Tel Aviv’s strategy of striking by air against the nuclear proliferation efforts of its neighboring adversaries has been continuously rewarded by virtue of Israel’s aerial-technical competence and the lack of alliance cohesion in its enemies. With Iran likely to be subjected to a permanent no–fly zone, director of geopolitics at Hebrew University, Meir Masri, has identified Pakistan as the next target of Israel’s de-nuclearization campaign. Israel’s hypersensitivity to the weakness of its concentrated population led it to demand air defense guarantees from France during their joint invasion of Egypt in 1956. With the U.S., Israel shared a concern with non-state actors acquiring nuclear material that seemed to coincide with what Steve Weissman termed Pakistan’s “Islamic Bomb” and the “loose nukes” allegedly for sale from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Israel has systematically acted to disrupt Egypt’s missile and nuclear program in the 1960s, Iraq in 1981, Syria in 2007, and now Iran in 2025. These layers of threat suggest that Israel’s strategy is one of continuous and aggressive action against successively emerging threats. This refusal to compromise to achieve lasting peace is the result of two reciprocally reinforced factors. First, that the dispossessed Palestinians, especially as their recalcitrance is intensified by deliberate impoverishment, are an incitement to Israel’s Muslim neighbors from ever providing credible security guarantees. Second, as both consequence and cause, Tel Aviv will not compromise on the Greater Israel project, which will eventually require mass deportation of Palestinians from the West to the East Bank of the Jordan River, Israel’s principal source of water for its agriculture, without which the Jewish state would not be viable.
Egypt, the principal frontline Arab threat to Israel’s existence, having invaded in 1948, was a client state of the Soviet Union during the Cold War but never a proxy, never having offered the Soviets any permanent bases. The 1967 Six-Day War has its origins in Soviet attempts to instigate a war in order to eventually force a negotiation to compel a closure of Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons facility, although the Soviets were far less successful than the Pentagon in predicting a quick Israeli victory. Soviet influence in the Eastern Mediterranean depended on being needed as an arms provider, not on ideology, and so Egypt was not a vital interest to Moscow’s decision-makers.
At the same time, while the U.S. was wary of the high cost of equipping Israel with weapons because of the high rate of munitions expenditure in war and how its provocation complicated Washington’s Cold War anti-communist alliances, it recognized the plausible deniability afforded by Israel’s attacks on nuclear proliferators. Israel’s attack on Iraq’s Osiraq reactor in 1981 was feasible because its president, Saddam Hussein, had withdrawn Iraq from association with the Soviet Union following border tensions with Syria, which remained dependent on Moscow after 1973. Thus, while the U.S. publicly condemned Israel’s unilateralism, it continued to provide arms to Tel Aviv. The U.S. calculus was that Arab nationalism, Nasserism, and anti-colonialism in the perennial Mediterranean influence game, in the counterfactual absence of both the Soviet Union and Israel, would still have led to Arab states seeking nuclear weapons, primarily because of political instability caused by misgovernance and poverty.
This author remembers editorials in which supporters of Israel voiced concerns about Pakistan’s putative nuclear weapons efforts in the 1970s and instigated media discussions of striking Pakistan from Indian bases in the 1980s. U.S. reliance on Pakistan in its proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan quashed and eventually silenced these intimations. Israel’s proliferation concern focused on Iraq, to the extent that when Israel became the target of Iraqi SCUD attacks during Operation Desert Storm in February and March 1991, it did not respond in a fashion that would have undermined Washington’s Arab coalition, which included Syria. Pro-Israeli neocon guidance in the George W. Bush administration provided major guidance on obtaining U.S. action against Iraq in 2003.
From 1991, with a no-fly zone over Iraq, and a strong U.S. presence in Iraq from 2003 until 2011, Israel shifted its crosshairs onto Iran but was unable to act. Israeli aircraft had clashed with Pakistani aircraft over Iraq’s H-3 during the 1967 Six-Day War and, with the aid of aerial tankers over Saudi Arabia, had been able to reach and strike at Iraq’s Osiraq reactor in 1981. Israel’s bombing of the PLO‘s headquarters 2,400 km away in Tunisia in 1985 indicated that it had the capacity for complex long-range aerial bombardments, albeit on a small scale. Iran and Pakistan have therefore been within range of Israel since at least the 1980s. The issue was that Israeli tankers were vulnerable to long-range missile attacks, and their destruction would be catastrophic for returning Israeli bombers. The collapse of Syria and its long-range radars has meant that Israeli and allied tankers, like Germany’s, could now stage over Jordan and western Iraq. Israel’s 2007 attack on Syria’s reactor was technically easy given its close proximity to Israel, but its location close to the Turkish border likely meant that the latter was alerted to avoid any inadvertent encounters.
An important factor in Israeli success is that it strikes against countries whose nationalism leads them to neutrality, importantly because they are seeking regional dominance outside of Cold War or post-Cold War bipolar constraints. Nationalist states typically create uncoordinated and mutually contemptuous alliances based on convenient weapons transfers. These shallow alliances are characterized by buck-passing, in which states hope that their allies get burdened with an enemy so that they win freedom of action. During the Second World War, the Axis alliance had Italy avoid helping Germany against France until after German victory was assured, and Japan did not help Germany with the Soviet Union. The effect was that the Axis were effectively defeated piecemeal and uncoordinated.
Israel’s current campaign against Iran is only feasible because Tehran has been isolated by Washington’s diplomacy. U.S. President Donald Trump has (far more successfully than former President Barack Obama) pulled Russian President Vladimir Putin away from providing assistance to either Iran or China by his slowdown of aid to Ukraine. Trump has also drawn China away from Tehran over the issue of tariffs. Mutual Sino-Russian suspicion has made unlikely any more than superficial coordinated effort to assist Iran.
If Iran becomes neutralized like Iraq, meaning there is a combination of regime change that undermines the state’s ability to organize for war and the nuclear weapons program is demolished, then Pakistan will become the primary target of Israeli counter-proliferation efforts. Washington will find it politically easy, from the perspective of broad mobilization of domestic interest groups, to create a united coalition of supporters of India, supporters of Israel, and mainstream military types preparing for war over Taiwan to pressure or conduct military action against Pakistan. Even if the U.S. recognizes the difficulty of reversing the Pakistani program, Israel will not be so restrained in its political pressure in Washington to limit, put under supervision, or even roll back Pakistan’s arsenal. Moscow, which depends on close cooperation with India to counterbalance the Chinese threat to the Russian Far East, will likely contribute technical assistance to a Pakistani strike.
A concerted air, cruise missile, or drone attack using India as a base would inflict severe damage on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, the sudden absence of which may coincide with a conventional Indian military attack to Balkanize Pakistan into the Sindh and the Punjab and attach Kashmir to India, cutting off Chinese access to the Indian Ocean. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons infrastructure is not hardened like Iran’s or dispersed like Iraq’s.
Although Pakistan is not committed to acting in support of a Chinese assault on Taiwan, and China has consistently rejected a Pakistani military solution to the contentious Kashmir issue, Beijing’s lavish support to Islamabad distracts the majority of India’s military, permitting China a light garrison of their Himalayan frontier. Furthermore, despite Western perceptions of Pakistan as a jihadist state, given that Osama bin Laden found sanctuary there, for decades Islamabad has ruthlessly deported to China both peaceful and militant activists from Central Asia in support of the Uyghurs. To what extent China will extend support to Pakistan depends on the stability of the Beijing Politburo at the time, an important factor given that all of the regimes of Russia, Tehran, and China are under stress to liberalize.
Major mitigating factors against further Israeli overt action (but not sabotage) are (1) that Pakistan already has a nuclear boosted-fission warhead arsenal larger than Israel’s (170 versus 90, with a few thermonuclear). However, Islamabad may be facing a severe shortage of fissile material that explains the deceleration of its arsenal in the last decade, although this may also be due to a covert arrangement with Washington in coordination with an Indian slowdown (this is consistent with a practice of coordinating tank sales to India and Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s). (2) Pakistan has the technical capability of adapting Chinese-supplied missiles to reach Israel. (3) Pakistan is backed by Saudi Arabia, which has negotiated access to Pakistan’s warheads for its CSS-2 missiles located atal-Nabhaniyah. (4) The U.S. is also wary of a too powerful India in the subcontinent, given New Delhi’s illiberal policies under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (5) Washington believes that Pakistan feels a need for a nuclear arsenal as a stabilizing instrument of deterrence against the broad consensus in India on aspirations for regional hegemony, which include the subordination of Pakistan.
A persisting puzzle to an outsider is the lack of coordination among like-minded Muslim nuclear aspirants in the Near East, who are often portrayed as ideologically united by Western observers and Israeli commentators seeking to appeal to that prejudice. That Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan are as suspicious of each other as Israel demonstrates that many of these states confidentially benefit from Israel’s anti-proliferation campaigns. The reality is that most politics is local, or at least regional, and is characterized by a balance of power system of insecure frontiers governed by a political system distracted by the tensions of poverty and multi-ethnic states. Iran, for example, fired rockets into Pakistan as recently as January of 2024, prompting a retaliation a few days later. Most of these nuclear programs were not, therefore, initiated with Israel as the principal target. However, Tel Aviv acts because it fears that domestic political incentives will lead to these arsenals being used as a shield behind which later attacks on Israel may be conducted, which is the Indian experience with Pakistan’s endorsement of Kashmiri militants.
