A Very Dangerous Moment

My purpose in this and succeeding posts is to do a fairly quick wrap-up of recent developments that may help us determine where we are in the long on-going battle for continuing US global hegemony on the Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan fronts, although my comments today will focus exclusively on the secnd of these three pillars of what we can loosely describe as a quarter-century of the US “offensive” to secure its preeminence.

The nuclear dimension is of course at its most raw, right now, in the case of Iran. I have previously discussed the view, to which I am inclined to subscribe, that the Israeli and US attacks on Iran during June were largely unsuccessful. We have much better information now, thanks to both Iranian and Israeli sources, that Israel’s attack on June 12 - three days before negotiations between the US and Iran on Iran’s nuclear program were scheduled to continue in Oman on June 15th - that this was a decapitation strike, first and foremost. It was intended to kill the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, but was unsuccessful in doing so. President Trump, at least in the brief period of time that he thought that Israel’s attack had achieved its objectives, indicated in his social posts that he had prior knowledge of the attack. And although the attack was not successful in killing Khameinei, there were many successful Israeli assassinations of military and scientific personnel, these were insufficient to disrupt the machinery of government.

President Trump’s prior knowledge of (if not active participation in) the attack appears to be a confession of a major war crime of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign nation; as was his strike on a sovereign country’s nuclear facilities (where there was no nuclear weapon), as is his continuing collusion with te Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

The othere major elements of the Israeli strike were waves of strikes from the air (from Iraqi airspace more than directly over Iranian territory) and by missile and drone on Iranian targets. These these were countered by waves of Iranian strikes on Israeli targets that pierced the “iron dome,” crippled two of Israel’s major ports, two of its major oil refineries, shut down Ben Gurion international airport, struck many military facilities and hit many western-owned facilities.

It seems highly likely that whereas the 12-day war seems to have barely dented Iran’s stockpiles of missiles, Israel’s stockpiles were running dangerously low and Israel then pleaded with the US to bring about a ceasefire. Trump achieved the ceasefire by ordering a US attack, using B2A-delivered bunker-busting bombs, among other weapons, on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Trump has persistently claimed that these facilities were completely destroyed. On June 23rd, Trump declared that a ceasefire had been agreed and although this seemed fragile for its first 24 hours, it has since appeared to have held.

In the meantime there has been a growing chorus of skepticism, including from expert sources, as to whether Iranian nuclear facilities were actually destroyed. In at least one of the sites attacked, Isfahan, there is very good reason to doubt the possibility of any bomb reaching down beneath the surface far enough. Secondly, Iran had very likely taken prior defensive measures., including the relocation of centrifuges and stocks of highly enriched uranium, and the safeguarding of entrances and exits with indistructable concrete.Third, the reported absence of evidence of significant radiation from these sites also raises doubts as to whether centrifuges were actually struck and disabled.

Two major casualties of the conflict are diplomacy and nuclear regulation. By agreeing the bombing of Iran by Israel on the eve of continuing negotiations, President Trump arguably torpedoed both US credibility and diplomacy itself. This creates an almost insurmountable hurdle for a re-start of the negotiation process, which this week Washington appears to want very badly. And then there is the curiously outrageous culpability of the IAEA which was reportedly pressured by the E3 - the major European powers that sit on the IAEA board and are also part of the negotiation team for the JCPOA (an agreement, sabotaged by Trump in his first administration, which was supposed to have put Iranian stocks of enriched uranium under Russian custody, to have consolidated Iran’s commitment not to weaponize its nuclear energy program during the life of the agreement, and to have lifted sanctions on Iran) to revisit ancient, buried controversies as to whether Iran in the 1990s either had or did not have a “secret nuclear weapon program”

An IAEA report, apparently drawing on data from Palentir’s Mosaic software that assesses the “intention” of threat, was the basis of an IAEA Board declaration that Iran was “out of compliance” with the IAEA that in turn, was (wrongly) considered by some to have provided justification for an unprovoked Israeli and then a US attack on Iran. IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi (an Argentine diplomat) has since said that the the notion that Iran was close to having developed a nuclear weapon was false.

The IAEA has not issued a work of criticism for Israel’s or the US attack on Iran, and of course it never uttered a word of criticism for Israel’s stockpile of nuclear warheads. Never having signed the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty (of which Iran is a signatory), Israel is freed entirely of IAEA inspectrions. There is widespread suspicion that the IAEA’s inspections of Iranian facilities have facilitated the passing of sensitive information from the IAEA to both Washington and Tel Aviv, and that such illicit information sharing may be the basis on which names and other data concerning Iranian nuclear scientists were weaponized for the purposes of Israel’s decapitation murders.

It is inconceivable to me that Iran, in these circumstances, could ever contemplate re-entering negotiations with the US whose credibility as a good-faith interlocutor is completely shot, or could even contemplate ever again succumbing to the protocols and discipline of the IAEA inspection and reporting machinery now that this has been so thoroughly compromised. For Iran to return to the table, we would first need to see a thorough and transparent international investigation under UN auspices, imposing subsequent sanctions where appropriate, and the wholesale reform of the entire infrastructure of nuclear regulation, one that takes account of former Western penetration and domination of UN agencies.

I do not expect this to happen any time soon.

If I am correct in thinking that a return to negotiations with either the US or with the IAEA is a non-starter for Iran (I believe Steve Witkoff has been reaching out to Iranian foreign minister Araghchi), then I think Iran is in extreme peril. Precisely because the evidence that its nuclear program has been successfully destroyed is so questionable, the issue of what Israel persists in describing as the “Iranian nuclear threat” remains on the table. As soon as the ceasefire has given Israel the time that it needs to rearm and reequip with US money, Israel, in the absence of a continuing flow of up-to-date information from the IAEA as to the volume and whereabout of Iran’s enriched uranium, is highly likely to attempt another attack.

We should also note Iran’s continuing and correct assertion as to its right as a sovereign nation, one that has also signed the non-proliferation treaty, to enrich uranium for peaceful energy purposes. It has long been said that Iran has enriched more uranium to the relatively high degree of 60% than it needs for medical purposes and that it has done this in order to create for itself a bargaining chip, perhaps that it could use to persuade the US to remove sanctions once Iran agrees to restrict enrichment to the relatively low degree of 3.5%.

Over the past month or so, Trump has said it cannot allow Iran to enrich any uranium whatsoever. There are potential compromise solutions such as allowing an international consortium - possibly including the US itself - to enrich whatever uranium Iran needs, whether on Iranian soil or otherwise. But this has been rejected by the US.

In his most recent statements, Trump appears to waver slightly and to talk in terms of “limiting” as opposed to closing all opportunity for Iran to enrich uranium. There is a point of view that even though Iran’s purpose in highly enriching uranium is to give itself a bargaining chip, its activity does nonetheless pose the threat that Iran could, if it chose to do so, proceed to the higher enrichment necessary to weaponization, and that this level of ambiguity is intolerable.

Nonethless, from what is generally known and, assuming that it has managed to save its stockpiles of enriched uranium from the US attack on June 21st, Iran is anywhere from one to three years away from being able to develop and apply sufficient highly enriched uranium to the making of from one to twelve nuclear war heads.

Certainly, these would give Iran scope for inflicting considerable damage on Israel if it was minded to do so preemptively. Given Iran’s moral position on the evil of nuclear weapons in general, and on preemptive warfare, I consider it is highly unlikely that Iran would actually use such a weapon, even assuming it had one. But even if it had, and it did use such a weapon, it would still lack a second strike capability to prevent Israel from hitting back very hard with the use of any number of its 200 plus nuclear warheads. In order to develop a second strike capability, Iran would probably have to labor hard over a ten year period of continuous production. That it would ever be allowed such an opportunity seems unrealistic.

This situation, therefore, would seem to push Iran in the direction of seeking greater support from both Russia, and China, and from its colleagues in the BRICS. These include India, a nuclear weapons power. Pakistan, a nuclear weapons power that is a close ally of China and which has actually offered to put nuclear weaponry at the disposal of Iran, has formally applied for membership of the BRICS. North Korea, another nuclear weapons power, has also expressed an interest in joining the BRICS.

Iran has good relations with all these countries and especially with both Russia and China, and has strategic partnerships with both. Putin has recently claimed that Iran turned down Russia’s suggestion that its strategic partnership agreement with Iran could include a mutual defense pact, as well as its invitation for Iran to integrate its air defense with that of Russia’s, and that Iran had not asked Russia to provide it with additional weapons in the twelve-day war. Previous reports that Russia had supplied Iran with S400 air defense systems appear to be incorrect.

The overall tenor of these considerations lead one to suppose that Iran, or, rather, that some factions within Iran, have been predisposed to adopt a sovereign, independent route for the resolution of Iran’s defense challenges. The troubled history of Russian-Iranian relations up to and including World War Two provides some substance for Iranian cautions. Furthermore the strategic partnership agreement that does exist between Russia and Iran, requires that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon, and Russia is very much oppose to any such eventuality.

Yet, up until now, the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, notwithstanding the fatwa, notwithstanding the constraint of its strategic parnership with Russia, and Islamic opposition to nuclear weapons, has given Iran some leverage, or at least so Iran believes, that helps underwrite its sense of national pride and independence.

In brief, the existing “nuclear hierarchy” that underpins a continuing colonialism in international relations between those powers that have nuclear weapons and those that don’t is a significant problem for countries like Iran that might be considered “threshold” states in terms of nuclear weapons capability.

Either the world persists in trying to sustain this hierarchy, even as countries like India, Pakistan and North Korea manage to smash through the barriers against them, or it decides to relax the rules so that most or all internationally recognized sovereign nations are permitted nuclear weapons, or it follows what surely would be preferred path towards the eradication of all such weapons everywhere.

The likelihood of any such shift towards this last possibility seems very slim for the moment. And yet it is in the moment that Iran is courting a very grave danger of annihilation. To reduce the risks of this happening, or the risks of further, dangerous and murderous, unprovoked attacks by Israel and the US, then Iran, with Russia and with China and other allies need to articulate a far more robust policy of mutual protection that will serve Iran and any other BRICS members caught in comparable predicaments, a policy that is strong enough in its guarantees of immediate retaliation to prevent any repeat of the tragic events that the world experienced in June 2025.