Iran Will Not Stop Until It Obtains Nuclear Weapons
Raoul Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argue in an article for the Wall Street Journal that the Islamic Republic of Iran will ultimately obtain nuclear bombs, and the United States should now work to build an international consensus in cooperation with Europeans, particularly France, against trade with Tehran.
These two researchers, at the beginning of their article, refer to the prevailing hope in Washington’s intelligence community that Iran’s government is unwilling to pursue nuclear weapons due to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatwa against their development, stating that these hopes are “delusional.”
According to them, the goal of Iran’s “ideological regime” and Ayatollah Khamenei in spending billions of dollars and enduring waves of sanctions and social unrest is not merely to come close to building nuclear weapons. Rather, as soon as they are able to build the bomb, they will do so and then proceed to justify it.
They further state that the purging of prominent reformist figures such as Mohammad Khatami and sidelining of pragmatists like Hassan Rouhani and even Ali Larijani, and instead bringing Ibrahim Raisi—a figure described as “ruthless, dogmatic, and indifferent to Western sensitivities”—to power, demonstrates the new character of Iran’s government.
In the view of these two researchers, “norms of non-proliferation [of nuclear weapons] and international conventions are meaningless in the [Islamic Republic’s] eyes.”
Referring to Tehran’s use of proxy forces and militias to exercise influence throughout the Middle East, they argue that building armies and air forces requires exorbitant costs, relying on proxy forces to confront enemies such as Israel and Persian Gulf Arab states is a risky endeavor, and “cheap hegemony can only be achieved through an atomic bomb.”
In their view, there is no longer any “meaningful obstacle” to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and the Biden administration is “overly cautious and fearful.” According to them, despite sanctions damaging Iran’s economy, the regime’s appetite for obtaining nuclear weapons has not been deterred, because the revolutionaries’ calculations, unlike those of bankers, are not based on cost-benefit analysis.
These two researchers, expressing doubt about the effectiveness of a potential Israeli military strike and sabotage and assassinations of figures involved in Iran’s nuclear program by Israel, state that “Tehran’s advances in developing centrifuges will soon make prevention impossible.”
At the end of their article, referring to the necessity of Washington’s readiness to build an international consensus for imposing sanctions against trade with Iran and legislation by Congress to restrict access to the American market for those dealing with Iran, they state: “If no action is taken, realism and defeatism… could work through a self-fulfilling prophecy in favor of the [Iranian] regime.”
Source: Voice of America
