Iran’s Threat Emerges Into Daylight

Deterrence ‘by deference’ has failed, says Mark Dubowitz, and Tehran is now closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons.

By Elliot Kaufman. WSJ

Iran’s proxy strategy never fooled anyone. It’s no secret that the militias ripping up the Middle East, country after country, are loyal to Tehran—but when the shooting starts, the West rushes to pretend otherwise. “Right after Oct. 7,” says Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “the Biden administration began disconnecting the dots.”

While it distanced Iran from the attack, “the White House echoed the line that ‘Hamas is ISIS,’” Mr. Dubowitz says. “The more natural thing to say is ‘Hamas is Iran.’ But if the focus is on Iran, then the question becomes: What’s your Iran policy? What are you going to do about the head of the octopus?”

These questions became unavoidable when Iran attacked Israel directly last weekend, but Mr. Dubowitz, 55, has been asking them since 2003. While others focused on Iraq, he worked on Iran sanctions. He was the leading U.S. opponent of the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal and worked with the Trump administration on its “maximum pressure” strategy— which, to his disappointment, rarely went beyond sanctions.

In 2019 Iran announced sanctions against Mr. Dubowitz and his think tank, known as FDD, and accused them of “economic terrorism.” He has been living with security protection ever since. “In Washington, I’m called an ‘Iran hawk,’ ” he says, “and it’s so politicized that they think I must be a Republican, too. All I’ve done is try to make the case that the Islamic Republic is a threat to the region, its own people and the U.S., and that it needs to be dealt with, not wished away.” Nobody makes that case better than FDD.

Iran’s shadow-war strategy against Israel is effective. Since Oct. 7, the regime has used its proxies to shock Israel into war, divide its forces, prolong the fighting and bleed it politically, economically and militarily—all without firing a shot from Iranian territory and risking a response in kind. Until April 13, when Iran escalated in reply to an Israeli strike in Syria.

Israeli intelligence didn’t expect such a large response, Mr. Dubowitz says, but “clearly the dynamic was changing.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “had seen that Israel was isolated after three months of Biden beating up on Bibi”—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—“and we had 60 members of Congress calling for aid to be cut off. Israel was taking a beating, and I think Khamenei decided this was his opportunity to establish a new normal.”

The ayatollah “thought he would reinforce Israel’s isolation, but he has done the opposite. At least temporarily—very temporarily—Israel got out of the penalty box and Iran has gone in.” On the other hand, “Khamenei has shown only the tip of the iceberg of Iran’s capabilities, and already he has persuaded the U.S. to de-escalate and restrain Israel’s response.”

The escalation is new, but it follows a familiar pattern. “They’re doing what they do on the nuclear program. You keep breaking through red lines, and things that would’ve been intolerable 10 years ago are tolerable today.” The West once thought Iranian enrichment of uranium was intolerable. “Now, they’re enriching uranium to 60%, which is a stone’s throw away from weapons-grade.” Similarly, rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas were once intolerable. “Now, the goal is to normalize that Israel will have to face it directly from Iran.”

That’s why Israel had to attack Iran—a strike that had “an almost poetic symmetry,” as Mr. Dubowitz puts it. “ ‘Our air defenses worked, your expensive S-300 didn’t. You targeted our air force base, we hit your air force base,’ using much less to do much more damage,” and near a nuclear facility. Adding insult to injury, the strike came on Mr. Khamenei’s 85th birthday.

The scope of Israel’s reprisal was limited by political considerations. Israel sought to demonstrate its capabilities and change Iran’s risk calculus “without jeopardizing the U.S. support and regional coalition building.” In this regard as well, Mr. Dubowitz reckons the attack a modest success: “It shifts the onus back on Biden to deliver tough sanctions and diplomatic progress,” he says, “and reaffirms to the Saudis that Israel is the only country with the will and capabilities to take on Iran.”

Hamas’s attack was shocking in its savagery, but “Iran is the most important theater, and its nuclearweapons program remains the overriding priority” in Mr. Dubowitz’s assessment. If Israel were forced to choose, “between Hamas’s four to six remaining battalions and Iran’s two dozen scientists working on nuclear weaponization, my strong recommendation would be to take out the scientists.”

“Imagine what Oct. 7 would’ve looked like under an Iranian nuclear umbrella,” he says. “A threat of nuclear escalation would lead Biden—or any U.S. president—to put immense pressure on Israel not to respond to any conventional attack.”

He invokes Ukraine: “One Iranian idea is to turn Tel Aviv into Kyiv— create a grinding war of attrition, cause as much damage as possible, drive out the most skilled and flexible Israelis, and leave behind an outmanned and outgunned rump that steadily loses support from the West, which, in the face of nuclear intimidation, limits Israel in how it can fight back.” How’s that for a nightmare scenario?

He worries part of the purpose of the war in Gaza is to distract. “What I found in Israel before Iran’s attack,” he says, “was that the nuclear issue wasn’t even on the back burner.” Busy with the war, “the Israelis hadn’t convened an interagency meeting on Iran’s nuclear program in six months.”

Mr. Dubowitz says Iran has enough enriched material “to break out to one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium in seven days, six bombs’ worth in a month.” And we’ve now seen a demonstration of Iran’s ballistic-missile capabilities: “ ‘These ones have conventional warheads,’ the Iranians were saying. ‘The next one may have unconventional warheads.’ ”

While the Biden administration “has its own acronym for ‘confidence-building measures’—CBMs,” the Iranians have an advanced program to develop ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles. They “aren’t to threaten Israel or the Gulf or Europe, because Iran can threaten them already with ballistic missiles,” he says. “They’ve got only one address: the U.S.A.”

The final task is attaching a nuclear warhead to the missile. Here, Mr. Dubowitz has a bomb of his own to drop: “I have been led to believe that Iran’s weaponization activities have begun. After a long pause during which Iran’s nuclear enrichment and missile program advanced, Iran is now taking preliminary steps that will help build a warhead. That is headline news,” he adds, “because it contradicts the longtime U.S. intelligence consensus, and it suggests the Iranians are even closer to a deliverable nuclear weapon than we had thought.”

Mr. Dubowitz says he has pressed U.S. officials. “I don’t get a straight answer in Washington, but I got a straight answer in Israel: ‘We have evidence, we have intelligence. They have begun preliminary work on the weapon.’"

Once the decision is made to build a warhead, Mr. Dubowitz says, the timeline for deployment has been 18 to 24 months. (A primitive device would take only six months.) “But those preliminary steps are important. The idea is to do advance work, with computer modeling and multipoint explosive detonation systems, that can be explained away with nonnuclear purposes. This advances the date for Iran, and limits the time the West would have to stop it.”

Iran has taken defensive steps, beginning to build a new nuclear facility in Natanz. “This one is underneath a mountain, and it is projected to go over 100 meters deep, buried in concrete, heavily fortified,” Mr. Dubowitz says. The concern is that “the Israelis won’t be able to bomb it, and even we, with our massive ordnance penetrators, won’t be able to destroy it.”

This calls for stopping it before it can be built, but it also raises larger questions: “Ultimately, the entire Israeli approach to Iran’s nuclear-weapons program has been to mowthe grass. Just delay it and delay it and delay it.” That was effective as far as it went—for years we’ve heard Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons, and it never quite got there. But Iran grew stronger all the while.

“The conceptzia that was destroyed on Oct. 7—it’s also on the nuclear side,” Mr. Dubowitz says. “But we’re not prepared to do deterrence by punishment, rather than deterrence by denial or by deference—the Biden approach. Not the kind of severe punishment that would completely change Iran’s risk-reward calculus.”

How severe? “Deterrence by punishment isn’t only taking out a bunch of scientists. Khamenei needs to understand that his decision to build nuclear weapons will cost him his regime.”

The U.S. could try a more robust version of maximum pressure, “which includes providing maximum support to the Iranian people,” he says. “There are millions of Iranians who despise the regime. But when they took to the streets in 2009, yelling, ‘Obama, are you with us or with the dictator?’ Obama chose the dictator.” (After our interview, Mr. Dubowitz meets the exiled dissident Masih Alinejad, who was the target of an Iranian assassination plot on U.S. soil.)

“The Trump administration said the right things and provided some technical support, but very limited,” he continues. “Then Biden misses this huge opportunity with the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement” sparked by the 2022 murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by Iran’s morality police. Mr. Dubowitz’s eyes close as he recalls how America stood by while the regime put down the protests: “Before the supreme leader trained, financed and armed Hamas to go rape and torture Israeli women, his thugs had been raping and torturing Iranian women.”

Even Israel has overlooked this Iranian weakness. “I’ve had many frustrating conversations with the heads of Israeli agencies who are in the right place” to aid dissidents, he says. “I always got this blank look: ‘Mark, you want us to be in the business of regime change?’ And I say to them, ‘I want you to be in the business of weakening your enemy. Are you in that business?’ ”

“You may not get lucky. The regime may not collapse,” Mr. Dubowitz says, “but it’s always good to put your enemy on defense instead of having it play offense.”

The Biden administration rejects that. “Its takeaway from the Trump years is that flexing of American muscle leads to Iranian nuclear expansion,” he says. Yet “almost all of Iran’s nuclear escalation since May 2018,” when Mr. Trump quit the Iran deal, “has occurred since President Biden was elected promising de-escalation.”

Since Mr. Biden stopped enforcing sanctions, Iran’s oil sales have increased tenfold. Tehran isn’t appeased. “Biden’s Plan A, a deal, has failed for three years. The bribes didn’t work. A longer deal didn’t work. A shorter deal didn’t work,” Mr. Dubowitz says, “but there is no Plan B from the administration. Only de-escalation.”

That leaves Israel to sort out the threats and take the blame. “Fundamentally, the Biden administration doesn’t believe in the use of power against Iran,” Mr. Dubowitz says. “That is why they loathe the Israeli approach, because Israelis, they don’t buy into this sort of CBMs, off-ramps, incentives, deference approach to Iran.”

For years, Israelis have argued that this Iranian regime will never be cajoled into abandoning its pursuit of Israel’s destruction. For that goal, Israelis said, Iran is willing to set the region ablaze and fight to the last Arab. “In a way,” Mr. Dubowitz says, “Khamenei did all of us a favor” with last weekend’s attack. “He has reconnected the dots. It turns out that it’s been the Islamic Republic all along. It’s a war between Israel and Iran.” Will Mr. Biden be able to cover up what has now been exposed?