Is Iran a nuclear threat to global peace? Depends who you ask. Against the din of resounding rejections, which includes that of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Britain, France and Germany (the EU3) and almost any other country in the world, the lonely “yes” exclaimed by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and a handful of other governments almost disappears. There is an incredibly small amount of evidence that Iran is plotting to upset the global balance of nuclear weaponry, but a lot of evidence that Iran stringently adheres to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, with a couple of insignificant missteps during the Ahmadinejad government. The US’s hostile stance towards any kind of Iranian nuclear program has changed very little since the (only) Clinton administration, but has become even more belligerent since Trump became Cheeto in Chief.
Even where there is evidence that there was Iranian research for the development of nuclear weapons, nothing concrete has ever been proven, nor has Iran made overtures towards threatening nuclear war (unlike, say, the US, which almost created a DMZ in Korea by nuking the entire coast and breadth of the peninsula).
As part of the Iran deal, Iran’s nuclear stockpile is being reduced to 2% of its low enriched uranium stockpile, which isn’t suitable for weapons anyway. Its atomic facilities are monitored by the IAEA, with most of the machines being destroyed or shipped out for safekeeping. The estimate for the amount of time it would take Iran to produce a small nuclear weapon under these new guidelines is over one year.
To the reasonable person, this would seem to be a more than adequate response by Iran to what are relatively unreasonable sanctions levelled by the UN Security Council. Only the US has threatened to decertify the deal, putting Iran under new sanctions, while at the same time pressuring its own intelligence officials to “find” evidence of Iran’s guilt.
Nor is this the first time the US has intervened in Iran for its own interests. Since 1953, the US has been overtly and covertly subverting Iranian domestic politics, and the new threats of new sanctions against Iran are yet another example of this. Iran has already suffered billions of dollars worth of damage to its economy because of sanctions, but the US insists on setting new ones simply to prove a point: the US is still a superpower and can do what it likes. The Trump administration, like the administrations that have preceded it, has the gall to label Iran as a hotbed of terrorism while at the same time stoking the flames of conflict in the Middle East yet again with its comments on Jerusalem. It is not Iran that poses a threat to global peace. That award remains, very solidly, with the United States of America.
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