Imminent Risks
March 24, 2026
Justification for the joint U.S. and Israeli war against Iran and the choice of February 28th for the start of their attack, a stage that involved leadership replacement by assassination of high Iranian officials, rested in large part on the assertion that Iran, which has perennially sponsored terrorism in the region and wider world, had become close to building a nuclear weapon. Such an achievement was said to impose an “imminent threat” to the United States and western civilization. Never mind doubts that Iran might not be quite as close to joining the nuclear weapons club to constitute a threat characterized as “imminent” since a claim was made by the Trump administration last June that its bombing raid then had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons capability. A broader question concerns the level of entailed risk to U.S. citizens if that were to happen and whether Americans hold that possible development highly among the threatening changes in their lives considered existential and imminent.
Among the nine countries that already have nuclear weapons, only those in France and Great Britain currently resemble pure democracies. North Korea, Russia, China and Pakistan are led by authoritarians. In the name of efficiencies needed to steer their countries in this fast-moving 21st century, leaders in India, Israel and, most importantly, the United States are engaged in campaigns to weaken other branches of government and shift their systems from ones where government power is shared and answerable to the people through fair elections to a much more authoritarian model ruled by a executive’s will rather than a set of agreed laws and rules. For every Vladimir Putin with a design on grabbing land for Russia from neighboring Ukraine, there is a Donald Trump orchestrating regime change in Venezuela, Iran, or maybe Canada and Denmark.
Why single out Iran and would the world, including the United States, really be more endangered if the nuclear weapons club had one more authoritarian member? In the eighty plus years since the only time that nuclear weapons have been dropped on a military foe, they have served as a defensive deterrent, not an offensive weapon of mass destruction. Regimes such as the ones in North Korea and Iran covet nuclear bomb capability in order to prevent other countries from attempting to oust them. The paradox is that if the weapons are actually used offensively, one enters a doomsday scenario of mutual destruction as depicted in Dr. Strangelove. So why is Iran really perceived differently, say, from North Korea when it comes to letting them develop nuclear weapons, and the answer seems to be that it’s all about oil, and Iran’s ability to manipulate the price of energy. More about that later.
If Americans want to worry obsessively about being on the receiving side of an exchange of nuclear bombings, I would submit that a more realistic concern is that the United States vests the decision over whether to drop a nuclear weapon on a military opponent with a single person. It’s an existential choice that must be made in minutes, not hours, and the official currently making that life-or-death verdict is someone not known for soliciting advice from others, preferring instead to go with his gut instinct.
The further problem of vesting the use of atomic weapons exclusively and only with the president of the United States is the recent proclivity to elect very elderly people to that office. Reagan was 69 when he became president, 77 when his second term ended, and by then within a couple of years of being diagnosed with dementia whose first development likely began while he was still in office. Over the past decade, voters elected a 70-year old Trump for the first time in the 2016 election and will see Trump end his second term at the ripe-old age of 82. In between, Joe Biden served as president from ages 78 to 82. All this resembles the crumbling days of the Soviet Union, when Brezhnev died in November 1982 at aged 76, was then succeeded for a year and 91 days by Andropov who died at age 70. After Andropov, Chernenko served as the Soviet leader for a year and 212 days before dying at age 84. It’s a shame and a mistake that the U.S. constitution stipulates a minimum but not a maximum age for the president.
It is an even more fateful error that in the name of enhancing democracy, U.S. political parties led ironically by the Democrats in the 1970’s introduced widespread primaries and caucuses into their candidate selection process. The consequence of that well-meaning switch was to greatly enhance the chances of candidates with more extreme left-leaning and extremist right views to end up as the party standard bearers.
There’s little dispute that Iran has been governed by a tyrannical regime and one that has often locked horns with the United States and Israel for nearly a half century. Street protests earlier this year against unwelcome conditions for ordinary Iranians were met with thousands of killings. Yet Iran still does not make the list of top ten humanitarian crises in the world, which is topped by Sudan, then Gaza, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Myanmar, the Congo, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Lebanon.
A desire to have a controlling influence over oil development — meaning access to such at inexpensive prices and with a share of the resulting profits — is the connecting link between the U.S. bombings and forced leadership removals in Venezuela and Iran this year. Oil, in turn, would not be so vital if the U.S. government encouraged diversification into non-fossil fuel sources of energy as rival China has been doing.
Opinion polls find both Republicans and Democrats in an agitated mood and worrying over a different set of imminent risks than the never-ending melodramas of the Middle East. People are fed up with America being drawn into that orbit, and they are stressed that Washington politicians aren’t paying more attention to everyday hardships like the unaffordability of necessities of life such as food, housing, insurance and healthcare. They are frazzled by rapid digitization of everyday activities, perceived corruption in the government, disturbing nightly news showing quasi-military groups harassing U.S. urban communities, unstoppable gun violence in public schools, negative political advertising, government lies told over and over, and fake news accusations by those same authorities of facts trusted to be true like climate change and the public health benefits of vaccines. Fear is mounting that in this 250th year of America’s existence that their beloved country might be careening toward a divorce or worse. Yes, American minds are flooded with lots of identified clear and present dangers. But no, what happens in faraway Iran hasn’t loomed high on the radar of what can possibly go wrong.
Copyright 2026, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved.
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