U.S. and Israel Discuss Joint Military Exercises Against Iran

Reuters is reporting that talks will be held in Washington today between Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz and U.S. defense officials about the possibility of holding joint military exercises with the IDF in case Iran appears to be on the verge of going nuclear.

The discussions will be held against the backdrop of a resumption of talks between European powers and Iran on restarting the 2015 nuclear deal that was abandoned by Donald Trump in 2018.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the talks resumed and then ended within an hour.

“The meeting of the Joint Commission is over. It was rather short and constructive,” Mikhail Ulyanov tweeted. “The participants observed a number of important commonalities in their positions, including with regard to the need to finalize the #ViennaTalks on restoration of #JCPOA successfully and swiftly.”

Iran is preparing to enrich uranium to a level of 90% — weapons-grade. Tehran has still not allowed UN inspectors back into the Parchin Nuclear Facility, and it’s not even clear if they’ve been maintaining the cameras and sensors the IAEA was using to monitor the facility since Iran prevented access to the equipment in February.

Taken together, all of these threads point to something very big on the horizon.

Such drills by the United States and Israel could address calls by Dennis Ross, a former senior U.S. official and Middle East expert, and others to openly signal to Iran that the United States and Israel are still serious about preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“Biden needs to disabuse Iran of the notion that Washington will not act militarily and will stop Israel from doing so,” Ross wrote last month.

Ross even suggested the United States should perhaps signal a willingness to give the Israeli’s the U.S. military’s bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bomb.

With the ascension of a radical, hardline Islamist to the presidency, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who engineered the election victory of Ebrahim Raisi for president, appears to be preparing for war. Raisi was known in his youth for his eagerness to execute regime opponents, sending as many as 5,000 to their deaths over the course of a couple of months in 1988.

He has since demonstrated cruelty toward protesters and other prisoners of conscience in Iran. Raisi was appointed the head of the judiciary in 2019 and ordered the execution of dozens of students and other freedom activists for their role in the unrest that caused the regime to totter.

Khamenei couldn’t have chosen a better wartime consigliere.

But how close is Iran to being able to create a bomb?

Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns said on Monday that the CIA does not believe Iran’s supreme leader has decided to take steps to weaponize a nuclear device but noted advances in its ability to enrich uranium, one pathway to the fissile material for a bomb.

Burns cautioned that, even if Iran decided to go ahead, it would still require a lot of work to weaponize that fissile material before attaching a nuclear weapon to a missile or other delivery system.

“But they’re further along in their mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle and that’s the kind of knowledge that is very difficult to sanction away or make disappear, as well,” he said.

If Iran already had a bomb, Israel would almost certainly have attacked. Yet, how close Tehran is to becoming a nuclear power is a matter of opinion. Burns believes they aren’t that close — at least two years to develop the technology to marry a warhead to a missile.

Others believe that mastering the nuclear fuel cycle is the last step for Iran before they are nuclear-capable. If true, that would mean an Israeli-U.S. intervention would become necessary in a matter of months.

Will Biden pull the trigger on war with Iran? One senior White House aide told Reuters, “When President Biden says Iran will never get a nuclear weapon, I mean, he means it.”

That claim will almost certainly be tested over the next few months.