Emmanuel Todd
September 8, 2025 Here is the English translation of an interview I recently gave in Japan. Speaking regularly in Japan on geopolitical issues (for at least twenty years) has helped me develop a de-Westernized view of the world, a non-narcissistic geopolitical awareness. This interview will show that it was my long-standing reflection on Japan's possible acquisition of nuclear weapons that led me to a rather calm view of the Iranian question.
European democracies are not doing well. They can no longer be described as pluralistic when it comes to geopolitical information. The opportunity to express myself in the major Japanese media has allowed me to escape the ban that weighs in France on any interpretation that does not conform to the Westernist line. The state-owned channels (France-Inter, France-Culture, France 2, France 3, La 5, France-Info, etc.) are particularly active (and incompetent) agents of geopolitical opinion control.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Japan, the country that allowed me to remain free. Without Tokyo's protection, the watchdogs raised in Paris would undoubtedly have succeeded in portraying me as a Moscow agent.
I especially thank my friend and editor Taishi Nishi, who conducted and edited this interview.
Bungei Shunjū, August 2025 issue
Emmanuel Todd
Interview: “Iran's nuclear weapons pose no specific problem”
On June 13, Israel launched a preemptive attack against Iran, bombing nuclear facilities and conducting a "decapitation operation" against senior military officers and scientists. Then, on June 21, US forces in turn bombed Iranian nuclear facilities with Tomahawk missiles and Bunker Busters. Not only Iran, but also China, Russia, and the UN Secretary-General have denounced a "violation of the United Nations Charter and international law, as well as an attack on Iran's sovereignty and territorial integrity." However, in the West, reactions have not been as strong as those following the attacks on Gaza. This is undoubtedly because many people share the argument of the United States and Israel that Iran should not possess nuclear weapons. I believe that most Japanese people share this view.
However, I believe that Iran's nuclear weapons do not pose a specific problem. On the contrary, I believe, as does Japan, that it would be preferable for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
If there is a historical lesson to be learned regarding nuclear weapons, it is that the risk of nuclear war arises from imbalance. The situation in 1945 is a perfect illustration of this: the United States, then the world's only nuclear power, was able to use this weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Conversely, there was no nuclear war during the Cold War. After World War II, large-scale Indo-Pakistani wars ceased after both countries acquired nuclear weapons. Since then, although armed clashes occasionally erupt, they no longer escalate into all-out war.
Today, regional tensions are escalating in East Asia and the Middle East. A non-nuclear Japan faces a nuclear-armed China and North Korea, while in the Middle East, only Israel possesses nuclear weapons. In other words, a "nuclear imbalance" has been created, generating an unstable situation. Just as Japan's possession of nuclear weapons would contribute to regional stability in East Asia, Iran's possession of nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent against Israel's drift and contribute to stability in the Middle East.
■ Nuclear Prejudice and Acceptance
Some twenty years ago, when I first mentioned Japan's nuclear weapons, the Japanese reaction was interesting, to say the least.
To summarize the various comments, it went something like: "Japan's nuclear weapons are unrealistic!" But what a sympathetic Westerner would dare to say that Japan also has the right to possess nuclear weapons?
The typical French intellectual is undoubtedly unconsciously convinced that France's possession of nuclear weapons poses no particular moral problem. We Westerners are specifically rational, reasonable, and trustworthy. Non-Westerners cannot benefit from this a priori qualification. But why, deep down, could Iran not have nuclear weapons when Israel does? Herein lies a formidable prejudice against Iran, a non-Western country.
If I see no particular problem with Japan or Iran possessing nuclear weapons, it is because I believe that, fundamentally, the Japanese and Iranians share the same non-suicidal "humanity" as the French. I have studied the "diversity of the world" through differences in family structures, escaping, I hope, the Westernist contempt for the world's great civilizations. Today, the West's refusal to recognize the world's cultural diversity has become its greatest weakness. Its defeat in the war in Ukraine stemmed from a misjudgment of Russia's true power, which itself stemmed from a ridiculous sense of Western superiority. The West is making the same mistake with Iran.
Here is the dominant Western media narrative regarding the attack on Iran: at first, Trump hesitated to attack. He wanted peace and had entered into negotiations with Iran, but faced with their stalling, he supposedly changed his mind, galvanized by Israel's spectacular military successes. But did Trump really hesitate?
Maurice Leblanc, the author of Arsène Lupin, has his hero say this, from whom I sometimes draw inspiration: "If all the facts we have agree with an interpretation we have of them, it is very likely that this interpretation is the correct one." If we start from the assumption that "Trump's hesitation was nothing more than a lie," we can follow events in their true logic.
Faced with the testimony of the US Director of National Intelligence, Ms. Gabbard, according to whom "we continue to analyze that Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei did not approve the resumption of the nuclear weapons program frozen in 2003," Trump retorted on June 17: "That's false," "they are on the verge of having nuclear weapons," thus rejecting the analysis of his own intelligence services.
The day before the attack, Trump declared that he would "decide whether to act within two weeks, taking into account the possibility of imminent negotiations with Iran." This was merely cover-up, and his surprise attack succeeded.
After twelve days of fighting, Trump persuaded Israel and Iran to agree to a ceasefire, acting as a "peace mediator." But it was all a farce. The United States was involved in the plan to attack Iran from the beginning.
■ "American Crusade"
The Israeli army has approximately 23,000 Americans, and 15% of the settlers in the West Bank (approximately 100,000 people) are American. The United States' pathological fixation on Israel is evident in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's 2020 book, "American Crusade."
I invite you to first look at the cover of this book. A photo of the author, looking macho and holding the American flag, adorns the cover, and it's clear that he is not the right person to be Secretary of Defense of the world's greatest power.
Here's what the chapter on Israel states:
“America’s front line, the front line of our faith, is Jerusalem and Israel. Israel is the symbol of freedom, but more than that, it is its living embodiment. Israel stands as proof, on the front lines of Western civilization, that the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness can transform a mired region and deliver a standard of living unmatched in the Middle East. Israel embodies the weapon of our American crusade, the ‘what’ of our ‘why.’” “Faith, family, liberty, and free enterprise. If you love these things, learn to love the State of Israel, and find a place where you can fight for it.”
This is the man who, as U.S. Secretary of Defense, led the attack on Iran.
How effective will this military attack be in the long run, the stated goal of which was to destroy nuclear facilities? North Korea, which has successfully developed nuclear weapons, has not been attacked by the United States and has come to be considered a de facto nuclear power. This attack will therefore only strengthen Iran's motivation to possess nuclear weapons, without ever eliminating it. This is counterproductive.
The deeper reality is that the United States and Israel had no rational war objective. It was an impulsive action, a quest for violence, driven by a taste for war—in short, by nihilism. War itself was the war's aim. One cannot help but think that the United States, bruised by its defeat to Russia in Ukraine, sought to maintain its psychological balance by attacking a weaker country.
They congratulate themselves on a "flawless lightning operation," a description echoed by the media. But posterity will probably record it in the history books as an event comparable to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which, after a resounding initial success, plunged Japan into the abyss.
■ My Personal Relationship with Iran
Although I had lunch at the Russian embassy two or three times before the Ukrainian war, I have never had personal relations with Russian diplomats. My opinions on Russia are intellectual reconstructions based on texts. For Iran, it's different. Just yesterday at noon, I had lunch and spent three and a half hours with the Iranian ambassador to France.
My personal relationship with Iran began around 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-line populist, was president.
While I was dozing in my office at the National Institute for
Demographic Studies (INED), I received a call from the Iranian Embassy
saying that someone wanted to meet me. My first reaction was fear, but
curiosity got the better of me. On my way to the embassy, I was somewhat
reassured to see a female employee wearing an elegant Burberry scarf. I
met with the chargé d'affaires, who said to me, ‘Mr Todd, I have no
idea who you are, but the translator of your latest book asked me to
give you a signed copy of the Farsi version of After the Empire.’ I
replied, ‘Wonderful,’ and asked, ‘So you've agreed with my publisher
Gallimard on the translation rights?’
His response was: ‘It wasn't
necessary. Iran is not a signatory to international copyright
conventions’ (in other words, they had translated it without worrying
about the rights). I began discussing the matter with this diplomat, who
had a background in history, on numerous occasions over the following
months. I ended up bringing journalists I knew, who worked for
France-Inter, Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur, to the Iranian
Embassy. It was a unique experience for me: I would sometimes be driven
home late at night after a lively discussion in an Iranian Embassy car.
Being a cautious man, I kept a close friend at the Élysée Palace
informed of my activities as an intellectual James Bond.
The
Western media are full of preconceptions about Iran, such as ‘the status
of women there is very low’, ‘women are persecuted there’, ‘Shiite
Islam is more threatening than Sunni Islam’. Under the pretext that it
is always about Islam, our media are blind to the differences between
‘Sunnis’ and ‘Shiites,’ between Arabs and Iranians.
Trump and
Netanyahu have declared that ‘the attack on Iran was aimed at regime
change,’ going so far as to suggest the assassination of Supreme Leader
Khamenei, as if that were possible. This totally unrealistic statement
shows that they have no idea what Iran is like.
The Libyan regime
collapsed with the death of Gaddafi, and the Iraqi regime imploded with
the military defeat of Saddam Hussein. But both countries, as is often
the case with Arab nations, had only fragile political systems. Iran,
Persian at its core and largely, though not exclusively, Shiite, is a
fundamentally different society. If Ayatollah Khamenei were
assassinated, it is very likely that the Iranian state would not
collapse.
■ The difference between Arabs and Persians
Sunni
Arab countries are characterised by the strength of their patrilineal
kinship networks. The patrilineal clan is often more powerful than the
state, which by definition makes state-building difficult. When a state
endures, such as Saudi Arabia, the country of the House of Saud, it is
dominated by a clan. In contrast, Iran, the distant heir to the great
Persian Empire, has inherited a tradition and history of state-building
that dates back 2,500 years.
The difference between Sunni Arabs
and Shiite Iran is also evident in the status of women. We must not be
misled by the issue of wearing the veil. In Iran, the rate of female
university enrolment exceeds that of males. The total fertility rate,
which declines as female literacy rates increase, is currently 1.7
children per woman in Iran, almost identical to that of France (1.65).
Why?
Unlike the Sunni Arab countries close to the ‘centre’ of the Middle
East, Iran, located on the “periphery”, has retained some of the
characteristics of archaic homo sapiens, which was egalitarian in terms
of gender relations and nuclear in its family structure (this is the
‘conservatism of peripheral areas’). In this sense, it is a little
closer to Europe than to the Arab world. Iran's nuclear tendency is also
evident in ‘succession’. On this subject, there is a wonderful book,
free of prejudice and ideology, by Noel Coulson: Succession in the Moslem Family (1971).
Let
us imagine, for example, the case of a man who dies, leaving as heirs
his brother, his wife, his daughter and his son's daughter.
According
to Sunni law, the brother receives one-fifth, the wife one-eighth, the
daughter half, and the son's daughter one-sixth. According to Shia law,
the brother receives nothing, the wife one-eighth, the daughter
seven-eighths, and the son's daughter nothing. Shia law is therefore
more favourable to women.
Let us imagine another case where a man
dies, leaving his son's son and his own daughter as heirs. According to
Sunni law, the son's son receives half and the daughter receives half.
According to Shia law, the son's son receives nothing, and everything
goes to the daughter.
Coulson concludes:
‘Unlike Sunni law,
which is based on the concept of the extended family or tribal group,
Shia law is based on a more restricted concept of the family group, a
nuclear concept that includes parents and their direct descendants
[children].’
Arab countries with a tribal structure versus Iran
with a nuclear structure. What is the consequence of this difference?
While Arab countries struggle to build modern states and armies, Iran
excels at this. Iranian cinema, recognised worldwide, is the fruit of
this cultural and social breeding ground. This nuclear character
explains both the order and disorder in Iranian society. Disorder has
allowed Israel to assassinate Iranian figures, while the potential for
order renders these operations futile.
The remarkable success of
these assassinations has been attributed to the excellence of the Mossad
and the incompetence of the Iranian intelligence services. However, it
is precisely because Iranian society is not tribal but nuclear in nature
that the infiltration of the Mossad and its collaborators has been
possible. However, killing a few military personnel or scientists will
not destabilise Iran, because it has a modern state organisation that is
not based on personal ties. The dead are replaced. In other words,
however brilliant it may be tactically, the decapitation operation is
strategically meaningless.
■ What was the Iranian Revolution?
If
the West, starting with the United States, misunderstands today's Iran
so much, it is mainly because it still does not understand the
significance of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. For the United States in
particular, the hostage-taking at the American embassy has become a
trauma that prevents any calm understanding. Yet the official name of
the state born of this revolution is indeed the ‘Islamic Republic of
Iran’. It was a democratic revolution. Due to its democratic and
egalitarian nature, the Iranian Revolution can be considered a cousin of
the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution.
British historian Lawrence Stone highlighted the link between ‘literacy’ and ‘revolution’.
In
France, around 1730, the literacy rate among men aged 20 to 24 exceeded
50%; in 1789, the French Revolution broke out. In Russia, this literacy
threshold was crossed in 1900, and the Russian Revolution took place in
1905 and 1917.
In Iran, the 50% literacy threshold for young men
was crossed around 1964. Fifteen years later, the Iranian Revolution
broke out and overthrew the monarchy. Around 1981, the literacy rate
among young women also exceeded 50%, and around 1985, fertility began to
decline as well.
The Iranian Revolution was certainly a religious
revolution, but so was the Puritan Revolution in England, led by
Cromwell. Insofar as both revolutions overthrew the monarchy in the name
of God, they are comparable. It can be said that Iranian Shiism, like
English Protestantism, accomplished a kind of left-wing religious
revolution.
This revolution was possible because Shiism holds a
vision that the world is a place of injustice and must be transformed.
While Sunni doctrine is, so to speak, ‘closed’, Shiite doctrine is
‘open’. It has a tradition of protest which, unlike Sunni Islam, values
debate.
One evening, during a very relaxed dinner with six Iranian
diplomats, my friend Bernard Guetta had the audacity to ask them who
they had voted for in the last presidential election. Each had voted for
a different candidate. They then began to argue with each other. I
witnessed this culture where everyone debates with everyone else.
■ American pressure is counterproductive
The
Iranian political regime is certainly repressive. The number of
candidates allowed to run for president is limited, and last year,
approximately 900 executions took place, half of them for drug-related
offences. But in my opinion, American pressure has distorted the Iranian
regime. ‘The problem is that the American threat constantly strengthens
the conservatives in Iran,’ an Iranian diplomat once explained to me.
It puts national sentiment at their service. Far from promoting
democracy in Iran, American action hinders its development.
There
is another point that the Western media, focused on the spectacular
bombing raids carried out by American and Israeli state-of-the-art
bombers, have overlooked. The most important aspect of Iran's military
build-up is not nuclear power but the production of ballistic missiles
and drones. Iran has deliberately foregone a costly air force in favour
of developing cheap ballistic missiles and drones. This intelligent and
determined asymmetric defence policy has worked remarkably well.
Israel's air defence system was literally exhausted by twelve days of
war.
■ Japan, a precursor to the BRICS
How was this possible? In The Defeat of the West,
I attributed Russia's coming victory and the certain defeat of the
United States in the war in Ukraine to the higher number of engineers
trained by Russia. Iran also trains a considerable number of engineers.
Among foreign students obtaining doctorates in the United States, the
proportion of Iranians choosing engineering courses is exceptionally
high (66%, compared to 35% for China and 39% for India).
The
Iranian ambassador, with whom I had lunch yesterday, emphasised that
the training of engineers is a project that was planned and executed by
successive governments. In fact, Iranian universities experienced
spectacular growth after the revolution, with a preference for training
engineers.
Iran has joined the BRICS. Russia, China and Iran,
although very different, share the same ideal of ‘national sovereignty’.
It is interesting to note that, while showing solidarity, they
understand and respect each other's sovereignty.
In contrast,
Trump, who sees the BRICS as an enemy, tramples on the sovereignty and
dignity of his own ‘allies’, treating them as protectorates or vassals,
trying to drag them into senseless wars. In Europe, which has
relinquished its autonomy from the United States, not only France and
the United Kingdom, traditionally belligerent towards Russia, but also
Germany under the new Merz government, are increasing their defence
spending and seeking to become more involved in the war in Ukraine.
Japan should not follow this European trend.
In the preface to the Japanese edition of The Defeat of the West, I wrote: ‘The defeat of the West is now a certainty. But one question remains: is Japan part of this defeated West?’
With
its unique civilisation, is Japan not destined to be part of a diverse,
non-Western world like that of the BRICS? Japan was the first country
to challenge Western domination. In this sense, the Meiji Restoration
was perhaps a precursor to the BRICS. I am convinced that if we were to
search through the literature of the Meiji era, we would find texts
asserting that engineers are needed to protect the country.
Source: https://strategika.fr/2025/09/11/larmement-nucleaire-de-liran/
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