Define safe

Today I had a conversation, not really in depth, but I pushed it there because of one superficial statement, which I so hate: easy populist answers to complex problems for small minds. “Now that Iran has been attacked, the world is much safer.” He just dropped it there, with no background in geopolitics, security, or any other relevant field. So instead of slapping him with all the arguments at once, I stayed calm and simply asked, “Define safe.”

People keep saying the world is safer now because Iran was hit and supposedly “stopped” from getting the bomb. That sounds decisive until you ask one simple question: define safer. Because if “safer” means reducing security to one single hypothetical weapon system, then maybe people can say that at the bar and feel strategic. But even on that narrow point, the story is sloppier than the slogan. Tulsi Gabbard’s March 2025 intelligence testimony said the U.S. intelligence community still assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. In March 2026, she said Iran’s enrichment programme had been “obliterated”, that there had been no effort to rebuild enrichment capability, and that the U.S. was still monitoring for any future signs of weaponisation (Gabbard, 2025; Gabbard, 2026).

At the same time, the IAEA later assessed that before the June 2025 strikes Iran had 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to 60%, which would be enough for roughly 10 weapons if further enriched. So no, Iran did not have a bomb. But no, that does not mean the issue was imaginary either. And the line that the June 2025 strikes simply “obliterated” the programme was never as clean as the chest-beating made it sound. Reuters later reported U.S. assessments that the strikes had degraded the programme rather than neatly erased it, while the IAEA kept pressing to account for the remaining stock and maintained that it had no credible indication of a coordinated Iranian nuclear weapons programme (Reuters, 2025a; Reuters, 2026a).

And I said...