Catherine Perez-Shakdam
Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, June 24, 2025
“We are not witnessing the end of Iran’s nuclear project. We are witnessing its decentralization.”
It is a truth too easily ignored in our ceaseless thirst for closure: blowing up a building does not annihilate an idea. And so it was that as the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran was reduced to rubble – courtesy of Israeli precision and a belated American cameo – a chorus of relief flooded Western airwaves. Relief, that is, from the sort of people who believe fireworks signify the end of a war and not the beginning of its next, far murkier chapter.
Indeed, the destruction of Fordow, the subterranean sanctum where Iran’s nuclear ambition festered in fortified secrecy, is best understood not as a final act but as a scene change. It is now that we must ask the question no one in Brussels or Berkeley seems brave enough to mouth: have we truly thwarted the nuclear aspirations of a regime built not on pragmatism, but on eschatology? Have we destroyed their capacity, or merely given them a martyr’s myth?
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a Westphalian state. It is not contained by its borders, nor is its ambition reducible to missiles and warheads. It is a revolutionary project – Shi’ite in theology, totalitarian in impulse, expansionist by design. To imagine that its defeat lies in the pulverization of uranium centrifuges is to believe, with tragic naiveté, that a serpent dies when you cut off its tail.
Let us recall what Fordow represented. This was not merely a nuclear site; it was an insurance policy against diplomacy, a fortified shrine to the belief that patience and lies could yield apocalypse in a bottle. Built into a mountain, declared late, and insulated from scrutiny, it was the pride of an Iranian regime that has made subterfuge into statecraft. For years, Western diplomats played chess with a mullahdom playing poker, bluffing enrichment levels, cheating on inspections, and smirking their way through international forums while sponsoring Hizbullah and the Houthis with impunity…..SOURCE