• United States
• Iran

June 16, 2025, 2:23 PM View Comments ()

Nuance doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. After 9/11, Americans watched as the Bush administration drew stark moral lines: countries were either with them or against them. That binary extended to domestic dissent, where questioning military action too often was caricatured as sympathizing with the enemy.

Today, people face similarly high-stakes decisions—especially regarding Israel and Iran—but the debate still struggles to accommodate complexity.

Much of the opposition to Israel’s latest attacks on Iran tends to emanate from the extremes—the isolationist far right and the anti-imperialist far left. Both sides can be sharply anti-Israel and at times antisemitic. But there is a more nuanced critique that suggests the assault was premature and perhaps strategically unwise, given the diplomatic moves that were underway and in reserve up until last week.

As a practical matter, it’s not difficult to understand why Israel went ahead with the operation—which has been on the table for more than a decade. Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, kept Iran’s nuclear program in a tightly controlled box. Once President Donald Trump exited the agreement in 2018, a catastrophic blunder, Tehran brought online more sophisticated centrifuges and enriched increasing quantities of uranium to higher levels, in a dangerous game of nuclear brinksmanship. Iran’s breakout time—how long it would take to build an actual nuclear weapon—collapsed from one year to about one week.

The regional dynamic also incentivized Israel to pounce. Iran’s proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Assad regime in Syria, are either enfeebled or defeated. Israel also took out a significant share of Iran’s anti-aircraft, ballistic missile, and drone capabilities in its more limited strikes on Iranian territory last year. In doing so, Israel had cleared a path to strike and degraded Iran’s ability to respond.

But might doesn’t make right, and we wouldn’t want to live in a world where it does—just as many people in the Biden administration argued in the context of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the moment may have been tactically advantageous for Israel to press its case, but that’s not the lens through which we should evaluate the decision.

It’s a core tenet, whether in U.S. decision-making or international law, that the use of force must be a last resort. That clearly was not the case here. The Trump administration was in the middle of direct and indirect nuclear negotiations with high-level Iranian officials, with the sixth round of talks scheduled to take place in Oman on June 15. Trump seemed to put his own credibility on the line hours before the attack began by suggesting Israel should not resort to military strikes, given that negotiators were set to meet again within days. To be fair, reports from the first several rounds of talks left little immediate reason for optimism, but diplomacy had not run its course.

What’s more, the United States and Europe had a powerful arrow in their quiver: the reimposition of snapback sanctions. Even though the Trump administration and the European architects of the JCPOA—the United Kingdom, Germany, and France—initially failed to see eye-to-eye on how to manage Iran, Europe had grown increasingly fed up with Iran’s nuclear escalation. Beyond agreeing to censure Iran via the International Atomic Energy Agency earlier in June, Europe was prepared to reimpose all United Nations sanctions in the coming weeks before the deadline to do so passed later this year.

Importantly, the structure of the JCPOA, which incorporated the snapback clause, would have made it impossible for Iran’s traditional backers in the U.N. Security Council, Russia and China, to block the move. In other words, it was almost an inevitability that Iran would have faced tremendous additional economic pressure in the coming weeks. Would it have caused Tehran to scale back its nuclear program? There’s cause for skepticism, but it was a powerful tool that went unused.

Israel, perhaps appreciating this argument, may have attempted to preempt it by citing a new rationale. Israeli officials disclosed intelligence purportedly indicating that Iran had decided to move toward producing a nuclear bomb—a process known as weaponization—in the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Calling it their “golden information,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said in the hours after the start of the operation that Iranian scientists, as part of a tightly compartmented program, had undertaken key weaponization experiments that would have put Iran within weeks of a usable nuclear bomb.

That would be alarming if it were true, but there’s reason to believe it may not be. Since 2007, U.S. intelligence agencies have maintained that Iran halted its weaponization efforts in 2003 and had not restarted them. The Trump administration recently reiterated that assessment in March, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said, “The [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Gabbard and the agencies under her purview have been notably mum on the question in the face of Israel’s new claims.

Of course, the U.S. intelligence community isn’t infallible. I know this better than most, having started my career at the CIA in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War intelligence imbroglio. At the same time, the intelligence relationship between the United States and Israel is incredibly close, and it’s difficult to imagine that Israel would have kept such startling information from its U.S. counterparts if it found it to be credible. Washington’s silence on this question reinforces the idea that Israel may have pointed to an intelligence smoking gun in order to jump the starting gun.

These are the early days of Israel’s operation, and it remains quite possible that it is ultimately successful in setting back Iran’s nuclear program and defanging Iran’s military infrastructure. We shouldn’t judge the wisdom of a decision of this magnitude solely on the basis of near-term results, however. A fuller assessment would consider the alternatives, including the possibility that diplomacy and international pressure could have prevented Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon permanently and verifiably, rather than just temporarily setting it back—and without firing a single shot or dropping a single bomb.

As missiles and munitions continue to rain down over both Iran and Israel, we should remember that diplomacy might have spared lives on both sides. Had that diplomacy failed, Israel would then have been justified in turning to this last resort. Only once every diplomatic path has been genuinely exhausted should we support the use of force. By embracing it prematurely, we risk not just escalation, but also betraying our core principles.