If lawless aggression by \u2018might is right\u2019 nuclear-armed powers spreads unchecked, what other option do middle-ranking countries have?<\/p>\n
With every bomb dropped, ship seized and blood-curdling threat of annihilation, Donald Trump increases Iran\u2019s incentive to reject his \u201cgrand bargain\u201d peace deal and sprint instead to acquire nuclear weapons for future self-defence. Justifying his declaration of war on 28 February, Trump claimed that Iran \u2013 and primarily its nuclear programme<\/a> \u2013 posed an \u201cimminent threat\u201d. But Iran does not possess nukes. The US and Israel do.<\/p>\n US intelligence chiefs and UN inspectors agree there\u2019s no firm evidence that the regime, while developing its technical capabilities and keeping political options open, has built, or ever tried to build, a nuclear weapon since at least 2003<\/a>, when a covert scheme was exposed. But after Trump\u2019s second unprovoked attack in a year, and his vow to bomb Iranian civilisation back to the \u201cstone ages\u201d, that is very likely to change.<\/p>\n Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If lawless aggression by \u2018might is right\u2019 nuclear-armed powers spreads unchecked, what other option do middle-ranking countries have? With every bomb dropped, ship seized and blood-curdling threat of annihilation, Donald Trump increases Iran\u2019s incentive to reject his \u201cgrand bargain\u201d peace deal and sprint instead to acquire nuclear weapons for future self-defence. Justifying his declaration of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}