Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Israel Pushed Iran to the Table, Says Hagel

Hagel, now in his ninth month leading the Pentagon, argued that Netanyahuâs threats of military action against Iranâs nuclear sites, combined with the pressure of sanctions, may have actually encouraged its leader to take negotiations seriously.

November 4, 2013 at 1:51 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.

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Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry, the Obama administration's most fervent supporter of nuclear negotiations with Iran, said in a speech that the U.S. would "not succumb to those fear tactics and forces that suggest" it is wrong to even test Iran's willingness to make nuclear concessions.

This statement, made at an event sponsored by the Ploughshares Fund, a group that opposes nuclear proliferation but which sometimes seems overly relaxed about the danger of a nuclear Iran, was generally understood to have been a brushback pitch thrown at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been arguing that the American administration, and its European allies, are walking into a trap of Iran's devising.