The United States has nuclear weapons. So does Russia, China, France, The United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.
Nine nations have them.
Why not Iran?
But revolutions that seek liberty don't replace one autocrat with another. What we saw under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wasn’t a freedom movement. It was an effort to reshape the moral, political, and cultural order of society according to his worldview. It sought to reverse what he saw as centuries of Western political and cultural dominance in the Muslim world.
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 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.
Within Mahdist belief, there are two strands: one emphasizes preparing for the Imam's return; the other seeks to create conditions that would hasten it. Both share the conviction that history is moving toward a day when divine justice will be established. They believe that their resistance to the West and their endurance in the face of sanctions, war, and isolation are all part of landscape. Resistance to Western ways—and even Western presence—isn't just policy, it's a sacred duty.
That's why a sovereign regime that tolerates no internal dissent constantly speaks of "revolution" and "resistance." The revolution isn't against domestic tyranny; it's against Western dominance and Western values.
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 enterprises to regional cartels, including some in Mexico. The same has gone on in Colombia and Bolivia.
The ideology that anticipates the Mahdi's return has produced Iran’s sponsorship of militant groups and terrorists throughout the world.
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 in Lebanon. In 1983, an Iranian proxy bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing seventeen Americans. That same year, a truck bomb destroyed 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 produce these atrocities 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 cannot 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.
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 deterrence models and tolerance.
Add to it the belief that one day, amid the chaos, the Mahdi will emerge to straighten it all out, it begins to look like a fatalistic regime that believes it has nothing to lose in the end. Their ideology clearly influences risk tolerance and long-term posture. A regime that sees itself as guardian of divine order and a participant in sacred history may accept costs that a purely secular state would avoid. It may frame prolonged—even fatal—confrontation as a virtue rather than miscalculation or a failure.
That's why the question is not simply whether Iran can have a nuclear weapon.
It is whether the world can afford it to take the risk that they might use them for destructive purposes or for blackmail.
