Israel Signals Unilateral Strike Plans on Iran’s Missile Arsenal Ahead of Trump Meeting

Israel’s threat echoes its 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor and the 2007 attack on Syria’s Al-Kibar site—both unilateral moves taken when Jerusalem judged outside diplomacy too slow. The episode fits a decades-long pattern: states facing what they deem existential weapons in rival hands often choose pre-emptive force (cf. Britain’s 1940 raid on Taranto’s fleet) rather than trust distant guarantors. It also spotlights a structural problem in non-proliferation: missile technology, cheaper and easier to hide than enrichment plants, has proliferated from Scud transfers in the 1980s to today’s underground “missile cities.” Over a 100-year arc, whether Israel actually strikes matters less than the precedent—normalising preventive attacks on delivery systems could erode already-fragile norms against first use and push regional actors toward further hardening, dispersion, and potentially nuclear hedging, locking the Middle East into an accelerating offense–defense spiral.