The foreign minister questioned the international assessment that the Tehran regime intends to produce nuclear weapons, claiming there is “no data that they want to build them.” He also cited Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons and asserted that Iran has only pursued uranium enrichment, not weaponization. Regarding Khamenei’s government, Fidan said that “the problem is not the regime itself [… it] is the decisions the regime makes.” Amid speculation over an impending US military action against Tehran, he argued that an American air campaign would be insufficient to collapse the Iranian regime and claimed that the threat of war had diminished amid negotiations. In 2019, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the notion that “countries like the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom could possess nuclear weapons while others, including Turkey, could not.” Until now, Erdogan’s rhetoric has not been matched by noteworthy actions to potentially procure such capabilities.
Author: William Doran & Sinan Ciddi
Published at: 2026-02-11 22:27:39
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