Btw, if anyone is wondering, my assessment of the Israel-Iran war is that Iran didn’t lose. So it’s like the 2006 Hezbollah war, only Iran inflicted far more damage than Hezbollah did. Not losing is winning in this calculus, so Israel is deterred.

There’s this expectation now that Iran will double down on developing a nuclear weapons program. But such a program is extremely costly, both economically and politically. Yet its sophisticated missile arsenal proved extremely effective in its war with Israel. A tremendous amount of damage was inflicted — the extent of which is not fully accounted for, in part because of Israel’s military censorship. It does seem that doubling down on the missile program — with emphasis on hypersonic missiles — would be more cost effective and in turn would provide the necessary force to deter both Israel and US forces in the region. Almost think not pursuing nukes would be more effective were the missile program ramped up instead

“We consider the use of such weapons as haraam, and believe that it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster.” — Ayatollah Khamenei

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Sorta agree. Though now I think the decision whether to get nukes or not depends entirely on whether it makes sense strategically, not because of the fatwa. I could be wrong!

Iran is a highly complex geopolitical actor in the region - non aligned with the majority Arab states and mostly focused on proxy strategic depth to push its nationalist agenda. I see the regime in Tehran very differently then let’s say the commentators sitting in London or New York.

But the way to understand the fatwa is to aligned it with Iran’s foreign policy and war doctrine, and its war doctrine doesn’t include weapons of mass destruction. If the regimes starts shifting away from its policy only then one can assume nuclear deterrence is on the way.

The fatwa argument is super interesting in terms of why they didn’t pursue a nuke like NK did. Strategically, getting nukes would have seemed smarter. Maybe their missiles are enough to provide deference now given that their main enemy, Israel, has no strategic depth (and has shown that its infra can easily be smashed) and because they basically wanna be frenemy buddies with America now (if only America would buddy up) 🤷