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struck me from that first meeting as strong, cool-headed, highly intelligent and
intensely cerebral. Though we didn’t go into the details of the Iranian nuclear
threat, he did talk at some length about the implications for the region, and about
broader Middle Eastern security challenges. He displayed a grasp of the cultural
and political nuances of an increasingly diverse and complex world that was more
impressive than many of the other American political or military leaders whom I’d
met.

When he and I now returned to the issue of Iran, in the White House, he had an
undeniable command of the details of Iran’s nuclear program, and of the American
military options, should he choose to use them. He opened by summarizing the US
position. He emphasized that his and our objective was the same: the keep Iran
from developing a nuclear weapon. We were already cooperating to achieve that,
for instance through cyber-attacks to slow down the nuclear program. The
difference, he said, was that Israeli leaders seemed to feel an urgent need to reach a
decision on military action. In Obama’s view, such a move would be both
premature and potentially harmful to the coalition he’d helped assemble to exert
diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran.

Maybe you had to be an Israeli truly to understand our urgency about Iran. In
the early years of the state, the explanation we gave for our preoccupation with
security – our near-obsession, as some non-Israelis saw it – was that we were
surrounded by Arab countries pledged not just to defeat us, but erase us from the
map. Egypt or Syria, Jordan or Iraq, could afford to lose an Arab-Israeli war.
Israel’s first defeat, however, would be its last. That picture had changed
dramatically over the decades. We no longer had to worry about the prospect of
losing a war. The “qualitative edge” we possessed over all enemy armies in the
region ensured that. As Israel’s chief of staff, Prime Minister, and now Defense
Minister, I had made it a major priority to safeguard that advantage, not just
through our alliance with the US but with the remarkable domestic resources we
possessed in military engineering, manufacturing, design, invention and high-tech.
But the new-order challenge represented by Iran was not just theoretical or
academic. Though we had a policy of not commenting on on our own nuclear
status, it was widely assumed in the Arab world and internationally that Israel had,
at the very least, the capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons. But whatever
nuclear capability we might possess was for deterrence. Even when threatened
with conventional defeat, however briefly, in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, it is

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