Dodson’s so-called realist case is profoundly misguided.
Last week, Ronald Dodson wrote in The American Mind that “acceptance of a limited Iranian nuclear capability could, paradoxically, enhance long-term regional stability and better serve the security interests of both the United States and Israel.” Dodson claims he premised this astonishing conclusion on decision theory courses he took while in college. He also supports his conclusion with inaccurate assessments of geopolitics generally—and the Middle East specifically.
Because Dodson favors Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb, he views a military strike as “unnecessary.” He believes military action would fail and would “destabilize” the region. Given his objective, he never discusses non-military alternatives or explains how to induce Iran to “limit” its nuclear capability.
In the context of Dodson’s core thesis and his other writings, the question of whether to attack Iran is a red herring: his goal is not to avoid kinetic action, but to facilitate Iran’s development of a nuclear capability that “restrains” Israel.
In his American Mind essay, Dodson observes that when a state sacrifices stability for “abstract moral clarity or the illusion of control, it erodes its own foundations…. In Iran’s case, only strategic patience—not a theology of war—can cultivate such space.”
He believes that “even on narrow tactical grounds” a strike on Iran is a “grave miscalculation,” because Iran has hardened and dispersed its facilities, which would require “an open-ended military campaign likely to trigger a regional war,” make Iran’s nuclear ambition “more likely and more dangerous,” and accelerate nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
Israel and the United States’s recent success in almost entirely defeating Iran’s barrages of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, as well as destroying its air defenses in a single night, suggests that Dodson’s defeatism does not mesh with reality.
It is, of course, preferable that diplomatic means stop Iran’s nuclear program and its development of more sophisticated ballistic missiles. But a military strike must always remain a live option.
To succeed, a military campaign should integrate targeted assassinations and strikes and include multiple waves of bombing. It should also feature joint U.S.-Israeli efforts. At the least, the U.S. should contribute real-time intelligence, mid-air refueling, and B-2 stealth bombers dropping precision-guided, 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs. Dodson’s contention that a military option would have to be “open-ended” goes too far.
Dodson’s assertion that an attack would make Iran’s nuclear ambition “more likely and more dangerous” is sophistry. Iran is committed to developing nuclear weapons. There is no room for that ambition to grow. Destroying all or much of what it has accomplished will make its nuclear program less dangerous. Less of something is not more of that thing.
Dodson claims that civilians would bear the brunt of an attack, and the region would “descend into chaos.” In this hyperbolic nightmare, he places no weight on what Iran would do with the nuclear weapons it covets and divorces his scenario from the region’s politics. The enemy is Iran. Except for the Iranian proxy forces Israel has greatly weakened since October 7, Iran is isolated in the Middle East. Its allies are China, Russia, and North Korea—not other Muslim nations.
There are many reasons Israel has survived, and has even prospered, in the Middle East. It has strong relations with Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan, each of which is aligned with Israel in opposing Iran. Though many Muslims would be discomforted by an attack on Iran, that Iran is a Shia nation in a Sunni world—and has repeatedly engaged in conflict with its neighbors—will moderate the consequences.
The risk of civilian casualties cannot be the decisive factor in most war planning, and certainly not here. The alternative is that Iran will use nuclear weapons to kill the 10 million civilians who live in Israel, and potentially others in the United States.
Turning to that threshold proposition, Dodson denies that Iran is “irrational or apocalyptic.” Disregarding that for the last 45 years Iran has been the aggressor, he contends that Iran is focused on “deterrence,” and that its “geopolitical posture fits a realist mold.”
Dodson never discusses the jihad against Israel and the U.S. undertaken by proxy forces that are funded, equipped, and coordinated by Iran, the persistent and continuing threats Iran makes against Israel and the West, or its attempts to assassinate Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
In 2005, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the World Without Zionism conference that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” In 2018, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that “must be eradicated,” a theme he has used for years. In November 2014, Khamenei issued a nine-point plan to destroy Israel, stating that the “barbaric” Jewish state “has no cure but to be annihilated.” In 2020, Khamenei published a poster evoking Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution” to advocate doing so.
In 2019, The Hill published “40 Years of Iranian Threats Against Israel,” which summarized Iran’s unwavering focus on destroying Israel, including marking the sides of the missiles it tests with the threat “Israel Must Be Wiped Out.” As the article fairly observed, “Israel is the only country to be incessantly threatened with annihilation.”
In 2023, as Israel marked its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi threatened to flatten Tel Aviv and Haifa during a ceremony carried live by Iranian state television, with fighter jets and helicopters flying overhead in Tehran and Iranian submarines sailing nearby.
More recently, Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders have repeatedly called the destruction of Israel a mandate from God. In November 2024, NBC News reported that an adviser to Khamenei said Iran was prepared to modify its doctrines to attack Israel and the United States with nuclear weapons. In February, senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel and “raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground.”
Ignoring all of this, Dodson instead calls our attention to what happened in 539 BC when “Cyrus the Great famously enabled the Jewish return from exile.” This is a bizarre analogy, especially given that the Achaemenid Persians are often cited by modern Iranians as the antithesis of the current Islamist regime, whose hostility to world Jewry is absolute. Moreover, it’s odd that Dodson thinks present-day Iranian autocrats are somehow entitled to be regarded as spiritual heirs of Cyrus, but that present-day Israeli citizens are not entitled to be regarded as spiritual heirs of the people Cyrus liberated. Dodson has recently written that the “blood status” of today’s Jews “is no longer valid.” Modern Israel, he writes, is “not cultrically [sic] related to the priestly administration of the Old Covenant Temple worship. They are not called a priestly people.”
It’s hard to see why the Jews, uniquely among world peoples, should be dispossessed of their cultural patrimony in this way, unless it’s because Dodson has a theological axe to grind which colors his regard for present-day Jewry and the modern state of Israel. Citing German theorist Carl Schmitt, Dodson explains that Jews who are unwilling to assimilate seek a “cosmopolitanism” ideal that is a “means to destroy state sovereignty.” He concludes that this is “antithetical to both historic Americanism and historic Protestantism. And these two impulses are why certain groups yield few allies.”
The dubious lesson Dodson draws from his historically confused and partisan perspective is that Iran is deterrable. In his American Mind article, he also makes the remarkably flippant claim that if the U.S. could live with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, it can live with a “constrained Iran.” He never explains what the constraints would be or how to achieve them. Rather, he contends that Iran should get nuclear weapons as a balance for, and deterrent against, Israel.
Dodson writes:
Israel, too, sits atop an overwhelming deterrent advantage: a second-strike-capable nuclear arsenal, diversified delivery systems, and regional technological dominance. A limited Iranian nuclear capacity, while regrettable, would not negate that. On the contrary, it might introduce mutual restraint where today only asymmetry reigns. Deterrence, not preemption, preserved peace during the Cold War. The burden of proof lies with those who would abandon that logic now.
Aside from a sop to those who oppose an Iranian nuclear capability, Dodson focuses on the purported benefit of deterring Israel and superciliously maintains that the burden of proof for rejecting that reckless position is on those who disagree with him.
Most observers believe that Israel has had nuclear weapons for more than 50 years. It has never admitted that it does, or threatened to use these weapons to annihilate its neighbors. In turn, its neighbors have seen no need to reciprocate. Their view of Iran is entirely different.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman explained to CBS in 2018 that “without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” In December, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud said, “If Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off…. We are in a very dangerous space in the region…you can expect that regional states will certainly look towards how they can ensure their own security.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi have signaled that their countries also would go nuclear if Iran does so, and the UAE has taken steps to do so.
Dodson rejects these warnings, writing that “proliferation has not followed other nuclear breakouts. After India, Pakistan, and North Korea went nuclear, predictions of regional arms races largely failed.” To the contrary, Pakistan developed a nuclear weapon to counter India. Only South Korea’s inactions support Dodson’s thesis. That is insufficient reason to disbelieve Middle East rulers.
“The real proliferation risk,” Dodson concludes, “comes not from a latent Iranian bomb, but from one built in defiance of a failed American or Israeli attack.” He believes that a nuclear bomb developed in defiance of the United States and Western powers, after coercing them into backing off an attack, would be ignored, but a nuclear bomb developed after an attack would have an entirely different result. The premise that rogue nations are this nuanced in their decision-making process is implausible. Regardless, if the U.S. and Israel back down, Iran will build nuclear weapons. If diplomacy and sanctions fail, and Israel and the United States attack, either this will not happen, or will not happen soon.
Of course, the debate about incentives is irrelevant if we are pursuing Dodson’s goal that Iran secure a “limited” nuclear capability.
Showing that his real intention is to diminish U.S. support for Israel, Dodson avers that the U.S. “should support balances of power that reflect new technological and political realities. This means…a shift in posture from enforcer to balancer.” Israel, he writes, must cede its “dominance.”
If an analyst who shares the goal of a non-nuclear Iran had written that diplomacy or sanctions need more time, we could engage in a robust discussion about alternatives. But when a commentator who sees Jews and Israel as the problem opines that Iran should go nuclear to restrain them, it is difficult to engage in a cogent discussion.
