Most people in the United States and other Western nations seem to consider it “normal”, or anyway unremarkable, that the U.S. should, on its own, have the authority to control and police the nuclear-enrichment projects of another country far away.
It is not.
There are a number of high-level UN bodies, with the Security Council at their apex, that have that authority. In 2015, the United States, the other four veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, and Germany jointly negotiated an arrangement with Iran that sought to address concerns that some countries had had about Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program. The agreement they reached, the “JCPOA”, was immediately endorsed by the Security Council.
In 2018, Pres. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the JCPOA and restored many of the unilateral U.S. economic sanctions on Iran that had earlier been lifted under its terms. The JCPOA’s other (non-Iran) signatories expressed mild concern at Trump’s move, but took no other action. (When Joe Biden became president he took some inconsequential steps to rejoin the agreement, then abandoned the project.)
Over the years, it had become increasingly taken for granted in most of U.S. public discourse that Washington has some kind of “right” to unilaterally supervise and police Iran’s nuclear programs. Last June, when Trump sent B-2 bombers to drop massive penetrator bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites, nearly all the “worries” expressed by U.S. politicians of both parties concerned the possibility of damage from Iranian reprisals or of ending up in another damaging forever war like the one in Iraq.
Several members of Congress also argued that Trump’s actions violated domestic law. But no-one in congress or the U.S. commentatoriat questioned the deeper– and very flawed–assumption that U.S. political institutions have some kind of (God-given?) right to police the nuclear-enrichment status of all the nations of the world.
It does not.
The United States, and Iran, and most other nations of the world are all members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which specifies the rights and responsibilities of both those members who have nuclear arsenals, and those that do not. Under an agreement with the UN, the NPT’s rules are policed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN body, and ultimately by the Security Council.
Meantime, one of the very few countries that have never joined the NPT is Israel, whose capable nuclear arsenal thus remains outside any international supervision. (Very few U.S. pols or speaking heads have ever been willing to point this fact out openly. It is viewed as “bad form”, or even anti-Semitic, to do so. But how can one intelligently analyze or discuss strategic developments in West Asia while complying with this vow of omertà ?)
During his second term in office, Pres. Trump has pursued numerous, outrageous attacks against the UN including his defunding of major UN agencies and his attacks on UN officials like Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Those moves have met with some criticism from U.S. pols and pundits (at least, those on the left.) But none of those figures, as far as I can see, has yet been willing to come out publicly and recognize– and strongly oppose– the widely shared assumption that somehow Washington alone, and not the broader body of the UN, has the right to dictate the nuclear policies of other countries around the world.
It is past time to call out this assumption as the dangerous attack on the principles of the UN, and of the entire concept of an “international community”, that it is. No to U.S. hegemony! And no to any war on Iran!
