The United States has nuclear weapons. So does Russia, China, France, The United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel.
Nine nations have them.
Why not Iran?
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| The Twelfth Imam |
I was a college student when the Shah was deposed in 1979. At the time, many observers described the Iranian Revolution as a freedom-seeking domestic uprising against dictatorship, and that interpretation still persists among some commentators today.
But revolutions that seek liberty don't replace one autocrat with another. What emerged under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wasn't a freedom movement. It was an effort to reshape the moral, political, and cultural order of Iranian society according to his Islamic revolutionary worldview. Khomeini believed Western political and cultural influence had corrupted the Muslim world and sought to replace it with a system governed by Islamic law and clerical authority.
Khomeini taught that until Muhammad al-Mahdi—the Twelfth Imam in Twelver Shi’ism—emerges, a senior Islamic jurist, an Islamic legal scholar, must govern to preserve divine law. The Mahdi, according to the teaching, has been in hiding—some say in a cave—since the 10th century and will one day emerge after a period of widespread oppression and disorder to defeat tyranny and establish universal justice. That doctrine, velayat-e faqih, still defines the Iranian Islamic Republic.
That means that the Iranian supreme leader doesn't govern simply as a political leader, he also governs as the guardian of an Islamic order awaiting the fulfillment of the Mahdi prophesy.
Belief in the eventual return of the Mahdi generally falls into two broad interpretations: one emphasizes preparing society for the Imam’s return, while another seeks to hasten it by creating conditions in which justice can emerge when the Mahdi appears. One might assume that a state that openly describes itself as “revolutionary” would lean toward the latter view. Whether that's the case or not, both perspectives share the conviction that history is moving toward a moment when divine justice will ultimately prevail. In the meantime, Iran’s leaders often portray their resistance to Western influence—and their endurance under sanctions, war, and isolation—as part of their sacred duty. What they call “resistance” is therefore not merely policy but an ideological obligation, even when it manifests in support for militant and terrorist groups or covert criminal operations abroad.
That's why a sovereign regime that tolerates no internal dissent constantly speaks of "revolution" and "resistance." We generally think of a revolution as a sudden, radical replacement of a government by the governed. But the revolution that Iran refers to isn't against domestic tyranny; it's against Western dominance and Western values.
It's also why, for forty-plus years, Iran hasn't behaved like a conventional nation-state pursuing a geopolitical advantage. It's operated as a revolutionary theocracy whose identity, legitimacy, and long-term objectives are deeply rooted in religious ideology. Its rhetoric isn't idle hyperbole either. It reflects their global perspective and it's a roadmap for their behavior and ambitions on the international scene.
That agenda has produced a network of proxies that have riddled the Middle East with violence and death. Hezbollah in Lebanon regularly launches attacks against Israel. Shiite militias in Iraq have undermined stability and targeted American forces. Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen threaten Gulf states and Red Sea shipping. In Gaza, Tehran supports Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even after the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, Iran held onto influence through various militias.
Beyond the Middle East, Iranian intelligence services have used criminal proxies across Scandinavia, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Belgium to target dissidents and Jewish communities.
Closer to home, Iranian-backed Hezbollah supports criminal enterprises that launder money, smuggle goods, and traffic narcotics in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. These enterprises help fund Hezbollah's operations in the Middle East. Until recently, the Venezuelan government was allied with Iran and Hezbollah to provide them a logistical and financial base that included Syrian and Iranian-aligned assets using Venezuelan territory to connect their criminal interests to regional cartels, including some in Mexico. The same has gone on in Colombia and Bolivia.
And when they call for "Death to America," they mean it.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 66 Americans hostage for 444 days. In 1982, an American military officer working for the CIA, William Buckley, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Hezbollah in Lebanon. In 1983, an Iranian proxy bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing seventeen Americans. That same year, Islamic Jihad used a truck bomb to destroy the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. service members. In 1988, the crime against Buckley was repeated when terrorists abducted, tortured, and killed Marine Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins in Lebanon. During the Iraq War, militias trained and supplied by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) killed hundreds of American troops. In 2007, IRGC-linked operatives murdered five U.S. soldiers in Karbala. In 2019, an Iran-backed militia attack killed an American contractor and wounded US service members at K-1 Air Base in Iraq.
When people ask whether an attack by Iran was imminent when Operation Epic Fury began, these examples call to mind the fact that Iranian attacks have been imminent since November 4, 1979.
The fusion of ideology and strategy that has produced these outcomes also defines Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has insisted that its nuclear activities are peaceful. Yet it has persistently expanded enrichment capacity, hardened facilities, absorbed punishing sanctions, and faced military consequences rather than abandon the program. From a purely material standpoint, the cost has been enormous. From an ideological perspective, it demonstrates a determined commitment to the revolutionary narrative that the Iranian Islamic Republic cannot be subordinated to the West or its dictates.
The result is a state that can't be understood solely through pragmatic cost-benefit analysis nor dismissed as completely unhinged. It's a revolutionary regime whose ideological commitments shape, justify, and sustain a persistent strategy of confrontation and defiance. It's what makes sitting at the negotiating table with Iranian representatives uniquely complex: in a system built on resistance, handshakes and concessions aren't necessarily steps toward compromise. They may simply be instruments of a broader revolutionary strategy.
And that brings us back to the original question: Why can't Iran have a nuclear weapon?
Because nuclear weapons in the hands of a revolutionary theocracy committed to resistance, and that sees "Death to America" as part of the formula, indiscriminately strikes civilian targets in neighboring Gulf states, and demonstrates a willingness to employ proxies, absorb sanctions, and sustain long-term confrontation poses risks beyond typical conceptions of deterrence and tolerance.
Add to it the belief that one day, amid the chaos, the Mahdi will emerge to straighten it all out, Iran begins to look like a fatalistic regime that believes it has nothing to lose. Their ideology clearly influences their long-term posture. A regime that sees itself as the guardian of divine order and a participant in sacred history may accept costs that a purely secular state would avoid. It may frame a prolonged—even fatal—confrontation as a virtue rather than a miscalculation or a failure.
That's why the question isn't simply whether Iran can have a nuclear weapon.
It's whether the world can afford to take the risk that they might use them.
