Israel's Existential Threat Strategy and Iran's National Security

With the rise of Iran’s role and regional power, especially after the introduction of its nuclear program in the international community in 2003, Israel has been branding Iran as an "existential threat" magnifying the so-called nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to its existence. What are the roots of adopting such strategy? What are the implications of this strategy for Iran’s national security? The authors argue that “Iran's nuclear threat” magnification and linking it to existential threat strategy is a policy of containment and control and deterrence against the rising regional power and role of Iran that causes a degradation of the role and position of Israel in the Middle East. To examine this hypothesis, the authors combine constructivism and the theory of neo-realism. Constructivism uses the values and identities as the cause of states’ behavior in relations with other states. But the neo-realism security approaches that involve the offensive realism and defensive realism consider “relative power” and “relative security” as the cause of states’ actions. The overall conclusion of this article is that this policy, in addition to some internal goals of Israel, justifies foreign aids the U.S. provides to Israel. Meanwhile, it is mainly the policy of containment and deterrence of Iran as a result of the failure and erosion of Israel's nuclear monopoly that leads to the degradation of Israel’s position in the Middle East.