Such concerns are even more prominent outside the Arab world. India is far away from the Middle East, but radical Islamic terrorism has taken many Indian lives, and the prospect of a nuclear armed Islamic republic and its possible galvanization of Islamic movements in and around India – especially in its longtime rival Pakistan – cannot be a particularly sanguine prospect. To the north, Russia is currently in the midst of an attempt to resurrect its own regional hegemony while simultaneously fighting its own long war against domestic and foreign Islamic radicalism. China, while perhaps hoping to remain aloof from a region it considers outside of its sphere of influence, is having its own problems with a burgeoning Islamic movement. Turkey, as has been amply demonstrated in recent weeks, is currently moving toward some kind of alignment with Iran, but the ruling AKP party has a large and by no means dormant secular opposition, and they likely do not desire to see their rivals strengthened by the emergence of a hegemonic Islamic theocracy.
Europe, ironically, has recently been far more proactive than the United States on this issue, and there are some fairly obvious reasons for this. There is not only the threat of radical Islam both outside and inside European borders, but the realization that, missile technology being what it is, an Iranian nuclear bomb could eventually threaten Europe as easily as the nations of the Middle East.
