Selling Out: The United States, Israel and an Iranian Nuclear Bomb

Nuclear scientists in the United States and Israel agree that at most, Iran is now a few weeks away from having enough nuclear fissile material for at least one nuclear bomb. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has expressed frustration with the Iranian behavior regarding the diplomatic process, saying the window for diplomacy is closing “because Iran has been using the time to advance its nuclear program in a variety of ways,” and “I’m not going to put a specific date on it, but with every passing day and Iran’s refusal to engage in good faith, the runway gets shortened.”

Israel is well aware of this, but if diplomacy fails, how serious is the Biden administration about implementing other tools in the toolbox? Will the United States demonstrate a credible threat of military force or even crippling economic sanctions? And at what price? Moreover, for decades now, the Israeli foreign policy establishment has allowed itself to submit to American demands regarding the Palestinian issue because they knew that the larger threat from Iran looming in the East, would necessitate American support.

Now we are reaching crunch time. Has the premise upon which decades of Israeli foreign policy have been predicated proven to be true? And if not, what are Israel’s options? Here to discuss this is Caroline Glick.

About the speaker: Caroline Glick was born in Chicago and made aliya in 1991. She joined the IDF that summer and served as an officer for more than five years. As an IDF captain from 1994 to 1996, she was coordinator of negotiations with the PLO in the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

After leaving the IDF, she worked as the assistant to the director-general of the Israel Antiquities Authority. She then returned to geo-politics serving as assistant foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from 1997 to1998.

In March 2002, she became deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Caroline covered the US-led war in Iraq as an embedded journalist with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. Reporting for the Post, Maariv, Israel TV’s Channel 2 and The Chicago Sun Times, she was one of the only female journalists on the front lines with the US forces and the first Israeli journalist to report from liberated Baghdad.

Caroline’s writings have been published in numerous newspapers and online journals: in 2004, in addition to her work at the Post, she resumed writing for Makor Rishon as the paper’s lead columnist and commentator. Caroline is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and routinely briefs senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.

In 2008, Caroline’s first solo book, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad was published by Gefen Publishers. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Israel Solution, published in 2014. She holds a BA in political science from Columbia University and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.