Who is “America’s greatest adversary?”
That is the question 60 Minutes asked Vice President Kamala Harris. “I think there’s an obvious one in mind, which is Iran,” was her answer. She gave two reasons for her verdict: “Iran has American blood on their hands” and “what we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power, that is one of my highest priorities.” All three claims are strange.
That Iran is America’s greatest adversary comes as a surprise after the U.S. has spent the past two and a half years comparing Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler and painting him as bent on the conquest of Europe. The U.S. has spent in the neighborhood of $175 billion helping Ukraine fight Russia.
As early as 2018, the U.S. National Defense Strategy ranked China as the “primary concern in US national strategy.” Throughout the Biden-Harris administration, the focus has been on “growing rivalry with China [and] Russia,” as the Interim National Security Guidance of 2021 put it. It was China, and not Iran, that was considered “the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge” to the U.S. led system. In 2021, it was Russia and China that the National Intelligence Council flagged as “rising revisionist powers,” while the 2022 National Defense Strategy named China “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security” and called Russia an “acute threat.”
Up until the moment Harris answered the question, the U.S. had seen Russia and China as America’s greatest adversaries.
Harris did not specify the American blood Iran had on its hands. But her quick description erases the historical record of the second partner in the bloody dance. The history of Iranian blood on American hands traces from the 1953 coup in Iran, which the CIA has formally acknowledged it helped plan and execute, to cyber attacks on Iran’s civilian Natanz nuclear enrichment site, and the 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
Harris’ third, and strangest, claim is that one of her highest priorities is to “ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power.” But Harris knows that Iran is not pursuing the ability to be a nuclear power. At the same time the Vice President was prioritizing blocking Iran from building a nuclear bomb, CIA Director William Burns was telling a security conference, “No, we do not see evidence today that the supreme leader has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program.”
Burns added that “We don’t see evidence today that such a decision [to build a bomb] has been made. We watch it very carefully.” He added that, if Iran were to make such a decision, “I think we are reasonably confident that – working with our friends and allies – we will be able to see it relatively early on.”
This is not the first time Burns has made the intelligence assessment clear. In February 2023, Burns said, “To the best of our knowledge, we don’t believe that the supreme leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program that we judge they suspended or stopped at the end of 2003.”
And, as Harris knows, it is not Burns or the CIA alone that assesses that Iran is not in pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The 2022 U.S. Department of Defense’s Nuclear Posture Review concludes that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.”
Iran never was pursuing one. The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, consistently ruled that nuclear weapons go against Islamic morality. The current supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently reiterated that ruling. Khamenei has insisted that “from an ideological and fiqhi [Islamic jurisprudence] perspective, we consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful. We consider using such weapons as a big sin.” In 2003, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa that declared nuclear weapons to be forbidden by Islam.
And Khamenei was neither going rogue nor the exception: “There is complete consensus on this issue,” Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, one of the highest-ranking clerics in Iran, has said. “It is self- evident in Islam that it is prohibited to have nuclear bombs. It is eternal law, because the basic function of these weapons is to kill innocent people. This cannot be reversed.”
In 2015, Iran agreed to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. Eleven consecutive International Atomic Energy Agency reports verified that Iran was completely and consistently in compliance with their commitments under the agreement prior to the U.S. illegally and unilaterally pulling out of the agreement in 2018. Despite promises by the Biden-Harris administration to return to diplomacy with Iran, they never have. Instead, despite Iran’s expressions of willingness to return to diplomatic negotiations, the State Department has said that negotiations with Iran are “not our focus right now” and that “It is not on our agenda…we are not going to waste our time on it.”
In July 2024, Masoud Pezeshkian was elected president of Iran. Pezeshkian is a reformist who has called for direct negotiations with the U.S on improving relations and returning to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. But, in a July 8 press briefing, when National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby was asked if the U.S. is now ready to resume nuclear talks, other talks, or make any diplomatic moves with Iran in light of this new president,” he answered, “No, we’re – we’re not in a position where we’re willing to get back to the negotiating table with Iran just based on the fact that they’ve elected a new president.”
Unphased, in his September 24 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Pezeshkian said that “we have the opportunity… to enter a new era” and declared that Iran is “ready to engage with JCPOA participants” and that “[i]f JCPOA commitments are implemented fully and in good faith, dialogue on other issues can follow.”
Contrary to her assertion that “ensur[ing] that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power… is one of [her] highest priorities,” the Biden-Harris administration has stubbornly refused to take the easiest and surest road to that end by honoring its promise to “offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy.”
It is strange and concerning that after encouraging and supporting two and a half years of war with Russia in Ukraine, that Harris considers, not Russia, but Iran to be America’s “greatest adversary.” It is also disturbing that Harris deletes America’s role in coups, sabotage and assassinations in Iran from history. And it is alarming and dangerous that Harris wants to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, seemingly unaware that her military-intelligence community is telling her that they are not attempting to acquire a bomb, while showing no inclination for returning to the nuclear diplomacy with Iran that was already working.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
