Living in Israel over the past several years, I have witnessed firsthand the escalating confrontation between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The direct clashes of June 2025 and since March 2026 revolved around a single issue that has shaped Middle Eastern geopolitics for decades: Iran’s nuclear program.

The positions are familiar.

Israel argues that the Iranian regime is pursuing the capability to produce nuclear weapons and that such a development would pose an existential threat to the Jewish state. Given Tehran’s longstanding hostility toward Israel and repeated calls for the elimination of the “Zionist entity”, Israeli leaders insist they cannot afford to wait until that capability is fully realized.

Iran, meanwhile, maintains that its nuclear program serves exclusively civilian purposes. Critics of Israeli military action therefore accuse Jerusalem of escalating a conflict based on assumptions rather than proven intentions.

Yet there is another way to approach the debate.

Instead of asking whether Iran seeks nuclear weapons, perhaps we should ask a different question: What lessons would any authoritarian regime draw from the war in Ukraine?

For me, this question carries a personal dimension. In 2019, I spent twelve months deployed to Ukraine as part of the European Union Border Assistance........

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