An interesting thought struck me the other day: Take an economist and a politician and put them both in a room (should probably make it a padded room…) and tell them to discuss the following topics:

From a purely political point of view, and certainly a global security point of view, the thought of Iran developing and maintaining a nuclear infrastructure is daunting to say the least.

President Ahmadinejad is still maintaining his story that he wants nuclear energy capabilities for his country. Naturally this would be an easier story to swallow if it weren’t followed by: “…and I think Israel should be wiped off the map…”

On the other side of things, the people who think Iran wants more than just nuclear energy aren’t so keen on the idea of the Iranians playing with atoms.

I hate to play devils advocate on this one, because the guy is clearly crazy as a football bat, but think about the situation Iran is in from an economic point of view.

Oil exports make up a large part of Iran’s revenue to the tune of $50 billion annually. Petroleum alone makes up about 80% of the countries income. So the Iranian economy is highly dependent on oil production, probably more so than the United States is dependent on oil for consumption.

Problem is that $50 billion in cash that stimulates Iran could drop by nearly half in under five years due to depleting reserves and underfunded infrastructure. This fact alone could leave Iran at the mercy of other developing, neighboring countries.

By virtue of his countries own dependence on oil, Ahmadinejad needs to come up with a way to conserve petroleum, even though his own country produces a ton of it. Face it, the more you save, the more you can export. Additionally, this makes it tough for Iran to use oil as a weapon.

So from a purely economic point of view, it’s not hard to understand why he wants nuclear energy capability.

However, considering his posturing and threatening dialog in the Middle East, it’s not hard to understand why we shouldn’t allow him to have that capability.

You wouldn’t give prisoners guns and tell them to go hunt for food, would you?

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