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    Perhaps the more correct title of this post should be ‘How Not to Deal with Iran: The International Community Just Does Not Get What Is at Stake’. That same community finally managed to refer Iran from the IAEA, whose diplomatic efforts were rebuffed long ago, to the UN Security Council, only to be unable to decide anything.
    The problem with this whole scenario is that none of the nations involved in trying to do something about Iran’s nuclear program seem to be considering the true stakes in this matter. Even if Iran is years away from successfully completing a nuclear weapon, every day that the international community allows to pass without action is a day that Iran has to advance its program.
    Meanwhile, nations like Russia and China are more concerned about their immediate economic opportunities in Iran than the fact that those economic ties are helping Iran build a nuclear weapon. The nations of the European Union are more concerned with the possibility that they might offend the Iranians and make them mad that the fact that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. The US is typically apathetic, allowing the agenda of the minority liberal left- the focus on isolationism, meaningless diplomacy, and overbearing domestic policy- to distract this nation from the reality that Iran is building a nuclear weapon it may very well try to us on the US or one of its allies.
    In fact, the only nation who has done anything definitive to date on the subject of Iran is Japan, which nation has begun to cut back its oil imports from Iran. Why? Because Japan already understands the consequences of inaction in the form of a nuclear armed North Korea. The very same inaction, selfishness, failed diplomacy, and apathy allowed North Korea to build nuclear weapons while the world decided what it should do about that nation trying to build those weapons. As a result, the entire dynamic of the Pacific Rim has changed, with North Korea possessing both completed weapons and the capacity to deliver them as far away as the West Coast of the US.
    What all of the nations involved in the issue of Iran fail to realize is that a nuclear armed Iran will make all of their present considerations irrelevant. With nuclear weapons, Iran can balance the diplomatic and military scales, no firmly tipped against them, in their favor. Using the threat of nuclear war, Iran can make demands, dictate policy, and forward its agenda of establishing a wider Islamic theocracy in the Middle East, destroying Israel, and breaking the influence of the West in the Muslim world. In the end, a nuclear armed Iran will completely change the dynamics of world politics in a way not done since the start of the Cold War.
    And this reality is being allowed to develop by the disunity and failure of foresight of the nations who could end such a threat now, before it has a chance to materialize. In the mean time, the threat continues to develop, moving the world closer to the kind of reality that no one really wants to face.
DLH
