Iran Is Not an Existential Threat

When he announced America’s attack on Iran, Donald Trump declared that the Islamic Republic’s “menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies.” Top Democrats responded by criticizing Trump for neither consulting Congress nor explaining what the war aimed to achieve. But they accepted his premise that Iran poses a grave danger. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer endorsed “confronting Iran’s malign regional activities” and “nuclear ambitions.” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned of “the threat” Iran “poses to our allies like Israel.”

But Iran doesn’t pose a significant threat to Israel, let alone the United States. Even at its strongest, Tehran has merely challenged Israel’s dominance of the Middle East, not its survival. Yet the claim that Iran existentially threatens the Jewish state is rarely disputed in mainstream American debate, even by politicians who oppose war.

The argument that Iran endangers Israel usually starts by citing Tehran’s rhetoric. As Israeli ambassador to the US Danny Danon told CNN this week, “When they chant death to Israel, we believe them.”

But Israel’s leaders haven’t always believed them. In 1985, when the Islamic Republic was still young, its embassy in Pakistan invited children to write stories and draw pictures on the topic “Israel must be erased from the Earth.” That same year, Israel sold Iran 100 anti-tank missiles. Israel spent much of the 1980s arming Iran in its war against Iraq, which the Jewish state saw as a much graver threat. Even Iran’s role in establishing Hezbollah, the armed group that grew out of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, didn’t stop the flow of weapons from Tel Aviv to Tehran. Nor did Iran’s missile program, which Trump administration officials now cite to justify war. When Iran acquired its first ballistic missile in 1985, in an effort to counter Iraq, Israel supplemented the Islamic Republic’s arsenal with shorter-range missiles of its own. Haaretz has even reported that some of the anti-tank missiles later fired by Hezbollah at Israeli forces were likely sold by Israel to Iran in the 1980s. In the words of Tel Aviv University’s David Menashri, one of Israel’s foremost authorities on Iran, as quoted by foreign policy analyst Trita Parsi in his book A Single Role of the Dice, “Throughout the 1980s, no one in Israel said anything about an Iranian threat—the word wasn’t even uttered.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Israeli and American leaders began describing Iran as a threat to the Jewish state. But this change in rhetoric didn’t occur because Iran’s attitude toward Israel changed. It occurred because Iraq, Israel’s chief bogeyman, had been brought to its knees. With Saddam Hussein hobbled by the 1991 Gulf War and then a decade of brutal US sanctions, the Islamic Republic took its place as Israel’s foremost regional competitor. “Nothing special happened with Iran,” retired Israeli Brigadier General Shlomo Brom told Parsi, “but because Iraq was removed [as a danger], Iran started to play a greater role in the threat perception of Israel.”

To be sure, Iran did grow stronger in the ’90s as a result of Iraq’s decline. It also began backing Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which opposed the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel. And in the early 1990s, Iran restarted its nuclear energy program, which had begun under the Shah. It was this cocktail—Iran’s hostile rhetoric, its nuclear program, and its support for armed anti-Zionist groups—that birthed the current conventional wisdom that Iran represents an existential threat to Israel.

But this claim has never been borne out by Iranian behavior. Despite its antipathy toward Zionism, and its efforts to resist Israeli and American power, the Iranian regime has shown no willingness to imperil itself by trying to destroy Israel. To the contrary, it has repeatedly sought to defuse conflict with both Jerusalem and Washington, if only because it recognizes their vastly superior power. In May 2003, after the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran sent the US government a secret message: If the US lifted sanctions, ceased trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic, and accepted Tehran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, Iran would end its support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, pressure Hezbollah to disarm, place its nuclear program under international inspection, and support the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which offered to recognize Israel if it accepted a Palestinian state and a “just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” According to Richard Haass, then head of policy planning at the State Department, the Bush administration spurned Tehran’s offer because “the bias was toward a policy of regime change.”

Because the Bush administration rejected Tehran’s proposal, it’s impossible to know if Tehran would have abandoned its armed proxies. But the Islamic Republic has generally tried to prevent them from dragging it into a direct conflict with Israel. In 1996, according to Parsi’s book, Treacherous Alliance, Iran pressured Hezbollah to accept a ceasefire after a 16-day skirmish with Israel. Before October 7th, according to documents discovered by The New York Times, Hamas hinted to Iranian officials that it was planning something big, and implored Tehran to use the occasion to strike Israel directly. Iran never did.

Iran has displayed the same caution when it comes to its nuclear program. In 2015, it signed an agreement with the Obama administration that, according to 29 of America’s top nuclear scientists, contained “much more stringent constraints than any previously negotiated non-proliferation framework.” (By comparison, Israel accepts no inspections of its nuclear weapons because it has never joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Iran not only abided by the agreement, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, but according to Gina Haspel, the CIA director in Trump’s first term, it remained in compliance for a year even after Trump tore up the deal.

None of this suggests a regime that behaves apocalyptically, or even recklessly. And in both the US and Israel, career security officials have said as much. In 2007, near the end of the Bush administration, 18 US intelligence agencies concluded in a joint assessment that “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” In 2012, Meir Dagan, who had just retired from nine years leading the Mossad, Israel’s external spy agency, called the Islamic Republic “a very rational regime.”

If the claim that Iran poses a grave threat to Israel is far-fetched, the claim that it poses a grave threat to the United States is even more absurd. For decades during the Cold War, Americans lived with a Soviet Union that possessed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and the missiles able to deliver them to every corner of the United States. Iran currently possesses neither a single nuclear weapon nor a single missile capable of hitting the US. And its regime has spent the last several years responding to blow after blow from the US and Israel with what has widely been deemed restraint.

Given all this, there’s no reason for Democratic leaders to offer procedural objections to a war whose justification they have essentially conceded. They should instead make a simple argument: Iran poses no threat, not to Israel, nor to the US. As a result, attacking it is both immoral and illegal—not to mention a waste of public funds that should be spent helping ordinary Americans. The fact that leaders like Schumer and Jeffries can’t say that helps explain why Americans yearning for a party that bluntly opposes war don’t think the Democrats are currently it.