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Counterpoint: The US already has nuclear adversaries. If the threat of nuclear retaliation works to deter Putin (who owns the world's largest nuke stockpile), it should also suffice to deter Iran. They might be religious nutjobs, but not total religious nutjobs, like Hamas. They will not consider the glassing of all their population centers as a price worth paying to nuke New York.
Nukes work great to prevent you from being invaded or bombed, but they are not the win button for any conflict. Putin has a ton of nukes, and yet this only meant that NATO would not join the fight directly (which, to be sure, is a big deal). He did not try to nuke cities until Ukraine surrenders.
Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since 1989. In 2015, the JCPA was negotiated between Iran and the Obama administration as well as China, Russia and Europe. It limited to the amount of nuclear material Iran was allowed to produce in exchange for sanction relief. While Israel (itself a noted expert on nuclear proliferation, I might add) claimed non-compliance, the IAEA claimed compliance in 2018, when Trump decided to quit the JCPA (possibly because it was an Obama deal) and impose sanctions on Iran. Since then, the gas centrifuges have been running.
Bombing the facilities and murdering their scientists can slow their program, but is unlikely to stop it. Sure, you kick the can down the road for another year, but you also normalize bombing sovereign countries, which is likely not a good lesson to teach a soon to be nuclear power.
If you do not want Iran to have nukes, then you need an invasion and regime change. I would like to point out that about the only one to benefit from recent US-led invasions in the Muslim world was the military industrial complex. The conquest of the Taliban was undone in a heartbeat as soon as the US withdrew, and the US invasion of Iraq prepared the ground for daesh. I for one would prefer not to find out what kind of religious crazies a US-led nation building project in Iran would inevitably give rise to.
I do not contest that Iran is very anti-Israel. Basically any group which prides itself on murdering Jews is supported by them. As someone who thinks Israel has a right to exist (though no right to the West Banks), I do not like this one bit. But at the end of the day, this is Israel's problem, not the problem of the US. Israel certainly has the ability to nuke Tehran, which should hopefully stop Iran from nuking Tel Aviv.
I am also not a fan of the current Israeli government, which basically encourages illegal settlements in the West Bank because they do not feel any pressure not to maximally piss off the Arabs, as they can be sure that the US will have their back if any large backslash happens. Them getting into a cold war with Iran might not be the worst thing in the world, there.
For what it is worth, compared to Sunni countries, Iran has not shown a lot of inclination to commit terrorist acts outside the Middle East. Bin Laden was famously a Saudi national with Saudi funding. Al-Qaeda and Daesh were Sunni extremist projects. This would bode well for the larger world in face of a nuclear Iran.
I don't deny this, but it's nonetheless an insane risk that risks global consequences. If you presented me a button of "these countries may nuke each other but you can guarantee it will never affect the world outside the middle east", I'd probably press it. But such an eventuality is no more a guarantee than some zealot in Tehran sees the Israeli missiles on the way and goes "fuck it, I'll take Europe/America out with me".
I mention this in another post but I think the prolonged nation-building stuff doesn't work if you don't a. rout the actual supporters (which would include a lot of collateral damage and questionable arrests where Afghanistan was concerned) and b. Don't work with the surviving establishment to make something new. In Iraq, this would have meant letting at least some Ba'ath party members be involved in the reorganization of the party, rather than completely ousting them and making them and all their supporters de facto enemies (hence the insurgency) while propping up a bunch of previously uninvolved Sunnis (hence ISIS). In Afghanistan, this likely never would have worked, because the only existing mass establishment they had was the Taliban. There were no mid level bureaucrats who were going "I'm just in the Taliban to do city planning", the Taliban was it. You can't replace them with tribal, sometimes boy raping farmers, and declare victory.
Point being, as I said in another post, you can just gut a country's military and leave, a la Gulf War 1. There's a reason we had an even easier time rolling over their conventional army in Gulf War 2, which is that they were never able to recover to the level they were at pre-Gulf War 1. I would be fine with the same thing happening to Iran.
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I mean, the reason that deterrence works on Putin is that he’s at least semi-rational. He doesn’t want to have millions of dead Russians as a result. The concepts of Jihad and martyrdom of killing and dying in the name of Islam giving you a ticket to paradise— these negate the deterrent effect of “don’t try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die.” Add in that there are statements in the Hadith that claim the end of days is marked by a great slaughter of Jews, and it’s not hard to imagine that they’d be willing to use it.
I question whether one can in fact rise to control of a nation-state without becoming sufficiently cynical/realist that "don't try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die" still works. We had a whole lot of evidence that the Japanese were insanely fanatical, but in the end they were, in fact, actually sane humans. Jihadism has demonstrated that it is willing to eat notable costs, but they still have to recruit their suicide bombers very carefully from a quite-limited pool.
It is not clear to me that Jihadism is actually more insane than Communism, and MAD worked on Communism.
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