The United States and Israeli strikes against Iran began only hours ago, but there’s already one clear lesson for the rest of the world: If you have a nuclear weapon, you are safe from potential U.S. attack, and if you don’t have a nuclear weapon, you are vulnerable. In 2018, President Trump violated a multilateral nuclear agreement—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran—that was working. Less than a decade later, he has decided with no sound legal or military justification to launch a barrage of military strikes with the apparent aim of toppling the Iranian regime. This is the clearest but by no means only example of a country without a nuclear weapon falling victim to illegal American military attack. The long-term consequences will likely be a large-scale increase in the number of countries who possess nuclear weapons, something that will undermine American and global security for generations to come.
Even before the U.S. detonated the first nuclear weapon in 1945, it has sought to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, recognizing that the more countries that have these capabilities, the more threatened the U.S. and global peace and security would be. That reality led the U.S. over the past 80 years to build up a global system of alliances, treaties, and legal norms that for the most part was successful in preventing the widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons. There are perhaps 50 countries in the world capable technically of building nuclear weapons, but only nine possess such weapons. They are the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Indeed more countries started nuclear weapon programs and then eventually gave them up than ever built nuclear weapons. This massive nonproliferation success story is unlikely to survive America’s attacks against Iran, and the future effort to limit proliferation is as cloudy as the true justification of Trump’s bombing of Iran, and what happens after the bombing is over.
