Last week, Biden publicly ruled out supporting any potential Israeli strikes on Iran’s enrichment facilities, an option that Netanyahu has held over the heads of prior US administrations, and suggested Israel should avoid striking Iran's oil infrastructure.
The US military has the capability to significantly disrupt if not destroy Iran's nuclear sites, current and former officials have said.
But Biden is the latest president to spurn the option out of concerns of wider fallout. If the White House thought it could sidestep Netanyahu while courting his defense chief at the Pentagon this week in a last-minute bid to avert a major Israeli strike against Iran, however, Bibi begged to differ.
The Israeli premier scored a phone call with Biden on Wednesday morning, breaking more than seven weeks of silence between the two leaders amid simmering frustration in the White House over his repeated rebuffing of American admonitions not to escalate against Iran’s proxy front.
Trust is at a new low between the two leaders. Further fueling the anxieties in Washington is a long-standing disagreement with the Israelis about how and when to deal with the Iran nuclear problem.
A number of Israeli officials have envisioned the psychological impact of long-range airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities as a sufficient deterrent to dissuade the Islamic Republic from any future attempts to enrich uranium to near-weapons-grade levels. The Israeli air force knocked out Iraq’s unfinished Osirak nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha in 1981, halting late dictator Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium.
But the Pentagon's top brass has long been concerned such a move could backfire in the case of Iran, a far larger country requiring aerial strikes over far greater distances and coordinated attacks to neutralize multilayered air defense arrays. Complicating matters, Iran’s key nuclear sites are buried deeply underground, and Israel is not believed to possess the heavy ground-penetrating munitions or the bomber aircraft required to deliver them.
Despite reservations within the Pentagon about the contingency, US CENTCOM briefed the Israelis on its highly classified plans for such an operation and together the two allies began war-gaming the scenario with the blessing of the White House early last year.
The intent of the Juniper Oak exercises was to intimidate Tehran into slowing or halting its enrichment and to engage seriously on de-escalation talks, analysts said at the time. It was also meant to impress upon the Israelis what can be accomplished as a coalition, rather than unilaterally.
US military officials say the Israeli Air Force could damage Iran’s nuclear facilities without American support, but the impact would be limited and escalation immediate, likely forcing the United States to intervene on the side of Israel and come to the defense of Gulf states.
“It’s always a concern,” one US military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity acknowledged to Security Briefing this week.
If undertaken together, joint US-Israeli strikes could at least set back Tehran’s uranium enrichment. But Pentagon officials have long worried it would also almost certainly start a regional war, provoking Iran to retaliate with ballistic missile barrages against US squadrons based in Arab countries in the Persian Gulf.
It could also convince Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to formally authorize the creation of a nuclear weapon utilizing whatever uranium stockpiles survive, a process that could potentially be facilitated by Russia’s nascent strategic alignment with Tehran.
Earlier this week, Pentagon spokesperson Patrick Ryder likened such a scenario in the Middle East to the outbreak of World War I in Europe.
“It started as a very regional thing, then suddenly you had multiple nations … involved in a four-year protracted conflict,” Ryder told a group of reporters on Monday.
“That became very complicated and very hard to stop. We want to prevent that from happening,” he added.
To be clear, the US officials say they have not taken the military option to disrupt Tehran’s nuclear program off the table, though diplomacy remains Washington’s heavily preferred route. And Iran’s government has been signaling the same.
Current and former military officials familiar with US intelligence suggest that, rather than actually obtain a nuclear weapon in the near term, Iran prefers to advertise its ability to do so, so as to squeeze greater concessions out of the West via diplomatic negotiations.
“By flirting with a nuclear threat, they hope to be able to gain sanctions relief,” the previous commander of all US forces in the Middle East, Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie (ret.), said during an interview on C-SPAN on Monday.
“If they cross the line and declare themselves a nuclear state … you can never go back from that. You've crossed the Rubicon.”
Iran however would be particularly vulnerable during what McKenzie described as the “valley of death” period, between finally deciding to create a nuclear weapon and actually completing the re-entry missile technology needed to deliver a warhead in a strike.
“That’s going to take a long time — many, many months,” McKenzie said. In that period, “You’re very vulnerable. The Iranians actually know that.”
So far, Khamenei has signaled continuation of a cautious approach on the nuclear issue.
But Israel has rapidly eroded Iran’s other main pillar of deterrence, Hezbollah, and defensive interventions by the United States and its partners have proven Tehran’s formidable ballistic missile arsenal to be less than effective. That could begin to tilt the Islamic Republic’s strategic calculus, some experts warn.
As in any conflict, politics plays a role here as well. Netanyahu’s recruitment of New Hope party leader and ex-Likud runner-up Gideon Saar into his government could influence Israel’s decision-making, Al-Monitor’s Ben Caspit reports this week.
And with Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris facing slumping polls in a tight national election next month against GOP frontrunner and former President Donald Trump, some Netanyahu associates see this as a window of opportunity for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister to redeem his marred legacy by forcing Biden's hand, Caspit writes.
And that, in large part, is what has Washington on edge.
“We don’t want Netanyahu pulling the strings,” a second US official told Security Briefing.
