What Is So Bad About a Nuclear Iran?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 12, 2025

 

American officials “have been told Israel is fully ready to launch an operation against Iran,” CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe reported Thursday. O’Keefe was hardly alone in that assessment. “Israel appears to be preparing to launch an attack soon on Iran,” the New York Times revealed. “We are watching and worried,” one diplomatic source in the region told the Washington Post’s reporters. “We think it’s more serious than any other time in the past.”

 

U.S. officials are battening down the hatches. On Wednesday, the Pentagon authorized the evacuation of service members’ families from areas in the Middle East within striking distance of Iran. Personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad have also been hastily withdrawn. Separately, the British navy warned vessels to avoid the Arabian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and the Strait of Hormuz because of “increased tensions within the region which could lead to an escalation of military activity.”

 

This flurry of activity comes as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified that there were “plenty of indications they have been moving their way towards something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon” — news that will come as a shock to Politico, whose sources within the Trump administration’s intelligence apparatus insist that anyone who alleges what Hegseth claimed should be dismissed a bloodthirsty warmonger.

 

In addition to all this, on Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency declared Iran in noncompliance with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations on Thursday — an assessment that led Tehran to insist that it has no intention of returning to compliance. In response to the IAEA’s verdict, Tehran pledged to “accelerate its production of near-weapons-grade uranium,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “and open a previously unrevealed enrichment site in what he said is a secure location.”

 

It seems that the Trump administration’s effort to hammer out a new nuclear deal with Iran will end in failure. Tough decisions will have to be made. For obvious reasons, Israel will not accept a status quo in which Iran is a threshold nuclear state. Iran has made it clear in word and deed that it seeks the destruction of the Jewish state. It has demonstrated that it can penetrate Israeli air defenses and deliver warheads over its cities, and the Islamic Republic’s eschatologically millenarian worldview may render the regime less responsive to conventional deterrent dynamics. Israel, with its 10 million people and tiny landmass, cannot take the risk.

 

But what about the United States? Why should America care if the Iranians have the bomb? After all, “Iran does not pose any credible threat to the United States,” the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh posited definitively. “We do not need to get involved in yet another war in the Middle East for reasons that have nothing to do with defending our own nation.”

 

The Iranian regime does, in fact, pose a direct threat to U.S. interests and citizens. Often through terrorist proxies, Iran is responsible for the deaths of perhaps 1,000 U.S. service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has engineered mass-casualty terror attacks against Americans, executed assassination plots on U.S. soil, sponsored the agitation of anti-American activists inside the United States, and works assiduously to destabilize a region where the United States maintains core strategic interests.

 

Skeptics of an attack on Iran’s nuclear program are reasonable to wonder why it is that a nuclear Iran cannot be deterred as Russia, China, and even North Korea seem to be. After all, the “balance of terror” has prevented the hostile use of nuclear force since 1945. Why is Iran different?

 

For one, Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism on earth. It exports terrorists and arms throughout the region and beyond, and there are no guarantees that it won’t play a similarly reckless game with nuclear material. At minimum, the terrorist elements in Iran’s orbit would be emboldened by Iran’s new nuclear might. Their numbers would surely grow, as would their willingness to court risk.

 

Iran maintains the largest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the region. It can certainly deliver a warhead to targets inside the Middle East, and it’s fast-tracking the development of space-launch vehicles that can threaten the U.S. mainland. Even if Tehran were a rational actor that could be reliably deterred, an acknowledged Iranian bomb would kick-start a race toward nuclear proliferation in the region. The Saudis, the Turks, the Egyptians, and others would probably be compelled to seek their own nuclear deterrents, leading to an infinitely more complex security environment.

 

In the meantime, Iran would be able to blackmail the West, allowing it to occasionally choke off the trade and energy exports that transit the Persian Gulf and to engage in far more reckless acts of international terrorism. At the very least, a nuclear Iran would compel the U.S. to devote more resources to the region and augment its forces in the Middle East — probably at the behest of our rattled regional partners.

 

The outcomes that would follow an Iranian breakout range from bad to unimaginably catastrophic. Taking proactive measures to ensure that the United States never has to confront them is the bare minimum we should expect from a competent steward of U.S. interests. The Iranian regime must know that it will face existential consequences if it continues on its present course.

 

Indeed, as indicated by the regime’s responses to the U.S. strikes on its naval assets in 1988 and the 2020 operation that neutralized Qasem Soleimani, regime survival often takes precedence over Iran’s narrower military goals when it is confronted with the prospect of a general war with the United States. On those two occasions, the regime chose to de-escalate, albeit amid superficial and face-saving displays of aggression.

 

It’s possible that a similar sequence of events could follow an Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear program — particularly if it’s an operation in which the United States takes a supporting role. Iranian retaliation might be measured with the understanding that if it’s not properly calibrated, the U.S. and Israel could begin taking out Iranian command-and-control targets next. If the symbols of the regime begin crumbling, the oppressed Iranian people might find the courage to finish the job. If there’s anything the mullahs fear more than the U.S. military, it’s their own citizens.

 

That may be an optimistic scenario, but it’s not unlikely. Even if an operation targeting Iranian nuclear sites leads Tehran to miscalculate itself into a larger regional conflict, it’s one the West knows how to fight. A world in which Iran acts with impunity while hiding behind its nuclear arsenal would be a more dangerous world that leaves Washington in uncharted territory. All we can predict is that the new status quo in the Middle East would leave the U.S. with fewer resources and options to confront the growing challenges to its interests in Europe and the Western Pacific.

 

There will be those who will insist that the U.S. support for, or even participation in, an Israeli operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities is a hijacking of U.S. foreign policy — a by-product of the Jewish State’s mesmeric hold over Washington. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States is directly threatened by the Islamic Republic. It has been since its inception in 1979. We cannot tolerate an atomic Iran, and we have spent the past decade doing everything possible to avoid a military confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran summoned the whirlwind it’s about to reap. Don’t let it try to tell you otherwise.