Let’s admit that our track record in halting rogue nuclear programs is rather poor. We may have bought off Libya, but we did not stop the nuclear programs of North Korea and Pakistan. As has been said by the former deputy head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Agency Ariel Levite, now at the Carnegie Endowment, the U.S. approach has been “too early, too early, oops, too late.”

Second, Israel has strong historical reasons to be skeptical of international guarantees. On the eve of the epic 1967 war, Israel’s then Foreign Minister Abba Eban came to the White House to remind President Lyndon Johnson of the U.S. commitment to militarily intercede if Egypt closed a key waterway — the Straits of Tiran — to Israeli shipping. But the United States was preoccupied with Vietnam and other issues, and Israel was left on its own. This traumatic moment enshrined Israel’s ethos of self-reliance.

Third, we need to admit that there are legitimate questions whether the United States will be able to detect with confidence Iran’s dash to weaponization. In his U.N. remarks, Netanyahu alluded to Iran’s ability to reach a level of enrichment by next summer that would put it in easy reach of weapons-grade nuclear fuel in as little as one to two months. If the Islamic Republic takes that step, will Washington discover it quickly enough to do something about it?

Iran allows video cameras to film around the clock in its underground sites, but it only allows the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to collect the images every six to eight weeks. Therefore, a cancelled IAEA visit can become a full-blown crisis: It would mean the world has no way of knowing whether Iran is expanding its enrichment efforts to produce weapons-grade uranium. Furthermore, it remains possible that Iran could install the next generation of centrifuges, allowing it to produce highly enriched uranium even quicker. The fact is, by sometime after the summer of 2013, we simply may not know what Iran is capable of.

Read the article in full at Foreign Policy.