But these kind of events--Israel defanging Hezbollah, US destroying nuclear sites--should change our priors. And it might change priors in Iran too. Until we actually sent B-2s in, Iran didn't know whether we ever would. They might have held out hope that we were bluffing--that we would never risk a $2 billion plane (not to mention a crew) on bombing a site that only sets back the program a couple of years.

Now that the US has done it, what's to stop us from doing it again later? Why bother spending so much effort on a program that gets blown up every few years? Maybe they'll just try to hide it better, but can they really rely on not having intelligence leaks, given the massive intelligence failures of the past few months?

And North Korea is not a great example. Even if it's true that their nuclear program has deterred us, they bought it at an enormous cost: North Korea is completely isolated. Iran would like to get rid of the current sanctions and start integrating into the rest of the world. Even if the regime doesn't care about its people, it still wants aircraft parts and oil revenue. The US and Israel would be fine if Iran continued to slowly rebuild its nuclear program, as long as it remained under sanctions. They can just wait five years and bomb again. But is that really a victory for Iran?

My point is that these events might cause Iran to re-evaluate the cost/benefits of their current strategy. They might decide that rushing to build a nuclear bomb is not worth the very large costs.