Striking Iran Would be a Mistake

During my time at Southern Methodist University, I had the privilege of studying under Herbert Simon, the polymath whose work on decision theory shaped Cold War strategic thinking. Simon critiqued idealized rational actor models and emphasized prudence over ideology. That education remains urgently relevant today as voices in Washington and Jerusalem renew calls to strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

From a realist perspective—one grounded in Cold War logic and decision-theoretic caution—a military strike would be not just unnecessary but destabilizing. A restrained 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.

Realism begins with the sober recognition that the international system is anarchic, and states act to ensure their survival. Power matters, but so does restraint. As John Mearsheimer argues, states pursue advantage not from moral aspiration but from cold cost-benefit analysis. Unlike liberal internationalists or neoconservatives who cloak intervention in moralism, realists ask: Will this war enhance stability? Can this adversary be deterred?

Too often dismissed as morally indifferent, realism in fact provides the space for national life to flourish. Stability enables families to thrive, cultures to mature, and ideals to deepen. When a state sacrifices these ends for abstract moral clarity or the illusion of control, it erodes its own foundations. Realism is not opposed to ideals—it insists that they require time, space, and order to take root. In Iran’s case, only strategic patience—not a theology of war—can cultivate such space.

Even on narrow tactical grounds, a preventive strike on Iran is a grave miscalculation. Its facilities are hardened, dispersed, and fortified against precisely such attacks. Success would require not a one-off raid, but an open-ended military campaign likely to trigger a regional war. History offers no reassurance: the 1981 Israeli strike on Iraq and the 2007 raid on Syria worked because those regimes couldn’t retaliate. Iran, by contrast, commands a sophisticated network of asymmetric tools—proxy militias, missiles, cyberwarfare—all of which it would unleash.

A strike would also unify a fractured regime, galvanize nationalism, and provide domestic legitimacy for the very nuclear program it seeks to halt. Rather than stopping proliferation, it would accelerate it. Iran would pursue weaponization not out of defiance, but out of perceived necessity. The irony is bitter but clear: a preemptive war would make Iran’s nuclear ambition both more likely and more dangerous.

War also carries costs too often sterilized in policy briefs. Civilians, not just combatants, would bear the brunt—on both sides. Iranian cities would suffer, Israeli civilians would endure mass rocket fire, and the wider region would descend into chaos. Realism does not ignore suffering. It insists that states count the full cost—not only in weapons, but in broken bodies and shattered lives.

Proponents of war claim Iran is irrational or apocalyptic. Yet its behavior suggests otherwise. After Soleimani’s assassination, Iran’s missile response was calculated to avoid U.S. casualties. Its support for proxies is aggressive but bounded. Its nuclear program, while provocative, has remained ambiguous and reversible. Beneath revolutionary rhetoric lies a logic of deterrence, not suicide.

Indeed, Iran’s geopolitical posture fits a realist mold: it seeks regional leverage and regime survival, not annihilation. While brutal at home, its foreign policy is shrewd and calibrated. Historically, Persia has not always been Israel’s foe. Cyrus the Great famously enabled the Jewish return from exile. That doesn’t absolve the current regime, but it reminds us that enmity between civilizations is not eternal. The strategic question is not whether Iran is moral, but whether it is deterrable. The evidence says yes.

If the U.S. could live with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union—thousands of warheads, global subversion, and revolutionary ideology—it can live with a constrained Iran. Mutually Assured Destruction was never sentimental; it was a doctrine of tragic wisdom. As long as second-strike capability exists, total war becomes irrational—even for ideological states.

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.

Interestingly, Claremont’s own Michael Anton has just been picked to lead the U.S. technical team in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Anton’s understanding of the U.S. power structure as being in a late-stage crisis, and seeing a more nationalistic stance as necessary (in addition to an overall realist temperament), favors a move toward these regionalist and self-interested ends with regard to Iran. Anton can only be seen as a step in the directions posited here.

The Begin Doctrine—Israel’s policy of preempting nuclear capability in enemy states—once made strategic sense. It worked against Iraq and Syria because those regimes were isolated, weak, and lacked retaliatory tools. But Iran is a different challenge altogether: large, institutionally complex, regionally entangled, and hardened against attack. The strategic conditions that justified Begin’s doctrine no longer apply.

A partial strike on Iran would ignite a regional war, with Hezbollah raining missiles on Israel. The Gulf would see maritime disruption. Iranian cyberattacks would strike civilian infrastructure. And Tehran would pursue the bomb under a flag of self-defense. The outcome: a nuclear Iran with broader legitimacy, not less. A doctrine once bold now risks becoming a liability—proof of strategic nostalgia, not clarity.

Realism teaches that doctrines must serve interests, not memories. Policymakers who prepare to fight the last war often stumble into the next one unprepared. Strategic restraint is not passivity—it is the discipline to recognize when holding back enhances long-term power. Iran, for all its provocations, is not a rising power. It suffers from internal decay: demographic decline, economic stagnation, and political repression. Its revolutionary fervor is no longer exportable. It rules by coercion, not conviction.

The United States, burdened by domestic fragmentation and great-power competition in Asia, has every reason to avoid a third war in the Middle East. It lacks the bandwidth, the political will, and the logistical capacity. Invasion is unthinkable. Iran is not Iraq. The terrain is forbidding, the population larger, and the military more capable. It would take months to stage a force, during which Iran would not sit idle. It would strike bases, mine sea lanes, and spike oil prices. The Gulf would become a no-go zone. The dream of rapid regime change is a delusion.

Nor is there a viable path through Iraq or Turkey, whose cooperation cannot be assumed. Afghanistan is not an option. The logistics of such a campaign are not merely challenging—they are prohibitive. As the expression goes, “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” The strategic diversion would also cripple America’s deterrent posture in Asia, just as China probes Taiwan.

Even if war could be launched, to what end? Strategic gain would be uncertain, costs would be immense, and the ripple effects would be uncontrollable. Realism teaches that denying a rival’s security guarantee—without the means to enforce total submission—is the fastest route to disaster. Iran may seek deterrent capability, but once achieved, it can be contained. The Cold War taught us that. It can teach us again.

War would freeze possibilities. Deterrence preserves them. Strategic restraint buys time—for alliances to shift, for adversaries to falter, and for national priorities to be reset. The realist seeks not a world without threat but one in which threats are managed before they become cataclysmic.

Opponents warn that a nuclear Iran will spark proliferation across the region. But proliferation has not followed other nuclear breakouts. After India, Pakistan, and North Korea went nuclear, predictions of regional arms races largely failed. Nuclear programs are costly, complex, and politically sensitive. Most U.S. allies prefer extended deterrence to developing their own arsenals. Saudi Arabia and Egypt remain heavily dependent on Western support and far from breakout capability. With proper incentives and pressure, Washington can keep proliferation in check.

The real proliferation risk comes not from a latent Iranian bomb, but from one built in defiance of a failed American or Israeli attack. That would vindicate Tehran’s narrative of resistance and teach its neighbors that only nuclear weapons prevent Western intervention. By contrast, a deterred and contained Iran offers less incentive to follow suit.

If war is a strategic error, what is the alternative? A policy rooted in realism, deterrence, and the new realities of 21st-century warfare. The unipolar moment is over. Power is diffusing, and high-end platforms are giving way to drone swarms, cyberattacks, and precision munitions. Offense is cheaper. Denial is easier. In this environment, hegemony is brittle. Balance becomes essential.

The United States must adapt. Rather than micromanaging every regional dispute, it should support balances of power that reflect new technological and political realities. This means de-escalation frameworks, missile defense, defensive arms sales, and a shift in posture from enforcer to balancer. Israel, with its survivable deterrent, can sustain peace not through dominance, but through credible consequences for aggression.

This is not pacifism. It is strategic patience. It is deterrence backed by readiness and a regional architecture that prevents unilateral aggression. In the new warfare landscape—cheap, fast, and unpredictable—restraint is not weakness. It is wisdom.

When I studied under Herbert Simon, I learned that statecraft is not the pursuit of certainty, but the discipline of humility: to act rationally under uncertainty. The impulse to strike Iran is understandable. But realism demands we weigh outcomes, not emotions. And war with Iran promises only instability.