U.S. Strategy and Added Sanctions on Iran: The Role of the Administration and Congress in a “Good Cop, Bad Cop” Approach | Center for Strategic and International Studies: Understand and Remember the Real Objective: Keeping Iran From Deploying Meaningful Nuclear Forces
At the same time, the United States now has every incentive to leverage the success of existing sanctions, take full advantage of the current climate, and to try to make the current negotiations work. They are by far the safest way to remove an Iranian nuclear threat, and it is critical to remember what the threat really is: The real objective is to deny Iran military capability, not to try to deny it technology it has already acquired.
Iran is already at the nuclear breakout point in terms of nuclear enrichment technology. No amount of Israeli or U.S. preventive strikes can roll back Iran’s level of technical understanding. No credible level of Israeli preventive strikes can seriously affect Iran’s technology base. No credible level of U.S. strikes can guarantee that Iran cannot make enough progress in centrifuge design to be able to create a covert and sheltered centrifuge program whether or not most of Iran’s current centrifuge facilities and production base is hit in preventive strikes.