the iranian ink blot

assessing the geopolitics

iran seems to have become the great global ink blot, a world-spanning rorschach test at once of surpassing complexity, scope, and divisiveness. the responses thereto come from 100 angles each likely revealing as much about the speaker as about the events themselves and, to be honest, an awful lot of what is being said is just plain bunk, made up facts, faulty calculations, emotive slop, and outright rage baited lunacy crashing into an already toxic political environment governed by rank tribalism.

meanwhile, like it or lump it, a new world order rooted not in soft power deference (some would say capitulation) but in the hard power exigencies of what was once called the “great game” among great powers is being forged. there are lots of ways to feel about that and i suspect that a great deal of what is making this particular bone so irreconcilably contentious is that it’s one of those situations where folks on many sides have a point and depending upon how one looks at it and which assumptions one embeds, you can get radically different answers.

it is not my aim here to provide the answer.

i’m not sure there is one.

rather, let’s at least understand the salients, the complexity, and the trade offs because this looks to be one of the most geopolitically complex and cross linked issues in modern times and anyone telling you “it’s just this one thing that i happen to care about” is likely missing an awful lot of what’s going on and risks leading you into moralistic demagoguery or the “one big square” first order thinking of the zealot or the dullard.

let’s start with a little history and stage setting and some baseline facts:

iran is and has for 45 years been a conquered nation. the “revolution” in 1978-9 was a collaboration of communists/marxists against a shah who was basically placed in power and held there by the CIA who, in cahoots with MI-6 et al, put him back in power in 1953 to take down prime mininster mossadegh who had become extremely popular after nationalizing the oil industry (a no-no from the standpoint of US and UK oilcos).

mossadegh had come to power after ~50 years of reforms dating back to the establishment of a constitution in 1906 that created a parliament and greatly limited the monarch. secular courts became prominent, restrictions on clerical influence expanded greatly, and western dress and mores proliferated.

the return of the shah was highly autocratic but brought many things “the west” liked like land reform that broke up large hereditary estates, women’s suffrage (1963), infrastructure, and family protection laws, esp around divorce and restricting polygamy.

clerics were out of government, civil law took precedence over sharia, western dress and alcohol became common in cities, women went to university, western movies played, etc. the west thought this was groovy, baby.

the problem is that this exposed a massive rural/urban fissure and the modernization benefitted cities and left rural areas behind while flouting, even vilifying, their values.

and the demographics on this were stark.

shi’a is a more fundamentalist form of islam rooted in the belief that leadership must remain within the family of the prophet (this split dates back to 632) and thus that the descendants of ali ibn abi talib should rule until the occulted 12th imam returns as the mahdi. the sunni sect is far larger, perhaps 85-90% of islam. shi’a is a majority only in iran, iraq, and bahrain.

shi’a constitutes a small aristocracy that does not share power willingly and this heritarian view has set them in opposition to the much larger sunni muslim community. shi’a demands central authority in formal hierarchy. this made the shah’s “white revolution” both galling to them and a massive threat to their power.

people in the west speak of the 60’s and 70’s and secular iran as a sort of golden age for mordern persia, but clearly, not everyone was experiencing it that way. this gave rise to a nasty confluence of communists (tudeh) and islmao-marxists (MEK - the people’s mujahedin) and a grab bag of guerrillas who all unified in opposition to monarchy, capitalism, and western values.

iran’s new suffragettes were among the vanguard actively supporting and voting for the regime that would so soon return them to sharia. the shah and his dreaded secret police were seen as western stooges and western interference (a not illegitimate perception as this was functionally a color revolution).

the economic slowdown in 1977 gave rise to huge protests that turned to national demonstrations and strikes by 1978 and a collapse of the monarchy and flight of the shah in jan 1979.

ayatollah khomeini returned from his ~15 year exile as a sort of galvanizing figure whose long suffering opposition of the shah lent him credibility and authority. revolutionary forces took power, held a one question, one option referendum of questionable validity and faster than you could say “mohammed’s your uncle” iran (with a highly suspicious 98% alleged approval rate) approved an islamic republic. secularism was done. by 1983: compulsory hijab.

the actual path is a sort of monty python skit crashing into a kafka novel where both the marxists and the islamists each assumed they could play the other as “useful idiots” and steal power from the “dupe” once the shah was deposed. obviously, that did not go well for the marxists. they got purged, murdered, and otherwise expunged and marginalized. “velayat-e faqih” (guardianship of the jurist) was to be a clerics only affair and the list of acceptable jurists was short and tightly curated. this was pure, narrow theocracy. the students who thought they were being “edgy” and supporting “revolution” by siding with violent theocrats they mistook for “fellow travelers” got the rugpull of a lifetime. (quite literally, their whole lifetime)

the “revolution” was won with organization in mosque networks where mosques in every neighborhood gave lockstep sermons dictated from central authority. it was a victory of networking and of “othering” the shah as illegitimate and a rousing of those left behind by growth and change to re-embrace their fundamentalist views.

the views of the ayatollahs are, by any western standard, abhorrent. the suppression of women has been severe and savage. gay men are forced to undergo gender transition as punishment (to avoid execution). 10’s of thousands of protesters were recently killed and the regime did not miss a beat.

at the risk of offending sensibilities (don’t read this if you’re overly sensitive) this is a page from khomenei's own book "tahrir ai-wasilah" governing how to have intercourse with 9 year olds (or infants) and when they need to be kept as a wife if you injure them sufficiently.

i want to be clear: this is not some radical outlier loon or outdated text that is no longer followed. this is the doctrine by which 93 million people are governed.

now consider that this is apparently a common enough issue that leaders felt a need to codify and publish rules and rules interpretations around it. yeah.

so look, anyone saying this hyper-brutalist and subjugating theocratic regime were somehow good folks, morally sound, or ethically defensible, well, good luck with that. we’re not going to agree. there is no objective moral position from which to defend or laud this. it’s a legal and religious structure for sadistic monsters and no amount of moral relativism lipstick is going to render this pig kissable.

this regime began in a hostage taking (66 diplomats from the US embassy) that was endorsed by khomeini and others in a show of power. they demanded the return of the shah from the US for “trial.” these hostages were held for 444 days and it was bleak in the US. newscasts carried a “days” tracker. a rescue attempt failed when helicopters were downed by sandstorm. it was, in no small part, why carter lost. he was seen as impotent and weak, a “malaise” president. the hostages were released within minutes of reagan’s innauguration.

iran’s ayatollah theocracy was born in anti-american, anti-western ideas and “death to america.” they have been a regional thorn disliked by and meddlesome in the rest of the middle east and the world. they are one of the top sponsors of international terrorism and a favorite cat's-paw of russia and china alike as they seek to engage in deniable action. iran has long sought nuclear weapons and has, of late, been aggressively building up its missile and drone arsenals (helped by china who has been shipping them parts, rocket fuel, weapons, radars, and tech).

this buildup posed a significant regional threat that many were tracking and citing as “about to become unmanagable” particulary for a county that sits astride the strait of hormuz (through which 20% of global oil production flows) and could therefore dominate it.

the projected math looks like this and while i cannot vet the specific numbers, the basic calculation makes sense and some of the intent seems to have been there. it’s far easier to build missiles than it is to protect 20 countries worth of potential targets.

this is a particularly acute issue in the ME as, as a number of scholars, military and otherwise, have been wont to point out:

many of the major ME states make no sense as actual viable countries and are incredibly vulnerable to targeted attacks.

they are not self-sufficient in food and need imports shipped in. their economies are rooted in/dependent upon oil exports and they need shipping lanes to export it. much of their water comes from desalinization plants which are extremely vulnerable to attack.

a regime with “rocket reach” could, if they chose, exert a great deal of difficult to resist power across the region and the ability to ramp up the capacity to shoot is far easier than trying to defend against it.

it is, the theory goes, an arms race the neighborhood cannot possibly win.

from a purely “military capabilities” standpoint, i suspect this is correct.

the counterpoint is, of course, an idea of mutually assured destruction and notions that “yeah, they could, but they would be crazy to.” this likely also has truth behind it. the pivot tends to be deterrence and credibility.

obama was notorious for giving the game away to iran and allowing them to chase nuclear aspirations by “pretending they were not because they signed a deal” and was, in general notably weak about asserting US interests around the world in the face of bad actors doing bad things. trump was mostly isolationist in his first term. biden was almost entirely asleep at the switch or complicit.

you had china and russia arming and building defenses for venezuela, and iran putting drone factories there. china and russia were both deep into iran as well, especially china. both have been playing a hard power game of setting up regional power bases with the ability to project military reach.

china bought ~80% of iran’s oil exports (at steep discounts to market because iran was barred from markets) and this amounted to ~15-20% of their overall oil consumption.

again, these are just facts. a great power game has been going on and just because one side says “but muh international order!” does not alter that even (and perhaps especially) when guterres from the UN whinges about

“I reiterate that there is no viable alternative to the peaceful settlement of international disputes, in full accordance with international law, including the UN Charter. The Charter provides the foundation for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

on X.

beyond being merely wrong, this tepid pronouncement exemplifies the sad impotence of an institution long past its sell by date.

they are stuck in bygone days, unrespected and irrelevant.

such influence as they once possessed, they squandered.

and they forgot the immutable rule:

there is no soft power (like the UN) that is not ultimately backed by hard power.

this is just my view, but i find it difficult to come to any other conculsion:

current world structures have become unstable and flailing. their failures have become too obvious to miss and their authority, moral or otherwise, has dissipated amidst their own corruption and uselessness.

the world is returning to structures more akin to "great power" competition and hard power is returning to the fore.

this is the inevitable outcome of soft power losing credibility and trust.

the strong accede to the weak only so long as they see the cause served by so doing as just and useful. when such standards are flouted, they stop listening.

it's been going on for decades. many in the west are just finally catching up.

but the UN is lost and cannot evolve. the same is likely true of NATO.

but reality does not go away because you publish strongly worded communiqués denying it.

the game did not stop just because a bunch of intersectionally obsessive race and gender communists became the generals of NATO and wanted to pretend it did so they could dress up like corporal klinger and flounce around the pentagon playing tea party and simping about inclusion over efficacy.

the game did not stop because the UN wanted to play the moral scold while putting angola and pakistan on the human rights council and holding interminable self-congratulatory symposia about supranational subjugation.

their times have passed.

in the end, the great power game always lies in hard power.

soft power only works when people respect you.

and that ship has sailed...

one might argue the same about US power and the wane of american influence and suasion based on 20 years of tepid tolerance for jackals nipping at our tail and of “new players” selling their potency as friends and allies and suppliers. one can push that argument in a number of directions, but one very potent fact has emerged from recent events in caracas and tehran: the idea that chinese radars and russian weapons systems can detect or stop US air power is over. this has been a walkover rout. twice. zero shoot downs. (the 3 f-15’s lost were shot by a kuwaiti who mistook them for migs) ideas that somehow the US was a faded military or a paper tiger just got wiped from the board.

i dont’ think there was a general in china who had the slightest notion of how one sided this would be.

but we did.

you can love that or hate it, but it’s a thing and that data looks uncontestable.

and so here we are, running a vast air campaign against iran’s theocracy.

i frame it that way because that’s what it is. this is not “war” per se, it’s decapitation using an entirely new set of capabilities never before seen or unleashed on nation state scale.

the first strikes took out the leadership with astonishing precision and left iran without a functioning government. when they tried to set up a new one, that was eliminated too. and again. and again.

the intersection of info war, intelligence gathering, and the projection of precise force has come together into something altogether unprecedented, a set of capabilities so astonishing and shocking and thorough as to be basically reshaping the idea of force projection.

and it has not abated, it has accelerated.

the goal here seems clear which is to not only completely destroy this theocracy but to tear out the roots so deeply that it cannot reform and regrow. this is a drive to extinction.

it’s also a drive to outright remove military capability, destroy the missiles, the factories, the radars, the command and control infrastructure. a rubicon has been crossed and this is the endgame, the real and genuine waking of lions who have had it up to here with the ongoing actions of a regime seen as illegitimate, oppressive, and chaos creating by its own people and its neighbors.

leaving aside right, wrong, should, or any of these other words (important words to be sure and more on this in a moment) this is a moment about “can” and “did.”

essentially, it’s the lion speech:

now here’s the thing about lion speeches:

they’re rousing and get your blood flowing. they harken back to and summon the deep underlying human darkness. they can feel like pride. they are also the start of 1000 ill concieved misadventures and atrocities precisely because they are about can and will, not should or ought. power for power’s sake carries potential both constructive and terrible and knowing which is which is a vexatious notion and realpolitik cuts in more than one direction. i think this is why this action is eliciting such wild and varied and (honestly often dissonant to the point of dark comedy) responses.

there seems to be an unusually large amount of “where you stand depends upon where you sit” here filtered by the frame of “what question are we asking?” (and of whom)

let’s first talk about what this is not. this is not the rebirth of the neocons. no one is trying to conquer iran and run it, rebuild it. it is also not the start of ww3. china and russia are in no position to go heavy here and iran is surrounded by regional enemies. the spread vector looks limited. iran tried that “drag the region in” play by shooting missiles at quite a few neighbors and it galvanized the region against them. even france, UK, and canada aligned.

but what it is is a grab bag of snakes and mongeese. (yes, i know that’s not a word) taking out a regime is one thing, but then what? there are loads of folks in iran who have been bravely protesting and students and dissidents clamoring to take power, but for those assuming that’s all one needs, i would direct your attention to what happened the last time that crowd deposed a government in iran. yeah.

and you still have the urban rural divide where the cities want to be modern and secular and the countryside prefers to live in the 12th century. china helped the ayatollahs build a sort of “great firewall” of their own to censor and suppress internet and information. when the world comes pouring in, americans have a naive presumption that everyone is happy to see it. they will not be. this is the same cultural disconnect that went septic last time.

having a friendly and secular persian nation that wants to join the west is a lovely idea, but iran is a deeply troubled structure and having it emerge as a failed state or take some excursion into newfound idiocy is a very real possibility. it’s not nearly as simple as the “knock it over and good stuff grows” gang suspects and whiffs of US interference or domination will just galvanize the rural views.

it also raises the question of “so why is this our problem?” the US has plenty going on without this vast expenditure of time, treasure, and lives. why go digging in another middle eastern rabbithole and play at worldcop? it’s not like our track record on this is good (or even middling). we’re team “egg on face” on this stuff. even when we “win” like afghanistan (the first time) we wind up fighting the people we armed (afghanistan the second time). unless you owned haliburton stock, “iraq the peace” lost anything that “iraq the war” might have gained and we destabilized a region over a set of WMD’s no one ever found.

the US military is without parallel or even comparable in terms of ability to fight and project power. but mostly too, we tend to butcher what comes next. ignoring that is just plain foolish.

perhaps this is not that and we seek no boots on the ground, just to cut the head off a snake, but what you want and what you get afterwards are not always the same thing and make no mistake, russia and china want to play in what comes next as well and they’re good at it. “we can just stay out” may be a costly illusion.

this is also a dangerous move for trump.

it’s another fracturing of his coalition and another “no one voted for this” moment. he lost a lot of the tech and fin bros with tariffs and de-emphasizing DOGE. this one has shucked off another huge group of “america first.” people who had been backing him are seriously angry.

it’s one of the biggest fractures i’ve ever seen on the right and frankly, X is just horrible right now. there are the jingo drum beaters howling for war and american international assertion and the performatively “betrayed” screaming about “you said you would not do this” and “no more foreign entanglements.”

if this goes well, it may help in midterms and 2028. if it goes badly, it’s going to be poison and fears around sucking the air out of the room on fraud hunting and SAVE act may be warranted. that said, we’re also one iranian terror attack on US soil away from trump running the table on immigration policy. (probably why it has not occured, iran knows that if that happened, we’d be in until the bitterest of ends)

this is a helluva muddled gameboard that has been overturned so many times i’m not sure anyone really knows which side we’re supposed to be playing on anymore.

and like many vicious, enduring arguments, this seems to be one where both sides have a point and there are a dozen ways to look at this:

• is it support of human rights against an oppressive and murderous regime?

• is it a geopolitical power move to check china and keep them from having a catspaw that can dominate/shut down the ME that needed to be done now before we lost the ability to stop it?

• is it stupid american adventurism playing bang-bang with weapons of war so that we can blow a trillion dollar budget hole before losing the peace and making everything worse?

one could answer yes to any of these depending upon how one looked at it.

• are we flouting international stability or providing a basis for it to exist?

• does this increase american influence or lose it?

these are hard questions.

to some extent, there is a wrestling match between the two faces of “america first.”

is america first isolationist/non-interventionist and trade oriented, tend to ours, build our own, trade with the others, and avoid foreign entanglements?

there is much to like in those ideas. more growth, less stupid, perhaps a more comfortable place in the world with fewer people raging at us for whatever the hell we just did. america does america and the rest of the world can sort its own messes out.

perhaps this is so.

perhaps, says the other side, it is not. perhaps a great power game is afoot and we’re 20 years behind on getting in it. perhaps if you want a stable world, you have to go stabilize it and if you don’t, you get a chinese missile state dominating the middle east and suddenly find that it’s too late to do anything about it and the game you did not want to play forces you in anyhow and now you have to play a much worse hand.

that too seems very possible and perhaps the lion does need to go do some lion things and remind everyone about whose food is whose and whose toes shall not be nipped.

i’m not sure there is an objective answer here.

there are only trade offs.

but this looks to me like the scylla and charybdis between which the coming decades will navigate.

i have long been a libertarian/isolationist but have increasingly come to fear that this is not a fully tenable idea when a great power game is afoot. it just means everyone else gets free turns to grab stuff while you stay home. perhaps that’s the path to “who cares?” because your economic might will protect you. perhaps it’s the path to “too late” where you wake up one day and realize you lost as the vise starts to close inexorably. but you’re basically making a bet that you can cede the rest of the risk board and that it will not, at some later date, come calling with more armies than you can repel.

i guess we all have to decide how we feel about that wager.

i would love to live and let live. unquestionably, that is the dream.

many here likely feel the same and share my dread of foreign adventurism and entanglement that so often turns into pogostick missions in a quicksand field.

the questions along the lines of “neat goals, but can you actually achieve them or are you just picking up another skunk and shaking it?” are obvious and warranted, and anyone refusing or unable to answer them is unserious.

i know many here will likely default to this.

but before fully acceding to this side of the debate, i ask your indulgence to consider an alternate framing and a potential “consequence of doing nothing.”

roman citizens did not walk in safety because rome was loved. they did so because the reprisal for touching team toga was so incredibly severe and predictable. when america is seen as weak, people take hostages and liberties. when strength returns, that ends, tout suite.

most of the world cannot be “convinced” by moral precepts. to presume that they can and that “they’ll all want to be just like us if we just explain it better and let them in the UN” is a luxury belief held only by those inhabiting the soft times created for them by the hard men who came before.

repudiating the essence of such hardness and ultimately rejecting it as repugnant is the precise mechanism by which soft men consign civilizations once more to hard times.

the immutable reality is this:

we all prefer to live in a world governed by soft power and suasion and without violence as a part of daily life. such a world is vastly better.

and it is good that we are reluctant to leave such structures.

but effective soft power is and must be underwritten by the possibility of hard power.

when it is not, it rapidly loses influence and authority. it is tested and found wanting.

the hyenas encroach. they circle ever closer, exploring, probing, seeing what may be taken, determining if and when any will resist them.

and such depredations will not stop until they are stopped.

that is the nature of the hyena.

and so perhaps sometimes the lion must wake and remind everyone what lions are like, of what they are capable and thereby restore the deference that allows them to live, once more, in peace.

in a perfect world of perfect people wherein everyone was nice and that was lovely, one could rely only upon the soft power of philosophy and ideas, but we do not inhabit that world and likely never shall.

hard power is hard truth and will always constitute the final test of civilizational fitness.

if someone wants to go there, that’s where you go.

one may lament this fact, and indeed perhaps it is lamentable, but a fact it remains and no less (and probably far more) so for being unliked.

to deny this fundamental law is to become food.

it is to be overrun and to lose that which you have built or would sustain.

you may abhor this conclusion (i do), but shooting its messenger is like blaming newton because an apple fell on your head.

so pause to consider because an inability or unwillingness to answer/engage with this idea is also unserious.

anyone trying to make this black and white is being unrealistic.

it’s not.

it almost never is.

and these are serious times and will not be kind to the unserious.