UNITED States President Donald Trump recently called Iran’s latest proposal on ending their war “garbage.” He said he did not even bother to finish reading it.
The obvious reason for Trump’s response was that the Iranian proposal did not contain anything about the US and Israel’s priority concern: preventing Tehran from producing nuclear weapons. The US has proposed that Iran should not undertake domestic uranium enrichment at all, and if it needs uranium for peaceful, civilian purposes, it should purchase it from external, commercial sources. It has also demanded that Iran turn over all its enriched uranium to the US.
As of this month, analysts and intelligence reports indicate that Iran does not currently possess a functional nuclear weapon. However, they maintain that the country already has the knowledge infrastructure and sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to produce atomic weapons quickly should the Iranians decide to produce them. Not everyone agrees that line has not been crossed.
Recent efforts of the US and Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities and assassinate nuclear scientists have only delayed by a few months Iran’s production of nuclear weapons. Those efforts appear to be somewhat perfunctory or partial, at best. Iran has more than a dozen nuclear facilities around the country. That delay is now past, anyway. There is at least one podcaster on YouTube who talks of an Iranian nuclear bomb as a reality. Iranians have, of late, reported experiencing slight earthquakes, arousing fears of some kind of underground nuclear tests going on.
Iran historically claimed its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes only. The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in fact, declared nuclear bombs to be evil and banned them. But recent shifts in the rhetoric of Iranian leaders about the country’s need for nuclear weapons for its security have been noted and found alarming.
Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in public since he was appointed to the role. He is reported by authorities to have been badly injured by the bombing that killed his father and predecessor Ali Khamenei, and is now undergoing treatment in a bunker-cum-hospital. His mental faculties, though, are reportedly functioning normally, and he writes down or dictates instructions and official statements. Because of his picture appearing on a wall commemorating the departed leaders of the Islamic republic, there are speculations that he is already dead and his broadcast image and statements might have been just artificial intelligence-generated. Whether he is underground, alive or dead, the new supreme leader has vowed to promote and protect Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities in no uncertain terms.
The supreme leader’s mark is reflected in the omission of Iran’s latest position paper. What was omitted could be the last word on the matter: Iran’s nuclear program is non-negotiable.
The paper sounds like Iran has won or is winning the war. It has the overweening confidence of a nuclear-power state. Realities on the ground have not fazed Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing his “special military operation” in Ukraine. Despite the massive number of casualties and growing social unrest because of the economic hardships Russian citizens have started to endure, Putin remains unflappable because he has nuclear weapons to save the day for him in the end. Pretty soon, Iran may be able to intimidate or blackmail adversaries or their supporters, just as Putin did with his country’s possession of nuclear weapons. The Americans and the Europeans forbade Kyiv from firing the missiles they provided at Russian territory for fear Putin might escalate the war in Ukraine from conventional to nuclear.
Trump, fortunately, does not like to be seen or remembered as weak and doing nothing to prevent a catastrophe from occurring during his term. He has extended the US-Iran ceasefire indefinitely at the request of mediator Pakistan to allow the Islamic republic to hammer out a common position on ending the war. But, in the same breath, Trump sees the ceasefire as being on life support. He has warned Iran’s current regime of decimation by the US if it doesn’t respect the wishes of Uncle Sam. We can trust that Trump will not allow Iran to be a nuclear power.
The US has tough tasks to fulfill before anyone could deem its intervention in Iran to be worth the blood of its soldiers and the money of its taxpayers. It has to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons. It has to liberate the many ships stranded in the Gulf because of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The shortcut solution to these problems appears to be regime change. The current and unbelievably corrupt and incompetent regime in Iran is beyond reform and redemption. Real power now rests with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has been considered a terrorist group by the US, European Union, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Ecuador, Israel, Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Ukraine, and others. Mediation efforts by Pakistan and Qatar seem less directed to peace in the Middle East than to save a regime that is not worth saving.
Turning to Iran’s elected officials is not regime change. They are very much a part of the current regime. They were chosen in elections that were neither free nor fair. Under the Islamic republic’s constitution, they do not represent the people; they only serve the interests of the supreme leader. Candidates for these elective positions are vetted by a non-elected council for their loyalty to the supreme leader. Many of them are former IRGC members.
Changing to a regime that is democratic, secular, competent, and stable can only mean calling on the millions of people in Iran and the Iranian diaspora supporting exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi.
