To stop Iran’s nuclear program, learn from Taiwan

Taiwan once had a secret nuclear weapons program. Beijing didn’t end it. Washington did. 

The fact that it was a strategic partner, not an adversary, that ended it — that is the key to understanding how Iran’s nuclear ambitions could be stopped.

In the 1960s, Chiang Kai-shek launched a covert nuclear weapons program. The rationale was obvious and, by any strategic logic, sound: Beijing had tested its first nuclear device in 1964, Taiwan’s survival was perpetually in question, and conventional deterrence felt insufficient. Beijing’s hostility was not an argument against the program. It was the entire justification for it. 

What ultimately killed Taiwan’s nuclear weapons program was sustained American pressure—brought to a head during the Reagan administration. Washington made its position clear: shuttering the program was a condition of continued American support. No elaborate inducement was offered. None was needed. The weight of the relationship — the arms, the trade, the diplomatic protection, the legitimacy that American backing conferred — made the cost of refusal self-evident. The threat of losing all of that was enough. And critically, that pressure landed because it came from a strategic partner, not an adversary.

Israel knows this history more intimately than most. Ernst David Bergmann, the father of Israel’s own nuclear program, reportedly advised Chiang Kai-shek on the development of Taiwan’s nuclear capability — recommending its institutional structure, guiding its direction, and returning periodically to Taiwan as a consultant for years. The program Bergmann helped shape was the same program the United States ultimately forced Taiwan to abandon. If anyone should understand how nuclear programs are built — and what it actually takes to stop them — it is Jerusalem.

The logic is not complicated. States pursue nuclear weapons because they feel threatened. External adversarial pressure does not dissolve that feeling. It confirms it. The only force that has historically moved a state off its nuclear ambitions is pressure from the relationships it values and depends upon — relationships it cannot afford to lose.

The case for sanctions and military strikes is not without foundation — and the recent strikes may well have succeeded on their own terms. Iran’s program has been set back, facilities destroyed, timelines extended. That is not nothing. But tactical success and strategic success are different things entirely. The question is not whether the strikes worked. It is: worked toward what end, and for how long? Bombs destroy facilities. They do not destroy intentions. Only a full invasion — with all the catastrophic risks that entails — could plausibly do that. Short of that, aerial campaigns have only ever convinced determined states to dig deeper, literally and figuratively. 

If the years purchased by military action are spent applying the same maximum pressure that has failed since the collapse of the JCPOA, the clock simply resets — with a nuclear program more dispersed, more hardened underground, and more deeply embedded in Iranian national identity than before.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions are no longer merely a preference of the Islamic Republic’s leadership. They represent, across factional lines, a matter of sovereignty. Every ultimatum from Washington or Jerusalem reinforces that narrative. From Tehran’s perspective, the strikes do not weaken the case for the program. They strengthen it.

There is a bitter irony buried in the sanctions regime itself. By cutting Iran off from Western trade and finance, the policy pushed Tehran closer to Moscow and Beijing — the very countries that have since spent years absorbing and neutralizing that pressure on Iran’s behalf at the UN Security Council. The tool designed to isolate Iran drove it toward the only partners capable of making isolation fail. And yet this is precisely where the opportunity lies. 

Russia and China are not Iran’s allies in any deep sense. They are Iran’s partners of convenience — and convenience cuts both ways. China is Iran’s largest oil customer, a relationship currently strangled by sanctions and regional instability. A diplomatically resolved Iran means resumed oil flows, a stable Gulf, and expanding Chinese influence across the Middle East. A nuclear Iran means escalation into a far wider and more devastating conflict, disrupted energy markets, and a Middle East spiraling away from Chinese strategic interests. Framed correctly, Beijing’s choice is not between Tehran and Washington. It is between short-term solidarity with Iran and its own long-term economic and strategic interests.

This is where the Taiwan parallel finds its full force — not in the degree of dependency, but in the nature of the moment. What the Reagan administration told Taiwan was simple: the nuclear program ends, or the backing from Washington ends. Choose.

The question worth asking now is whether Beijing or Moscow could be brought to deliver that same message to Tehran. Not as a favor to Washington or Jerusalem, but as an act of self-interest. When Donald Trump arrives in Beijing later this month, that is the message he should be delivering.

The window to do so will not remain open indefinitely.