Iran After America • EQUATOR
▻https://www.equator.org/articles/trump-war-iran-vali-nasr
Vali Nasr est interviewé
The myth of a cost-free war – where the US bullies the world into submission with sanctions and threats and kidnap – has collapsed. If Iran can constrain the US, other powers will notice, and the result will be something the US can no longer manage.
Since 1979 the United States had been able to maintain, with authoritarian regimes and with Israel, a particular order in the Middle East. But the US took an axe to that order by attacking Iran and putting the Gulf states in danger – and since then it has shown that it is not willing or capable of defending the region. The US has caused this order to fall apart, and it cannot fix the situation. Donald Trump, even after this war ends, has no vision for a new order in the Middle East. So the more the US is seen around the world as the destroyer rather than the builder, the more both its soft power and hard power come into question.
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How should we describe this new generation of leaders? Are they more ruthless than their predecessors?
They are the more extreme people whom the previous Supreme Leader had sidelined. But they have also learned that his moderation did not bring them peace; it actually brought them war. They believe the US only respects extreme violence and pressure. But they are also a generation born after the revolution. These are not the young activists and ideologues who languished in the Shah’s prisons and then came to power, your Trotskys and Lenins. These guys are more state-minded technocrats, they are Brezhnevs and Stalins.
Are we going to see more repression along the lines of January’s massacres?
Iran is nationalistic, angry, depressed. It’s a very difficult domestic situation. Yes, there are now more cultural freedoms. But the economic situation in Iran is horrible, and the Islamic Republic is not going to reform politically. On the other side, they’re being invaded and bombed. And it’s not the regime that’s being bombed – it’s the Iranian people and their livelihoods.
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