Strategic Assessment

The inability to stop Iran’s nuclear program is liable to make the Unite States come to terms with Iran’s capability of enriching uranium on its soil. This essay seeks to explore the limits, possibility, and implications of a compromise with Iran on this matter. Formal recognition of Iran’s nuclear capabilities as the result of negotiations will present a complicated dilemma for Israel, because it will find it difficult to justify any offensive action intended to deny this capability to Iran. Yet with or without a compromise, it is already possible to define Iran as a nuclear “threshold state,” or one rapidly approaching that status.