Stagecraft and Statecraft

Military strikes might slow down a nuclear program, but they cannot impose long-term restraint – especially when they are carried out by powers that flout the very rules they claim to be enforcing. The US and Israel are likely to learn this the hard way, as Iran abandons all doubts about pursuing nuclear breakout.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

Israel and the United States have dealt punishing blows to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. “Operation Rising Lion” and “Operation Midnight Hammer” have been portrayed as precision strikes that will stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in its tracks. But whatever the bombings might have achieved tactically, they risk forfeiting strategically, as Iran is now more convinced than ever that nuclear weapons are the only way to deter future aggression and ensure the regime’s survival.

Iran was once brought to the negotiating table through a carefully calibrated mix of pressure and incentives. Despite its imperfections, that approach worked. In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was agreed, with Iran agreeing to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and other concessions. But – at Israel’s urging and despite Iran’s apparent compliance – Donald Trump abandoned the JCPOA during his first term as president, destroying whatever mutual trust had been built over the course of 20 months of painstaking diplomacy.

Now, despite pursuing new nuclear negotiations with Iran, the US has joined Israel in abandoning strategic patience in favor of spasmodic force. Some argue that Iran invited the attacks by deceiving the international community, stoking regional conflicts, and enriching uranium to levels well beyond those needed for any civilian application. These are legitimate complaints.

Even the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a report released just before Israel’s campaign began, raised concerns about Iran’s compliance with its international obligations. Indeed, an analysis of this report by the Institute for Science and International Security argued that “Iran can convert its current stock of 60 percent enriched uranium into 233 kg of [weapon-grade uranium] in three weeks at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), enough for 9 nuclear weapons.” That conclusion may well have lit a fire under the Trump administration.

But the IAEA also concluded that it had “no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear program” in Iran, while underscoring the urgency of reaching a nuclear deal. “Iran,” the agency warned, “is the only non-nuclear-weapon state in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60%” – just a short technical step away from the 90% purity needed for weapons-grade material.

Even so, US and Israeli decision-makers green-lit attacks on Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – facilities that are subject to IAEA safeguards and monitored under Iran’s Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitments. With that, they unraveled the legal and verification framework that exists precisely to prevent weaponization.

Beyond undermining the authority of the IAEA and its inspection regime, the attacks violated the NPT’s principle of peaceful nuclear use (Article IV) and breachedinternational law, including the United Nations Charter. The US, a nuclear superpower with a record of catastrophic wars aimed at regime change, and Israel, a clandestine nuclear-armed state that refuses to sign the NPT, have thus sent an unmistakable message: only the weak follow rules, and only the strong are safe. In fact, as long as you have nuclear weapons, you can violate international law at will. 

This is true not only for major powers, but also for smaller states. Pakistan, for example, nurtures cross-border terrorism and exports proxy war with impunity, threatening nuclear retaliation for anyone who crosses it. This poses a more acute threat to regional peace than Iran’s hypothetical bomb, but the US remains silent. 

This hypocrisy is deeply rooted. It was the US, after all, that aided and abettedPakistan’s covert pursuit of the bomb. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, successive US administrations ignored mounting evidence that Pakistan was secretly enriching uranium and building nuclear weapons – and continued funneling billions of dollars in aid to the country. The result is a fragile state armed with an “Islamic bomb.” 

Today, with diplomacy derailed, inspections discredited, coercion normalized, and double standards embraced, what tools remain to convince Iran that remaining non-nuclear is wise and strategically viable? After years of debate over the value of a nuclear deterrent – with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even issuing religious edicts against nuclear weapons – Iranian decision-makers are almost certain to decide that there is no other way to keep the country safe from attack. 

Iran now has every incentive to exit – or at least limit – the IAEA framework and race toward nuclear breakout. Just as Saddam Hussein took his nuclear program underground following Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s IAEA-monitored Osirak reactor, Iran is likely to reject transparency and oversight in favor of secrecy and ambiguity. That would not be some dramatic act of defiance, but rather a rational response to a serious – even existential – threat. 

And it is not just Iran. If powerful states can bomb safeguarded nuclear facilities with impunity, why should any country put its faith in the global nonproliferation regime? Any government that wants to avoid the fateof Saddam’s Iraq or Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya (or, for that matter, democratic Ukraine), will seek to acquire the bomb – or at least come close enough to keep adversaries guessing. 

The only viable path to nonproliferation is and always will be diplomacy, not destruction. Military strikes might slow down a nuclear program, but they cannot impose long-term restraint – especially when they are carried out by powers that flout the very rules they claim to be enforcing. In the end, Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer may be remembered not as preemptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear breakout, but as catalysts for it.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Israel has long pursued a strategy to remain the Middle East’s sole nuclear-armed state, using military force to preempt or prevent other regional powers from acquiring nuclear-weapons capabilities. But Israel’s strikes on Iran risk backfiring, with a wounded foe more determined than ever to acquire the nuclear bomb. 

Israel’s strategic posture, institutionalized as the “Begin Doctrine” after former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, holds that it will not allow any neighboring state to even approach nuclear-weapons capability. In practice, Israel has expanded this doctrine to block even peaceful nuclear programs under international safeguards.

The Begin Doctrine was first operationalized in 1981 with the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which was built by France for peaceful research and subject to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Though Iraq was a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and had agreed to stringent safeguards extending beyond international inspections to prevent reactor misuse, Israel claimed Baghdad harbored military ambitions and struck preemptively.

The attack, which destroyed the $275 million reactor just before it was to become operational, was carried out with U.S.-supplied F-16 and F-15 aircraft. One French engineer and 10 Iraqi soldiers were killed. The operation triggered minimal diplomatic fallout for Israel, but pushed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program underground — an outcome that would later lead to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq under the false pretext of dismantling weapons of mass destruction.

In 2007, Israel again invoked the Begin Doctrine to destroy a suspected nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. The al-Kibar facility was flattened in an airstrike dubbed Operation Orchard. Israeli intelligence claimed the project, allegedly aided by North Korea, had covert military dimensions. The IAEA concluded three years later that the destroyed facility was “very likely” a nuclear reactor under development.

These precedents pale in comparison to Israel’s current military campaign against Iran, dubbed Operation Rising Lion, which aims to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program. The stakes are exponentially higher: Iran is a larger, more capable adversary located beyond Israel’s immediate neighborhood. And unlike Iraq or Syria in decades past, Iran has already accumulated significant nuclear know-how and material.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, invoking the Begin Doctrine, claimed that Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons and vowed that Israeli strikes would continue “as long as necessary” to neutralize the threat. But this assertion lacks backing from key intelligence assessments.

On March 25, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified that the American intelligence community had assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” However, Gabbard — and the IAEA separately in a recent report — expressed concern over Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, which, if enriched further to 90 percent, would become weapons-grade material. The IAEA, like Gabbard, concluded there was no evidence of a structured nuclear-weapons program underway.

Yet Israel pressed ahead with its military strikes. Netanyahu’s government, in coordination with the Trump administration, seems to believe that such force will buy leverage at the diplomatic table.

In reality, the attacks are likely to achieve the opposite. Far from forcing concessions, the Israeli strikes have derailed nuclear diplomacy. Tehran has suspended talks indefinitely, accusing Washington of coordinating and authorizing the Israeli operation. This mirrors a pattern from Trump’s first term, when his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran backfired, hardening Iranian resolve rather than moderating it.

Indeed, if Israel’s goal is to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat, this strategy may prove deeply counterproductive.

Two key factors make this preemptive war particularly perilous. First, Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear program by military means alone. Tzachi Hanegbi, Netanyahu’s own national security adviser, acknowledged on Israeli television on June 13 that Iran’s program “cannot be destroyed through kinetic means.” A negotiated settlement, he suggested, was the only sustainable option.

But with the collapse of diplomacy and deepening Iranian hostility, Israel may be forcing Iran toward the very nuclear path it wants to prevent. Tehran could emulate North Korea’s playbook: withdraw from the NPT, eject IAEA inspectors and weaponize its nuclear assets at speed. North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003 and tested a nuclear bomb just three years later, becoming a de facto nuclear-weapons state.

Iran, heavily sanctioned and increasingly isolated, may now conclude that it has little to lose from following suit. If Iran raises enrichment from 60 percent to 90 percent purity — a short technical leap — it could rapidly convert its uranium stockpile into bomb-grade material. That would mark a historic failure of U.S. and Israeli nonproliferation strategy and hand Tehran the strategic deterrent it long claimed not to seek.

Second, the underlying logic of the Israeli campaign may no longer be about nuclear rollback but rather regime change. Netanyahu has openly called for the fall of the Iranian regime, and Israeli strikes have expanded beyond nuclear and military sites to include economic infrastructure, energy facilities and civilian aviation hubs.

This broadening of war aims could lock Israel into a prolonged military confrontation with Iran — a campaign that could exact heavy human and economic costs. Even before the Iran operation, Israeli society was showing signs of war fatigue, with growing numbers of reservists declining to report for duty.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces are increasingly entangled in the conflict. In defending Israel from retaliatory missile and drone attacks, American troops are already operating in air, land and naval roles. A broader U.S. intervention remains a distinct risk.

Israel has long justified its aggressive posture on existential grounds. Its small size and hostile environment, it argues, require proactive and sometimes disproportionate defense measures. But the line between deterrence and provocation is perilously thin — and it may now have been crossed.

History shows that Israel’s pursuit of short-term tactical victories often undermines its long-term strategic interests. The Osirak attack contributed to decades of conflict in Iraq. The al-Kibar strike delayed but did not eliminate Syria’s nuclear ambitions. And now, Operation Rising Lion could go down as the moment when Israel’s policy of preemption made an Iranian bomb inevitable.

Israel remains the Middle East’s preeminent military power, possessing not only superior conventional forces but also undeclared nuclear weapons. That should afford it the confidence to pursue measured strategies.

Instead, by trying to preserve its nuclear monopoly through force, Israel risks fueling the very proliferation spiral it has long sought to prevent.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”