The American Left is becoming Iran’s defense attorney.
In today's "progressive" foreign-policy imagination, Iranian aggression is contextual, Israeli deterrence is provocative, and the Jewish state is always at fault.
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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is a special kind of Washington, D.C. genius that looks at the Middle East, sees Iran sitting on a mountain of near-weapons-grade uranium, firing missiles through its proxies, hiding nuclear work from inspectors, and chanting death threats like it’s karaoke night at the apocalypse — and says:
You know who we really need to worry about?
Israel.
That is much of the current Democratic Party’s foreign policy brain trust at work, a contradiction in terms so perfect it makes “Michael Jackson’s child-care advisors” sound like a blue-ribbon commission.
Thirty Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by Representative Joaquin Castro, sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio a letter demanding that the United States publicly cough up the details of Israel’s nuclear capabilities — warheads, launchers, fissile-material production, Dimona, doctrine, red lines, use thresholds, the works.
In other words, while Iran is the country that built secret enrichment facilities, blew past civilian enrichment needs, armed and trained Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and turned the enire region into a missile petting zoo, these Democrats want to subpoena the Jewish state’s deterrent.
If your nonproliferation policy on Iran begins with “First, expose Israel,” you’re not doing arms control. You’re part of what should be called “The Ayatollah’s Congressional Caucus.”
Castro letter’s theory is not subtle. It says Iran and Saudi Arabia make nuclear decisions based on the “perceived capabilities” of their neighbors and argues that U.S. silence about Israel’s arsenal makes coherent Middle East nonproliferation impossible.
The letter even invokes the 2006 testimony of Robert Gates, during his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Defense, that Iran is surrounded by nuclear powers — Pakistan, Russia, Israel, and the United States in the Gulf. The implication is not exactly hidden under a Persian rug: Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, at least partly, a “rational response” to Israel.
That is how we got from “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” to “Israel made them do it.” It is nonproliferation as couples therapy: “I only enriched uranium to 60 percent because Israel wouldn’t be emotionally available about Dimona1.”
And the congressional letter is only the elected-politician version of a much broader Democratic Party catechism. Israel attacked before diplomacy was exhausted and “without credible evidence” that the attack was necessary at that precise moment. So that explains why Iran, which signatories claimed was not a nuclear threat, has become one.
Ilan Goldenberg, J Street’s senior policy chief and a veteran of Democratic Party foreign policy circles, made the argument more explicitly. After Israel’s strike, Iran would “almost certainly” conclude that its only real deterrent is a nuclear weapons arsenal. In the long run, Iran is “almost certainly going for a nuclear weapon” unless diplomacy somehow changes the equation.
So, according to these Democrats, Iran does not pursue nuclear weapons because it is an expansionist theocracy which has spent 45 years exporting Islamist revolution, sponsoring terrorism, and threatening to wipe out and trying to dominate the region. No, of course not. Iran pursues nuclear weapons because Israel fought back too convincingly. In Democratic Party foreign policy, deterrence is provocative when Jews do it and understandable when mullahs do it.
Their argument has three parts. First, Iran was not actively building a bomb this minute. Second, Israeli and U.S. attacks were therefore unnecessary and provocative. Third, those attacks may now cause Iran to build the bomb.
According to them, Iran is some misunderstood Quaker study group with centrifuges. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that, as of June 2025, Iran had 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60 percent — a short technical step from weapons-grade — and inspectors had not been able to verify the stockpile after the June attacks.
Furthermore, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation noted that going from that 60 percent stockpile to 90 percent weapons-grade material requires only about one percent of the separative work Iran had already done.
But yes, by all means, let’s spend the afternoon asking whether Israel’s ambiguity is making the mullahs feel insecure.
Iran gets to stand at the edge of weaponization forever, because any attempt to stop it will allegedly justify the very weaponization you are trying to prevent. All the more reason to once again trust Iran not to secretly rebuild its nuclear weapons program and use the billions in unfrozen assets to rebuild its air defenses and ballistic missile systems while amping up drone production.
Israel’s policy of ambiguity has done what deterrence is supposed to do. Israel has not tested a nuclear weapon. Israel has not transferred nuclear designs to rogue states and other actors. Israel has not built a global nuclear bazaar like Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan network. Israel has not signed the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and has spent decades playing hide-and-seek with inspectors. Israel has not threatened to erase another country from the map while enriching uranium deep under a mountain.
But in an increasing part of the Democratic Party’s moral imagination, Israel’s restraint becomes sinister because it is Israeli (i.e., Jewish), and Iran’s aggression becomes contextual because it is anti-Israeli (i.e., anti-Jewish). Israel’s deterrent is destabilizing. Iran’s deterrent would be understandable. Israel’s secrecy is the problem. Iran’s secrecy is a negotiating challenge. Israel must be transparent. Iran must be engaged. Israel gets congressional interrogation, embargos, and stipulations. Iran gets another “round of talks.”
The most dangerous part is the message this sends to Tehran: Keep enriching, keep threatening, keep rebuilding, keep hiding what survives the strikes. The American Left — and, really, much of the Western Left — will eventually explain that your nuclear ambitions are a reaction to Israeli arrogance, Israeli ambiguity, Israeli escalation, and Israeli existence. And if Israel hits you again, all the better! Now your bomb becomes “defensive.”
If I were the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I would want exactly this faction running U.S. policy — not because they love Iran (they do not), but because they reliably deliver what Tehran needs: American division, pressure on Israel, endless process, and a vocabulary in which Iranian nuclear ambition is always a response to someone else’s provocation.
The regime in Tehran understands the West very well. It knows which politicians will blame Israel first. It knows which think tanks will convert Iranian escalation into Israeli fault. It knows which former officials will confuse “not building a bomb today” with “not preparing the option for tomorrow.”
And it knows which party faction can look at the Middle East and conclude that the nuclear power we really need to worry about is the one that has never used the bomb, never sold the bomb, and never made “Death to America!” a governing slogan.
And here’s the punchline: These visionaries really believe the way to deter Iran is to expose Israel’s deterrent, blame Israel for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, cut off weapons to Israel, and revive the deal that gave Tehran time, money, and diplomatic cover while it funded and trained Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, not to mention expediting its ballistic missiles and nuclear programs.
“Useful idiots” doesn’t begin to cover it. Useful idiots are amateurs. This is lethal credentialed stupidity — the kind that looks at a genocidal regime racing toward the bomb and decides the real problem is the country trying to stop it.
The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona (a city in the Southern District of Israel, nestled in the Negev Desert) is widely believed to be the heart of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons program, functioning as a plutonium-production reactor that has served as the backbone of its nuclear deterrent strategy since the 1960s.
We can see the modern addled Progressive mind at work here in its "all roads of evil lead to Israel/Jews" ideology.
Once the communal Progressive brain backed itself into an unthinking, reflexive "Pro-Palestinian" allegiance—which required them to not only ignore the entire history of this long conflict, the fact that Israel has offered the Palestinians their own state many times only to be always turned down, and which quickly led them to blaming Israelis for being on the receiving end of a massacre—they've trapped themselves in a moral and intellectual cul-de-sac where no revisions or new perspectives are allowed and where inside their echo chambers all that's left to say or do is crank the Jew hate volume up to 11.
This is how we've reached the point where the NYT can run a long piece on IDF rape dogs and where the Social Justice cult now openly supports a theocratic dictatorship that murders dissidents and treats women like chattel—nothing matters but supporting all enemies of Israel, no matter how odious. They've simply invested too much emotionally, socially and spiritually in the Anti-Zionist cause and all new information can only be processed in a way that keeps the cause alive and pristine. This is traditional Jew hysteria but amplified by social media and its algorithms designed to spread and intensify rage and hatred, essentially achieving in two years what took a decade for Goebbels.
What all the J Street "As A Jews" are doing now is providing the permission structure for every deranged anti-Israel conspiracy theory and giving cover to present and future Jew haters, who will think and say: If even Jews are enemies of Israel, that country must really be evil.
The J Streeters are Progressives before they're Jews, modern liberalism provides their worldviews, social lives and (most importantly) their careers, but now as Progressivism has become explicitly anti-Jewish, they are simply supporting the enemies of their own people. But of course they will be the last to see or admit this, as their paychecks demand otherwise.