In an interview last week, the Mossad director David Barnea told Israeli reporters that the nuclear deal the U.S. appears close to concluding with the Islamic Republic is “based on lies.” Richard Kemp explains why the agreement, a renewed version of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), cannot accomplish what it purports to do:

The reality that the optimistic and the unschooled fail to grasp is that the regime in Tehran will ignore constraints imposed by the deal that it does not like. That is what it did with the original JCPOA and its other international undertakings, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that it has frequently breached, as confirmed again earlier this year by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Tehran will continue to develop the nuclear capability that it sees as its right—deal or no deal—at the speed it wants until it is physically stopped from doing so. Whatever shape Biden’s deal takes, there are only downsides for the West and the Middle East and only upsides for Tehran. Signing the deal will give Iran renewed legitimacy. . . . More than that, according to Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid, Tehran will receive $100 billion a year as a result of lifted sanctions.

Those dollars will enable Iran to speed up its nuclear program, including development of ballistic missiles capable of launching nuclear warheads not just across the Middle East but also to Europe and the U.S. Those dollars will boost Iran’s regional aggression, threatening Saudi Arabia and the UAE from Yemen, threatening Israel from Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, and threatening the U.S., Europe, and the world with its global network of terrorist proxies and followers. This violent malignity, which will shift into overdrive with a massive cash injection, was most recently exhibited by Tehran’s proxies in Gaza launching thousands of missiles at Israel in August, by rocket attacks in Syria that wounded U.S. servicemen just a few days ago, by the attempt to murder Salman Rushdie in the U.S., and by recently revealed Iranian assassination plots against former members of the Trump administration. All that while dictating terms at the negotiating table.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.