/ BARAK / 138 struck me from that first meeting as strong, cool-headed, highly intelligent and intensely cerebral. Though we didn’t go into the details of the Iranian nuclear threat, he did talk at some length about the implications for the region, and about broader Middle Eastern security challenges. He displayed a grasp of the cultural and political nuances of an increasingly diverse and complex world that was more impressive than many of the other American political or military leaders whom I'd met. When he and I now returned to the issue of Iran, in the White House, he had an undeniable command of the details of Iran’s nuclear program, and of the American military options, should he choose to use them. He opened by summarizing the US position. He emphasized that his and our objective was the same: the keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. We were already cooperating to achieve that, for instance through cyber-attacks to slow down the nuclear program. The difference, he said, was that Israeli leaders seemed to feel an urgent need to reach a decision on military action. In Obama’s view, such a move would be both premature and potentially harmful to the coalition he’d helped assemble to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran. Maybe you had to be an Israeli truly to understand our urgency about Iran. In the early years of the state, the explanation we gave for our preoccupation with security — our near-obsession, as some non-Israelis saw it — was that we were surrounded by Arab countries pledged not just to defeat us, but erase us from the map. Egypt or Syria, Jordan or Iraq, could afford to lose an Arab-Israeli war. Israel’s first defeat, however, would be its last. That picture had changed dramatically over the decades. We no longer had to worry about the prospect of losing a war. The “qualitative edge” we possessed over all enemy armies in the region ensured that. As Israel’s chief of staff, Prime Minister, and now Defense Minister, I had made it