Ambassador Jack Lew, writing in these pages, lays out a series of reasonable, compelling recommendations for how to repair the US-Israel relationship, and correctly diagnoses some of the internal political dynamics in both Israel and the US that have threatened to derail it. Both dynamics are, essentially, demographic in origin: a younger electorate in the US has grown up with an image of Israel as a Western-supported Goliath, having forgotten how Western-style armies (first German and then Soviet-supplied Arab forces) targeted a friendless Jewish people for extermination. Meanwhile, a younger electorate in Israel, having experienced firsthand twenty-five years of post-Oslo Palestinian intransigence and terror attacks, has grown increasingly right-wing, emboldening extremist elements in Netanyahu’s coalition.

Nevertheless, it is fair to question whether the ambassador was correct to close his important piece by stating that Israel must accept ‘that diplomatic engagement will be needed to prevent Iran from developing a military nuclear capability.’ Having served at the highest reaches of the Obama administration in the period when the JCPOA, seeking to prevent or at least delay Iran’s nuclear program via diplomatic engagement, was a top priority, it is unsurprising that Ambassador Lew should promote this view. But is it correct? Does diplomatic engagement alone to limit nuclear proliferation actually work? Or does only force, or the threat of it, prevent the spread of what the early nuclear theorist Bernard Brodie called ‘the ultimate weapon’?

Having begun his career as a foreign policy aide to congressional Democratic leadership during the closing years of the Cold War, Lew has seen successful nuclear diplomacy in action: the 1986 Reykjavik talks and subsequent INF treaty were uniquely effective in de-escalating nuclear tensions in Europe, by eliminating short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles there. But the success of these talks was largely due to Gorbachev’s desire to reform the declining Soviet empire from within, by ratcheting down Cold War tensions. Only an underlying political thaw between the two powers allowed significant progress in arms control, after decades of........

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