Iran is the one to watch this year

Iran has taken upon itself the role of world's chief mischief-maker. The ayatollahs have always played a dangerous game with the rest of the world, especially with the United States. But Tehran has kicked off 2024 with a blast of ballistic missiles aimed all over the place, hitting targets in Syria, Iraq and now Pakistan. And what the ayatollahs are doing clandestinely with their nuclear weapons programme, we can only guess at but they are very close to developing bomb-grade highly enriched uranium and have all the wherewithal to produce a nuclear warhead in a relatively short time. Tehran with nuclear weapons would be deeply scary. We know they have built intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could reach Israel. Normally Israel would be revving up their bombers to hit Iran's nuclear sites, just like they did against a nearly finshed nuclear reactor southeast of Baghdad in Iraq on June 7, 1981. But Israel is a bit distracted right now with Gaza and the West Bank and Hezbollah. Tehran's flagrant aggression against Iraq, Syria and Pakistan is a sign that the ayatollahs have decided to grab tbeir moment while the world is focused on Gaza and Israel's war with Hamas and launch missiles in the expectation that they might get away with it. They will have been pleased to see how limited the strikes have been against the Houthis in Yemen, carried out by the US and Britain, and have probably gambled that Washington won't want to start striking targets in Iran for fear of further escalating an already escalating Middle East war. So we can expect more ballistic missile launches emanating from Iran in the next few weeks. Iran and especially its nuclear weapons programme, will have to be watched like the most hawkish of hawks throughout 2024.