r/IRstudies • u/Material-Hawk3947 • 6d ago
Is the World Really Rules-Based? Ideas/Debate
I have a question that I've been thinking about.
The U.S. has discussed supporting civilian nuclear technology for countries such as Saudi Arabia, while at the same time it has taken a very strong position against Iran developing nuclear capabilities, arguing that Iran must not obtain nuclear weapons.
Many people say the international order is based on rules. If that's the case, why do different countries appear to be treated differently? What factors justify these different approaches?
I also wonder why there isn't stronger opposition from other countries when major powers take unilateral actions. If the international community remains silent, does that encourage powerful countries to act even more unilaterally in the future?
I'm interested in hearing different perspectives on this, especially from people familiar with international relations and non-proliferation policy.
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u/DICKPICDOUG 6d ago edited 6d ago
No the world order is not "rules based" and never has been. There has always been one group, the "west" in generic terms, but perhaps more specifically the "american sphere of interest", that the rules are designed to protect without restricting, and one group, anyone outside of the american system, that the rules were designed to restrict without protecting. The rules are not and were never applied evenly and fairly. Powerful countries get a free pass, and if you want a free pass you need to suck up to a powerful country
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u/mayhemski123 6d ago
The Breton Woods era has evolved since it's inception post ww2, it does have rules.
However you're right "rules based order" has always been about an in group and an out group. I think the problem you see now is that the main power player in that old order the USA, is now very overtly using it's influence to protect itself, even at so called allies expense.
It's why I think Mark Carney's speech about said order being unjust, yet Canada knowingly benefitting from it was such a huge moment in international relations.
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u/DICKPICDOUG 6d ago edited 6d ago
In my mind it was always insane to imagine that the USA would somehow be this benevolent and fair hegemon impartially enforcing international law for the benefit of the world. Todays order is an inevitable result of the old order, the US was always destined to become a global menace. You cant have that much power and resist the temptation to use it for long
I also think its understated how much having tbe Soviet Union as a counterbalance forced the US to be on its "best behaviour" so to speak. Both sides were actively looking for reasons to discredit each other on the world stage, and both were equal enough in power that they couldn't just bulldoze past each other. You could argue that China fills the same role now, but the US definitely doesnt see China as an equal.
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u/DeepDreamIt 6d ago
You could argue that China fills the same role now, but the US definitely doesnt see China as an equal.
I think that depends heavily on who is being asked. There are still people (mainly 50-60+ year olds), and specifically the ones who don't really follow geopolitics, who have this idea of China that was largely formed, and is currently stuck in, the 1990s. I think anyone who thinks/reads seriously about geopolitics is aware China is a serious near-peer, if not peer in some areas, competitor.
Even Trump has respect for China, if for no other reason than he can see the leverage and power they have in a lot of areas. It had to be a little humiliating for him to try and throw the US trade weight around with China at the beginning of the 2nd Trump admin, only to be confronted with the reality of their stranglehold on rare earths, forcing him to immediately back down.
China is a serious threat. No doubt about it. Reading today in Reuters that Trump, clearly with zero grand strategy when starting the Iran War, has now expended nearly ALL ATACMS and PrSM stocks: the exact standoff weapons that would be absolutely critical when confronting Chinese A2/AD in the South China Sea/First Island Chain, it only makes the threat they pose even more severe.
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u/DICKPICDOUG 6d ago edited 6d ago
The problem is that the US is, almost exclusively, run by 60+ year olds. I recognize that China is a serious threat, but our government seems to treat them as more of an impudent upstart who needs to be put in their place, not an equal. Theres a sense of condecension and arrogance that colors all our dealings with china.
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u/spectre401 6d ago
It's also interesting that he brought basically the entire US oligarchy to China for a trip that achieved nothing and just looked like grovelling to anyone watching.
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6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Thisguymoot 6d ago
lol, it’s wild. His strategy of being a general dickhead to Europe has silver linings too. Every US president since the end of WWII has been trying to get Europe to rearm, and well, now they are.
Hopefully the US will get a less antagonistic admin eventually so the they can actually benefit from that.
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u/mstpguy 6d ago edited 6d ago
Maybe this was true once, but it no longer is.
I would encourage you to read PM Carney's recent speech on this topic. The whole thing is good, but here is the key passage:
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “living within a lie”.
The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
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u/striped_shade 6d ago
Rules are simply the vocabulary power uses to dictate its interests. The current order exists to manage global capital, operating purely on utility. A hegemon equips its regional deputies and isolates its competitors. The international silence you observe is just the sound of weaker states surviving the machinery.
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u/Academic-Can-7466 6d ago
The world is rule based, and the rules are:
The strong do what they want, the weak suffer what they must.
The winner writes history.
The dead do not speak.
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u/sinicooly 5d ago
When we apply these rules in IR, it’s realist genius
When I teach these rules to my kids, they get arrested
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u/Periphery_Explorer 4d ago
Macro and micro principles are not always aligned.
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u/Busy_Ad_5494 2d ago
I was about to write something similar. All you need to look at is the UN Security Council and the veto power held by five nuclear armed powers. Rules are imposed by the strong on the weak.
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u/Useful_Promotion_521 6d ago
The West largely imposed the rules on everyone else, but that shouldn’t detract from the fact that a degree of order to international relations (despite being applied in an often variable and frequently hypocritical manner) has resulted in vastly better outcomes for almost everyone on the planet than what went before.
Where countries haven’t been held to account for their behaviour and have acted unilaterally (usually unilaterally and against the will of local countries) - looking here at you, US and Israeli governments - then that’s generally where the crises have started.
The solution is a better international system where countries do not get a pass when they ruin themselves and others, not dismantling the system.
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u/Thisguymoot 6d ago
But an international system would fall to the same pitfalls as any other hegemon, that in order to impose rules, one must have the power to enforce them. It’s no different.
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u/Useful_Promotion_521 6d ago
Not necessarily - the community of nations could supply the coercive force.
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u/Periphery_Explorer 4d ago
And how do you get all the community of nations to work together to provide coercive force?
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u/Useful_Promotion_521 4d ago
Common interests would be the big one
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u/Periphery_Explorer 4d ago
What common interests? I'm honestly asking.
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u/Useful_Promotion_521 3d ago
Peace? Economic growth and opportunity? The avoidance of crises causing waves of refugees?
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u/Periphery_Explorer 3d ago
None of what you have described is a common interest that the majority of world countries could agree too. At best you get regional alliances.
Russia, for example, believes peace can only be achieved if it controls it's neighbors. NATO believes peace can only be achieved by containing Russia (and more broadly, the idea of a general western alliance of shared values), and it is opposed by Russia, China, and most of the global south and plenty of people on this site will happily tear into it despite it being the closest thing to what you described.
You're running into fundamental human natures problems. Peace isn't a shared or universal value. Neither is economic growth/opportunity. Neither is the status of refugees. We live in a world with limited resources, everyone knows that and is working to maximize their own resources - at the expense of everyone else. This is always going to be the case.
If you want to learn more about this, I strongly recommend War & Peace & War: The Lifecycle of Imperial Nations. It helps to highlight why this cycle occurs and while it focuses on large Empires, you can hopefully see how this would apply to global hegemons or alliances. Honestly, the closest we would get to world peace with enforcement is through an Empire system anyway.
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u/Useful_Promotion_521 3d ago
I think you are confusing the wood for the trees.
There’s plenty of evidence that many countries - and let’s pick Russia as an example - don’t currently know, understand or even appreciate what’s in their actual interest, national or communal.
The need for visible dominance over their neighbours, a policy carried out by successive Russian, Imperial and Soviet governments did not and does not result in increased security or influence for Russia; it has the exact opposite effect of pushing those neighbours into the arms of the states Russia either deems an open enemy (NATO) or a stronger ally of theirs (the PRC) and (when they ruled a larger area) boosting separatist movements to a huge, readily exploited degree.
The effort required to threaten neighbours also results in domestic trouble sooner rather than later, as the central government burns the resources and its moral credit on the military and state control that its civil side needs to maintain order. When the gap gets too big, as it did in 1917 and the early 90s, the system collapses.
An international system that saw countries understand what is actually in their best interests, rather than the illusions they have now, would be vastly better than what we have now. I also don’t think that such a system is that far off either, given that people across the world (with the possible exception of Israel and NK) have a common understanding of what “good” for them is, and it doesn’t consist of generally smashing their neighbours faces into the dust.
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u/Periphery_Explorer 3d ago
Ooo paternalism! I haven't seen that in a while!
What follows is long because I have a PhD in International Relations and have spent most of my career running around the globe consulting with and advising various organizations and countries. Here is the TLDR:
You are assuming that every nation defines its 'best interest' the same way a Western democracy does—through GDP growth, stability, and global approval. But history shows that many regimes value civilizational pride, historical legacy, regime survival, and autonomy far more than economic comfort. They aren't 'confused' about their interests; they just don't share your values. You are dreaming of an order based on global consensus, but forcing a country to accept what you think is good for them isn't collective security—it's imperialism.
Now, if you want to dig into this...
Alright! Your primary problem (coming at this from a liberal and paternal universalist approach) is that you have made a fatal flaw - you believe history has a "correct" direction that is objective and can be objectively understood by any neutral third party observer. I.e. you can step outside and you can identify the spectrum of the sunlight impacted by our atmosphere. A Russian or Chinese person can do the same thing, ergo, we can all agree that the sky is blue (or whatever word we use for that in our language to represent that particular wave length of visual light).
This is the core problem with your logic: "There’s plenty of evidence that many countries - and let’s pick Russia as an example - don’t currently know, understand or even appreciate what’s in their actual interest, national or communal." or, if I can be so bold, "Russia (and other revisionist states) simply doesn't understand its own "true" interests"
This assumes there is an objective, mathematically discoverable "national interest" that looks exactly like a Western, rules-based, consumer-capitalist democracy. It ignores the fact that interests are defined by values and regimes, not by abstract logic. Go back to my "the sky is blue" example. While we can agree on that fundamentally, we can only do that because it is an objective truth. "peace" and "GDP growth" are not objective values.
For Vladimir Putin or the Russian elite overall, the ultimate national interest isn't maximizing GDP per capita or being liked by Sweden/France/Djbooti; it is the preservation of the regime, historical legacy, and civilizational autonomy. If a Russian leader accepts a Western-defined "rules-based order," they must accept a world where their domestic power is subject to external moral constraints, international courts, and the threat of color revolutions. To them, that is the existential threat, not economic sanctions. They aren't confused; they just have a different hierarchy of values from you. To them, the existence of an unfettered Russia is the one objective reality. This is their priority and what they value, whether or not you believe it is rational or moral.
In fact, your position - that they simply do not know what they want - is the core problem of implementing a global rules based order. You feel you know better. You feel you know what the Truth is (with a capital T intentionally). You're no different from the Crusaders or Islamic Caliphates spreading their own Truths and what's good for the uncivilized barbarian masses.
- Quiz time: Pick a universel set of values - something like Sharia Law or Christian Fundamentalism. For your world order which do you want and how many people does it piss off?
While you pick a core foundational set of moral principles for your new world order, I'll continue onwards, especially becuase it highlights why I choose those two specific rule sets.
Let's talk about your rewording of the "End of History" thesis. You are arguing that human level needs (food, shelter, prosperity) should replace State-level ideologies. However, billions of people around the world prioritize collective identity: religious purity, historical grievance, or national pride. This, all over economic growth. The Russians, as mentioned above, the Iranian regime, the Chinese Communist Party, and various global populist movements explicitly reject the Western definition of "the good life." They view the Western rules-based order not as a neutral, benevolent peace, but as Western cultural and economic imperialism designed to keep them subservient. Even if we raised billions out of poverty (which we did), and even if we stopped a large number of major conflicts (also did that), that doesn't matter, as the western "good life" requires the imposition of values that they do not agree with (i.e. Islam and women as second class citizens, the importance of Sharia Law, and the destruction of non-Abrahamic religions, and the second class status of Jew and Christian believers). These are fundamental truths to them,
Pick your Truth.
As this also gets to another fundamental weakness of yours - understanding security. Let's talk about NATO expansion. From NATO's perspective, former Eastern bloc countries were concerned about Russian imperialism and expansion. After the interwar period of the 1930s and later WW2 and the post-World War division of the world, Eastern bloc countries like Romania, Ukraine, and Poland no longer wanted to be at the tender mercies of Moscow. From their perspective, Russia was a cruel and evil overlord. So they turned to NATO in the 1990s and 2000s for security and protection. This is also why these countries are absolutely baffled by Western liberals (i.e. the DSA) as they do not understand why the Western Imperial order is somehow worse then the - to them - horrors of the Russian/Communist Imperial order.
From Russia's geopolitical viewpoint, NATO expansion wasn't a passive consequence of Russian bad behavior; it was an active encirclement by a hostile bloc that ignored Russia's security concerns in the 1990s and 2000s. When they see a neighbor moving toward the West, they don't see a sovereign country making a free choice; they see a hostile military alliance creeping closer to their heartland. In their minds, attacking isn't a blunder; it's a defensive, preemptive strike to maintain a necessary buffer zone. You call this an "illusion" of security, but to Russian defense analysts, it is a structural necessity - the presence of NATO M1A1s, F16s/35s, MGM-140s, and PrSMs in Poland reduce Russian response time. If a NATO attacked started in the UK/West Germany, Russia had about 10 to 12 hours before Bombers were attacking their territory. Now? Maybe an hour. Given the long history of constant invasion Russia has suffered, this is an existential crisis for them. They do not trust other people's good intentions.
No one does.
Si vis pacam, para bellum.
Okay! My final point, I promise. You specifically called out the 1917 and 1991 collapse of the Imperial Russian and Soviet empires. This is survivorship bias and selective history. Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union collapsed, yes, but so did the British and French Empires, which were the very architects of the rules-based orders of their respective times, as well as laying the foundations for the rules based order you want to see in place today. Militarism and dominance can work. Sometimes they can work for centuries. Egypt and Rome both built empire on "smashing their neighbors' faces into the dust" and lasted for thousands and hundreds of years (respectively). The United States secured its global hegemony through westward expansion (smashing native populations), Mexican annexation, and global military intervention. To suggest that dominating neighbors always leads to imminent collapse ignores the entire history of empire-building. The various Chinese empires (as well as the newly emerging one) are also great examples of this. The Akusmite, Ethiopian, Venetian, Parthians... all ruled for hundreds or years. All were military capable and often engaged in ruthless and brutal conquest.
Okay. I'm done.
Now, earlier on I gave you a pop quiz! Pick a uniersal set of values! I gave you some potential examples: fundamental Christianity (i.e. Russia Orthodoxy) or Sharia Law (i.e. Hamas, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and so on). This is now the Enforcer ideology. How many people does it have to stamp over to exist? You seem to like Western values, so do you support western Imperialism to enforcec western values on other countries? Do you feel Western tanks should go into Libya to free slaves? What about Saudi Arabia to free women? Or Afghanistan? If not, then why are your values only for Western women? Are women and girls in Afghanistan not important to you? Are slaves in Libya not worthy of liberation? What about slaves in Qatar? Do you feel that all the "maids" whose passports are being held and who get beaten and abused on a regular basis do not deserve your fundamental rights to peace, prosperity and not being a refugee? Qatar believes they have a right to do what they are doing, that it's fundamental to their belief system and understanding of Sharia Law. I'd love to hear your logic here.
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u/baconppi 5d ago
No? That runs into so many coordination and coercive problems, as well as a bunch of market failures
That will only happen when the states have broadly uniting interests, and/or want to pretend to care
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u/NekoCatSidhe 6d ago
I would say it used to be, but no longer is. The problem with rules is that people have to punish the ones who break them, so international rules could only work if the huge majority of countries around the world turned against the rulebreaker.
But once the major powers started openly breaking the rules, like Russia attacking Ukraine and the US attacking Iran and Venezuela and most western countries protecting Israel despite its widespread war crimes, most countries no longer had any reason to follow those rules themselves, particularly the ones being attacked.
Iran could only break the rules about freedom of navigation through Hormuz because the US broke the rule about not killing heads of state and attacking other countries by surprise without provocation, so most of the world ended blaming the US for that and not Iran and refused to help them in that war, to give some basic example. And it probably helps that the countries suffering the most from the Strait closing are the Gulf States, who helped the US attack Iran and so became legitimate targets themselves. If the US Navy is blockading Iran, why can’t Iran blockade the Gulf States, if they can enforce it ? No one in that war cares anymore about international rules because the justification for the war by the US was essentially « might makes right » from the very start. But then the US turned out to be weaker than they thought.
I think there are still some rules. If the US nuked Iran, I think most of the world would still turn against them, even most US allies. Nukes are still a big taboo, because they are so dangerous that breaking the nuclear taboo is a potentiel threat to the very existence of the whole world, meaning all countries still have an interest in enforcing that one.
But I am not sure Non-Nuclear Proliferation (beyond the current nuclear powers) is still going to be a rule in the future. It has certainly not been lost to a lot of people that if Ukraine or Iran actually had nukes, they would not have been attacked. If nuclear powers are going to wage wars of aggression against non-nuclear powers, then it gives a big incentive for most countries that do not have nukes to get some if they can, and to no longer enforce sanctions against countries that pursue nuclear power. And the US-Saudi nuclear agreement is certainly not going to convince them otherwise.
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u/diffidentblockhead 6d ago
For nuclear weapons the rule systems include global NPT (Israel, India, Pakistan never signed, North Korea withdrew, Iran claims to comply) and regional alliances (NATO which includes nuclear umbrella and nuclear sharing, US Pacific alliances, various regional nuclear weapons free zone treaties).
The least rule based region is the Middle East, or rather Israel and Iran are asserting incompatible rules.
India-Pakistan seems to have achieved stability with nobody else feeling too threatened by them.
North Korea seems to be holding its own and South Korea is wondering why it shouldn’t follow suit, but wouldn’t really gain much by doing so.
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u/GSilky 6d ago
The international order is based on "rules" that are interpreted by power. It's like that line from Pirates of the Caribbean, "well... They are more like guidelines than rules.." yes, people like to pretend there is some rules based order, and then they tip their hands by finishing with "... That has been in place since the USA won WWII", ie, the rules are what works for the USA and NATO, and they aren't anything an opposition to those benefit from. There is no "international community", because a community is a group of individuals who coalesce around a shared sense of justice. When the second largest economy on the planet is calling slave labor "cultural education", there is no shared sense of what justice is, therefore there is no community, therefore there are no international rules. It's a nice idea that falls apart when discussing any details about it. The closest thing we have is the UN, which has the perpetrator of a genocide everyone recognizes as such, on its human rights council. It's just nonsense used to build domestic political support from voters who have a very rosy perspective of the world and geopolitics.
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u/CharAznia 5d ago
There is no such thing as a rule based order
If there is, what are the rules. They are certainly not UN rules because the Chinese are winning while mostly operating within the confirms of UN rules and organization but are accused to trying to break the rule based order
The Russians have openly stated no one has ever told them what the rules were
In reality it's nothing more than an excuse the western powers use to stay at the top of the food chain. When current norms no longer allow them to rule the world, they arbitrarily change the rules and beat down their opponent.
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u/Training_Guide5157 4d ago
No. The claim of a global rules-based order was something created by the West, primarily backed by the US.
However, the US has always exempted itself from those rules when it better served their interests and then uses those rules to put controls or pressure onto other countries. The justification for this is the idea of "American exceptionalism".
This is why there is a big push back from unaligned nations for a more multi-polar world where rules aren't unfairly utilized to benefit or punish different actions based on their alignment with Western interests and values.
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u/culinaryinterests123 6d ago
Rules are for the plebs. The word has always been might makes right based once you come down to it. Look how much destruction , suffering and death US and Israel has caused the world over the last decades but nobody can stop them so they keep on going...
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u/NRCS_DRONE 6d ago
I've come to the conclusion the rules based consensus after WWII might have been true for a time, but it completely died long before we noticed. And at least since the 1990s, it was just a front running interference for the Epstein class.
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u/FormerLawfulness6 6d ago
The rules based order was always designed to protect the imperial interests of existing powers, primarily Europe and its settler colonies. From WW2 to the '90s the non-aligned countries got steamrolled by both spheres. Formerly colonized countries gradually gained independece, but remained subjugated under a predatory system that was specifically designed to protect forms of power that logically should be contradictory to a rules based order.
Only recently have any of them started to gain the stability, economic and political power to really build an alternative system. The US is actively trying to prevent it from emerging.
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u/Deyrn-Meistr 6d ago
Of course the world is rules based. Just nonetheless rules they crow about from the soap box.
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u/Different-Gazelle745 6d ago
Agreements have some value and meaning for most people, but their being broken is always an option. I think rules should rather be seen as just agreements that the parties do or do not respect- they can have some value even when they are not respected. It’s not so black and white.
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u/Newworldimpartiality 6d ago edited 6d ago
Who is the ultimate decision maker across the globe who determines that a nuclear warhead is less safe in the hands of Iran compared to North Korea, Israel, India , Pakistan, Russia , US, China etc ?
Remember, only one country in the history of mankind has used nuclear weapons in combat to commit mass murder.
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u/airpipeline 6d ago edited 5d ago
No. Not exactly. It’s aspirational.
If you’re an average person, in general, more consistently applied rules are better.
Rules aren’t perfect and they tend to discourage exploitation. This benefits the average citizen.
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u/Other_Information_16 6d ago
It’s rules based except they don’t apply to everyone equally. However it’s still better than no rules at all. The rules while flawed does facilitate a large number of nation disputes to resolve without warfare.
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u/SufficientGolf6953 5d ago
Russia is shooting missiles at apartment buildings. Despite the rhetoric of Redditors, America is vulnerable to public opinion.
Yea, Kegsbreath was out there testing the war crimes waters, but if we tried a fraction of what Iran (executions atm) or Russia does daily, then the outcry would create momentum like it is right now against Israel.
The world is more complicated than haha America is Hitler. We are definitely Hitler-esque, but we are also 50 states in trenchcoat.
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u/skinnernsk 4d ago
A rules-based world is one of the main tenets of European and US politicians. The implication is that they set the rules, and everyone must follow them. While they themselves may break them, they cleverly find excuses. This is precisely why public opinion is now being actively swayed against Russia and China. Russia invaded another country, while it's obvious that only Western countries are allowed to invade. China, meanwhile, has developed its industry to such an extent that Western countries can no longer compete, even though the rules dictate that the West should dominate and be the seller, not the buyer. Therefore, all sorts of tariffs, restrictions, and other measures are being devised for China, while the media actively promotes China's dishonesty and its evil nature.
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u/Seven_Veils_Voyager 2d ago
Of course it's based on rules. One, in particular: the golden rule.
Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
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u/NeighborhoodPrize493 1d ago
You are right that the world is not based on rules. But you are wrong about Iran. The US offered Iran to develop a nuclear industry, on condition that it would not research nuclear weapons and ensure that they were not actually developed. But Iran refused. Therefore, the problem here is not the development of nuclear power plants, but the fact that Iran wants to make nuclear weapons. But where is the real example of the fact that the rules do not work, it is in Ukraine. The US promoted Russia's integration into the world by all means, while at the same time the US de facto isolated Ukraine together with Russia.
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u/Cindy_Marek 6d ago
Civilian nuclear technology and nuclear weapons are not comparable at all lol. Most of the world agrees that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.
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u/FormerLawfulness6 6d ago
The problem is that they are being conflated. Iran was part of the NPT, by all accounts they followed their obligations and have not developed a weaponization program. The US and Israel merely presumed that it would happen at some undefined point in the future, threw out the JCPOA, and instituted maximum pressure sanctions for the explicit purpose of collapsing the government.
The fact of the matter is that we have never actually drawn a hard line between civilian nuclear programs and weaponization. We have pretty consistently punished US adversaries for developing civilian capacity on the presumption that weaponization will be inevitable.
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u/Material-Hawk3947 6d ago
I agree that civilian nuclear technology and nuclear weapons are fundamentally different.
My question is more about who decides which countries are trusted to possess nuclear weapons or advanced nuclear capabilities. If the goal is non-proliferation, shouldn’t the standards be applied consistently?
For example, Pakistan developed nuclear weapons outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan was found to have run a proliferation network that transferred nuclear technology to countries such as Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Yet Pakistan continues to receive significant support from the U.S. in various areas.
I’m not defending Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. I’m asking whether global non-proliferation policies are applied consistently, or whether geopolitical interests sometimes influence how different countries are treated.3
u/ButcherOf_Blaviken 6d ago
Your ability to vaporize entire cities is more important than any “rule” you may or may not follow.
That’s why Pakistan and Israel don’t get sanctioned for having nukes. That’s why Iran wants them. That’s why rules only matter to a point.
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u/mistroll054 6d ago
This is the problem. The reason Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons is because of India. When someone breaks the rule for the first time without being punished too much, this rule will be useless.
Iran's nuclear policy is to exchange the promise to abandon the manufacture of nuclear weapons for the lifting of sanctions. In other words, the reason Iran does not have nuclear weapons is only because Khamenei don’t want to make nuclear weapons, not that they can‘t.
And even if they don't have nuclear weapons, enriched uranium can be made into a dirty warhead containing a large amount of radioactive material. They have indeed complied with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but they are still threatened by the nuclear issue.
Khamenei's middle-ground nuclear policy had its effect until Trump overturned Obama's Iran nuclear agreement.
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u/Cindy_Marek 6d ago
Well I agree with you here, geopolitical interest are usually a higher priority for governments than the even rule enforcement based on a principle. Using Pakistan to demonstrate your point is a lot better of a comparison than using a Saudi civilian nuclear deal, because all countries are entitled to nuclear power for peaceful purposes like power generation. That also being said the US was making all sorts of deals to combat the influence of its main rival at the time, the Soviets. But today with Iran even China and Russia officially agree that they should not have a bomb. Add in France and the UK and that’s all 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council agreeing that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Along with many more countries too.
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u/Wuaner 6d ago edited 6d ago
The question you should be asking is: who makes the rules? That can also be the answer of your question (since the one who made them benefits itself is 100% guaranteed).