No one knows for certain how this will turn out given North Korea’s status as a rogue nation and some have speculated that Kim Jong-Un is only closing nuclear facilities that were already damaged. Still, maybe the dictator has realised that his military might is nothing compared with the US’s and decided to yield.

This brings up several questions about international diplomacy, but let’s focus for now on the other rogue state that has been in the news recently for its nuclear programme: Iran.
Similar Rogue States

The parallels between Iran and North Korea are astounding, but could we hope that the Iranian mullahs will one day lay down their nukes in favour of peace? Well, simply no.

The Iranian Regime has had decades to reform and could well have surrendered their nuclear weapons programme in 2015, when they signed a nuclear pact with the US and other top nations, but it didn’t and we should remember that. No matter what the future holds for North Korea, Iran will not make a pact for peace while the mullahs are in charge.

Under the mullahs’ regime, Iran is suffering from a broken economy with the vast majority of its people in absolute poverty, with half of all Iranians currently starving and the numbers rising by the day.

Let’s be clear that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei isn’t concerned about the fate of his people; he is only concerned about spreading his corrupted version of Shiism and making Iran a regional power. Thus, he wants to divert Iran’s budget to the military (including the funding of terrorists and proxy militias) and the nuclear programme, as he believes that this will bolster Iran’s threat to other nation states and make them more susceptible to Iran’s religious dictatorship.

Mohammed Al-Shaikh, a Saudi writer with al-Jazirah newspaper, wrote: “The politicized Persian theocrats are not aware that the world standards today differ from those in the past — when invasion, jihad and dominance and exporting ideological revolutions by force controlled the relations of peoples. It has become impossible to invade nowadays. Today’s world would never, I repeat never, let a theocratic state expand and act like terrorist militias, which it’s working to combat and to eradicate their culture.”

The Iranian Regime’s constant interference in other Middle Eastern countries, from supplying terrorist cells with weapons to paying proxy groups to fight in Syria on behalf of Bashar Assad to training terrorists in Iranian camps, has attracted international attention.

Other Middle Eastern countries have been talking about this for a while and defending themselves against the Regime, while Donald Trump noted it as one of the reasons that he pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal last week, and European diplomats are soon to bring it up in meetings with the Regime.

If Iran were to surrender its weapons and work with the rest of the world, it would be glorious for Iran and everyone else, but it’s not going to happen. Instead, in order to see a non-nuclear Iran, the international community should support the Iranian Resistance in their fight for a Free Iran, run by and for the Iranian people.