00:00In 2026, France announced more nuclear warheads.
00:04Finland legalized nuclear weapons on its soil.
00:08Lithuania is deleting its nuclear ban from its constitution.
00:13Germany is debating a bomb of its own.
00:16Nobody was sanctioned.
00:19Iran, a country that has no nuclear weapon, was bombed twice.
00:25For 20 years, Europe told the world that nuclear weapons were the problem.
00:30Now it's building its own nuclear future, and calling it responsibility.
00:36So what's really going on, hypocrisy is the easy answer.
00:40The real one is older, and it explains a lot more than Iran.
00:45Let's examine this complex issue, through the lens of geopolitics.
00:51And that's just the headlines.
00:52Look closer and you'll see three steps, each one bigger than the last.
00:57Step 1 More Bombs
00:59In March, at the Eel Long Submarine Base, Macron didn't just expand the arsenal.
01:05He broke with two decades of reductions.
01:08And summed up the new doctrine in one line, to be free one must be feared.
01:14Step 2 Bombs on Other People's Soil
01:17Eight countries, including Germany and Poland, signed up to Macron's forward deterrence.
01:23French nuclear-capable jets may now be deployed on their bases.
01:28Every October, NATO rehearses moving American nuclear bombs from underground vaults onto European
01:34fighter jets.
01:36And Finland's new law goes beyond hosting.
01:39It allows nuclear weapons to be possessed on Finnish soil, when defense requires it.
01:45Step 3 A Bomb of Their Own
01:47In Germany, the debate is no longer about borrowing.
01:51Respected academics like Joachim Crozet, openly argue for a German or European nuclear weapon.
01:59None of this is a conspiracy theory.
02:02It's the official agenda, and announced with pride.
02:05Europe says it's all about Russia.
02:07But to understand what's really going on, we need two tools.
02:11The concept of imperialism, and Edward Said's critique of Orientalism.
02:16Let's start with imperialism, not as an insult but as a concept.
02:20Since Lenin, the critical tradition has described imperialism, as a system,
02:25in which a core of powers organizes the international order to secure its own position.
02:31The rules of that order are not neutral.
02:33They reflect the hierarchy of those who wrote them.
02:37David Harvey in this century called it the new imperialism.
02:40The core's economic and military power combine to keep control over strategic regions of the
02:46periphery.
02:47And the Middle East is the most obvious example.
02:50The nuclear regime may be the clearest expression of this hierarchy.
02:55The non-proliferation treaty of 1968 split the world into two groups.
03:00The five countries that had tested a bomb before 1967, the United States, the Soviet Union,
03:07the United Kingdom, France and China.
03:09And everyone else.
03:11The first group kept their arsenals.
03:13The rest got a promise that one day there would be disarmament.
03:17In 1998, India's then-foreign minister Jaswant Singh gave this arrangement a name, nuclear apartheid.
03:25A system that separates those who may from those who may not, not by any standard of responsibility,
03:31but by the date each one got the bomb.
03:34Seen through this lens, Europe's behavior stops looking inconsistent.
03:38It is perfectly consistent with imperial logic.
03:42The core decides how much security each country is allowed.
03:46Sanctions, inspections, and when none of that is enough bombing,
03:50these are the tools for maintaining the hierarchy.
03:53Iran isn't punished only for what it has.
03:56It's punished for the place it occupies, and for refusing to accept it.
04:01Imperialism explains the structure.
04:03But it doesn't explain why so many people find this hierarchy natural.
04:08For that the second lens, Edward said.
04:11In Orientalism, published in 1978,
04:14Seed showed how the West built, over centuries,
04:17an image of the Orient as its opposite.
04:20Irrational, emotional, fanatical, despotic.
04:22The West, by contrast, saw itself as rational, moderate, civilized.
04:27And Seed's central point is that this image was not mere prejudice.
04:32It was a form of knowledge in the service of power.
04:35It justified tutelage, administration, and intervention.
04:39In 1999, the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson carried this idea into the nuclear field,
04:45and coined the term nuclear Orientalism.
04:48He showed that Western discourse on proliferation always follows the same script.
04:53Weapons in Western hands are stable,
04:55because the West is supposedly rational and mature.
04:59In the hands of global South countries they are dangerous,
05:02because those governments are supposedly unpredictable,
05:05fanatical, incapable of following the logic of deterrence.
05:09Notice how this shows up in the Iranian case.
05:12When Iran enriches uranium, the vocabulary is,
05:16the Ayatollah's regime, theocracy, mullers with the bomb.
05:20The implicit question is, can you trust religious fanatics?
05:23When Macron says that to be free one must be feared,
05:27nobody calls him a fanatic, he's treated as a statesman.
05:31And think about the record.
05:34France tested bombs in the Algerian desert, and on the adals of Polynesia.
05:39The United States is the only country that has ever used the bomb against cities.
05:45Yet it is Iran, which has never tested or possessed a nuclear weapon,
05:49that occupies the place of irrational danger in the Western imagination.
05:54That is nuclear orientalism, turning a question of power into a question of character.
06:00And once the problem becomes character, there is no negotiation between equals,
06:05only tutelage.
06:07Now Iran sighed, without idealizing it.
06:11Decades of sanctions, nuclear scientists assassinated, facilities sabotaged.
06:16In June 2025, Israel and the United States bombed Iran's nuclear facilities.
06:22In early 2026, more strikes followed.
06:25Next door, Israel keeps a nuclear arsenal, it has never declared.
06:30Europe talks about the risk of a confrontation with Russia.
06:33Iran talks about attacks that have already happened.
06:37One point where I have to be straight with you,
06:39you often hear that Iran's program remains under international inspection.
06:43Today it doesn't.
06:46Since the bombing IAEA inspectors have not returned to the sites that were hit.
06:51In July 2025, Iran's parliament suspended cooperation with the agency.
06:57And on 27 October, Director General Rafael Grossi told the Security Council he cannot verify
07:03about 440 kilograms of uranium, enriched to 60%.
07:08But the order of events matters, inspections stopped because the facilities were bombed.
07:14And Grossi himself says there are no signs of reconstruction since 2025,
07:19and that the technical basis for a deal exists.
07:22This is where the two lenses meet.
07:25The NPT has three pillars.
07:28The pillar that weighs on the periphery, don't proliferate,
07:31is enforced with sanctions and bombs.
07:33The pillar that weighs on the core, negotiate disarmament under Article 6,
07:38France has justified, by announcing more warheads.
07:42Nobody gets sanctioned for that.
07:44And the message to the rest of the world, is dangerous.
07:48If wealthy countries, protected by the largest military alliance in history,
07:53conclude they need more bombs, what do countries with no alliance at all conclude?
07:58Grossi himself warned just days ago at the U.N. General Assembly,
08:03about the growing fragility of the non-proliferation regime.
08:07Imperialism and Orientalism aren't buzzwords.
08:11They're tools for seeing what official discourse hides.
08:15Imperialism shows the structure,
08:17a nuclear order in which the core decides how much security the periphery may have.
08:23Orientalism shows the justification,
08:26the idea that certain people supposedly aren't mature enough for the same sovereignty.
08:31It's about rejecting an order in which security is a privilege for those at the top,
08:37while everyone else must depend on the goodwill of the very powers that sanction and bomb them.
08:43What about you?
08:44Do you think there's a legitimate standard for deciding who may
08:47and who may not have nuclear deterrence, or is it all a hierarchy of power?
08:53Tell me in the comments.
08:55And don't forget like the video and subscribe to the channel,
08:59to keep thinking about the world how it really is.
