In fact, there are advantages for Iran today in delaying a nuclear tipping point. For one thing, Israel might attack if a critical waypoint appears imminent.
But it’s not just Israel whose reaction matters, nor should the critical juncture be defined simplistically as “Iran getting a bomb” or Iran being “about to” get a bomb. The nations of the region will jockey based on perception. As conditions shift, each nation will prepare to defend its interests (and even pursue newly feasible strategies for extending power); the driver will actually be big-picture expectations, and the factors will go beyond nuclearization.
No one will want to be in a tail-chase. We can expect Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to operate, with some level of anxiety and determination, in a forward-looking mode. They are already doing it, in matters like the Turks’ dealings with the Kurds, and the Saudis’ back-channel maneuvering to bolster Sunnis in Lebanon. Neither Ankara nor Riyadh makes the mistake Western observers do, of imagining that today’s arrangements are being made in a stable situation. Those in the region see clearly that the arrangements they make today are for the purpose of shaping the changes that must come.
The Iranians know that going nuclear will be a transformative game-changer. It will provoke regional reactions; change conditions that today are highly exploitable, even favorable. I’m not so sure they want to pull that lever while Obama is in office. They’re making too much hay off of him. Why screw that up for themselves?
After all, they can keep the highly profitable nuclear “negotiations” charade going for as long as Obama is the president of the United States. In the absence of American power, no one is going to force Iran to undergo any UN inspection she does not choose to submit to. Iran doesn’t have to let herself get any further from being able to “break out,” as the price of stringing the Western powers along for another three years. She can keep doing exactly what she’s been doing: increasing her stockpile of enriched uranium, limiting the access of inspectors to a level that is functionally meaningless, and testing ballistic missiles.
She can also keep pushing on the other vector of her strategic approach: the client/proxy vector. It’s on this vector that only the United States could mount decisive pushback. The best any other opponent can achieve, whether it’s ISIS, Turkey, a Sunni Arab coalition, Israel, or the Western Europeans, is to get into a nasty, draining confrontation with Iran – one on the daunting model of guerrilla terrorism versus the beleaguered state.
Make no mistake: from this perspective – destabilization and misery in the Middle East – it will be no better for Iran to not get the bomb than to get it, in the next few years. Territory will be encroached on. People and governments will be subjected to the slow torture of instability and proxy harassment. Since it will still be probable that Iran will ultimately get a bomb, the Iranian leadership will enjoy the advantages of that expectation, without the drawbacks of an officially triggered reaction.
This will be an exceptionally hard set of conditions in which to make the case that Iran needs preempting. As far as the Western media and many Western politicians are concerned, Iran will be able to hide behind her proxies and avoid any meaningful political culpability, as the old Soviet Union so often did.
(There are plenty of other worrisome actors besides Iran, but that doesn’t change the fact that Iran will make a difference to outcomes around the region by backing some, opposing others, and intervening directly with the Bolshevik-style methods characteristic of Hezbollah and Iran’s Qods Force.)