After years of defying demands to dismantle its nuclear programme, it is now viewed as largely impregnable.
Trump exchanged friendly letters with its dictator, Kim Jong Un, and met him twice in a fruitless effort to negotiate a deal.
In Iran’s case, Trump deployed B-2 bombers just weeks after making a fresh diplomatic overture to its leaders.
“The risks of Iran acquiring a small nuclear arsenal are now higher than they were before the events of last week,” said Robert Einhorn, an arms control expert who negotiated with Iran during the Obama Administration.
“We can assume there are a number of hardliners who are arguing that they should cross that nuclear threshold.”
Iran would face formidable hurdles to producing a bomb even if it made a concerted dash for one, Einhorn said, not least the knowledge that if the US and Israel detect such a move, they will strike again.
It is far from clear that Iran’s leaders, isolated, weakened and in disarray, want to provoke them.
Yet the logic of proliferation looms large in a world where the nuclear-armed great powers — the United States, Russia, and China — are viewed as increasingly unreliable and even predatory towards their neighbours.
From the Gulf and Central Europe to East Asia, analysts said, non-nuclear countries are watching Iran’s plight and calculating lessons they should learn from it.
Lesson one: North Korea
“Certainly, North Korea doesn’t rue the day it acquired nuclear weapons,” said Christopher Hill, who led lengthy, ultimately unsuccessful, talks with Pyongyang in 2007 and 2008 to try to persuade it to dismantle its nuclear programme.
The lure of the bomb, Hill said, has become stronger for America’s allies in the Middle East and Asia.
Since World War II, they have sheltered under a US security umbrella. But they now confront a president, in Trump, who views alliances as incompatible with his vision of “America first”.
“I’d be very careful with the assumption that there is a US nuclear umbrella,” said Hill, who served as ambassador to South Korea, Iraq, Poland, and Serbia under Democratic and Republican presidents.
“Countries like Japan and South Korea are wondering whether they can rely on the US.”
Support for developing nuclear weapons has risen in South Korea, though its newly elected president, Lee Jae Myung, has vowed to improve relations with North Korea.
In 2023, President Joe Biden signed a deal with Seoul to involve it more in nuclear planning with the US, in part to head off a push by South Korean politicians and scientists to develop their own nuclear weapons capability.
In Japan, the public has long favoured disarmament, a legacy of the US atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
But it has begun debating whether to store nuclear weapons from the US on its soil, as some members of Nato do.
Lesson two: Ukraine
Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister of Japan, said that if Ukraine had kept some of its Soviet-era bombs, it might have avoided a Russian invasion.
President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use tactical nuclear weapons early in that conflict gave pause to the Biden Administration about how aggressively to arm the Ukrainian military.
It also deepened fears that other revisionist powers could use nuclear blackmail to intimidate their neighbours.
The lesson of Ukraine could end up being, “If you have nuclear weapons, keep them. If you don’t have them yet, get them, especially if you lack a strong defender like the US as your ally and if you have a beef with a big country that could plausibly lead to war,” wrote Bruce Riedel and Michael O’Hanlon, analysts at the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, in 2022.
Lesson three: the Middle East
Saudi Arabia, an ally of the US and arch-rival of Iran, has watched Tehran’s nuclear ambitions with alarm.
Experts say it would feel huge pressure to develop its own weapon if Iran ever obtained one. The US has tried to reassure the Saudis by dangling assistance to a civil nuclear programme, but those negotiations were interrupted by Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
And yet, for all the predictions of a regional arms race, it has yet to occur.
Experts say that is a testament to the success of non-proliferation policies, as well as to the checkered history of countries that pursued weapons.
The Middle East is a messy landscape of dashed nuclear dreams.
Iraq, Syria, and Libya all had their programmes dismantled by diplomacy, sanctions, or military force.
In the category of cautionary tales, Libya’s is perhaps the most vivid: Muammar Gaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
Eight years later, after a Nato-backed military operation toppled his Government, he crawled out of a drainpipe to face a brutal death at the hands of his own people.
Iran’s strategy of aggressively enriching uranium, while stopping short of a bomb, did not ultimately protect it either.
“To the extent that people are looking at Iran as a test case, Trump has shown that its strategy is not a guarantee that you will prevent a military attack,” said Gary Samore, a professor at Brandeis University who worked on arms control negotiations in the Obama and Clinton administrations.
Samore said it was too soon to say how the Israeli and American strikes on Iran would affect the calculus of other countries.
“How does this end?” he said. “Does it end with a deal? Or is Iran left to pursue a nuclear weapon?”
Experts on proliferation are, by nature, wary. But some are trying to find a silver lining in the events of the last week.
Einhorn said that in delivering on his threat to bomb a nuclear-minded Iran, Trump had sent a reassuring message to US allies facing their own nuclear insecurities.
“In Moscow, Pyongyang, and Beijing,” Einhorn said, “they’ve taken notice not just of the reach and capacity of the US military, but the willingness of this president to use that capability.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Mark Landler
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
