By Richard Goldberg
Friday,
October 04, 2024
Iran’s large-scale
strategic attack on Israel this week came in the wake of Jerusalem’s utter
decimation of Hezbollah, Tehran’s flagship terrorist organization. The United
States and Israel have now come to a strategic fork in the road — a decision
point on how to respond.
Despite
the Biden administration’s best efforts to appease Iran and restrain Israel
over the past four years, and certainly over the past few months, Israel is
finally executing a victory strategy to defeat Iran and its axis of terror in
the Middle East. That strategy’s logical conclusion — never clearer or within
closer reach than at this very hour — is one that would be not just a win for
Israel but a major achievement for American grand strategy: Iran must lose.
In
addition to sustained missile-defense contributions, we should be providing
Israel all the logistical and intelligence support it needs to do severe damage
to Iran’s most lethal threats: its missile arsenal, nuclear infrastructure, and
Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control. We should also not hesitate to
use our own stand-off capabilities against the regime in response to any attack
on U.S. interests by its proxies, including the Houthis. It goes without saying
that the Biden-Harris era of appeasement must, at the same time, come to an
end: The U.S. must shut down the regime’s access to financial resources,
increase its political isolation, and find new, creative ways to support Iran’s
people.
The
threat that Tehran by itself poses directly to the world is reason enough to
support Israeli military action to cripple its nuclear and missile
infrastructure, alongside a U.S.-led Reagan-style strategy to help the Iranian
people bring down their radical Islamic regime. But its more recent evolution
into a center of gravity for the global China-led axis of anti-American powers
offers another compelling reason to seize the moment.
As
the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran has not only set the
Middle East on fire from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, it continues to
plot terror attacks on the U.S. homeland — from plotting to assassinate
American officials, including a former president, to attempting to kidnap
American citizens from the Port of New York.
Iran’s
terror subsidiaries in Iraq and Syria have killed and maimed American soldiers
and contractors while its terror arm in Yemen rains missiles and drones down on
U.S. Navy destroyers on a nearly daily basis, attempting to shut down one of
the world’s most strategic waterways.
And
that’s what Iran can do on its own without nuclear weapons and
intercontinental ballistic missiles — both of which the regime is pursuing in
earnest. For the first time in 17 years, even though we’ve watched as the
assembly line was built before our eyes, the U.S. intelligence community can no
longer assess that Iran isn’t working on a nuclear weapon. And Iran’s recent
satellite launch reminds us that its ultimate objective, beyond the destruction
of Israel, is the destruction of the U.S. homeland — and it won’t stop until it
develops the delivery system to fulfill its infamous pledge, “Death to
America.”
President
Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, played along with Iran’s extortion game:
The U.S. paid a racket to fund terrorism and missile production in the false
hope that doing so might delay a military showdown. President Biden’s reversion
to this failed strategy in 2021 allowed Iran to recover from President Trump’s
maximum-pressure campaign.
Over
the past three years, the regime raced toward the nuclear threshold as terror
budgets skyrocketed, with Hamas’s terror subsidies tripling in the months
before the October 7 massacre. But Iran has also become a strategic linchpin
for America’s top two adversaries and thus a strategic vulnerability for both
should the regime ever collapse.
China
depends on Middle Eastern oil to run its economy, and with the United States
not enforcing sanctions, Iran has emerged as China’s discount gas station.
Beijing has positioned itself as a pseudo Middle East power broker, luring
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into its strategic orbit on the
promise it can mediate with Iran. Beijing hopes those relationships will lead
to port access, missile-production cooperation, and nuclear-energy deals in the
future.
Meanwhile,
Iran’s support to terror proxies like the Houthis in Yemen keeps the U.S.
military distracted in the Middle East instead of diverting more resources to
the Indo-Pacific. And a nuclear-armed Iran aligned with China would be an
insurance policy against any attempt by the United States to cut off Beijing’s
oil supply in the middle of an assault on Taiwan.
Russia,
which once held the senior-partner status in the relationship with Iran —
building nuclear reactors and selling air-defense systems — now depends on
Tehran for drones and ballistic missiles as Putin’s war in Ukraine drags on
through yet another year. Iran also advises Moscow on how to find the holes in
the Swiss cheese of multilateral Russia sanctions.
The
collapse of the Islamic Republic — or at the very least the severe degradation
of its military, missile, and nuclear capabilities — would be a strategic blow
to both China and Russia. It would mean an easier time for Washington as it
keeps Gulf allies anchored in a U.S.-backed, Arab-Israeli regional-security
framework and proceeds with a visionary economic and energy corridor stretching
from India to Saudi Arabia to Israel to Europe. The U.S. will see further
benefits as Iran’s terror infrastructure crumbles in Latin America and Africa.
The
United States has an opportunity to fundamentally reshape global relations in
our favor and to benefit the West. We should seize the moment.
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