Kamala, what’s your plan for Iran?

I can’t imagine voting for Donald Trump, not least because I believe in democracy and it’s clear, after January 6th, the “stop the steal” campaign, and his open admiration of dictators, that he does not. And yet the prospect of a Harris victory also fills me with ambivalence and unease. That’s because Israel is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Iran, which has vowed to destroy the Jewish state. Even as its proxies attack Israel from multiple directions, Iran is terrifyingly close to producing a nuclear bomb.

Harris owes it to the American people to tell us what her plan — vis-à-vis Iran — will be. Harris has expressed her support for a two-state solution numerous times and has said she will use the leverage the United States has as Israel’s primary provider of weapons to influence Israeli military policy. That’s pretty specific. But Harris has remained mum or spewed generalities concerning Iran. Does she believe that a Palestinian state can happen while Iran continues to preach the destruction of Israel while training and arming the likes of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi? If so, let us know how, because the defanging of Iran and progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are intimately connected. Would Harris allow Iran to become a nuclear power? The Biden administration has said it would not, but not much more. We need to hear from Harris: How far would she go to prevent a nuclear Iran?

Harris owes it to us as well to say how she now sees Obama’s JCPOA, the agreement meant to prevent a nuclear Iran, at least for a while. As part of the agreement, Obama released $150 billion to Iran that sanctions had frozen. That money, we know now, enabled Iran to create a radical Shiite arc stretching across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, thus spanning the entirety of Israel’s northern border. Those billions were used by Iran to partner with Assad in the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslim civilians, men women, and children, including through the use of chemical weapons. The left’s discourse in the United States on Iran largely ignores the central Iranian role in the Syrian genocide. Iran not only financed the murders, they had boots — and tanks — on the ground. Tens of thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guards troops orchestrated the massacres from within Syria, joining Hezbollah and other Shiite militias recruited by Iran. The JCPOA signing windfall also helped Hezbollah consolidate its power in Lebanon, hollowing out the Lebanese state and causing great suffering to its people.

Maybe the agreement, which Trump abandoned, would have been worth all this death and destruction. There are disagreements on this point, but apparently, Iran was largely complying and had stopped increasing its enrichment of uranium, although it continued to develop long-range missiles seemingly designed to carry a nuclear warhead. Trump’s abrogation of the agreement was unwise, so it seems in retrospect – the $150 billion of damage had already been done and now Iran is much closer to nuclear capability than when Trump left the agreement.

But if stopping Iran from getting the bomb was worth hundreds of thousands of lives and an extension of Iranian power right through to the Mediterranean, doesn’t that imply that preventing Iran from getting an atomic bomb should still be a major priority of American policy now? Don’t we deserve a more robust articulation of this goal, beyond the perfunctory “Iran must not get the bomb” that we have heard so far? Yes, Harris has said that she wants to return to the JCPOA, but what does that even mean today when Iran is days away from a bomb – or perhaps already has it? Does the US have the leverage today, considering Iran’s oil deals with China and close relationship with Russia, to get an effective agreement signed? For which kinds of terms would Harris hold out? What would Harris do about the Iranian arming of vicious regimes and terrorist groups, whose activities in any case threaten to engulf the Middle East in flames?

If I had to choose one flaw in the political discourse and legacy media coverage of post-October-7th Israel, it is its failure to understand the extent to which an empowered Iran and its proxies attacking Israel from the north, south and east represent an existential threat to the revived and renewed Jewish nation. We have our backs to the wall, and everything we are doing is a function of that fact. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the Iranian regime, stupid.” Kamala Harris needs to etch these words into her brain if she wants to truly create a horizon for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And if she wants us to believe her about “having Israel’s back,” Ms. Harris must tell us more, much more, about her plan to contain Iran.