By: professor Alan Dershowitz
WND Nrt, 3 December 2017– With its latest intercontinental ballistic missile launch in the early hours of Wednesday morning, North Korea announced its arrival as a worldwide nuclear threat. The Hwasong-15 missile soared 2,800 miles at the highest altitude ever recorded for a North Korean missile before landing in the Sea of Japan.
Had the missile been launched at a lower trajectory, it could have struck Washington, D.C., or, indeed, any part of the continental United States, according to CNN. Defense Secretary James Mattis admitted the test proved Kim Jong Un now has the ability to hit “everywhere in the world, basically.”
There has been much debate about how the U.S. should handle the threat. But Alan Dershowitz, the iconic constitutional law scholar and political analyst, is already thinking about how Washington’s actions now will impact another potentially dangerous nuclear power 10 years down the road.
“I think this is not about North Korea at all,” Dershowitz said during this week’s episode of ILTV’s “One on One with Alan Dershowitz.” “I think this is all about Iran, and it’s all about how to make sure, 10 years from now, we’re not facing this crisis with Iran.
“Iran already has the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons, and once the Iran deal terminates, as it will in eight or so years, they will be allowed to spin centrifuges sufficient to create a nuclear arsenal capable of reaching all over the world, and certainly capable of reaching American allies in the Middle East and in Europe.”
Dershowitz said the U.S. can’t afford to fail with Iran the same way it has failed with North Korea. He sees Iran as the more dangerous threat because of its ambitions.
“The big difference is North Korea is not hegemonic in its interests,” the scholar explained. “It just simply wants to survive. It’s creating a nuclear arsenal in order to prevent it from being destroyed and the regime toppled, whereas Iran has hegemonic interests, which they’ve already manifested from Lebanon to Syria to parts of Iraq, and clearly, they have their eyes on the Gulf states and the Sunni Arab world. And so whatever we do with North Korea has to be done with an eye to Iran. The goal has to be to make sure Iran never becomes a North Korea.”
