Unlike a pre-emptive strike – an attack on your enemy hours or days before he attacks you, which is a legal and relatively frequent practice between countries – a pre-emptive war means attacking the enemy once conditions for the attacker become optimal. This is both illegal and rare. With that, in certain conditions a pre-emptive war – or in other words, "better now than later" – makes more sense. Do these conditions exist in the current Israeli-Iranian context?
Saddam Hussein irked the United States before he acquired nuclear weapons, earning himself a military invasion and public execution. Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi relinquished his nuclear development program and he, too, is no longer with us. North Korea deceitfully acquired atomic weapons, and it appears its regime now has immunity from external attempts to overthrow it. The lesson for Iran is clear. Indeed, despite the nuclear deal with Western powers, Iran seems to be steaming ahead with its development of ballistic missiles and compatible nuclear warheads, while pursuing its ambitions of forcibly changing the face of the Middle East. Iran's deeds and the lessons it has learned from North Korea's nuclearization have led to a reality where Iran's nuclear power is a question of when, not if. What, then, will such a future look like?
The research literature posits two competing mechanisms that provide glimpses at such a future. The first is "nuclear peace" and the second is "the paradox of stability and instability." If the first mechanism – which seems to have led the U.S. and the former Soviet Union to a stable and long-term peace – is to be implemented in the Middle East, we can expect Iran and Israel to tread cautiously. Under such conditions, the fear of nuclear war is so strong that both sides would take great pains to avoid any show of violence capable of sparking a process of conventional escalation ultimately devolving into a nuclear conflict.
The second mechanism – which apparently led the Soviet Union and China in 1969, and India and Pakistan in 1999 to exchange conventional military blows – presently exists in the Middle East. We can, therefore, expect a surge in conventional clashes between the sides. This paradox stems from the unique efficacy of strategic stability in the nuclear era, where both sides understand their large population centers are perpetually vulnerable and assures that neither side will start a nuclear war. In this case, the path to a limited conventional war is always open.
Applying this logic, Israel will not attack strategic targets in Iran, and Iran will not attack Israel. However, the thousands of missiles Hezbollah can fire at Israel could render Israel's missile defense systems ineffective. Israel, of course, will attack Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, but the person making the decisions – the one who has to be convinced to accept defeat – will be safe and sound in Tehran.
Can Israeli society, Western in nature – and which some claim is soft and spoiled – withstand a two-to-three-week barrage of conventional missiles on its cities from Syria and Lebanon and a high number of civilian casualties? To be sure, this scenario can repeat itself every few years. Although Israel has fought wars with frequency in the past, the causalities were primarily soldiers, not civilians, and not in these projected numbers.
If everything detailed above sounds reasonable, then the precise conditions for the irregular logic of "better now than later" are present. A statesman such as Henry Kissinger would certainly tie such a move to a grander complementary regional initiative to end the Israeli-Arab conflict, either by manipulating or perhaps even forcing the various players to accept a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It appears that with U.S. President Donald Trump's new appointments, Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser, the conditions have matured, despite all the expected and unexpected costs, to the point where the dangerous but potentially revolutionary logic of "better now that later" can be applied.
