A good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use
The vice president asked, and got an answer
In the tweet from Vice President J.D. Vance that I quoted in yesterday’s post, he stated, “I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use.”
Journalist Aaron Maté responded on X with a valid reason, but Vance seems to have conveniently missed (ignored) it. I thought it was worth documenting and spreading as far as possible.
The argument is that Trump broke the original Iran nuclear deal, which capped Iran's enrichment at the threshold for civilian use. By killing that deal, which Iran was adhering to, Trump sent the message that the US would not accept Iran enriching even for civilian use.
So Iran -- as it was allowed to under the deal, given Trump's violation of it -- increased enrichment in the hopes of convincing the US to return to the deal and abandon its crippling sanctions that strangle Iran's economy. What were they supposed to do, wait for Donald Trump, Joe Biden and then Donald Trump again to change their minds?
If one wants to argue that the original deal that Trump broke was flawed because it was set to expire, well Trump could have tried to renegotiate it. He didn't. He simply killed it, re-imposed crippling sanctions, and then assassinated Iran's top general as he was trying to de-escalate to Saudi Arabia.
One could also argue that Iran made a tactical error in enriching at a higher level. But it not only has the right to do that, it did so while actively negotiating with Trump and repeatedly renouncing nuclear weapons, as it long has. Just a few months ago, the US intelligence community affirmed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program suspended in 2003.”
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