Air raid sirens are sounding throughout northern and central Israel, as Hezbollah unleashes new rounds of missile attacks on the Jewish State and Israeli Defense Forces stage raids into Lebanon, vowing to uproot the terrorist group from their shared border.
Anticipation is now building for the potential of a full Israeli ground invasion.
The White House is scrambling to prevent all-out regional conflict, warning Tuesday morning that Iran is ‘preparing to imminently launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel’, and vowing ‘severe consequences’ for Tehran if they do.
It is not, however, only what happens in the next few days and weeks that is terrifying the Biden administration.
The President’s national security team is also now looking ahead to the dangerous months after the 2024 election – the roughly 90-day period between the election on November 4 and the inauguration of America’s next president on January 20, 2025.
It is in this ‘lame duck’ interval — when a presidential successor has been chosen but not yet sworn into office and the incumbent president’s power is at its lowest ebb — that the White House is desperately worried about the outbreak of a ‘lame duck war.’
Biden’s team has grown increasingly concerned that Iran (patron of Hezbollah and nearly all of Israel’s enemies) may seize on this period to blow off international restraints and race to build a nuclear weapon.
President Trump, too, has raised concerns over an Iranian nuclear breakout in the waning days of Biden’s term, according to my sources.
If Iran does make a break for the bomb, America, Israel and the West will be forced to decide whether to preemptively strike Tehran or standby while the Islamic Republic becomes a nuclear-armed menace.
Biden is taking this threat extremely seriously.
I know this because in the spring, the administration asked my think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) for ideas on what they should do.
The FDD is a well-known critic of former President Barack Obama’s fatally flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which gifted Tehran tens of billions in economic relief yet still would have allowed the regime to begin to pursue nuclear weapons after a ten-year pause. President Trump withdrew from that agreement in 2018.
FDD has even taken President Biden to task for restraining Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks.
However, to his credit, Biden’s advisors were open to our ideas on permanently deterring Tehran from going nuclear.
The frightening reality, though, is that no matter what Biden does or who wins the election in November, President Biden may be faced with the most treacherous foreign policy dilemma in generations.
In one scenario, Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election.
This will signal to Tehran that they can expect more sympathetic treatment from the White House.
For all of Harris’s lip service about standing up to Iranian aggression, her team has a distinctively different record.
Her current national security advisor Phil Gordon previously played a crucial role in designing President Obama’s Middle East policy – a time when U.S.-Israel relations were historically toxic and Iran’s aggression was on the ascent.
Gordon’s approach has been to engage Tehran and restrain Jerusalem.
The Islamic Republic will see a potential negotiating partner in a President Harris – and far-left Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will try to push the inexperienced new president into an even more anti-Israel direction.
For months inside the Biden-Harris administration, an intense policy debate has been raging – pitting the President’s national security team against the Vice President’s foreign policy advisors.
On one side is Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan and his team who are obsessed with ‘de-escalation’ of the conflict between Israel and its Iranian-backed enemies, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran-backed militias in Iraq.
At times, Biden has forced the Israelis to rein in their response to attacks and withheld or delayed the delivery of crucial weapons systems and bombs.
All of this has emboldened Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
But the president frequently stood by Israel in the face of withering criticism from the left flank of his party, sent US carrier strike groups to the waters near Iran and assembled an impressive coalition of Middle Eastern partners, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to help defend Israel against Tehran’s April 13 drone and missile attack.
It’s a mixed record, for sure.
But, for Israel, it’s better than the alternative.
Israel will view Harris’s impending election as a signal that they have less than 90 days to severely degrade their regional enemies.
At FDD, we have long warned about supreme leader Khamenei’s decades-long strategy to drive American forces out of the Middle East, surround Israel with its terrorist proxy armies and destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
In 2015, he vowed to destroy Israel by 2040 – and a countdown clock was erected in Tehran’s Palestine Square to tick off the minutes until that day.
Israel may see little choice but to strike at Iran’s nuclear weapons program and take out Tehran’s senior leadership and economic assets.
Such a conflagration would make their crippling decapitation strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the destruction of Hamas’s terror and governance capabilities look tame by comparison.
The second scenario for this lame-duck period at the end of Biden’s term is equally fraught.
If Donald Trump wins the election, Iran’s ayatollahs may decide it is now time for them to race towards a nuclear bomb – and, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence, Tehran is just a turn of the screw from that goal.
The Islamist fundamentalist regime has mastered the production of fissile material and the long-range missiles that are necessary for delivering a nuclear payload.
The next step is the construction of a warhead and Iranian scientists have reportedly taken initial steps toward the design of a weapon.
The only thing holding Khamenei back is an instinct for self-preservation.
With memories of crippling Trump-era sanctions that brought Iran’s economy to its knees in 2016, and Trump’s killing of his most trusted and lethal battlefield commander Qasem Suleimani, Khamenei may decide that a Trump administration is too dangerous for him.
Since 2009, Khamenei and his shock troops have put down multiple rounds of domestic protests against their rule.
Another round of Western economic warfare may tip the population against Khamenei’s regime yet again. Add to that American and Israeli support for Iranian protesters and the regime could be at risk.
In this light, the Iranian dictator may see an A-bomb as his only guarantee of survival.
Khamenei could then use a bomb as nuclear blackmail – a sword of Damocles that he hangs over an American president.
Trump or Harris may win office with radical mullahs holding the most deadly weapons in the world if Khamenei rushes for the bomb and Biden does nothing. By then, Khamenei will have accomplished his goal of committing genocide.
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