alt Hacker NewsIf you ask international relations scholars or people in the state department, they actually support the prevention of nuclear proliferation.
The general population typically are doves because they can't see the consequences 10-50 years out.
My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.
I lived through North Korea getting nuclear weapons in my lifetime. Before they were the end of a joke, today we have to care about the opinions of that backwater. (And I read international relations structural realists as much as I drink coffee... The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo.)
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The world would be more safe if Iran had nuclear weapons (less American/Israeli/Saudi interventions in the middle east). They should have smuggled nukes from the collapsed soviet Russia or do whatever was necessary to produce nukes.
Nukes, (or thousands of artillery pointed at densely populated areas allied with a country with nukes) are the surest way maintain sovereignty in the mad world we live in.
> My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.
I suspect that this belief has the same level of thought put into it as the "general populace". The crux of the issue is not Iran's nuclear proliferation, it's the hegemon's unreliability.
The US had the JCPOA, had allies for deterrence, and unilaterally decided to discard them in the name of inflation. One might argue that the electorate has decided that the US should no longer be a hegemon, and yet the administration still impose it's will on others.
There was a time when I believed that Iran was not a rational actor. That is not the case now. I can only hope that there are enough checks and balances to prevent other actors from acting too irrationally.
Iran already wasn't working on nuclear weapons (a confident assessment by our intelligence community across the past 20+ years). The JCPOA then gave us the ability to verify that for ourselves. Then we (metaphorically) blew up that agreement, and (literally) blew up their leader who was firmly opposed to developing nuclear weapons, and the new one doesn't feel the same.