Iran'25: We've seen this movie before…

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the world spent part of 2002 debating whether or not Iraq was in possession of nuclear weapons. In 2003, the United States led a coalition that attacked and effectively occupied Iraq, changing the regime with a view to democratizing it. As a result, millions of people died and Iraq fell apart. There was no democracy, and there is no democracy, but in the meantime, there was the Islamic State, with many atrocities in between.

Today, two decades later, we know that the evidence that the US administration at the time presented to the world was false. At the time, Hans Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, headed the International Atomic Energy Agency and claimed that no evidence of the development of nuclear weapons had been found.

In recent days, we have been told by Israel that Iran is weeks away from having nuclear weapons, and needs to defend itself from an existential threat. Today, as at the beginning of the century, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi, has said that Iran is at best three years away from having a nuclear capability. Iran's leadership has always maintained that its interest in nuclear technology serves only civilian, not military, purposes.

I confess that, perhaps due to Western ethnocentric influence, I tend to share the idea of ​​the danger of Iran having nuclear weapons. Ethnocentric influence because, in the West, we tend to diminish the rationality of non-Western actors, as if the same rules did not apply to them.

We believe, among ourselves, in the deterrence provided by the guarantee of mutual destruction, resulting from the capacity of the second strike (in simple terms: two states with nuclear weapons do not attack each other if both can respond to an attack). Making nuclear weapons, in the language of Raymond Aron, an "unusable power". When they are non-Western, we tend to think that rationality is not the same. Sting sang in the Cold War that he "hoped the Russians loved their children too".

In reality, as in Iraq, the nuclear threat is the 'casus beli' of a so-called pre-emptive self-defence war, based on the fear that a duly demonised regime causes (also for its own sake), with two clear objectives: to provoke a change of regime (or at the limit to destabilise it), in order to create security for Israel; and, effectively prevent Iran from developing a nuclear capability, which would take away from Israel the supremacy that possession of the weapon confers.

The first days of the war have shown that Israeli intelligence services remain efficient, Iranian leaders have been targeted and military research and development sites have been attacked. However, Israel does not have the weapons to destroy the facilities built deep underground, and its anti-missile shield has not been able to completely stop all Iranian missiles.

If the Iranian regime resists, and the US finds itself forced to enter the conflict directly, it could be in for a whole new quagmire. The last time it did so, it spent decades fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it woke up, it found that China’s economy was almost the size of its own.

What will the world be like after the next awakening?