In this month’s Cato Unbound, “What to Do about Iran,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Islamic Paradox, argues in a provocative new essay that diplomatic attempts keep Iran’s clerical regime from getting nuclear weapons will fail, so the U.S. must choose between preemptively bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities or allowing the mullahs to have the bomb. Arguing that the latter option “would empower its worst enemies in Tehran and spiritually invigorate all Muslim radicals who live on American weakness,” Gerecht advises the former: a policy of preemptively bombing Iran’s nuclear sites.

This week and next, a panel of defense strategy and foreign policy experts will challenge Gerecht’s argument, starting with Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and followed by Edward N. Luttwak, senior fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of widely discussed recent article in Commentary, “Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran — Yet,” and Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of Iran’s Developing Military Capabilities.

Is Gerecht right? Are all non-military approaches to the Iranian nuke bound to fail? If so, should the U.S. resign itself to a nuclear Iran and rely on deterrence as it did during the Cold War? Or is deterrence ill-suited to a regime run by religious extremists?

Stay tuned for incisive commentary and criticism by some of America’s leading defense policy thinkers.