February 17, 2023
by Robert D. Kaplan
A 44-year epoch in the greater Middle East may be coming to an end, as the region begins to turn on its axis. In early 1979, a radical Islamic regime under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini toppled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran, spreading revolutionary turmoil throughout the Levant and challenging the conservative Gulf Arab monarchies. The region was never the same, as Iranian-backed militias aggravated existent civil wars and started new ones.
Domestically, Iran has spent the past few decades as a bleak, repressed and relatively impoverished society. Henry Kissinger told me that had the Pahlavi dynasty remained in power, Iran, given its strong state and civilizational richness, would have evolved into a constitutional monarchy with an economy comparable to South Korea’s.
Now, the regime has been rocked by months of widespread protests against wearing the hijab, unrest cutting across economic, educational and regional divisions. Cracks are starting to appear in the Islamic Republic’s power structure. Because Iran constitutes the Middle East’s geopolitical pivot point, nothing has the potential to change the region as much as a more liberal regime there in the coming months or years.
Whereas many Arab countries that fell into chaos during the Arab Spring have artificial borders drawn by Europeans rather than being strong historical states, they are merely vague geographical expressions there is nothing artificial about Iran. With a highly educated population of 85 million, larger than any Arab country save for Egypt, Iran is synonymous with the Iranian plateau, one of the region’s critical geographical features. The plateau overlooks and influences Mesopotamia to the west and Central Asia to the northeast.
Iran fronts not one but two vast energy-producing areas, the Persian Gulf, from which shipping lanes radiate, and the Caspian Sea, from which oil and gas pipelines do. It has more gas reserves than any other country in the Middle East, and is second only to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves.
But beyond the determinism of the map and geopolitics, there is what the British historian Michael Axworthy calls the “idea of Iran.” In this view, Iran is a civilizational attractor, as ancient Greece and China were, drawing adjacent peoples and languages into its linguistic realm. Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and Iraqi Arabic are all either variants of Persian or measurably influenced by it. To travel from Baghdad eastward to Kolkata is to be inside a Persian cultural orbit of sorts.
Iran has potentially great societal and economic appeal in the relatively secular republics of formerly Soviet Central Asia, particularly because of the pockets of Shiite Islam there. Yet Iran’s ability to use its culture to project political power has been undermined by the mullahs. That influence could be unleashed by a more democratic Iran.
To see the postmodern political sophistication of Iran, one should look back to the Green Movement, the anti-regime demonstrations following the disputed election of 2009. The Greens mastered Twitter, Facebook and texting to organize themselves, two years before the Arab Spring. It took all the means of the Iranian state to crush them.
The current uprising has carried social media to an even more innovative level, providing organizational heft toward the goal of toppling the regime without the benefit of a charismatic leader or even the ability to hold in-person strategy meetings. An image that went viral on social media of two young people kissing in public had the touch of iconic genius about it, since it encapsulated everything that the Islamic Revolution has denied its youth.
This is a postmodern, globalized civilization: The Iranian drone, missile, cyberwar and nuclear programs are all examples, albeit negative ones, of Iran’s sophistication which in a different political context could make it a mid-level economic, military and cultural power.
Now, after a half-century period of darkness, we could be at the beginning of the end. Just as the Islamic Revolution saw power transfer relatively seamlessly from the Shah to the mullahs, Iran could see another transfer of power just as dramatic.
Iran may be geopolitically coherent enough to avoid the chaos that accompanied the yearnings for democracy in such an artificially drawn state as Iraq next door. Don’t be cynical about the prospects for Iranian democracy.
A post-revolutionary regime, or especially a counter-revolutionary one that repudiates the ayatollahs, could change the Middle East as much as the collapse of the Berlin Wall changed Europe.
For decades, Washington has supported the conservative Gulf Arab autocracies against a fiercely anti-American and anti-Israel Iran. These monarchies may not be democracies, but they are venerable emirates and kingdoms not artificially conceived, and relatively well governed. Saudi Arabia may understandably offend Western humanitarians, but it has used technology to streamline governance, and has recently allowed women to dress less modestly and live more normal lives.
Despite the tensions between President Joe Biden’s administration and Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the historic friendship between Washington and these Arab regimes has a solid basis. Nevertheless, the future could see the US moving closer to a newly democratic Iran, while helping to broker peace accords with it and Israel, and also with the Gulf Arabs.
Of course, competition between Iran and the Arab states would not end even should the mullahs fall, but it could very well be mitigated by a new Tehran that turns away from regional adventurism and concentrates on internal development.
Indeed, the Gulf monarchs would welcome a democratic Iran and see no contradiction in it despite their own autocratic regimes if Tehran ended its hostile intentions in Yemen and elsewhere, and curbed its weapons programs, nuclear and otherwise. Get rid of the radical faction of mullahs and the Middle East could enter a period of relative peace. Iraq, Syria and Lebanon could all gradually stabilize without the presence of Iranian-backed militias.
And while Iran is not Arab, a dramatic demonstration of democracy there could have a positive influence on the emerging politics of Arab North Africa, including Egypt, where regimes are less enlightened than in the Gulf.
There is, of course, a new wild card in this, China, and how a new Middle East would chain-react with Beijing’s increasing influence. As Saudis were at pains to tell me during a visit early this year, China comes to the table with lots of business, a devouring need for Gulf oil, and no moral lectures about human rights or democracy. China’s hunger for hydrocarbons will partly offset the global trend toward renewables in the coming years.
A democratic Iran would add a twist to all this. Not only would it be by several magnitudes more economically dynamic than the current Iranian state, but because of geography and geopolitics it would be a critical junction for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Chinese won’t mind if Iran is democratic, and the new Iranian regime would likewise want the further development of overland transport links rails, roads and pipelines to China. Such a vibrant Iran, even with good intentions, would make the Gulf Arabs nervous enough to require US protection in a new security framework.
A post-clerical Iran would initially be very pro-Western, because of its experience with the mullahs. But over time, as it became a large puzzle piece of Eurasian integration, it might develop even stronger ties with authoritarian China than, for instance, Germany now has.
That is to say, a more peaceful and more integrated Middle East could actually present a new challenge to the US, because of competition with Beijing. Some 85 million people from a highly strategic territory will suddenly be integrated into the global economy; Iran will become a gold mine for international business and integral to the next phase of globalization. A democratic Iran won’t enhance a post-American world as much as complicate and diversify it.
Obviously, less sanguine political scenarios are possible for Iran, such as a regime led by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which would continue Iran’s radical foreign and defense policy, albeit with more social leniency at home. Or a somewhat chaotic, less centrally controlled and weaker Iran, partially democratic, with virtual autonomy grabbed away by the large Kurdish, Azeri, Turkoman and Baluch minorities along the fringes of the state.
Nobody could imagine the end to the shah’s regime until it actually happened. Now we can realistically imagine the end of the clerical regime and its regional and global implications.
Robert D. Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, He is the author of the forthcoming, “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power.