The Middle East has erupted into open war once again.
Iran launched a barrage of missiles into central Israel and at least eight people were killed in an apparent terrorist attack on the streets of Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has unleashed new rounds of rocket attacks against the Jewish state and the Israel Defense Forces are conducting raids into Lebanon, vowing to uproot terrorists from their shared border.
Anticipation is growing over the possibility of an all-out ground invasion of Lebanon by Israel, and the White House is fighting to avoid an all-out regional conflict.
but it is No Just what happens in the coming days and weeks has the Biden administration on high alert.
The president’s national security team is also looking ahead to the dangerous months after the 2024 election: the roughly 90-day period between the Nov. 4 election and the inauguration of the next U.S. president on Jan. 20, 2025. .
It is in this “outgoing duck” interval – when a presidential successor has been chosen but not yet sworn in and the power of the sitting president is at its lowest – that the White House is desperately worried about the outbreak of a ” outgoing duck war”. .’
The Biden team is increasingly concerned that Iran (the patron of Hezbollah and almost all of Israel’s enemies) could take advantage of this period to overcome international restrictions and jump into the race to build a nuclear weapon.
The White House is scrambling to avoid an all-out regional conflict, warning Tuesday morning that Iran is “imminently preparing to launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel” and promising “serious consequences” for Tehran if it does so. (Above) Smoke clouds after an Israeli Air Force airstrike in southern Lebanon on October 1, 2024
Air raid sirens sound across northern and central Israel, as Hezbollah unleashes new rounds of missile attacks on the Jewish state and the Israel Defense Forces conduct raids into Lebanon, vowing to uproot the terrorist group from their shared border. . (Above) Israeli security forces inspect damage caused by a rocket allegedly launched from Lebanon on October 1, 2024.
According to my sources, President Trump has also expressed concern about an Iranian nuclear leak in the final days of Biden’s term.
If Iran decides to stop using the bomb, the United States, Israel and the West will be forced to decide whether to preemptively strike Tehran or stand by while the Islamic Republic becomes a nuclear-armed threat.
Biden is taking this threat very 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 has so far provided Tehran with tens of billions in economic relief. still would have allowed the regime to begin pursuing nuclear weapons after a ten-year hiatus. President Trump withdrew from that agreement in 2018.
The FDD has even criticized President Biden for restricting Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks.
To their credit, however, Biden’s advisers were open to our ideas about permanently deterring Tehran from going nuclear.
The president’s national security team is also looking ahead to the dangerous months after the 2024 election: the roughly 90-day period between the Nov. 4 election and the inauguration of the next U.S. president on Jan. 20, 2025. .
The terrifying reality, however, is that regardless of what Biden does or who wins the November election, President Biden may face 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 talk about confronting Iranian aggression, her team has a distinctively different record.
His current national security adviser, Phil Gordon, previously played a crucial role in shaping President Obama’s Middle East policy, at a time when US-Israel relations were historically toxic and Iran’s aggression was on the rise.
Gordon’s approach has been to engage Tehran and restrain Jerusalem.
The Islamic Republic will look to President Harris as a potential negotiating partner, and far-left Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will try to push the inexperienced new president in an even more anti-Israel direction.
For months within the Biden-Harris administration, intense political debate has raged, pitting the president’s national security team against the vice president’s foreign policy advisers.
For all of Harris’s talk about confronting Iranian aggression, her team has a distinctively different record.
On one side is Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his team, who are obsessed with “de-escalating” the conflict between Israel and its Iran-backed enemies, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. .
Biden has at times forced the Israelis to slow their response to the attacks and withheld or delayed the delivery of crucial bombs and weapons systems.
All this has emboldened Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
But the president frequently supported Israel in the face of harsh criticism from his party’s left flank, sent U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups to waters near Iran and assembled an impressive coalition of Middle Eastern partners, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to help. to defend Israel against the drone and missile attack launched by Tehran on April 13.
It’s a mixed record, to be sure.
But, for Israel, it is better than the alternative.
Israel will see Harris’ impending election as a sign that it has less than 90 days to seriously degrade its regional enemies.
At FDD, we have long warned about Supreme Leader Khamenei’s decades-long strategy to expel US forces from the Middle East, encircle Israel with his terrorist armies, and destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
In 2015, he vowed to destroy Israel by 2040, and a countdown clock was installed in Tehran’s Palestine Square to count down the minutes until that day.
Israel may see no option but to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons program and eliminate Tehran’s top leaders and economic assets.
Such a conflagration would make his crippling beheading attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the destruction of Hamas’s terror and governance capabilities seem tame by comparison.
The second scenario for this outgoing term at the end of Biden’s term is equally complicated.
If Donald Trump wins the election, Iran’s ayatollahs may decide that the time has come to race toward a nuclear bomb, and according to American and Israeli intelligence, Tehran is just one turn away from that goal.
The fundamentalist Islamist regime has mastered the production of fissile material and the long-range missiles needed to deliver a nuclear payload.
The next step is the construction of a warhead and Iranian scientists have reportedly taken the first steps towards designing a weapon.
If Donald Trump wins the election, Iran’s ayatollahs may decide that the time has come to race toward a nuclear bomb, and according to American and Israeli intelligence, Tehran is just one turn away from that goal.
The only thing holding Khamenei back is the instinct of self-preservation.
With memories of crippling Trump-era sanctions that brought Iran’s economy to its knees in 2016, and Trump’s assassination 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 quelled multiple rounds of domestic protests against his rule.
Another round of Western economic warfare may once again turn the population against the Khamenei regime. If we add to this that American and Israeli support for the Iranian protesters and the regime could be at risk.
From this point of view, the Iranian dictator can see an atomic bomb as his only guarantee of survival.
Khamenei could then use a bomb as nuclear blackmail: a sword of Damocles hanging over an American president.
If Khamenei goes for the bomb and Biden doesn’t act, Trump or Harris could take office with radical mullahs in possession of the world’s most dangerous weapons.
Then Khamenei will be on his way to realizing his genocidal ambitions.
