This week, the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to release its latest report on Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. If the leaks are to be believed, that report will accuse Iran of constructing a steel tank at the Parchin military complex for testing explosives associated with atomic weapons design. The allegation is hardly new. Since 2004, there have been suspicions of work at Parchin related to weapons design and in May this year the agency listed a series of research projects it suggested could not make sense unless related to weapons research.

If the report is significant, it is because with each new IAEA report on Iran comes a familiar diplomatic ritual of threatened new sanctions from the US and its allies and reports of threatened military strikes from Israel. If there is a difference this time, it is in the strong impression, after years of veiled threats from Israel, that it will act alone if necessary to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, that the country's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and his closest allies in a cabinet split on the issue would like to launch a pre-emptive military strike, a view opposed by other senior figures in Israel's security establishment.

There are many reasons for the international community to oppose Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, not least the fact that nuclear arms proliferation is a dangerous and retrograde step in a world that has been reducing its stockpiles. Indeed, there is much merit in calls by many Arab states for the Middle East to be a nuclear-free zone whose major sticking point, ironically, is Israel's insistence on maintaining a substantial and undeclared nuclear stockpile.

Despite that caveat, the doctrine of pre-emptive retaliation – being invoked to justify a possible attack on Iranian nuclear facilities – is one with a dangerous and disreputable history. It was used most recently by President George W Bush and his allies to launch the invasion of Iraq.

To have any justification for its use, it requires an immediate and proximate threat, as existed when Israel was faced with Egyptian tank divisions manoeuvring on its borders to the loud drum beat of war, which persuaded Israel to attack first in the 1967 Six Day War. For the suggested pre-emptive strike against Iran, however, no such justifications exist.

While those favouring an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities hope that this week's IAEA report will contain conclusive proof that Iran is engaged in weapon design, ownership and use are very different issues. Tehran, despite its recent history of interference in the region and its support for groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Shia militias in Iraq, has avoided overt aggression against any of its neighbours.

Indeed, Iranian regional power, far from being on the rise as seemed to be happening only a handful of years ago, has been eclipsed by recent events, not least the repositioning of Turkey, the events of the Arab Spring and its own failed Green Revolution which has focused its attention inwards.

It is true that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has voiced a profound antipathy for Israel, which has been interpreted in many quarters as threatening the existence of the Jewish state. But behind the rhetoric Iran's clerical elite is well aware of the consequences that an Iranian nuclear attack – or Iranian-sponsored attack – on Israel would provoke, not least retaliation from a US that has committed itself to the defence of Israel.

The reality is that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons is seen as a threat for reasons partly of Israel's own making – foremost its absolute reliance on a policy of military supremacy and deterrence to underpin security. A nuclear-armed Iran would hole that policy below the waterline, making it far more difficult, for instance, to launch the kind of war it waged against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.

Israel's recent posturing ahead of the IAEA meeting, which included testing a new long-range missile and launching a long-range air strike exercise, is a doubly dangerous game. For while some senior Israeli air force officers are understood to support Netanyahu's desire to strike Iran sooner rather than later, other independent analysis is far more sceptical of Israel's ability to cause lasting damage on Iran's nuclear programme, suggesting that it might require up to a fifth of the country's operational aircraft to inflict serious harm, which could still fall short of Israel's desired outcome. Some experts have estimated that even a successful raid on Iran would buy Israel only four years at best while encouraging Iran to redouble its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

If that is the short-term analysis, then in the medium term the risks for Israel perhaps would be greater still. With its regional alliances with friendly states quickly unravelling in the fall-out from the Arab Spring, from Israel's botched attack on the Turkish-flagged MV Mavi Marmara and from its war against Gaza, an attack on the scale required to halt Iran's nuclear programme is unlikely to improve either its relations with its neighbours or Israel's security environment.

All of which leads to the question – if the consequences carry such risk for so little benefit, why are Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, pushing the plan?

One possibility is that Netanyahu is determined to impose the terms of the debate about the issues raised by the IAEA report at a time when it is clear that both Russia and China are lukewarm on the prospect of further sanctions against Tehran. If that is Netanyahu's aim – to use the threat of war to leverage diplomatic effect – it is the behaviour of a tinpot state, not the mature democracy Israel claims to be.

Far more worrying is the notion that Netanyahu, who has long chafed against President Obama's strictures on settlement building and the peace process, and is said to be obsessed with the issue of Iran, is contemplating an attack having calculated he has sufficient friends in Congress to defy the White House.

Whatever Netanyahu is thinking, he is playing a high-risk game for even higher stakes, betting Israel's security and international prestige against an uncertain outcome, even by allowing it to be suggested that Israel might strike. After Israel's failure to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, its failure to break Hamas in Gaza in 2009 – and with the international opprobrium that followed that operation – Israel risks talking itself into a corner where it appears weak if it doesn't act and perhaps weaker if it does, a country increasingly bereft of any notion of how to manage relations with its neighbours except through the threat of aggression.