The recent unveiling of Iranian underground missile silos will probably spark the usual Western outrage against Iran and increase calls for attacks against Iran's nuclear facilities.
The more serious security threat, however, is not Iran's provocative measures but the West's continued inability to understand Iran and its motives.
The West continues to believe that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs that lead Iran are completely irrational and hell bent on wiping Israel off the face of the earth. From this perspective, if Iran develops nuclear weapons, it will surely embark on a suicidal mission by using them against Israel.
However, Iran is hardly the existential threat it's cracked up to be.
Yes, rhetoric like Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be "wiped off the map" is completely out of line and should undoubtedly be condemned. But when determining whether a state is rational or not, one must separate rhetoric from actions. Iran's anti-Israeli rhetoric should not be taken at face value but, rather, should be seen as a political move to gain popularity both in Iran and throughout the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world. As long as the Palestinians are occupied by Israel, playing the Palestinian card will always be popular among authoritarian leaders in the Middle East.
However, past decisions by Iranian leaders have shown that they indeed act in a rational manner. For example, in 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq and took out Saddam Hussein’s regime in a matter of weeks, a frightened Iran put a temporary halt to its nuclear program. Why? Because Iran – as part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” – rationally feared that it would be next on America’s list of states to invade.
However, once Iran saw that the U.S. would be tied down in Iraq for quite some time, it resumed its nuclear program. Once again, this decision was completely rational. Surrounded by hostile U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf, having a nuclear weapon would act as a permanent deterrent against a U.S. or Israeli attack.
Iran’s quest for a nuclear arsenal, therefore, is not a part of an apocalyptic mission to destroy Israel and the West but, rather, a way to guarantee the survival of the Iranian regime in a particularly hostile environment.
Until the West starts treating Iran as a rational actor, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program will continue to fail and the security situation in the Middle East will continue to deteriorate.
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