Iran throws down the gauntlet

When you engage in confrontational diplomacy, you can expect a slap in the face back. Such is the case between Donald Trump and Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei, the spiritual leader. Trump extracted the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and now the ayatollah has ordered his nuclear scientists to get ready to rev up their work on enriching uranium. So are we back to square one? Is Tehran going to make a rush for a nuclear weapon or is the ayatollah's command just a way of scaring the other signatories of the 2015 deal to stay loyal to the agreement and start trading big-time with Iran? Whatever it is, the latest move from Tehran is a signal to the rest of the world that Iran is not going to be dictated to by Trump. The timing of the announcement was also clearly deliberate. Only a week away from the summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un, Ayatollah Khamenei wanted to make it clear that whatever happens at the meeting in Singapore it would have no relevance to Iran's future strategies. We already know, from the documents stolen by Mossad, that Iran WAS developing nuclear weapons up to 2003, despite persistent denials, and then put a halt to the work, but kept open the possibility of reviving the pogramme. Now Tehran says it plans to build new and bigger gas centrifuges to accelerate the enriching process if necessary. The US intelligence services have been warning for years that it would take Iran about a year to produce a nuclear bomb if it decided to push ahead as fast as possible to develop a weapon. This is now the threat from the ayatollah. Israel must be preparing its contingency plans for military action. Trump right now has North Korea on his mind and he probably hasn't given much thought yet to what Iran is up to. But surely he must have worked out how Tehran would react to his decision to opt out of the 2015 deal? Confrontational decisions lead to confrontational reactions. So the Tehran announcement is not a surprise. But it means that even as he discusses denuclearisation with Kim Jong-un, Trump needs to keep one eye firmly on the Iranians. On the one hand, he has provoked North Korea into considering giving up its nuclear waapons. On the other hand, he has provoked Iran into considering reviving its nuclear weapons programme. That's a kind of special madness.