Lieberman’s statement reflected the view of many in Congress and in the Obama Administration. As Presidential candidates in 2008, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had warned of an Iranian nuclear arsenal, and occasionally spoke as if it were an established fact that Iran had decided to get the bomb. In Obama’s first prime-time news conference as President, in early February, 2009, he declared that Iran’s “financing of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, the bellicose language that they’ve used towards Israel, their development of a nuclear weapon, or their pursuit of a nuclear weapon—that all of those things create the possibility of destabilizing the region and are not only contrary to our interests but I think are contrary to the interests of international peace.”

Thomas E. Donilon, Obama’s national-security adviser, returned to that theme a few weeks ago. In a speech on May 12th to the Washington Institution for Near East Policy, he said that the United States would continue its aggressive sanctions policy until Iran proves that its enrichment intentions are peaceful and meets all its obligations under the nonproliferation treaty, to which Iran is a signatory. “Like all N.P.T. parties, Iran has the right to peaceful nuclear energy,” Donilon said. “But it also has a responsibility to fulfill its obligations. There is no alternative to doing so.” He did not mention the current intelligence stating that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran is making any efforts to weaponize; nor could he say that the current sanctions regime is aimed at forcing Iran to stop a nuclear-weapons program that does not exist. Later in his speech, however, Donilon said that Iran’s nuclear program “is part of a larger pattern of destabilizing activities throughout the region. . . . We have no illusions about the Iranian regime’s regional ambitions. We know that they will try to exploit this period of tumult and will remain vigilant. . . . The door to diplomacy remains open to Iran. But that diplomacy must be meaningful and not a tactical attempt to ward off sanctions.”

America’s sanctions policy thus is increasingly aimed, as Donilon indicated, at changing Iran’s political behavior, and the spectre of nuclear-weapons development has become a tool for accomplishing that goal.

President Obama has been prudent in his public warnings about the consequences of an Iranian bomb, but he and others in his Administration have often overstated the available intelligence about Iranian intentions. Last October, Dennis Ross, a leading Administration adviser on the region, told a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that “the challenge of Iran” was “a foremost national-security priority of the United States.” He said that Iran had “significantly expanded its nuclear program,” and accused it of pursuing the program “in violation of its international obligations.” He also repeated the President’s declaration that his Administration was “determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

“The point here is that the pressure on Iran only continues to grow,” Ross told the AIPAC convention. “Ultimately, we hope that the severe pressure Iran faces today will compel a change in behavior. . . . Its leaders should listen carefully to President Obama, who has said many times, ‘We are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.’ ” The Obama Administration has played a leading role in winning more sanctions against Iran in the United Nations, the European Union, and Congress. The sanctions bar a wide array of weapons and missile sales to Iran, and make it more difficult for banks and other financial institutions to do business there.

In early March, Robert Einhorn, the special adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for nonproliferation and arms control, gave a talk about the Iranian nuclear posture to the Arms Control Association, in which he went beyond the findings of the most recent N.I.E. “They are clearly acquiring all the necessary elements of a nuclear-weapons capability,” Einhorn said. Leonard Spector, the deputy director of nonproliferation studies at the Monterey Institute, and a fellow arms-control expert, pointedly asked whether the Obama Administration now believed that Iran has re-started weaponization activities. Einhorn said, “The N.I.E. addresses this issue, but, as I mentioned before, it remains classified.” Einhorn also referred Spector to the most recent I.A.E.A. report on Iran, which, like previous reports, included a complaint that Tehran was refusing to help resolve a number of issues that were preventing the agency from establishing that all nuclear activities in Iran were peaceful. Iran maintains that the issues in dispute were based solely on fabricated documents. (Einhorn said in an e-mail that he would prefer not to discuss Iranian weaponization with me, as did a spokesman for Gary Samore, President Obama’s special assistant for arms control.)

Officials in Western Europe and Israel told me what their governments had concluded about Iranian nuclear weapons. Although none knew of any specific evidence of an Iranian weapons program, all said that they believed that Iran was intent on getting the bomb––and quickly. One senior European diplomat complained about America’s N.I.E. process. “The American intelligence community was trying desperately not to be blamed anew for an intelligence assessment, as it was in Iraq,” he said. “I think Iraq paralyzed the community, and its first N.I.E. on Iran was disastrous, in my view, because it conflated weaponization with the process of developing a nuclear weapon. Weaponization is only a part of the process, but there are other parts as well, including enrichment and the development of delivery systems. Yet to the layman the N.I.E. meant that Iran hadn’t been weaponizing. Yes, it may very well be the case that there is no evidence of developing a nuclear weapon. To me, that is not the whole basis of making a judgment. The more important questions are: Is Iran behaving in a way that would be rational if they were not developing a nuclear weapon? And the answer on that is very clear—their behavior only makes sense if their goal is to have the bomb. And are they doing the other elements of developing a bomb? And they definitely are. There may or may not be weaponization in Iran today, but I don’t think it is an interesting question. It says nothing about their intention.” The diplomat cited as evidence of Iran’s weapons intent its decision to enrich some uranium to a purity level of twenty per cent for medical purposes.

Israel views Iran, which provides material and military support to Hezbollah, Hamas, and other such groups, as an existential threat. Many of its generals and political leaders have insisted for decades that once the Iranian leadership acquired a bomb—an inevitability, in their view—they would use it against Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, despite the certainty of massive retaliation. Nevertheless, most Israeli military experts agree that Iran does not now have a nuclear weapon and fear regional proliferation more than they do attack. In January, Meir Dagan, the Mossad chief between 2002 and 2010, marked his retirement by declaring that he did not believe Iran would become a nuclear power before 2015. The statement contradicted many previous Israeli estimates. But, as a former senior adviser to a Labor Prime Minister of Israel told me, the extended timeline revolves, in part, around domestic politics. Dagan believed that Iran should be handled with covert action, not with a major bombing assault. (Israeli fighter pilots have been training for years at the Hatzerim airbase, in the Negev, and at a foreign site, for a potential raid on known and suspected nuclear-weapons facilities in Iran.) “Meir is doing two things,” the former official told me. “He’s basically saying, ‘I’ve overcome the Iranian threat with covert action,’ and he’s trying to screw up Bibi’s options for going forward with an attack on Iran. And he’s also keeping Bibi from taking credit for keeping Iran from going nuclear.”

The political infighting in Israel over the Iranian threat continued in early May, when Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense Minister, told the daily paper Haaretz that he did not believe that Iran would drop a nuclear bomb on Israel or any other country in the region. He added, in a clear swipe at Netanyahu, that Israel should not spread public fear about the Iranian nuclear program. “I don’t think in terms of panic,” Barak said. “I don’t think [the Iranian leadership] will do anything so long as they are in complete control of their senses, but to say that somebody really knows and understands what will happen with such a leadership sitting in a bunker in Tehran and thinking that it’s going to fall in a few days . . . I don’t know what it would do.”

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Early in the Obama Administration, Secretary of State Clinton provoked a brief diplomatic furor by raising the concept of an American nuclear deterrent to protect our allies in the Middle East. At a news conference in Bangkok, in July of 2009, Clinton noted the fears of Iran’s neighbors “who come to see me and convey their deep apprehension about what might happen” if Iran gets the bomb. She then began discussing the possibility of an American nuclear umbrella in the area, which would give the Iranians pause, “because they won’t be able to intimidate and dominate, as they apparently believe they can, once they have a nuclear weapon.” The obvious inference was that Iran recognized the limits of nuclear power and the possibility of mutual assured destruction (MAD), the deterrent that may have kept the United States and the Soviet Union from waging nuclear warfare at the height of the Cold War.

Clinton’s remarks prompted Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, to say, “I was not thrilled to hear the American statement from yesterday that they will protect their allies with a nuclear umbrella, as if they had already come to terms with a nuclear Iran.” Clinton quickly clarified her comments, saying that the Obama Administration was not backing away from its commitment to prevent Iran from developing the bomb. In a subsequent Sunday-morning television interview, Clinton warned Iran, “You do not have a right to obtain a nuclear weapon. You do not have the right to have the full enrichment and reprocessing cycle under your control.”

A round of negotiations five months ago between Iran and the West, first in Geneva and then in Istanbul, yielded little progress. Iran continued to insist on the same two preconditions that prevented progress in earlier meetings: that the United States and its allies lift all sanctions and acknowledge Iran’s right to enrich uranium. The American response to Iran’s demand, as Einhorn told the Arms Control Association in his speech a few weeks later, would be more sanctions. “We have determined that in the wake of Istanbul we have no choice but to increase the cost to Iran of refusing to engage seriously.” He revealed that, because of sanctions, in recent years Iran may have lost as much as sixty billion dollars in much needed energy investments. He described other setbacks—to the shipping, banking, and transportation industries—all aimed at forcing Iran to return to negotiations. But Einhorn also acknowledged the limitation of sanctions: “While Iran’s leaders are feeling the pressure, the sanctions have not yet produced a change in Iran’s strategic thinking about its nuclear program.”

During the Cold War, Cuba was similarly confronted by American economic sanctions. Those sanctions took effect in 1962, after Fidel Castro’s nationalization of American companies doing business there. Fifty years later, the boycott is still largely in place, and so is the regime.

Meanwhile, the Iranian economy has been bolstered by booming trade with its neighbors and closer ties with Turkey and Syria. The economic and political ties with Turkey are especially significant, because Turkey has been vocal about its opposition to an Iranian bomb. “We tell the Iranians all the time that we would not like to see a nuclear bomb in Iran,” a senior Turkish diplomat told me. “They know the price of not telling the truth.” Billions of dollars annually in food, oil, and other goods are crossing Iran’s borders, and this has strengthened Iran’s political ties with its neighbors and established the country as a regional power base and as a counterweight to the Israeli and American influence.

The political stress between Washington and Tehran has promoted some unconventional thinking. A group of English diplomats and public officials have suggested thinking in terms of containing an Iranian bomb, and not in terms of getting rid of it. “We just don’t think the Iranians will deal with us,” a former senior adviser to the British Foreign Office told me. “We want to talk about nuclear bombs, and they talk about regional issues.” The officials at 10 Downing Street were amused by the initial optimism of the Obama Administration. “The President thought an initiative to talk about the bomb with Iran would work, and then he found it would not. And the U.S. had no Plan B.”

One of the worries is that Netanyahu “might take a pot shot” at Iran, as the former adviser put it. “Everything in London is now about containment and the notion that if the Iranians get a bomb we’ll have to live with it. I believe that the Iranians do understand the logic of nuclear deterrence, but the Israelis do not. London believes we cannot allow containment to be seen as a policy of failure”—in terms of a fallback policy for dealing with Iran. “And so we’re trying to shift the public perception of deterrence so it is seen as a good. The Brits are really concerned about the Israelis, and what they might do unilaterally.”

A third approach, championed by the American diplomat Thomas Pickering and others, is to accept Iran’s nuclear-power program, but to try to internationalize it and offer Iran various incentives. Pickering is a retired ambassador who, having served in Russia, India, Israel, Jordan, and elsewhere, ended his public career by serving for three and a half years as the Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Clinton Administration. He has been active in many public organizations, including the American Iranian Council, which is devoted to the normalization of relations with Iran, and most recently he has been involved in secret, back-channel talks with Palestinian leaders, with Afghanis, and with some of the key advisers close to Ahmadinejad in Iran. His communications with Iran, known informally as Track II talks, have been shared since early 2005 with Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. In a recent interview, Pickering would not discuss the details of his contacts with Iran, but he did express cautious support for the findings of the 2011 N.I.E. When asked for his views about an Iranian bomb, Pickering said, “I’ve seen nothing to indicate there is a there there, but there are indications of intent. And there may be programs we don’t know about. Even if the Iranians can be mechanical klutzes, we believe they can enrich uranium to ninety per cent.”