One of the things that has been in the news a disproportionate amount recently, and which has been provoking much thought in me has been the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, and America’s objection to it.
I can’t ever get past the feeling that it’s terribly arrogant and hipocritical of America to say “We don’t trust you with a single nuclear weapon, and we don’t ever really trust you to simply run a civilian nuclear program for generating power”, while at the same time insisting on maintaining a stockpile of something like 4000 nuclear warheads themselves.
If they were in the process of actively reducing their nuclear stockpile towards some goal like 50 or 100 weapons (which would still be plenty enough to continue threatening people with…) then sure, saying “We don’t want you to have nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are bad, and we’re also getting rid of most of ours as well” might seem a little more reasonable.
As it stands it seems that the Iranians have a legitimate reason for wanting a nuclear power plant, and a reasonable arrangement with the russians where the russians sell the iranians nuclear power plant fuel, and the iranians send their nuclear waste back to Russia for processing, which allows for confirmation that no fuel has been retained by the iranians.
All up it’s almost as bad as the US continuing to say “We want a free trade pact with China” while also trying to tell everyone (particularly the Europeans) that they’re not allowed to sell military technology to the Chinese. I mean either China is a bad coutry, and no trade sould be entered into with it, or else it is accepted as a legitimate nation that you can trade (whatever goods you want to) with.
It all just seems that American foreign policy revolves around not letting anyone else get big enough to challenge it. Now I don’t like China, but on some levels It’d be very satisfying to see them get big enough to push America around for a change. (although a strong European Union would be my preferred choice for contender of course)