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Nuclear Prohibition?
Recently, there’s been a series of talks between Iran and the P5+1 powers regarding Iranian nuclear ambitions. Iran wants the economic sanctions (imposed for not suspending their nuclear enrichment activities) against them eased and the P5+1 powers want to restrict their enrichment capabilities to ensure that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes only.

The Obama administration has taken a different tact on Iran with respect to their nuclear program, a good first step at trying something new, since everything else didnt work. You can’t get a 3D understanding of this issue without exploring the history of nuclear non-proliferation.

45 years ago, the countries who had nuclear weapons decided that everybody else can’t have them and they formed an exclusive old boys’ club (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Everybody else was barred from entering, If you try to get nuclear weapons, then you’d be the new enemy No.1 (this is where Iran was/is). BUT, if you did manage to get them, though, that’s a different story. Rather than being a scrawny kid that could be pushed around, you’d be as buff as anyone else in the playground. What’s the reason why we can stomp all through Iraq, yet can’t set a foot in Russia - Russia have nuclear weapons. When you have nuclear weapons, you become invasion-proof. We incentivise countries that don’t want to be invaded to get this stuff, yet we do everything in our power to paint you as a rogue regime if you try. This naturally creates an unfriendly dynamic between us and whoever the new ‘nuclear kid’ on the block is.

The failure of the NNPT is due to the fact that it’s unenforceable. Keeping nuclear weapons out of states that want them is virtually impossible. Pakistan has them through North Korea. Israel is believed to have hundreds. Any state with the capability to produce nuclear energy can make them/trade them, and any state has the right to produce nuclear energy under one of the ‘three-pillars’ of the NNPT; ‘the right to peacefully use nuclear technology’. We worry about the weapons getting into the hands of the wrong people but the black market already has them. The NNPT is a failure and not pulling the plug on it is only damaging our international relations further.

We want Iran onto our side. Having them, the principal Shiite nation, on our side would be a game-changer. The focus on keeping them from acquiring weapons, depicting their success as tantamount to something like the end of the world, is a force that keeps things the way it is.

Iran is our natural ally in the Middle East. They are a young people, with Western sympathies, that like what the West has to offer and like the idea of more freedoms. When we look at Ahmadinejad, the guy that used to lead Iran before Rouhani, he didn’t look like a guy that we wanted in charge, but if you look at the Iranians themselves, they didn’t like him much either. He’s had to remove secular candidates from elections to prevent the young pro-West populace from voting them in, and he was constantly on the other side of efforts by the people to seek more freedoms. Now Iran has a far more moderate leader, Rouhani, who’s more in tune with the people and looking to improve relations with the West.

“If the Iranian’s are our friends then how come they’ve hated us?” Their rage is very justified. In 1953, because of oil (what else?), we overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh and placed a guy subservient to Western interest named the ‘Shah’ in power. Long story short, the Shah led a very brutal, very oppresive regime. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when Khomeini revealed the Shah’s torture rooms and the extent of the atrocities of the regime, widespread national outrage and hatred towards Americans really exploded. From this, you get the creation of the ‘Death to America’ chant and the succeeding Iran hostage crisis. Since then, the Iranian govts. still haven’t really cooled down about all that - but the new generation of Iranians, a generation that doesn’t remember the Shah as much, is more inclined towards positive change.

There’s an old saying in power politics that goes, ‘The strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must’. Iran has pretty much been the dominant power in the Middle East since 2200BC. The Iranians are proud of this fact. The existence of this ‘nuclear old boys club’ and our treating them like some lesser, 3rd world nation is insulting and makes enemies from people who should be friends. The way you create friends is by being friendly. Hopefully, these talks are a step in this direction.

If you want to defuse the danger of Iranian WMDs, the best way to do that is to transform them into the kind of country that we wouldn’t fear having nuclear weapons.

tl;dr, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty doesn't work, and continuing to enforce it only worsens diplomacy and relations.

So, what’s everyone's thoughts on the issue - i.e. Iran specifically, nuclear non-proliferation more broadly?