By Ray Takeyh October 18, 2021

After years of high tensions and fitful diplomacy, it should now be clear to all that there will be no negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. And although U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers have routinely insisted that all options remain on the table, it is unlikely that either the United States or Israel will use overt military force to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. It is time to start envisioning a world with a nuclear-armed Iran.

Critics of the theocracy in Tehran tend to cast that outcome as a nightmare scenario. In fact, going nuclear could lead to the undoing of the Islamic Republic. Getting the bomb would likely backfire on the regime, in part by sparking a much-needed reset of U.S. policy that would allow Washington to finally focus on the Islamist state itself and not just its nuclear apparatus. A nuclear arsenal would not offer the regime the security it so desperately craves; to the contrary, soon after testing a nuclear weapon, the theocracy would find itself more vulnerable than ever.

MUCH PAIN, NO GAIN

Since 2005, four U.S. presidents have made resolving the Iran nuclear issue a priority. But neither diplomacy nor covert action nor the threat of military force has done much to slow Iran’s march toward the bomb, much less stop it. There is little doubt that Tehran, building on decades of illicit research and production, could quickly enrich enough uranium to test a nuclear device. And the hard men who rule Iran are too suspicious of the United States and the global order it leads—and too committed to achieving regional hegemony—to simply stop at the threshold of acquiring the bomb. The Islamic Republic is not Japan.

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