military credibility in the eyes of the supreme leader?

SHAPIRO: It’s an interesting idea. I don’t think a B-2 is like handing the keys to your teenager to borrow for a weekend drive to–

DUBOWITZ: I’ve asked the Israelis how long it would take to get trained up on it, I’ve been told six weeks.

SHAPIRO: I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. These are major systems that are the crown jewels of the American strategic–

DUBOWITZ: But let’s assume for the sake of argument, Israelis pilots could be trained in a fairly short period of time.

SHAPIRO: There’s another question about if that operation be conducted with our assets, maybe we should just do it, because if it’s our assets, it’s the same as us doing it, at least from a legal point of view, as somebody else flying in that plane. So, I’m not really sure what the benefit is to have Israel do it, rather than us.

DUBOWITZ: You know the Israelis are doing it every day. They’re actually flying American planes, F-35s, F-16s, F-15s, we’re actually giving Israelis planes to fly and they used that against Iran in April and in October, and they used that against Iran’s terrorist proxy.

SHAPIRO: Again, those are planes that they own, because we’ve transferred them to them. The B-2s I don’t think are going to fall into that category.

Look, I’m not sure about all the specifics of the very dramatic scenario you described, and again, maybe that has some of the Trump dramatic flair, but the message should be –a message can be conveyed to the Iranians, I think, in less dramatic ways, but very persuasive ways, that some version of a US, or an Israeli, or combined, or Israeli supported by U.S. military operation is something that really holds at risk things that they value very dearly. Obviously, talking about the nuclear facilities, but because they don’t have the same capability. They do have a capability to respond, I mentioned the short-range ballistic missiles, but they don’t have the same capability to respond by unleashing a Hezbollah arsenal that could destroy Tel Aviv. Right?

That there are risks beyond even the strikes against nuclear facilities that they could face, leadership targets, economic targets, things that really put at risk the stability of the regime. So, there are ways of messaging what they could face. You’ve described one very dramatic one, I’m not sure there has to be all those details, but there’s certainly ways of messaging what they could face and trying to leverage that to get much more flexibility on the negotiations.

I so far haven’t seen that be the approach of the Trump administration. In fairness, that wasn’t the approach the Biden administration was using either, as it was trying to prevent the broadening of the war into a regional conflict. But again, we have a rare, I think, moment and window of opportunity, because of the Iranian vulnerability that they face post the October strikes, and post Hezbollah’s dismantlement. And I think it gives us real advantages in these negotiations, but we have to make sure we use them.

DUBOWITZ: Well, that’s a great point. Perhaps to end on, the Trump administration has much more leverage than even President Obama and certainly President Biden had, right? As you’ve described, Iran has never been weaker probably since the Iran-Iraq war. Their air defenses have been crippled, and Hezbollah has been severely degraded. And today American leverage is probably at its zenith. Maybe it can be expanded, but this is the time not to do another JCPOA. This is the time not to do another JPOA [Joint Plan of Action] interim agreement, kick the can down the road. This is the time to do a deal that diplomatically and peacefully fully dismantles the program, and ensures that Iran does not have the enrichment capability, or the reprocessing capability to build nuclear weapons.

SHAPIRO: By the way, had I continued to serve in, let’s say, a Harris administration, I would’ve been advocate for taking advantage of the increased leverage, and the fact that Iran ended the Biden administration really on its back foot in multiple ways, and that we should use that leverage to keep them on their back foot and try to gain some of these goals that we’ve long sought, but largely had to continue to push down the road.

By the way, you and I have spoken about a lot of things today, the one thing we didn’t get to, and we won’t have time here, is the support that we should also be providing to the Iranian people, right? The Iranian people have really demonstrated through multiple rounds of protests over many, many years, their disgust and their outrage over the corruption and the brutality of this regime: the water shortages, the power shortages, the explosions of missile fuel at a port, the brutal suppression of women’s and others, now a labor strike, other protests through many decades.

You and I actually, I think the first thing we’ve worked on together post-JCPOA was a New Year’s Day 2018 piece in Politico about where we can agree- even people who disagreed strongly on the JCPOA, and maybe even today, people who disagree on the methodology to use to approach the nuclear question in Iran, should be able to agree on providing maximum support to the Iranian people as they try to express themselves against this really terrible, brutal regime that has caused their lives to be so damaged through decades of misrule.

DUBOWITZ: Well, Dan, thank you for bringing that up. It certainly has been a consistent theme over 10 episodes of “The Iran Breakdown,” is maximum support for the Iranian people, along with maximum pressure on the regime. And it’s a real pleasure having you on, I think I learn a ton from you when I talk to you, and I certainly learned a lot over the years. Thanks for all you’ve done for the United States and look forward to having you back.

SHAPIRO: Thanks, Mark. Great to be here.

DUBOWITZ: That was Ambassador Dan Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, senior White House and Pentagon official, and someone who, like many of us, has reassessed some of his views on U.S. strategy against the Islamic Republic. When the defenders and critics of the JCPOA end up on the same side, it’s not about politics, it’s about reality. Iran is weaker, more dangerous, and closer to nuclear capability than ever.

Thanks for listening to “The Iran Breakdown.” I’m Mark Dubowitz. See you next time.