Barack Obama delivered his most explicit threat yet that the US will attack Iran if that is what it takes to prevent the Islamic republic from developing a nuclear bomb.
I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognise that when the US says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say
The US president also warned Israelis that they would only make a bad situation worse if they moved pre-emptively against Iranian nuclear facilities.
The double-barrelled warning, in an interview with The Atlantic magazine, comes before Mr Obama’s high-stakes meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tomorrow and a speech tomorrow to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israeli lobby.
Mr Obama said an Israeli strike would stir sympathy for Iran in a region where it has few allies. But he made clearer than before that Iran could face attack from the US.
“I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognise that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say,” Mr Obama told the magazine. “I don’t bluff.”
He said Iran and Israel both understood that “a military component” was among a mix of many options for dealing with Iran, along with sanctions and diplomacy, making plain a threat to attack that had previously been more subtly implied.
The warning reveals how the threat that Iran could pose to Israel has eclipsed every other issue in the close, but often contentious US relationship with Israel, and raised the political stakes for Mr Obama.
Iran’s disputed nuclear ambitions dwarf the unfinished business of peace with the Palestinians and Mr Obama’s sometimes testy relationship with Mr Netanyahu.
The White House dispute with Israel is about the risks versus the benefits of a military strike in the near term, not whether one is ever appropriate.
The issue is infused with domestic politics in both the US and Israel, and Mr Obama is at pains to show American Jewish voters that he is not being harder on Israel than on Iran.
“Every single commitment I have made to the state of Israel and its security, I have kept,” he said in the magazine interview. “Why is it that despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they’ve had over the last three years, that there are still questions about that?”
Mr Obama then suggested an election-year answer to his own question, accusing Republicans of trying to fan the doubts and slam a wedge “between Barack Obama and a Jewish-American vote that has historically been very supportive of his candidacy”.
He firmly rejected the notion that the US might settle for a strategy of letting the Iranians build a nuclear weapon but deterring them from using one.
“You’re talking about the most volatile region in the world,” he said. “It will not be tolerable to a number of states in that region for Iran to have a nuclear weapon and them not to have a nuclear weapon. Iran is known to sponsor terrorist organisations, so the threat of proliferation becomes that much more severe.”
Israel has been publicly debating whether to launch air strikes on Iran’s known nuclear facilities in the next several months, before Israel judges that Iran’s programme would be too far along to stop.
The Obama administration argues that the time for a strike is further away, and that there remains enough time to persuade Iran’s leaders to back down. Iran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes.