Iran and the world: it’s complicated

It took 12 years and six world powers to negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA – longhand for the Iran nuclear deal), but only one intuitive decision by a single actor to

unravel it. President Trump’s subsequent “maximum pressure” campaign has split an apparent Western consensus and set a course of confrontation between the USA and Iran.

As the US deploys an aircraft carrier strike group and the Iranians indulge in various expressions of retaliatory adventurism, perhaps it’s time to step back from the immediate drama and try

to place the current situation in a broader historical and strategic context. In particular, how does it look from Tehran?

First history, and there’s lots of it. Vernacular Farsi uses the phrase An English Job to describe a cruel twist of fate, without rational explanation. It’s a backhanded compliment to the

regular intrusions made into Iranian domestic affairs by Britain and, in particular, the mythic powers Iran invests in British – and latterly American – intelligence agencies. As the gateway

to Afghanistan and the invasion routes to India, Iran was used by both Britain and Russia as a pawn in the Great Game of imperial supremacy played out in the 18th and 19th centuries. In

some ways, Iran suffered in not becoming a colony of either Britain or Russia in that it endured the standard depredations of imperial occupation, like economic exploitation, but none of the

legacy benefits, like rail infrastructure or an efficient civil service. 

As far as economic exploitation is concerned, few more egregious examples exist than the de facto British nationalisation of the Iranian oil deposits by the creation in 1908 of the

Anglo-Persian Oil Company, an antecedent of today’s BP. Indeed, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was able to predicate the conversion of the Royal Navy from coal burning to oil

fuelled ships on the basis of guaranteed price and availability of Iranian oil, completely independent of any competent Iranian authority. But the English Job that left the most vivid mark

on collective Iranian memory was the MI6/CIA orchestrated coup in 1953 that displaced the popular, democratically elected, but politically irritating, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed

Mossadegh. Mossadegh’s departure reinforced the absolutist tendencies of the Iranian royal family and there may be a direct and deeply ironic line to be drawn between 1953 and the fall of

the Shah in 1979. Of course, it is not only Iranians that are captive to their history, and the failure of the 1980 American raid to free the hostages held in Tehran lies in the collective

Washington subconscious as an undischarged humiliation. In the last hurrah of the English Job, the raid was commanded by Colonel Charlie Beckwith, a graduate of an exchange posting with the

SAS and passionate anglophile.

Along with China and Egypt, Iran has a claim to be the longest continuous civilization in the world. Of its 7,000 years of identifiable history, a relatively short period has been dominated

by Islamic governance (around 1,400 years) and an even shorter period dominated by the Shia strand of Islam (around 500 years), but it is the Shia/Sunni schism within Islam that shapes so

much of the Iranian world view today. If there is a single date that marks the schism it is probably 680 AD, when the Prophet’s grandson, Huseyn, was defeated and killed by the Umayyad

caliph Yazid at the battle of Karbala. The battle set the scene for the succeeding 1,300 years, with Huseyn creating the tradition of martyrdom, endurance and redemption through suffering

that has marked the Shia experience and Yazid establishing a Sunni ascendancy that has run on for most of the intervening period. Most but not all, and the 12th-century Fatimid caliphate in

Egypt and the 16th-century Safavid Empire in Iran are the most prominent examples of when the Shia were able to challenge Sunni pre-eminence. Interestingly, we are living through another of

those rare periods when the Shia can give the Sunni a run for their confessional money. A combination of the vitality installed by the 1979 Revolution, the crucible of the Iran/Iraq War and

historical accident (of which more later) has created a powerful sense of Shia Iranian identity, to which the natural counterpoint within both the Middle East and the Islamic belief system

is Sunni Saudi Arabia.

Iran can boast the heritage of the Achaemenid, Sasanian and Safavid Empires, the classical architecture of Isfahan, the poetry of Rumi and the jurisprudence of Qom. It can also claim a vivid

culture that even today is marked by a vibrant civil society. In contrast, Saudi Arabia was created from British military expediency 100 years ago, is demonstrably guilty of the

state-sponsored execution and dismemberment of its own citizens and authorship of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world by its intervention in Yemen. In addition, we should not forget

that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen, as were 15 of the 19 individuals responsible for the 9/11 attacks, that Saudi Arabia is a net exporter of terrorism and that its state religion is

underpinned by the spiritual austerity of Wahhabism. Above all, we should recognise that international Islamic terrorism is overwhelmingly a Sunni phenomenon and that ISIS reserved its most

poisonous bile and acts of exquisite violence for the apostate Shia rather than the misguided unbelievers. And yet Saudi Arabia enjoys the public support of America, the fraternal support of

the Emirates and even the implicit support of Israel – how can this be explained? Economic and strategic self-interest are the obvious answers, and weapons for oil has been a central plank

of the US/Saudi relationship, since President Roosevelt reached a deal with Ibn Saud on board USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake near Cairo in February 1945. But there’s also that

historical accident.

Iran at the end of the 20th century was strategically bereft. Exhausted by the war against Iraq and opposed by America, it was also tightly contained by Sunni political geography. Iraq in

the west and Taliban controlled Afghanistan in the east maintained a strategic squeeze and the Tehran regime looked isolated and anachronistic; then American foreign policy changed

everything. The 2001 US-led operation in Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq immediately demolished the Sunni-containing walls and released energies that America could neither

comprehend nor control. In particular, the long disenfranchised Shia majority in Iraq sensed the possibility of political power, an ambition its Iranian co-religionists encouraged it to

pursue with ruthless single mindedness. The aggregate result is that Iran has become strategically unbound with Iraq as its client state and Shia power and influence at unprecedented levels

throughout the region; in turn, this may set the terms of a wider inter-confessional conflict within Islam. Iran is the fortuitous beneficiary of a strategic design of which it was not the

author, but, given the opportunity, it has seized it with alacrity. Rarely can the law of unintended consequence have had such a profound impact.

Yet there is something chimerical about Iranian power. In 2017, its military expenditure was $14 billion, that of Saudi Arabia was $70 billion, Israel $58 billion and American $750 billion.

In November 2018, the New York Times reported that the US and Saudi Arabia had reached a framework agreement for the sale of nuclear power stations to the Kingdom. Within the deal, Riyadh

insisted on creating its own nuclear fuel, even though it was cheaper to buy abroad. An explanation for this is that the Saudis are reserving the right to develop their own nuclear weapons,

with complicit US support. The odds are, therefore, clearly stacked against Iran and it may be that it has been granted a fortuitous strategic opportunity that it is tactically unable to

exploit – indeed, that it tactically may not survive. One way in which it might negotiate a difficult path is to adapt the Russian techniques of hybrid warfare and avoid direct confrontation

by the use of proxies or indirect forms of engagement like cyber or information operations. The close co-operation with Russian forces in Syria will allow the Iranians to learn on the job

and with unlimited opportunities for battlefield experimentation. Beyond that, the societal coherence of an ancient, sophisticated and resilient civilisation is a standing challenge to any

territorial aggressor, and, after the salutary lessons of Iraq, even America might conclude: it’s complicated.

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