Imagine you’re living in a country like Iran. You have a deep civilizational history. Empires that predate most modern states. A culture that endured invasions, revolutions, and wars. You are no longer imperial — just sovereign, wary, and determined to exist on your own terms. Then a superpower decides it wants your oil. You resist. Your elected government falls. A dictator more accommodating to foreign interests rises. Years pass. The dictatorship collapses in revolution. But democracy doesn’t return cleanly. Trauma reshapes the system. Security becomes religion. Suspicion becomes doctrine. You are invaded indirectly. Your neighbor — Iraq — attacks, encouraged and supplied by the very power that once toppled your government. Seven brutal years follow. Hundreds of thousands dead. Cities ruined. A generation scarred. You conclude something simple: survival requires resistance. Decades later, the same outside power returns — sanctions, isolation, covert operations. Your nuclear facilities are bombed. Your leadership urges restraint. You swallow pride for the sake of stability. Then, during negotiations, your Supreme Leader — Ali Khamenei — is killed in an external strike. And the architects of the strike announce, with confidence: “Now the country can choose a moderate, pro-American future.” The US has just demonstrated overwhelming force, Humiliated the state, created a martyr and validated every hardliner’s narrative about foreign domination...And the US expects...gratitude?
Eek.
Chatgpt got it all wrong we simply want them to mind their own business.