With just a single recent exception, Israel’s military operations against Iran have been launched against Iranian proxies. Nonetheless, a direct war between Israel and Iran is increasingly plausible – and apt to be protracted. Consulting history and logic, any such longer-term conflict would display a continuously competitive search for “escalation dominance.” Paradoxically, such a mutual search could be both destabilizing and rational.
How should Israel proceed? The only reasonable answer is by choosing strategy and tactics that would offer it a persistent bargaining advantage without incurring unacceptable nuclear war risks. The only way to ensure such an escalation advantage would be to engage Iran directly while it is still pre-nuclear. Once Iran is able to join the “nuclear club,” Israel’s required capacities to dominate military escalations would be severely limited or moot. At that point, moreover, prospects for a successful Israeli preemption would likely have vanished.
In the matter of a direct Israel-Iran war, there would be complicating nuances and intersecting details. Even if Iran remained pre-nuclear, tangible conflict between the two bitter adversaries could sometime become “asymmetrically nuclear.” Here, Israel (and only Israel) would cross the nuclear military threshold to maintain “escalation dominance.” Israel’s strategic calculation would be that without such an epochal crossing, Tehran could acquire an intolerable and potentially irreversible “battlefield advantage.”
Though not widely discussed, even a pre-nuclear Iran could make compelling combat use of radiation dispersal weapons and/or launch conventional combat missiles against Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. In a conceivably worst case scenario, Iranian ally North Korea would place its own nuclear assets at Tehran’s operational disposal. North Korea has previously been involved in Middle Eastern military matters (e.g., it built a nuclear reactor for Syria at Al Kibar that was preemptively destroyed by Israel’s Operation Orchard on September 6, 2007), and is currently forging ambitious mutual security ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
In such an unprecedented cauldron of geo-political perils, nothing could be meaningfully predictable.
THERE ARE further issues. What exactly should Israel do with regard to waging war against a pre-nuclear Iran? Most urgently, Jerusalem needs to commence a prompt or incremental process of “selective nuclear disclosure” (putting an end to its traditional posture of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity,” aka the “bomb in the basement”) and to clarify its widely-assumed “Samson Option.” Whatever its tactical particulars, the overriding point of any last-resort Israeli military option would not be to “die with the Philistines” (per Samson in the biblical Book of Judges), but to enhance the credibility of its indispensable nuclear deterrent.
In our unsteady nuclear age, Israel’s two-fold obligation to “escalation dominance” and nuclear war avoidance could produce an intentional or unintentional nuclear conflict. Regarding unintentional nuclear war, it could be an irremediable error for Israeli planners to assume that direct and extended war with Iran would always involve a rational adversary.
But even a rational Iranian adversary could produce variously unwanted outcomes. For Israel, the ultimate survival problem might not be Iranian irrationality or madness, but the cumulatively injurious outcome of fully rational enemy calculations.
There is more. Even if assumptions of Iranian rationality were reasonable and well-founded, there would remain the attendant dangers of an unintentional nuclear war. Such potentially existential dangers could be produced by enemy hacking operations, computer malfunction (accidental nuclear war) or decision-making miscalculation.
In this last scenario, erroneous calculations could be committed by Iran, Israel or both parties in “synergy.” By definition, in the synergism scenario, the “whole” outcome of any military interaction would exceed the sum of its “parts.” Significantly, these “force-multiplying” interactions could surface all at once, as “a bolt from the blue,” or sequentially, in more-or-less fathomable increments.
SINCE 1945, the historic global “balance of power” has been partially transformed into a “balance of terror.” To an unforeseeable extent, the geo-strategic search for “escalation dominance” by Israel and Iran – a search magnified by starkly divergent security expectations of the ongoing Gaza war – could enlarge the risks of an inadvertent nuclear war. This ominous conclusion remains plausible even if Iran remains non–nuclear. At some point in this unprecedented or sui generis narrative, seemingly out-of-control escalations could prod Israel to cross the nuclear combat threshold.
There are more particulars. As mentioned, risks of any direct Israel-Iran war would include nuclear war by accident and a nuclear war by decisional miscalculation. In this perilous context, the “solution” for Israel could never be to “wish away” the causal imperative (the mutual search for “escalation dominance”) but to manage all prospectively nuclear crises at their lowest possible levels of destructiveness.
Wherever feasible, it would be best for Israel to avoid existential crises altogether and to maintain reliable “circuit breakers” against strategic hacking and technical malfunction. Realistically, however, to achieve durable nuclear war avoidance in the Middle East, a more manageable Israeli nuclear posture will be required. In all cases, identifying such a key posture would represent an intellectual rather than political task.
The Iranian existential threat to Israel does not exist in vacuo. Israel faces other potential foes and enemy alliances. Pakistan is a nuclear Islamic state with pertinent ties to China. Like Israel, Pakistan is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). North Korea is sharing advanced ballistic missile technologies with Russia and Iran.
“Everything is very simple in war,” says Carl von Clausewitz in On War, “but the simplest thing is very difficult.” A relevant example would concern the limits of an Israeli strategic posture resting disproportionately on defense. Though Israel’s active defenses operated with great success during the April 2024 missile attacks from Iran, such weapon systems could never produce a tangible military victory. Long before the advent of nuclear weapons, ancient Chinese military strategist Sun-Tzu warned presciently in The Art of War: “Those who excel at offense move from above the greatest heights of heaven. Thus they are able to preserve themselves and attain complete victory.”
Devising nuclear strategies for averting a nuclear war
FOR THE immediate future, Israel should consider comprehensively whether there could be an auspicious place for nuclear threats directed against its not-yet-nuclear Iranian adversary. In part, “correct answers” will depend on Israel’s prior transformations of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” into “selective nuclear disclosure.” To survive as a state, there could be no more urgent transformations.
Israeli strategists now need to devise optimal strategies for averting a nuclear war with Iran without sacrificing intra-crisis capacities for “escalation dominance.” The difficulty of this task will vary according to (1) presumed Iranian intentions, (2) presumed plausibility of accident or hacking intrusion, and/or (3) presumed plausibility of Iranian decisional miscalculations. In Jerusalem. many core elements of the task will be indecipherable or unpredictable.
It’s time for a purposeful summation. Any specific instance of an accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent, but not every case of inadvertent nuclear war would be the result of an accident.
There is more. “Escalation dominance” should never be approached by Israeli security planners as a narrowly tactical problem. Instead, informed by in-depth historical understandings and appropriately analytic capacities, these strategists should prepare for a self-expanding variety of intersectional explanations.
In the always-bewildering Middle East, competitive dynamics of nuclear deterrence will never simply fade away. In our traditionally anarchic or “self-help” world legal system, Israel must capably prepare to prevail in variously interrelated struggles for “escalation dominance.”
Significantly, however, over time, no matter how carefully, responsibly and comprehensively such preparations are carried out, a world order based on incessant power struggle and competitive risk-taking will fail. It follows that while Israel has no sensible immediate-term alternative to seeking competitive military advantage vis-à-vis Iran, even the most promising advantage could fall short of national survival in the longer-term.
For now, all things considered, Israel’s primary survival obligation is to prepare for “escalation dominance” without enlarging risks of eventual nuclear war with Iran. Such Israeli preparations could represent the best remaining way to keep Iran non-nuclear. Though the pertinent issues are complicated and opaque, they should never be minimized or misunderstood in Jerusalem. The errors could prove to be existential.
The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018).
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