The slow disintegration of Israel’s Government makes it even less likely that it would attack Iran’s nuclear installations, a question that has arisen again this week after a new report cautioning that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons. The likelihood that the US would take that course has also fallen in the past six months. The result is that the response to Iran’s determination to put nuclear weapons within reach looks more like being the first difficult decision facing the next US president, rather than the last, dramatic one of President Bush.

This week’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has brought new urgency to the questions of whether Iran can be talked or forced down from its nuclear ambitions. In tone and detail, this is the most alarming report in the long sequence, published every few months by the United Nations watchdog, since Iran’s 20-year covert work was exposed by dissidents six years ago. The agency expresses “serious concern” – harsh language, by its standards – that Iran is hiding details of work on nuclear warheads, the first time it has included firm suspicions of such ambitions, which Iran denies. It also notes that Iran has defied UN Security Council demands to stop enriching uranium, the main obstacle to making such weapons. Iran hardly disputes that point; it recently illustrated its boasts of rapid progress with pictures of President Ahmedinejad walking through columns of enrichment centrifuges in white coat and blue protective shoes, beaming at the spinning cylinders looming over him.

The IAEA report goes a long way to puncture the effect of the United States’s own National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in November, which argued that Iran had stopped working on the actual design of nuclear warheads some years earlier. That unfortunately phrased conclusion, which undermined its more important warnings about Iran’s mastery of more difficult nuclear technology, destroyed the hawks’ momentum.

The view of John Bolton, the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, and one of those hawks, is that Bush will not now contemplate a strike on Iran’s facilities. “If you’d asked me a year ago I would have said that he would [have considered it]. But now, I don’t think he’s going to do it. He’s been so demoralised by the NIE and by Condi [Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State] telling him that the diplomacy is working.”

Bolton’s view, in an interview with The Times, is that “this puts enormous pressure on Israel to decide [whether it will strike]." He pinpoints a window for a possible Israeli strike between November 4, the US presidential election, and January 20, the inauguration of the new president, on the ground that Israel would prefer to attack within the Bush presidency but would not want to influence the election.

Bolton is not now an insider, and in some ways, never was. As Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security in 2001-05, he caught the spirit of the Bush Administration in opposing the International Criminal Court and some arms treaties, but he has been sharply critical of the US decision not to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis immediately after the 2003 invasion. On the Iranian threat, his preoccupation in office and after, he is more hawkish than most of the Administration, and sour at its hesitancy, but his view of its likely response still has some weight.

He does not speak for Israel, of course, but its Government’s current paralysis is a significant obstacle to it making any credible threats, never mind acting on them. The likelihood is, then, that for the rest of the Bush presidency, the Iran problem will remain the preserve of the Security Council, and its attempts, through more sanctions, to talk Iran down from its ambitions.

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