Credibility, empire, and the geopolitics of distrust: Rethinking Iran's nuclear question

Public discourse on Iran's nuclear program continues to return to a familiar question: does Iran intend to develop nuclear weapons? This paper argues that the persistence of this question is itself part of the problem. It is not simply an inquiry into intention, but a structure of suspicion—one that places Iran, despite its status as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its declared prohibition on nuclear weapons, under a continuous demand to prove what it has already renounced. The question, in this sense, operates as a form of epistemic and political penalization. Rather than treating the issue as one of verification, the paper shifts attention to the conditions under which statements are believed, dismissed, or rendered unintelligible. Drawing on Foucault and Said, it examines how regimes of truth and colonial epistemologies shape the reception of Iranian claims, producing a field in which credibility is unevenly distributed and suspicion becomes self-reinforcing. It further traces how this structure is sustained through the convergence of Israeli state discourse—most prominently under Netanyahu—and US imperial interests in the Middle East, where Iran is repeatedly constituted as a subject incapable of credible speech. Within such a configuration, verification does not resolve uncertainty; it reproduces it. The problem is not that Iran cannot be known, but that it is not allowed to be believed.