Abstract
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.
Introduction
Public discourse on Iran's nuclear program has long been organized around a seemingly straightforward question: does Iran intend to develop a nuclear weapon? The persistence of this question—across decades of inspections, intelligence assessments, and diplomatic negotiations—has generated an equally familiar set of responses: demands for verification, expanded monitoring regimes, and renewed calls for transparency. Yet the durability of the debate suggests that something more than a lack of information is at stake. The problem is not simply that Iran's intentions remain unknown. It is that the terms under which those intentions are interrogated are themselves structured by relations of power.
This essay argues that the Iran nuclear question has been persistently misframed as a problem of verification when it is, more fundamentally, a problem of credibility. The central issue is not only what Iran intends, but whether Iran is positioned as a subject capable of making credible claims about its own intentions. In this sense, the question “does Iran intend to develop nuclear weapons?” is not a neutral inquiry. It is an interrogative form that presupposes suspicion and places Iran in a position of perpetual answerability. Despite being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), despite having been subjected to one of the most extensive inspection regimes in the history of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and despite articulating prohibitions on nuclear weapons through both legal and religious registers, Iran remains constituted as a state whose claims cannot stabilize as knowledge. 1 The question thus operates not merely as a request for information, but as a subtle and continuous form of penalization.
To understand this dynamic, it is necessary to move beyond treating credibility as an attribute that states either possess or lack, and instead to approach it as a political and epistemic formation. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of regimes of truth and Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism, this essay conceptualizes credibility as something that is historically produced, differentially distributed, and unevenly recognized. Within such a framework, statements do not stand on their own. They are evaluated within fields of interpretation that determine in advance whose claims are likely to be believed and whose are likely to be doubted. Iran's nuclear discourse unfolds within precisely such a field—one in which suspicion is not an outcome of failed verification but its precondition.
This reframing allows us to reconsider the role of verification itself. Institutions such as the IAEA and agreements such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are often understood as technical mechanisms designed to resolve uncertainty. Yet, as this essay shows, verification operates within a broader technopolitical arrangement in which knowledge production is inseparable from the distribution of authority and legitimacy. Evidence, in this context, cannot by itself resolve disputes about intention, because it is always interpreted through prior structures of credibility. The more Iran is subjected to verification, the more it is reproduced as an object of suspicion.
The persistence of this dynamic is not accidental. It is sustained through a convergence of geopolitical and historical forces, including the strategic framing of Iran as an existential threat within Israeli state discourse (e.g., Leverett and Leverett, 2013; Netanyahu, 2012) and the longer colonial genealogy through which non-Western actors—particularly Muslim-majority societies—have been represented as epistemically unreliable (Dabashi, 2011; Hallaq, 2018; Mamdani, 2004; Said, 1978). These formations do not merely shape how Iran is perceived; they structure the very conditions under which its claims can be heard.
The diffusion of these formations into broader public discourse can be observed not only in policy statements and expert analysis, but also in more everyday representational forms. A recent political cartoon published in a US newspaper depicts Iran as a Pinocchio-like figure, its nose extending as it offers compliance and negotiations (Varvel, 2026). The visual logic is immediate: the act of speaking itself is rendered as deception. The issue is not whether the claim is true or false; it is that it cannot, in principle, be believed. Such representations do not simply reflect suspicion—they participate in its reproduction, encoding at a cultural level the very asymmetry of credibility that structures the geopolitical field.
The argument proceeds in four parts. The first section examines how the nuclear question itself operates as a form of penalization, placing Iran in a position of perpetual proof despite formal commitments and institutional compliance. The second develops a conceptual account of credibility as a form of power, drawing on Foucault and Said to show how regimes of truth and representation structure the distribution of belief. The third turns to the technopolitics of verification, analyzing how institutions such as the IAEA and frameworks such as the JCPOA participate in reproducing asymmetries of credibility. The fourth situates these dynamics within the broader geopolitical field, focusing on the role of Israeli and US discursive and strategic practices in stabilizing Iran as a subject of permanent suspicion. The conclusion returns to the question of Iran's nuclear intentions to argue that what appears as an unresolved empirical problem is, more fundamentally, a political condition: one in which the uneven allocation of credibility ensures that resolution remains perpetually out of reach.
The question as penalization
If the Iran nuclear question is treated as a problem of verification, it is because it is assumed that uncertainty persists due to insufficient evidence. Yet this assumption is difficult to sustain in light of the institutional and legal context within which Iran's nuclear program has been situated. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear NPT, through which it has formally committed to abstaining from the development of nuclear weapons. It has also been subject to one of the most extensive inspection regimes in the history of the IAEA, including the enhanced monitoring provisions established under the JCPOA (IAEA, 2017, 207; Cortright, 2026). 2 For a sustained period, these arrangements produced a measurable degree of technical confidence regarding Iranian compliance.
And yet, these forms of compliance have not resolved the central question. On the contrary, they have often been recast as provisional, strategic, or incomplete. The issue, then, is not simply whether evidence exists, but what that evidence is permitted to do. Rather than stabilizing knowledge, compliance is repeatedly transformed into a new basis for suspicion. Each demonstration of adherence is treated not as confirmation, but as a deferral: evidence that concealment may yet be underway.
This dynamic reveals a more troubling structure. The question “does Iran intend to develop nuclear weapons?” does not operate as a neutral inquiry posed to an unknown actor. It is directed at a state that has already been incorporated into legal regimes of non-proliferation and subjected to continuous oversight. To pose the question under these conditions is to require repeated demonstrations of a commitment that has already been formally articulated. The demand is not for information alone, but for reiteration. Iran is thus positioned within a field of perpetual proof, where the burden of demonstration is never exhausted.
The asymmetry becomes clearer when situated comparatively. Nuclear ambiguity, opacity, and even outright refusal to join the NPT are tolerated in some cases without generating a comparable regime of continuous interrogation (Cohen, 1998; Hymans, 2006; Paul, 2000; Solingen, 2007). In these contexts, the absence of formal commitment does not produce an equivalent demand for proof. By contrast, Iran's formal commitments and institutional participation do not reduce the intensity of scrutiny. The difference lies not in the availability of evidence, but in the distribution of credibility.
The effect is to transform the nuclear question into a mechanism of penalization. Iran is not only monitored; it is compelled to repeatedly demonstrate what it has already declared. This compulsion operates through institutional channels—inspections, reporting requirements, compliance assessments—but also through discursive ones. Public and policy debates continually return to the question of intent, even in moments where available evidence might otherwise allow for provisional closure. The question persists not because it cannot be answered, but because its function is not exhausted by being answered.
It is here that the relationship between credibility and power becomes visible. To be placed in a position of perpetual answerability is not simply to be scrutinized; it is to be constituted as a subject whose claims cannot stabilize as knowledge (Foucault, 1980; Fricker, 2007; Jasanoff, 2004). The question thus does more than seek truth. It organizes a field in which truth, when articulated by certain actors, remains structurally insufficient.
Credibility as power
The dynamics described above cannot be explained solely by reference to geopolitical rivalry or strategic mistrust. They point instead to a more fundamental question: how is credibility produced, and why is it distributed so unevenly? To address this, it is necessary to move beyond treating credibility as an attribute that states either possess or lack, and to approach it as a form of power.
Michel Foucault's concept of “regimes of truth” is instructive here. For Foucault (1980, 131), truth is not simply a matter of correspondence between statement and reality, but the outcome of historically specific arrangements that determine which statements are recognized as valid and which subjects are authorized to speak. As he puts it, “each society has its regime of truth … the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true”. Truth, in this sense, is inseparable from power, produced within institutional and discursive fields that structure the conditions of its recognition. In geopolitical terms, regimes of truth are inseparable from colonial formations that prefigure the credibility of some actors while foreclosing that of others.
Applied to the Iran nuclear question, this perspective shifts the focus from the content of Iranian claims to the conditions under which those claims are evaluated. The issue is not only whether Iran is telling the truth, but whether it is positioned as a subject capable of producing credible truth in the first place. As the previous section has shown, the persistence of the nuclear question despite sustained forms of compliance suggests that the problem is not simply the absence of evidence. It is the presence of a framework in which evidence, when produced by certain actors, cannot stabilize as knowledge.
Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism helps to specify the historical and geopolitical dimensions of this framework. Said argues that non-Western societies have long been represented as lacking the capacity for transparent self-representation, their claims mediated through external authority. The Orient is spoken for by “making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it described, analyzed, disciplined … by the West” (Said, 1978, 3). This is not merely a matter of misrepresentation, but a structure of knowledge—what Said calls a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3)—that positions certain subjects as inherently suspect. Within such a formation, statements do not fail because they lack content; they fail because of the subject from which they emerge.
The treatment of Iran's nuclear discourse reflects precisely this dynamic. Iranian statements—whether articulated through diplomatic channels, legal commitments, or religious pronouncements—are not evaluated solely in relation to their content. They are subjected to a prior hermeneutics of suspicion. Denials of nuclear intent are read as strategic concealment; commitments are interpreted as reversible; even prohibitions are displaced onto a future in which they may no longer hold. In each case, the possibility of credibility is preemptively constrained.
What emerges, then, is not simply mistrust, but a structured asymmetry in the conditions of belief. Some states operate within a horizon of presumed rationality, where their actions are interpreted as strategic and therefore intelligible. Others are situated within a horizon of suspicion, where their actions are read as potentially deceptive regardless of available evidence. This distinction is not reducible to present behavior. It is historically sedimented and geopolitically reinforced.
To conceptualize credibility in this way is to recognize it as a technology of power. It is not merely conferred or denied in discrete moments; it is produced through the interaction of institutions, discourses, and historical narratives that together determine what can count as a credible claim. International organizations, intelligence agencies, media networks, and diplomatic practices all participate in this production. They do not simply assess credibility; they help constitute it.
This reframing also clarifies the relationship between credibility and verification. If credibility is unevenly distributed, then verification cannot function as a neutral arbiter of truth. It operates within, and often reinforces, the very asymmetries it appears to adjudicate. Evidence does not enter an empty space; it enters a field already structured by expectations about who is likely to be truthful and who is not. Under such conditions, verification does not resolve suspicion. It reorganizes it.
The consequence is a recursive dynamic in which Iran's claims are continuously evaluated but never fully accepted. Each new piece of evidence is incorporated into an interpretive framework that preserves the possibility of doubt. Credibility, in this sense, is not simply withheld; it is structurally unattainable. The problem is not that Iran has failed to produce convincing evidence. It is that the conditions under which evidence could be convincing are themselves unevenly constituted.
Technopolitics and the limits of verification
If credibility is produced within asymmetrical regimes of truth, then verification cannot be understood as a neutral mechanism that simply resolves uncertainty. It must instead be situated within a broader technopolitical arrangement—one in which knowledge production, institutional authority, and geopolitical power are tightly interwoven through processes of co-production and technopolitical governance (Jasanoff, 2004; Mitchell, 2002).
Verification regimes such as those administered by the IAEA are often presented as technical solutions to political problems. Through inspections, monitoring technologies, and reporting protocols, they are tasked with producing objective assessments of nuclear activity. In principle, these assessments should stabilize knowledge and reduce the scope for dispute. Yet in practice, verification does not operate in an epistemic vacuum. It is embedded within institutional and geopolitical contexts that shape how its findings are interpreted and what they are allowed to resolve, as knowledge and authority are co-produced within broader technopolitical arrangements (Findlay, 2018).
The case of Iran is instructive. Under the JCPOA, Iran accepted some of the most intrusive inspection measures ever implemented within the non-proliferation regime, including continuous monitoring of enrichment activities, expanded access under the Additional Protocol, and hundreds of annual IAEA inspections (Arms Control Center, 2016; Council on Foreign Relations, 2015; IAEA, 2017). For a period, these mechanisms generated sustained reports indicating Iranian compliance with the agreement's terms. From a strictly technical standpoint, the regime functioned as intended: it produced detailed, continuous knowledge about Iran's nuclear activities.
And yet, this knowledge did not produce closure. Compliance did not translate into credibility. Instead, verification became folded into an interpretive structure in which evidence was treated as provisional, incomplete, or strategically managed. Reports of adherence were frequently accompanied by renewed concerns about hidden sites, future intentions, or the possibility of withdrawal. The problem, once again, was not the absence of information, but the conditions under which information could be accepted as sufficient.
This dynamic highlights the technopolitical character of verification. As scholars of science and technology have shown, systems of measurement and monitoring do not simply reveal reality; they help constitute the authority through which reality is made knowable (Jasanoff, 2004; Latour, 1987; Mitchell, 2002). The ability to define what counts as evidence, to establish the standards of proof, and to interpret compliance is itself a form of power. In this sense, verification regimes do not merely assess credibility—they participate in its production.
The uneven distribution of this power is historically rooted. The modern non-proliferation regime emerged alongside broader projects of Western scientific and technological dominance, particularly during the Cold War, when nuclear capability became a central marker of geopolitical authority. Within this context, technological development was closely tied to claims about rationality, objectivity, and progress. Western states were positioned as the primary producers of legitimate scientific knowledge, while non-Western states were often cast as derivative, ideological, or insufficiently developed.
These historical formations continue to shape contemporary technopolitics. The authority of institutions such as the IAEA rests not only on their technical capacity, but on their embeddedness within a broader epistemic order in which Western scientific practices are taken as the standard of objectivity. This does not render their assessments invalid. It does, however, situate them within a field in which the credibility of certain actors is already unevenly constituted.
Within such a field, verification takes on a paradoxical role. It is both necessary and insufficient. Necessary, because it produces the information required to govern nuclear risk. Insufficient, because that information cannot by itself overcome the asymmetries of credibility within which it is interpreted. The more Iran is subjected to inspection, the more it is constituted as an object of scrutiny; the more it complies, the more compliance is framed as temporary or strategic. Verification thus risks becoming a mechanism through which suspicion is not resolved, but institutionalized.
This paradox is further intensified by the geopolitical context in which verification operates. The withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA in 2018, despite documented Iranian compliance, underscored the limits of technical verification as a guarantor of political commitment. The collapse of the agreement did not follow from a failure of the inspection regime, but from a shift in political strategy. In its aftermath, the framework of verification remained intact, but its capacity to produce trust was further eroded. Evidence continued to be generated, but its authority was increasingly contingent on broader geopolitical alignments.
What emerges from this analysis is a more complex understanding of verification. It is not simply a tool for resolving uncertainty, but a site at which power, knowledge, and credibility intersect. To treat verification as a purely technical solution is to overlook the conditions under which its outputs are interpreted and mobilized. In the case of Iran, those conditions ensure that verification cannot fully accomplish what it promises. It can produce knowledge, but it cannot secure belief.
Conclusion: the politics of credibility
Do we know whether Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons? The answer, in strictly empirical terms, remains uncertain. But this uncertainty has been asked to do too much analytical work. It has been treated as the central problem, when in fact it obscures a more fundamental one. The persistence of the nuclear question is not simply a reflection of incomplete knowledge. It is the effect of a political and epistemic structure in which the conditions of belief are unevenly distributed.
This essay has argued that the Iran nuclear debate has been misframed, to use Nancy Fraser's argument (2005), as a problem of verification when it is more fundamentally a problem of credibility. The question “does Iran intend to develop nuclear weapons?” appears to invite a factual answer. Yet, as the preceding analysis has shown, it operates within a field in which answers cannot be accepted as knowledge. Iran's formal commitments, institutional compliance, and repeated denials do not resolve suspicion because they are evaluated within a framework that is predisposed to reproduce it. The issue, then, is not only what Iran says or does, but how its statements are positioned within regimes of truth that determine in advance their credibility.
To recognize credibility as a form of power is to shift the terms of the debate. It directs attention away from the endless accumulation of evidence and toward the structures through which evidence is interpreted. It reveals that verification, far from being a neutral solution, operates within a technopolitical arrangement that both depends on and reinforces asymmetries of belief. It situates geopolitical discourse—particularly the framing of Iran as an existential threat—as an active participant in the production of suspicion, rather than a passive reflection of it.
Under such conditions, the nuclear question cannot be resolved by better information alone. Each new report, inspection, or diplomatic commitment enters a field already organized by unequal credibility. Evidence is incorporated, but it does not settle the matter. Suspicion adapts, shifts, and reappears. What presents itself as a persistent lack of knowledge is, more accurately, a structured condition in which knowledge cannot achieve closure.
This is not to claim that Iran is incapable of pursuing nuclear weapons; like other states, it operates within strategic conditions that make such trajectories conceivable. Nor is the argument that Iranian claims should be taken at face value. The point, instead, is that the frameworks through which such claims are evaluated are themselves structured by power. As long as the distribution of credibility remains unexamined, the debate will continue to reproduce the uncertainty it purports to resolve.
In this sense, the enduring question is not only whether Iran can be trusted. It is whether the regimes through which trust is allocated can themselves produce anything other than the suspicion they are already structured to sustain.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Editor of Human Geography, Waquar Ahmed, for encouraging the submission of this manuscript. I am also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and timely feedback, which significantly strengthened the paper. Any remaining errors are my own.
Ethical consideration
The author(s) declared that ethical approval was not necessary for this study.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: In part, my research for this paper has been supported by the Buttel-Sewell Professor Funds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Samer Alatout is Buttel-Sewell Professor, Associate Professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Graduate Program in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work explores how infrastructures, environmental knowledge, and technopolitical systems participate in the production of territorial authority, political legitimacy, and regimes of truth. Situated at the intersection of science and technology studies, political geography, and environmental sociology, his research focuses particularly on water, settler colonialism, and the geopolitics of expertise in Palestine, the Middle East, and Indigenous North America.