Quote (bogie160 @ 29 Nov 2020 08:16)
These countries have agency of their own, all with competing agendas. You are so Eurocentric in this as to almost be racist.
Iran is a pariah because Iran has made it state policy to export the Shia revolution. They support, explicitly, revolution in the Gulf states. They exert significant control over politics in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Blow-back to Iranian imperialism is to such an extent that the Gulf States once supported a rabid dog in Saddam Hussein rather than risk Iranian domination.
Iran was given a huge windfall via the Iranian nuclear deal. They promptly funneled it into proxies wars abroad. They overextended, the deal was scrapped, and now they are back where they started. We can and should blame Iran's leaders for the incompetence, paranoia, and short-sightedness that came to pass, but there is blame to go around for the incompetent American and European negotiators who put the framework of the deal in place to begin with. In the history of politics, we have never gotten so close to "solving" international relations as with game theory and political realism (in many ways the precursor). And yet it was thrown to the winds in order to gift the regional hegemon a stronger position to no tangible benefit. Iran acted predictably, Israel and the Gulf States responded predictably, and here we are. The base currency of politics is power. Iran had little power or no leverage through which to use it, so much so that they were facing significant domestic unrest, a collapsing economy and a fragile political order. The deal conferred economic strength, political legitimacy, and validated the hard-liners in control. It did not lead to a resurgence in power for the "moderates", as was hoped, as they were always directly under the thumb of the conservative faction and never had any legitimate authority.
There is no diplomatic path forward that weakens the hard-liners. They are completely, systematically in control of the country. There is no burgeoning democratic movement without political revolution. But there is hope. Iran's economy is relatively developed, and its population expects a certain level of prosperity. Iran needs to be isolated, its ability to exert influence cut-off, and its political leaders starved of domestic legitimacy by inflation and scarcity. These are precisely the things that had the hard-liners on the ropes to begin with. If Iran insists on waging proxy wars, their generals should be murdered. If they insist on developing nuclear weapons, their scientists should be targeted and their sites bombed.
It is very possible for authoritarian, repressive regimes to experience economic growth and "globalization" while maintaining a tight grip on the population at home. We have seen this in Russia and China only recently. We are not going to increase liberalization in Iran by giving them more resources any more than giving Russia a trillion dollars tomorrow would overthrow Putin or more than WHO membership made China a responsible member of the international political order. It is beyond belief that we are still discussing these things today, almost a century after appeasement was tried and catastrophically failed in the run-up to WWII. We saw the same situation play out during the French invasion of Italy in the 15th century, which Machiavelli was kind enough to document at length. These are not new situations, if you want to constrain a strong regional power, you unite its weaker neighbors against it and provide them support. This had largely been accomplished, and was temporarily undone by the ramifications of the Iranian peace process, which saw the United States and Europe "pivot" to Iran at the expense of the existing alliance structures in place.
agency yes, options no. those are different things, you know? you're spinning a narrative that seeks to exclusively blame iran for its current situation, while noticeably ignoring america's chief role in putting them there, diligently covering every single talking point that trump apologists and neocons put out there during this administration's repeated actions to escalate the conflict. you are correct in pointing out that their fundamentalist leadership are no angels, and it's absolutely justified to mention and criticise their provocations and dangerous ambitions in their sphere of influence, but it's outright laughable to just leave it there and not put that into further context.
you're also making the mistake of treating them as a monolith, forgoing nuance and failing to look at the situation from any other perspective than a neocon's, in order to pretend their domestic situation was entirely of their own choosing, which is rather absurd considering their modern history and america's prominent and devastating role in it.
outright ignoring the fact that the iran deal demonstrably halted their nuclear program and lead to significant improvements of diplomatic relations, while also noticeably weakening iranian hardliners (that vehemently opposed the deal btw), ignoring that the whole international community, as well as the overwhelming majority of foreign policy experts and diplomats advising against trump's move to unilaterally cancel it, simplistically reframing that as 'iran overextended', illustrates that you're either incapable or unwilling to have an honest discussion about this, that your whole point here is to be an apologist for escalation and murder, which is not really shocking, but still a bit of a shame considering you at least seem to be somewhat interested in the situation...
i could go on trying to explain the difference between targeted sanctions against leadership and those hurting the whole population in a way that plays into the hands of radicals, to explain iran's recent history and how they went from a relatively open country to fundamentalist islamic republic, the absurdity of suggesting that china's economic growth (largely based in their massive work force producing consumer goods for the whole world) and iran's potential (largely based on exporting natural resources) were the same in nature - or that their political starting point was a similar one to begin with, but i realise that'd be a complete waste of time, given your obvious intentions here.