America Needs to Think Big about Confronting Iran

As the Islamic Republic faces persistent unrest in its streets, it continues its steady march to acquiring nuclear weapons, and Washington appears to lack a comprehensive or consistent approach toward the country. Mark Dubowitz and Orde Kittrie carefully describe what such an approach could, and ought to, entail:

America should adopt a “rollback” strategy to intensify the existing weaknesses of the regime and to support the Iranian people’s goal of establishing a government that abandons the quest for nuclear weapons and is neither internally repressive nor regionally aggressive. To accomplish this, the American administration should take a page from the playbook President Ronald Reagan first used against the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, Reagan seriously upgraded his predecessors’ containment strategy by pushing policies designed to roll back Soviet expansionism. The cornerstone of his strategy was the recognition that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and revolutionary yet internally fragile state that Washington could defeat.

The Biden administration should address every aspect of the Iranian menace, not merely the nuclear program. A narrow focus on disarmament paralyzes American policy and has deterred the Biden administration from responding to Iran’s non-nuclear misconduct out of fear that Tehran would withdraw from nuclear negotiations. Engagement with the Islamic Republic as an end in itself has reflected the same delusions that American leaders entertained about Communist China. Those delusions of engagement made China more wealthy and more powerful and aggressive but did not moderate China’s rulers. . . . The Islamic Republic cannot be reformed; it must be rolled back. That is the message of the Iranian protesters.

Washington should target the regime’s terrorist networks, influence operations, and proliferation of weapons, missiles, and drones. Iranian military support for Vladimir Putin’s murder of Ukrainians, and growing Russian support for the Islamic Republic’s military expansion, should be a wakeup call for Washington and Europe that Tehran’s malign activities will not remain confined to the Middle East. Biden must develop a more muscular covert-action program and greenlight closer cooperation with allied intelligence agencies.

Dubowitz and Kittrie go on to detail how all this can be accomplished, by using more robust sanctions, interdicting the shipment of weapons, coordinating efforts across government agencies, countering Iranian cyberwarfare, restricting air travel, and taking action in Iraq, Syria, and Latin America—among much else.

Read more at FDD

More about: Iran, U.S. Foreign policy

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society