Ehud Barak was Israel’s 10th prime minister. Before and after that, he was Israel’s minister of defense. He also served as minister of foreign affairs, and chief of the General Staff of Israel’s defense forces. Today Barak and I had a wide-ranging conversation in which we spoke about Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah, Bibi, the peace process, Israel’s Labor party, and his new book My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace. This is a transcript of the first of two parts, edited for clarity.
Adam Rubenstein: So, Iran: Trump announced yesterday that the U.S. is reimposing sanctions, the U.S. is out of the Iran Deal. Did he make the right move? What’s next?
Ehud Barak: You know, I thought that there was not enough reason to pull out, but one thing: Once he pulls out, it’s effective. We have to look into the advantages here of it, and of the risk. So the advantage is that the Iranians, because they are worried and because they know the American’s next step might be to find the slightest mistake, in some area somehow related to the deal—and it might be followed by an attack on some installation, a surgical attack—so, they might end up behaving more cautiously, they might be more controlled, disciplined.
AR: So it might be a good thing?
EB: That might be a positive a consequence. The other side is that the deal is still there. Because America pulled out doesn’t mean that others will pull out. I doubt whether they will. So, Europeans will continue, some multinational corporations will probably be constrained by the American cloud on the financial world. But the others, Russia and China, for sure will be ready to fill the vacuum. And even some European companies might find partners, somewhere in the far east, to bypass these sanctions.
For Iran, if they at any stage in the future try to or contemplate breaking out, it might be a source of legitimacy that the U.S. already left the deal, so it doesn’t commit them to the deal. I don’t think that’s going to be the case, now or in the near term.
AR: In the short term, you’ve written, you don’t think Iran is an existential threat.
EB: Not to Israel. And not the world. Of course it’s a potential existential threat—if it reactivates its nuclear program. But there is the commitment of the world not to let it happen. And Israel is there, we’re not totally helpless in this regard. We already considered once to do it. And all of the options are still on the table.
I still want to make one last mention, that with regard to the North Korea negotiations: there is a certain element here that doesn’t help. The North Koreans might argue what sense it makes to negotiate a deal with an American president and then you wake up and he’s replaced with the president who just cancels it or just pulls out. It somehow hurts the consistency.
AR: You had considered in the 2000s, as defense minister, launching an attack on Iran. Why didn’t you? Did you not have the political or technical capability?
EB: You know, there were different reasons in different years. There was a different one in 2009, 2010, and in 2011. We basically tried to set up a situation where we could do it.
AR: Well in your book, you write about discussing it with Leon Panetta . . . when he asked how long before a strike would you inform the U.S., and you had told him, only a few hours. Do you wish you had attacked, then?
EB: No, we were very confident then, that we know enough about American protocols of sending the alarm that we can give in case we decided to act, we could give them an early warning, one which would cause no risk to any American or anyone else.
AR: So do you wish that you had attacked?
EB: I’m dealing with the real world, not with wishes. I thought that we had to be ready to act and to prepare the ground, operationally. We needed operational capability. There needed to be political will, we were not trigger-happy, so there had to be compelling reason to think that if we didn’t do it now, there would be no opportunity to do it later.
And, international legitimacy was a consideration. There were certain understandings that we were acting because all other means didn’t work. These were the preconditions. I hoped that these preconditions would work, but for this or that reason, in each of those years, it wasn’t totally closed or tightly wrapped [enough] to make a decision.
