What If Iran Already Has the Bomb? | Can a U.S.-China Military Hotline Stop the Downward Spiral? | Islamic Terrorism Is About to Return to Europe, and more

One such change took a while to register but is now obvious to all: In a sharp departure from a years-long policy, Iran’s leading officials are now openly threatening to build and test a nuclear bomb.
Earlier this month, Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister, said that Tehran had the capacity to build a bomb and that, if it faced existential threats, it could “change its nuclear doctrine.”
“When Israel threatens other countries, they can’t sit silent,” he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic on May 9.
To emphasize that this wasn’t a gaffe, he reiterated the position a few days later when he addressed an Iranian Arab conference in Tehran.
Kharazi isn’t just any old diplomat. He heads a foreign-policy advisory body that reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who also appointed Kharazi to the regime’s Expediency Council. He would not have spoken without Khamenei’s blessing.
Under the 2015 deal, Iran had agreed to enrich uranium up to only 3.67 percent for a period of 15 years, thus keeping it far from the high-grades necessary for possible military use, and to cut its stockpile of already-enriched uranium by 98 percent. When the U.S. withdrew from the deal in 2018, Iran started gradually scaling up its program. Today, according to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has more than 5,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, including more than 120 kilograms that are 60 percent pure, many times more than what’s necessary for most civil purposes and a very short step away from the necessary military grade. Not only is Iran the only nonnuclear weapons state in the world to have enriched uranium to such levels, but it already has enough material for at least three bombs.
The United States and others should still want to do all they can to scale back Iran’s nuclear program. The realist theoretician Kenneth Waltz famously mused that a nuclear Iran would actually help stabilize the region. But as even Waltz’s ideological successors admit, this is a gamble best not taken.

Democracies Aren’t the Peacemakers Anymore  (Chester Crocker, Foreign Policy)
Authoritarian states’ traditional approach to conflict outside their borders is to choose sides—supplying political-diplomatic support and military muscle to their allies—or to freeze the conflict while keeping a hand in to stir the pot and shape possible outcomes. Russia has done both: the first by backing Syria’s Bashar al Assad against various rebel movements, and the second by trying to dominate the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Authoritarians are not known for expending resources on peacemaking ventures with uncertain outcomes. Nor do they focus on good governance norms after a settlement. They are often content to consolidate the power and standing of local authoritarians.
Yet that pattern seems to be shifting. Today, we are witnessing a number of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states engage in mediation, and conflict management. China has mediated between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Qatar has led talks between Israel and Hamas, and Turkey has done the same between Russia and Ukraine leading to the Black Sea Grain deal that lapsed last year.
In an attempt at heavy-handed conflict management, Russia tried to freeze the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and sent in peacekeepers in 2020 but  stood  aside when the Azerbaijani forces took decisive action to seize the disputed territory three years later. Such activities are pursued by a wide range of nominal and quasi-democracies, military governments, presidential one-party states, and monarchies.
The impact of this surge in authoritarian peacemaking gets less attention than it deserves. Authoritarian states are buffeting the peacemaking diplomacy of Western states, blocking or undercutting Western initiatives and challenging Western leadership of the global peacemaking agenda. The most obvious impact has been the global polarization that creates gridlock in the U.N. Security Council, undercuts support for U.N. peace operations and saps coherence around critical norms such as human rights and individual freedoms.

The Inevitable Role of Clans in Post-Conflict Stabilization in Gaza  (Yaniv Voller, War on the Rocks)
“Palestinian tribes, clans and families are not an alternative to any Palestinian political system.” This statement was made not by a Palestinian government official or an expert advisor on democratic reforms in Palestine. Rather, it was made by representatives of Gazan clans and families themselves. This emphatic denial came in response to assertions that the Israeli government seeks to promote these clans as future proxies following the end of combat operations in the territory.
The Israeli government has indeed considered this idea, which has in turn attracted fierce criticism from commentators across the political spectrum. Many of these criticisms are valid. But the outright dismissal of the clans as potential security and service providers ignores realities on the ground, where clans are already significant actors who have stepped in to fill the vacuum created by Hamas’s administrative withdrawal.
The question of clans’ role in post-conflict Gaza has yet to gain any significant attention among policymakers outside of Israel and Palestine. However, experience in both the region and other post-conflict environments shows that the involvement of clans and tribes in post-conflict environments is inevitable.

Iran’s Near-Bomb-Grade Uranium Stock Grows, Talks Stall, IAEA Reports Say  (Reuters)
Iran is enriching uranium to close to weapons-grade at a steady pace while discussions aimed at improving its cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog are stalled, two confidential reports by the watchdog showed on Monday. The International Atomic Energy Agency faces a range of difficulties in Iran, including the fact it only implemented a small fraction of the steps IAEA chief Rafael Grossi thought it committed to in a “Joint Statement” on cooperation last year. “There has been no progress in the past year towards implementing the Joint Statement of 4 March 2023,” one of the two reports to member states, both of which were seen by Reuters, said. Grossi travelled to Iran this month for talks with Iranian officials aimed at improving cooperation and IAEA monitoring in Iran. Follow-up talks have stalled, however, after the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last week.

Islamic Terrorism Is About to Return to Europe, the Possible Targets: the Paris Olympics and Euro 2024  (Pamfleti)
“The current terrorist threat to Europe is very large, as there is an intersection of a series of disconnected but unfortunately mutually reinforcing events,” says Hans-Jakob Schindler, director of the Berlin-New York-based Counter-Extremism Project. “The attacks of October 7 changed the level of threat from groups that for a long time did not pose any threat on the European continent. Certainly there has always been Islamic terrorism, but it is not Islamic terrorism in all its varieties from Hamas to Al-Qaeda. It’s usually Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and lone actors. Whereas now we have Hamas, Hezbollah, actors acting alone, Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, extreme left and right. And all of these can see their targets. The threat of terrorism has been there all along, but because of the attacks on October 7, 2023, it has taken off the media’s attention, and this is the threat that comes from the Islamic State ,” he adds.

The United States Is Expected to Lift Its Ban on the Sale of Offensive Weapons to Saudi Arabia  (Financial Times)
The ban will likely e lifted in the coming weeks, according to U.S. officials. President Biden suspended the sale of such armaments to the kingdom three years ago, and lifting the ban would represent Washington’s latest move to improve U.S.-Saudi relations.