On Sunday morning, Iraqi terrorists hit a naval base in the southern Israeli city of Eilat with a drone, damaging a building but not causing any injuries. Michael Knights and Hamdi Malik calculate that Iran-backed militias in Iraq have launched 40 attacks on Israel since November 2 of last year, most of which fell short or were intercepted. They also observe an overall increase in the frequency of attacks, except for a pause in the second half of February in response to American retaliatory strikes.

On Monday, meanwhile, the head of Kataib Hizballah—the most formidable of Tehran’s many terrorist proxies operating in Iraq—announced plans to arm 12,000 Jordanians to make war on Israel in retaliation for the IDF’s targeted killing of Iranian officers in Syria. The threat comes amid several days of large protests outside the Israeli embassy in Amman calling for the revocation of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, protests that are thought to be supported by Iran as well. Knights and Malik write that the threat

could be seen as part of a long-term ambition of the Islamic Republic to arm fighters in the West Bank. In July 2014, the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei said, “We believe that like Gaza, the West Bank must be armed.” . . . . There is only one efficient way to arm fighters in the West Bank, and that is via Jordan. Kataib Hizballah has some experience training Arab operatives and projecting back into their home nations, and providing arms to those fighters, notably in Bahrain.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Kataib Hizballah closely follow the pro-Palestinian protests in Jordan. There are reports of Jordanian authorities fear of a “Hamas takeover.” The Iranian front seems to see in these protests a possible opportunity to expand the unrest in the region. At a minimum, Iran and its proxies find in the threat to stoke unrest in Jordan an opportunity to push a concerned U.S. administration to put increasing pressure on the Israeli government not to launch the Rafah operation and to hold back greater attacks on Iranian and Lebanese Hizballah interests in Lebanon and Syria.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.