Originally Posted by
rickair7777
First part is true, for now. But DPRK worked it's range up, IR could eventually do the same.
But there is an element of potentially extreme irrational behavior in their command & control, so while I mostly am comfortable with DPRK not launching on the US unprovoked, I'm not at all sure about IR... they poked the IL bear to the breaking and got full FAFO. Did they learn their lesson? Obviously not so far.
Policy wise, they define IL as the "little satan" and the US as the "great satan"... if they'd do it to IL, there's absolutely no reason to think they wouldn't do it to us.
Also they are objectively the nation most likely to actually use nukes, and any such use would probably be catastrophically disruptive to the global economy. I do care about that, and want .gov to do something about it.
The discussion of, "preventing Iran from building and obtaining a nuclear weapon,” is the distraction. If Iran decommissioned their nuke program today, the Israeli policy on Iran would not change. The publicly stated goal of Israel is regime change in Iran. Thats the end state of this. Israel cannot do that on their own and they must have American help to do so.
In 1967, every Arab country was adversarial to the state of Israel. Several of them engaged in direct combat. In the preceding decades, every Arab government who did not surrender and become quasi-vassal states were subject to regime change. The United States was the combatant arm of Israeli foreign policy for nearly every one of them. Iraq, Lybia, Syria, Houthi’s, Arab Spring, ect.. Many of us, myself included, took part in these operations.
There is only one adversarial country left that threatens Israeli national security, Iran.
For the sake of not getting banned, Im not going to state on this site who specifically runs US foreign policy, but suffice it to say they have Wikipedia pages with early life sections….