This Saturday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, was killed following joint U.S.-Israeli missile strikes across Iran, including a strike on an elementary girl’s school in Minab, where at least 165 people were murdered, according to Iranian authorities.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society reports that, across the nation, over 555 Iranians have already been slaughtered.
This comes less than two months after socialist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were abducted in a strike that claimed 100 lives. A week later, Ibrahim Traore, the pan-Africanist President of Burkina Faso, survived an assassination plot from French proxy groups.
In the meantime, the Trump regime has tightened a deadly blockade on Cuba with the goal of forcing regime change, causing an energy crisis that has left doctors operating on pregnant women using the lights from their cellphones. Genocidal violence funded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE continues in Sudan. The Israeli Knesset, or parliament, is considering a bill to mass execute Palestinians as the IDF razes Gaza and forces its occupants into concentration camps.
Rules-based order, if it ever existed, is dead. We live in the time of monsters. In such a state of affairs, we must challenge our preconceived notions of nuclear deterrence.
To be clear, Iran does not have nuclear weapons. While Iran does have a nuclear development program, there is no credible evidence that they have achieved even some of the first steps of developing functional nuclear missiles.
But they should.
Iran has been under extreme imperial violence for centuries, and has more justification than maybe any other nation in the world to seek assurance against invasion through nuclear deterrence.
I implore you to cut through the noise from legacy media that this is somehow all about protecting protestors and young women from “Islamist extremism.” That in the very first attack, Israeli forces bombed an all-girls elementary school tells you all you need to know about the credibility of such an idea.
The real reason these attacks happened is that capitalist hegemony is being harmed by the Iranian government’s support of anti-Zionist resistance groups like the Yemeni Houthis. And, because Iran’s nuclear potential is an existential threat to the unilateral structure of power Israel holds in Western Asia.
Zionist logic dictates that Israel, and by extension every Jewish person, is only safe if it is the sole arbiter and controller of all military technology in its region. As a fundamentally white-supremacist ideology, it demands a world where a white micro-minority has unchecked authoritarian power over millions of black and brown people who are expected to sit peacefully as they are starved, displaced and slaughtered.
The myth of anti-nuclear proliferation is a bourgeois screen for violently enforcing the status quo. It is absurd to expect leaders of non-Western-hegemonic nations to voluntarily lay down or stop attempting to create the only arms that could reasonably protect them from invasion.
It’s deeply hypocritical. Israel likely has a stockpile of over 90 nuclear weapons — we don’t know for sure, because they have repeatedly lied to international authorities about their nuclear capabilities. Yet, they have the audacity to condemn Iran for not being transparent about its nuclear program.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy risked instigating a war to prevent Cuba from obtaining nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, just two years prior, Western forces had placed nuclear missiles in Turkey, in a similar proximity to the Soviet Union as Cuba is to the United States.
The North Korean government has long been depicted as a rogue state and a threat to humanity. Yet, with nuclear deterrence offering a level of protection against Western interference, the Workers’ Party has overseen significant economic growth, as a result of a partnership with Russia, despite crippling imperialist sanctions.
The neoliberal framing around nuclear weapons tells us when nuclear weapons are with “the bad guys” — i.e., any nation opposed to Western exploitation — they’re existential threats to humanity and must be stopped. But when they’re in the hands of actual war criminals like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, they’re essential safety measures.
Further, the idea that Western forces should have authority over who is able to achieve nuclear capabilities is a product of a larger imperialist framework that sees the global population as the property and responsibility of Western colonizers.
Western-forced regime changes are universally devastating to a region’s autonomy, wellness and stability. As Iranian author Muhammad Ali Mojaradi put it, “When an egg is cracked from within, it means the bird inside is ready to fly free, but when an egg is cracked from … the outside by someone else, it means the egg is going to be cooked.”
We need not endorse every policy of the Iranian government to stand in solidarity with a nation defending itself from extortionist imperial violence.
Resistance is justified, and nuclear deterrence is a proven method of resistance.