5 takeaways from Israel’s assassination of Iran’s top nuclear weapons scientist
The Biden administration has prioritized America’s return to the 2015 JCPOA nuclear accord. What happened on Friday shows just how challenging this will be.
By assassinating the figurative and literal godfather of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Israel is laying down a marker to the incoming U.S. president. Fakhrizadeh was involved in nuclear weapons research, something the Israelis know that the Biden team knows. This attack serves as a message from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President-elect Joe Biden that he intends to escalate his covert action on Tehran regardless of Washington’s policy. The Biden administration will not be able to ignore this pressure and pursue U.S. policy separate from it. After all, Iran’s hard-liner factions perceive and politicize Israeli intelligence activity as a symbiotic extension of U.S. foreign policy. They will hold the U.S. partly responsible for what has happened. Moreover, considering Iran’s sustaining blood feud with the U.S. over its January assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani, this attack makes it even likelier that Iran will retaliate against U.S. interests in some form in the first year of Biden’s presidency. Iran fears how President Trump might retaliate to any attack but believes that the Biden administration would respond timidly. That latter understanding is not without good reason, considering that the Obama administration did next to nothing when the IRGC attempted to blow up a Washington, D.C., restaurant in 2011. But come 2021, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, is likely to retain a sizable U.S. government security detail after leaving office.