As is well known, there are two main unresolved problems at the center of the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran: Iran’s nuclear program and freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Before the attack by the United States and Israel, the second was not a problem at all — the strait was freely navigable, with no threats or toll collection by Iran and no blockade imposed by the American Navy. The nuclear issue, on the other hand, was from the very beginning identified as the most important among the various pretexts offered for launching the war (regime change, popular uprising stimulated by “liberating” bombardments, control of oil supplies, etc.).
At the start of his first term in 2017, Donald Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated two years earlier by Barack Obama together with five European countries, to regulate Iran’s uranium enrichment and place it under the strict supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). That agreement was not intended to ban uranium enrichment outright, but to prevent it from reaching the level required to build a nuclear weapon. Iran’s nuclear program had, moreover, begun as far back as 1957 — with the blessing of the United States — when the country was still called Persia and was governed by Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had been installed through a coup organized by the CIA and British intelligence services.
Enriching uranium by any country was (and is) perfectly legitimate under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and was in fact encouraged by the “Atoms for Peace” program launched in 1953 by President Eisenhower. However, it is entirely understandable that, following the Khomeini-led revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the openly anti-Israeli and anti-American(“the little and the great Satan”) ayatollah regime in Iran, the Israeli government came to view Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to the very existence of the state of Israel — which in turn was the only country in the region that had quietly armed itself with a small nuclear arsenal since the early 1960s, again with American assistance.
The fatwa (a religious decree carrying the force of law) issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the early 2000s — which declared the production and use of atomic weapons to be haram (forbidden) as contrary to Islamic law, while asserting the right to peaceful nuclear energy development — counted for nothing. Israel, the United States, and the Gulf Arab states always believed that Iran would not keep its promises and would sooner or later build an atomic bomb to use against Israel, and that its nuclear program therefore had to be stopped by any means necessary.
Much of the international politics of the last seventy years has revolved around the question of who may and who may not possess nuclear weapons. At the time the Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed, the nuclear states were the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and France) plus Israel, albeit unofficially, who were joined in the early 1970s by India and Pakistan. Faced with the looming threat of an atomic war that would bring about the mutual destruction of the belligerents, the following decade saw a new round of negotiations between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, aimed at reducing the risk by ending nuclear tests and cutting atomic arsenals.
Tens of thousands of nuclear warheads were destroyed in the 1990s, and the world began to breathe a sigh of relief. But just a few years later, with the spread of Islamist international terrorism, the possibility emerged that nuclear devices and other weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) could fall into the hands of terrorist organizations, or be used by so-called “rogue states” — a new category of dangerous and unreliable states set against the good and responsible members of the nuclear club.
Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration counted Iraq, Iran, and North Korea among the main rogue states. These countries formed what American and Western propaganda dubbed the “axis of evil,” to which two other states — Syria and Libya — were later added. With Libya, the Bush administration reached a deal under which Tripoli agreed to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for economic concessions. Iraq fared worse. Accused of being on the verge of building an atomic bomb, it was invaded and occupied in 2003 by American forces and other willing allies. However, no trace of a nuclear program (which had already been dismantled years earlier) or other weapons of mass destruction were ever found. During those years the United States was engaged in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran and North Korea (which had by then received nuclear technology from Pakistan) were left relatively undisturbed. They were threatened and economically sanctioned but not militarily attacked.
During his first presidency, Donald Trump, after an initial exchange of insults with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, entered into friendly negotiations with him that led nowhere, but for reasons that were never explained, left Trump very satisfied. Those negotiations were never concluded, and North Korea was able to quietly build its own arsenal, which now amounts to several dozen nuclear warheads. Toward Iran, however, for equally inexplicable reasons, Trump took the opposite approach: he scrapped the existing agreements that allowed the IAEA to inspect Iranian nuclear sites and imposed increasingly harsh economic sanctions on the country to force it to capitulate. The Biden administration, which succeeded Trump in 2021, promised to restore the agreements negotiated by Barack Obama — but never did.
Thus, we arrive at the very recent events that have taken place under the second Trump administration. In June 2025, the president ordered massive bombardments of Iranian nuclear sites, at the conclusion of which he declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely obliterated.” It appears that was not quite the case, because in February 2026, when the U.S. followed the Israeli military into yet another major bombing campaign, one of the many contradictory justifications offered was, once again, preventing Iran from “developing a nuclear device”.
Meanwhile, the desire for atomic bombs is making a comeback around the world. The Americans first and then the Russians have launched enormously expensive programs to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and have announced the resumption of related tests. Arms reduction treaties are nearing expiration, and there is little hope they will be renewed. In any case, both China and the other smaller nuclear powers refuse to reduce their arsenals, arguing that they are already far smaller than those of the major players.
Fearing they can no longer count on the American “nuclear umbrella”, some European countries without nuclear weapons are asking those that have them (France and the United Kingdom) to commit to using them in their defense — forgetting, however, a cardinal principle of nuclear deterrence: in the event of a nuclear conflict, the first country to be struck is the one that possesses nuclear weapons. At the same time, such a country would be reluctant to use them in response to a conventional attack on an ally, because doing so would bring nuclear retaliation down on itself rather than on the country being attacked. It is hard to imagine France or the United Kingdom being willing to accept the annihilation of one of their own cities in order to defend some other country with its atomic weapons. The nuclear umbrella only shelters whoever controls the button that deploys it.
It is for this reason that countries like Turkey, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea are more or less openly showing their intention to acquire their own nuclear weapons. The lesson of North Korea teaches that if you have an atomic bomb, even a great power will be reluctant to attack you — including with nuclear weapons — because the risk that even a single bomb might survive is too great to take. Iran, meanwhile, has learned the hard way that without an atomic bomb it cannot deter determined adversaries like Israel and the United States from inflicting enormous damage with conventional weapons.
We do not know how sincere the Iranians were in their denials of any desire to acquire nuclear weapons. What is certain is that the reckless (and criminal) American-Israeli attacks killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei removed the only possible religious brake on bomb-building. Now, the Revolutionary Guards — who appear to be the dominant force in the country today — will not, if they can help it, make the same mistake of being caught unprepared in the face of an enemy attack without an atomic arsenal with which to respond (or threaten to respond, which would probably be enough to deter the enemy from attacking in the first place). We should therefore expect a future with more nuclear weapons in the hands of far more countries — and we should keep our fingers crossed for the future of the planet, and of humanity.
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Grazie!