Im Iran könnte alles passieren

The combination of new UN-backed sanctions and a weakened military are making Iran desperate, Arash Azizi and Graeme Wood write. “Although it still has options, all of them are bad.”

An appealing direction may be the “relative calm of North Korea, whose combined nuclear and conventional deterrent shows no sign of weakness. States that go nuclear tend to survive. For a North Korean option to work, however, Iran would actually have to get a bomb,” Azizi and Wood write. But “the result for Iran will be isolation and poverty … and the permanent withholding of any carrots Tehran might once have hoped to acquire through negotiation. The only thing worse than not having the bomb might be having one.”

Another option would be to go ballistic, the authors continue. However, “Iran’s drones and missiles will never match those held by its primary adversaries. At most, Iran can hope to wound America or Israel when attacked. But its own weapons can never win a war,” they write. 

Or, Iran could more closely align with Russia and China. Neither “have proved reliable for Iran,” Azizi and Wood write. “They are hostile to its Islamism (they crush it within their own borders), and even if Iran became completely pragmatic, both China and Russia have higher priorities than friendship with Iran.”

Ayatollah Rafsanjani, a founding figure of the Iranian Revolution, had another idea: Soon before his death in 2017, he proposed that Iran could follow in the footsteps of postwar West Germany and Japan. “These countries accepted their defeat at war and gave up their missiles to get a chance at economic development instead,” Azizi and Wood write. 

Read more: [https://theatln.tc/Gl1H6YQh](https://theatln.tc/Gl1H6YQh) 

— Kim Jao, assistant editor, audience and engagement, *The Atlantic*