Former U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that Israel is now in the strongest geopolitical position in its history following the seismic changes throughout the Middle East that have taken place in the past two years.

Burns is a co-chair of the Aspen Security Forum and was a top member of President Joe Biden’s national security team.

“Israel is in such an extraordinary position. … Think about Israel being born, created May 14, 1948, besieged over decades by attacks and enmity from all of its Arab neighbors, now the strongest country in the Middle East,” Burns said as he opened the forum’s second day of events. “Israel’s in the strongest geopolitical position it’s ever been in, after the extraordinary events in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iran, in Syria over the last two years.”

In his opening remarks at the conference the day prior, Burns said that Iran is “in its weakest strategic position since the Iranian revolution.”

“Consider the impact these turbulent series of events of the last few years have had on Yemen and on poor Lebanon, which is searching for true stability and independence, on the people of Syria. Consider the impact on the people of Gaza and the desperate situation that the people in Gaza are suffering right now,” Burns added.

Susan Rice, who served as national security advisor during the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, sharply criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Tehran’s nuclear program while defending the 2015 agreement during a panel discussion on Monday at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival.

Rice, who was on stage with former Trump administration National Security Advisor John Bolton and former CIA director David Petraeus, disagreed with her two colleagues that Trump’s Iran strikes were largely a success. 

“I think the resort to military action when diplomacy had not been exhausted was a strategic mistake,” Rice said. “And the reality is, and we’re back to this point today, only diplomacy and a negotiated settlement can ensure the sustainable and verifiable dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. You need inspectors on the ground. You need verifiable constraints that are very significant, and you don’t achieve that by ripping up the 2015 nuclear agreement and replacing it with nothing.”

Rice joins a chorus of former Obama and Biden administration officials who have criticized Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, despite many experts concluding the damage to the program was significant. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, for instance, said that “based on the assessments of senior officers in IDF Intelligence, the damage to [Iran’s] nuclear program is … systemic … severe, broad and deep, and pushed back by years.”

Last week, former Secretary of State Tony Blinken wrote an op-ed in The New York Times: “The strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States was unwise and unnecessary. Now that it’s done, I very much hope it succeeded.”

At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, former Biden administration National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told moderator Fareed Zakaria: “We still need a deal because Iran still has, it appears, stockpiles of enriched uranium, still has centrifuge capacity, even if the installed centrifuge capacity has been destroyed or damaged or who knows what, and still has know-how and therefore still has the possibility of reconstituting its program.”

Bolton, on the same panel as Rice, argued that the time was ripe for military action against Iran.

“I think the regime is weaker than at any point since the 1979 revolution,” Bolton said. “But I think we will never have an opportunity this good to remove not just the nuclear program but the Iranian support for terrorism, which dates back to 1979 when they seized our embassy employees and it went downhill from there.”

Bolton outlined several ways in which Iranians are dissatisfied with the regime, including economic stagnation and state of women’s rights in the country. 

“The answer is regime change. But in the meantime, we want to make sure that there aren’t any even possible successful efforts by Iran to do something with what they have,” Bolton said.

Turning to Israel’s war in Gaza, all members of the panel argued that Israel needed to shift its strategy to successfully eliminate Hamas. Bolton said that, despite successfully degrading the terror group’s organizational structure, Israel had not successfully fulfilled all of its war goals, which include eliminating Hamas and securing the release of all the hostages.

Bolton argued that an additional objective of the war should be to “provide a better future for the Palestinians without Hamas in their lives. The only way you can achieve all four of these is … by going in and conducting a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign. You clear every building floor room and block all the tunnel entrances, let the people that belong there back in with biometric ID cards, and then you have an entry control point to the rest of Gaza. With security, anything is possible.”

Daniel Shapiro, a deputy assistant secretary of defense under the Biden administration, U.S. ambassador to Israel under the Obama administration and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in an interview with Jewish Insider on Friday morning that Israel’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely halt any further efforts toward a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program. 

Shapiro also said that major questions ahead for the region will be if and under what circumstances the U.S. would directly join Israeli strikes on Iran, and whether the strikes prompt Iran to attempt to make a sprint to a nuclear bomb.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Insider: What are your biggest takeaways from these strikes?

Shapiro: These strikes lay bare the depth of Iran’s miscalculation following Oct. 7. Just stack it up: their top proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, is gone or deeply damaged. The Assad regime has gone. Their own state-to-state attacks against Israel in April and October were pretty ineffective, and then Israel did significant damage in response last October. 

But since the state-to-state taboo has been broken, Israel demonstrated last night that it has full penetration of the Iranian system and the ability to wreak havoc across the system. Iran really has never looked weaker, and its ability to respond meaningfully is going to be tested. 

So far, they haven’t mustered a very effective response. I’m sure they will. They will continue to respond, but the first wave of 100 or so UAVs was not very effective. 

Now the story doesn’t end here. Israel’s already conducting additional attacks. Iran is going to be very motivated to try to sprint to a nuclear breakout at one of their hardened underground facilities. And the United States, I’m sure, is going to assist Israel with defense against any retaliation. 

But the prospect of a diplomatic resolution that President Trump very much wanted, that would end Iranian enrichment, I think, is pretty much dead, and it’s more likely that he’ll be faced with a decision on whether to use the U.S. capabilities to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities and to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. 

So that’s a big decision that may be still ahead, and could be the type of dilemma that splits his advisors, his political base, and probably will raise accusations from some corners that Israel is trying to drag the United States into the war.

JI: Let’s say the U.S. doesn’t get involved and doesn’t strike those facilities … What are the implications of that?

DS: The United States has unique capabilities to deal with the underground, deeply hardened sites. It could mean, if the United States is not involved, that those sites survive and are the place where Iran would be, if they chose, trying to execute their nuclear breakout.

That doesn’t mean that’s the only way to address those sites, and so if Israel is intent on really eliminating any threat of a nuclear Iran, it may turn to other methods … I think it’s going to be probably a very intense conversation between Netanyahu and Trump about the pros and cons of U.S. participation.

JI: Do you think that this is going to prompt Iran to move to nuclear breakout?

DS: I think they’re going to be very motivated to try to sprint to a breakout. They’ve often always seen their nuclear program as a pillar of the regime’s survival … If they’re looking for a way to gain a deterrent that would preserve what can be preserved, there’d be a strong case within their system to try to sprint to achieve a nuclear weapon. But there’s also chaos in their leadership right now, because so many of the top leaders were killed last night. So I don’t think that’s a decision that’s necessarily being made immediately.

JI: As we’re looking ahead to potential Iranian retaliation, [how do you think] some of the other states in the region are going to respond? So far, it seems like Jordan [intercepted some] of that first wave of drones … Do you think we’ll see the same sort of coordinated regional response effectively in defense of Israel like we saw last April?

DS: I think countries will act to defend their own airspace and their own assets. I think generally, they will not want to be advertised as participating in a defense of Israel, per se. But that doesn’t mean, even in defending their own airspace, they don’t in some way participate. … 

But I think most of the countries want to distance themselves from this action … They want to not give Iran any motivation or excuse to attack them or to associate them with the strikes … I suspect in private rooms, there’s probably some cheering going on in Arab capitals when they’ve seen the extent of the damage to the Iranian military.

JI: How do you read the response we’ve been seeing from the Trump administration so far?

DS: I think President Trump wanted more time to pursue his diplomatic initiative and to try to reach an agreement. And so I think this was not his preference to have this action take place this soon. 

However, it’s inconceivable Israel didn’t provide some forewarning, and if he didn’t give a firm red light, he probably gave sort of a yellow light. Israel may have argued that Iran was taking, or had taken, or was on the verge of taking some new steps that would shorten the already very short distance to nuclear breakout, or would advance their weaponization research. …

The initial statement from Secretary Rubio was intended to make clear that the United States was not a direct participant, and to try to dissuade Iran from responding in any way against the United States, and to warn them that if they did, it would be a very, very heavy price. …

The big question ahead, as I mentioned at the beginning, is, would the United States, under any circumstances, participate in strikes against Iran? And if so, what would be the trigger for that? Would it be the appearance that Iran is trying to do a nuclear breakout at the Fordow facility? Would it be in response to any kind of Iranian action against U.S. bases?

JI: In an alternate history where Joe Biden or Kamala Harris are in the White House, how do you think they would have handled this? Would they have given the same “yellow light?”

DS: I think it’s impossible to answer the hypothetical without knowing more about the information that Israel may have presented.