Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Yes, Obama Would Use Force in Iran

Yes, there are circumstances in which President Obama would use force to stop Iran from gaining possession of a nuclear weapon.

February 21, 2014 at 7:42 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

Not the biggest fans: Iranian hard-liners walk on Barack Obama's photo after prayers in Tehran. Photographer: Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images — Not the biggest fans: Iranian hard-liners walk on Barack Obama's photo after prayers in Tehran. Photographer: Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images

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A question I'm frequently asked -- several times a week during periods when the Barack Obama administration is especially focused on achieving a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis -- goes something like this: "Do you still believe that there are circumstances in which President Obama would use military force to stop Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, given that [choose one, or more] he didn't enforce his own chemical weapons red line on Syria; he's so eager for any sort of substantial achievement in the Middle East that he's ready to make a bad deal with the Iranians; he's abandoning the U.S.'s Sunni and Jewish allies in the Middle East in favor of Iran's Shia; he is himself secretly a Shia, through a distant relative on his mother's side?"

The answer is, yes, I still believe that there are circumstances in which Obama would use force to stop Iran from gaining possession of a nuclear weapon. It's no secret that he prefers a diplomatic solution (one brought about by a crippling sanctions regime he orchestrated with significant help from Congress) to this problem. It is also no secret that he believes a military strike might have unintended consequences that could actually lead to a redoubling of the Iranian effort to cross the nuclear finish line. But there are certainly circumstances -- two immediately come to mind -- in which I think he would use force to prevent the Middle East from falling into a destructive spiral of nuclear proliferation.