The coming months are critical to Israel's national security, as the United States' decisions vis-à-vis Iran will shape our strategic environment for many years to come. : At the one pole, a responsible policy, the main point of which is to curb the Iranian momentum for hegemony in the region and to establish a coalition that will enable the divertment of US resources to the global struggle in China.
The other pole is the rise of the Iranian revolution to the status of a power, whose moves are likely to lead, with high probability, to a widespread regional conflict.
The Democratic West in general, and the Americans in particular, has repeatedly failed to understand radical phenomena. The Americans assume that these are empty "extreme" slogans and fundamentally "rational" leaders who will behave "pragmatically" from the moment they "have something to lose." This is how they misunderstood Hitler, Nasser, Castro, Assad, Arafat, Chavez and Erdogan. A similar cultural blindness has serially failed in bringing democracy to the Iraqis, pluralism to the Libyans, tolerance for the Muslim Brotherhood, equality of women to the Afghans and peace to the Palestinians. Iranian sophistication makes it especially difficult for Americans when their representatives - former Secretary of State John Kerry and Special Representative of Biden Rob Mali - are exposed to Iranian manipulations, due to their ideological leanings and unimpressive personal skills.
A nuclear deal will contribute marginally to curbing Iran's progress on one of the less critical issues of the Iranian nuclear program, but will give dramatic impetus to its powerful capabilities and regional aggression. In the area of enrichment, Iran has achieved almost its full potential. Even if it stops enriching to 60 percent and exports to Russia the pool it has accumulated - its control and independence in the process allow Iran to return to it, if it decides, with a lot of advanced centrifuges. It is not the enrichment, but the missing elements in the means of launch and the weapons system that are the main obstacle in its quest for the status of a threshold state capable of leaping into a nuclear arsenal. The agreement, in fact, will give immunity to their development.
The danger of the agreement is in the strategic realm, in which the Americans repeatedly fail: an obsessive focus on a desirable but secondary issue, in a way that thwarts the immensely important goal. Thus, for example, in its justified struggle against ISIS, the United States inflicted severe strategic damage: it controlled Iran's Shiite militias over Iraq, built Erdogan's status in Syria at the expense of its Kurdish allies, and invited Russian involvement in Syria. Designed to justify the struggle for enrichment, after the horses have fled the stable, will make it easier for Iran in the overall context to realize its striving to be a threshold state, strengthen the status of the domestic revolutionary regime, and give it the tools to pursue regional hegemony.
The key questions were and remain economics and consciousness. The lifting of the sanctions will make the Ayatollahs available tens of millions of dollars as a direct product, and will open the way for hundreds of billions from Europe, China, India and others, who feared secondary US sanctions. Threats in the area and actually allow their realization. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are already preparing, in an in-depth dialogue with Iran since the US election, for the possibility of a US defeat, if Biden adopts Obama's conception. This channel, in the hope that Biden will recover.
A critical US contribution to strengthening the ayatollahs' regime and striving for regional hegemony will almost inevitably lead to widespread conflict with Israel, which sees such hegemony as an existential danger. The overall regional equation, beyond the narrow realm of nuclear enrichment.
