JERUSALEM — President Biden on Thursday issued one of the bluntest warnings to Tehran of his presidency, committing to Israel’s leaders that “we will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” but Israel’s caretaker prime minister, Yair Lapid, pushed even further, asking all democratic nations to vow to act if the Iranians continue “to develop their nuclear program.”
The distinction between Mr. Biden’s vow to stop a “weapon” and Mr. Lapid’s insistence on destroying Iran’s entire “program” was more than semantic: It goes to the heart of their countries’ differing approaches in dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Even amid frequent and public affirmations of the close relationship between Israel and the United States, the differences over how to handle Iran remain stubborn. Several times on Thursday, members of Israel’s leadership publicly and privately urged that the United States develop a more credible military option to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, as a way of convincing Tehran it must halt a rapidly accelerating program.
Israel has conducted a series of covert sabotage and assassination operations to slow Iran’s ability to enrich nuclear fuel, while Mr. Biden has insisted that diplomacy, and a restoration of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, are the best ways to find a permanent solution.
“If they continue to develop their nuclear program, the free world will use force,” Mr. Lapid said at the opening of a news conference in Jerusalem after the two leaders met as part of Mr. Biden’s four-day visit to the Middle East.
During those remarks, Mr. Biden listened attentively but never repeated that commitment. Instead, he stuck to talking about blocking Iran from obtaining a weapon — not a “program” that might be intended to develop one.
But even these long-running differences of strategy are shifting, amid cracks in Israel’s own consensus about how imminent and urgent a threat is posed by the Iranian nuclear program.
And on Thursday, those differences on Iran strategy were largely set aside on the first full day of Mr. Biden’s first trip to the Middle East as president, in a region where alliances and relationships have changed radically since he was last here as Barack Obama’s vice president.
On Friday he moves to the trip’s harder task: trying to revive the alliance with Saudi Arabia, amid sharp criticism, especially from the progressive wing of his own party, that he is rehabilitating a crown prince whom the C.I.A. believes was knowledgeable of, and perhaps complicit in, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, an American-based dissident and columnist.
Mr. Biden’s mission in Jerusalem was to bolster and deepen the relationship with Israeli leaders while stepping around a roiling election for a new prime minister.And Mr. Biden used Thursday’s news conference with Mr. Lapid to bolster the blossoming relationship between Israel and a handful of Arab states, including the creation of a joint air defense zone to protect against Iranian drones and missiles.