The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Moreover, Iran, as we know from the headlines, has had, at least through 2011, an enviable political position by the Mediterranean: in Hamas-controlled Gaza, Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon, and Alawite Syria. Yet one interpretation of history and geography suggests an Iranian breakout in all directions. In the palace of the sixth-century Sassanian Persian emperors at Ctesiphon, south of modern-day Baghdad, there were empty seats beneath the royal throne for the emperors of Rome and China, and for the leader of the Central Asian nomads, in case those rulers came as supplicants to the court of the king of kings.12 The pretensions of Iranian rulers have not lessened with modernity; in this way the clerics are much like the late shah. That is ultimately why Moscow must tread carefully regarding its relations with Iran. A century ago Russia had a zone of influence in northern Iran. Though Russia is comparatively weaker now, proximity and contiguity do matter.

  Iran, furthermore, is not some twentieth-century contrivance of family and religious ideology like Saudi Arabia, bracketed as it is by arbitrary borders. Iran corresponds almost completely with the Iranian plateau—“the Castile of the Near East,” in Princeton historian Peter Brown’s phrase—even as the dynamism of its civilization reaches far beyond it. Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower. The Persian Empire, even as it besieged Greece, “uncoiled, like a dragon’s tail … as far as the Oxus, Afghanistan and the Indus valley,” writes Brown.13 W. Barthold, the great Russian geographer of the turn of the twentieth century, concurs, situating Greater Iran between the Euphrates and the Indus, and identifying the Kurds and Afghans as essentially Iranian peoples.14

  Of the ancient peoples of the Near East, only the Hebrews and the Iranians “have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to modern times,” writes the linguist Nicholas Ostler.15 Persian (Farsi) was not replaced by Arabic, like so many other tongues, and is in the same form today as it was in the eleventh century, even as it has adopted the Arabic script. Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and Palestine. There is nothing artificial about Iran, in other words: the very competing power centers within its clerical regime indicate a greater level of institutionalization than almost anywhere in the region save for Israel and Turkey. Just as the Middle East is the quadrilateral for Afro-Eurasia, that is, for the World-Island, Iran is the Middle East’s very own universal joint. Mackinder’s pivot, rather than in the Central Asian steppe-land, should be moved to the Iranian plateau just to the south. It is no surprise that Iran is increasingly being wooed by both India and China, whose navies may at some point in the twenty-first century share dominance with that of the United States in the Eurasian sea lanes. Though Iran is much smaller in size and population than those two powers, or Russia or Europe for that matter, Iran, because it is in possession of the key geography of the Middle East—in terms of location, population, and energy resources—is, therefore, fundamental to global geopolitics.

  There is, too, what British historian Michael Axworthy calls the “Idea of Iran,” which, as he explains, is as much about culture and language as about race and territory.16 Iran, he means, is a civilizational attractor, much as ancient Greece and China were, pulling other peoples and languages into its linguistic orbit: the essence of soft power, in other words, and so emblematic of McNeill’s concept of one civilization and culture influencing another. Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and Iraqi Arabic are all either variants of Persian or significantly influenced by it. That is, one can travel from Baghdad to Calcutta and remain inside a Persian cultural realm of sorts. A brief scan of Iranian history, with an emphasis on old maps, further clarifies this dynamism.

  Greater Iran began back in 700 B.C. with the Medes, an ancient Iranian people who established, with the help of the Scythians, an independent state in northwestern Iran. By 600 B.C., this empire reached from central Anatolia to the Hindu Kush (Turkey to Afghanistan), as well as south to the Persian Gulf. In 549 B.C., Cyrus (the Great), a prince from the Persian house of Achaemenes, captured the Median capital of Ecbatana (Hamadan) in western Iran, and went on a further bout of conquest. The map of the Achaemenid Empire, governed from Persepolis (near Shiraz) in southern Iran, shows antique Persia at its apex, from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C. It stretched from Thrace and Macedonia in the northwest, and from Libya and Egypt in the southwest, all the way to the Punjab in the east; and from the Transcaucasus and the Caspian and Aral seas in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea in the south. This was Bosporus-to-Indus, including the Nile. No empire up to that point in world history had matched it. While the fifth-century B.C. wars between Persia and Greece dominate Western attitudes toward ancient Iran, with our sympathies lying with the Westernized Greeks as opposed to the Asiatic Persians, it is also the case that, as Hodgson notes, the Oikoumene, under the relative peace, tolerance, and sovereignty of Achaemenid Persia and later empires, provided a sturdy base for the emergence and prospering of the great confessional religions.17

  “The Parthians,” Axworthy writes, “exemplified the best of Iranian genius—the recognition, acceptance, and tolerance of the complexity of the cultures … over which they ruled.”18 Headquartered in the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan and the adjacent Kara Kum, and speaking an Iranian language, the Parthians ruled between the third century B.C. and the third century A.D., generally from Syria and Iraq to central Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Armenia and Turkmenistan. Thus, rather than Bosporus-to-Indus or Nile-to-Oxus like Achaemenid Persia, the Parthian Empire constitutes a more realistic vision of a Greater Iran for the twenty-first century. And this is not necessarily bad. For the Parthian Empire was extremely decentralized, a zone of strong influence rather than of outright control, which leaned heavily on art, architecture, and administrative practices inherited from the Greeks. As for the Iran of today, it is no secret that the clerical regime is formidable, but demographic, economic, and political forces are equally dynamic, and key segments of the population are restive.

  The medieval record both cartographically and linguistically follows from the ancient one, though in more subtle ways perhaps. In the eighth century the political locus of the Arab world shifted eastward from Syria to Mesopotamia: that is, from the Umayyad caliphs to the Abbasid ones. The Abbasid Caliphate at its zenith in the middle of the ninth century ruled from Tunisia eastward to Pakistan, and from the Caucasus and Central Asia southward to the Persian Gulf. Its capital was the new city of Baghdad, close upon the old Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon; and Persian bureaucratic practices, which added whole new layers of hierarchy, undergirded this new imperium. The Abbasid Caliphate became more a symbol of an Iranian despotism than of an Arab sheikhdom. Some historians have labeled the Abbasid Caliphate the equivalent of the “cultural reconquest” of the Middle East by the Persians under the guise of Arab rulers.19 The Abbasids succumbed to Persian practices just as the Umayyads, closer to Asia Minor, had succumbed to Byzantine ones. “Persian titles, Persian wines and wives, Persian mistresses, Persian songs, as well as Persian ideas and thoughts, won the day,” writes historian Philip K. Hitti.20 The Persians also helped determine medieval Baghdad’s monumental brick architecture and circular ground plan.

  “In the western imagination,” writes Peter Brown of Princeton, “the Islamic [Abbasid] empire stands as the quintessence of an oriental power. Islam owed this crucial orientation neither to Muhammad nor to the adaptable conquerors of the seventh century, but to the massive resurgence of eastern, Persian traditions in the eighth and ninth centuries.” It wasn’t so much Charles Martel at Tours in 732 who “brought the Arab war machine to a halt,” but the very foundation of Baghdad, which replaced the dynamism of Bedouin cavalry with that of an imperial and luxurious Persian administration.21

  Not even the thirteenth-century Mongol conquest of Baghdad, which laid waste to Iraq, and particularly to its irrigation system (as it did in Iran), a devasta
tion from which Iraq never completely recovered, could halt the vitality of Persian arts and letters. The poetry of Rumi, Iraqi, Sa’adi, and Hafez all prospered in the wake of Hulagu Khan’s assault, which had reduced Mesopotamia to a malarial swamp. Nostalgic for their Sassanid ancestors, who had ruled an empire greater than their Parthian predecessors and almost equal to that of the Achaemenids, Persian artists and scholars embellished the intellectual and linguistic terrain of a succession of non-Persian empires—Abbasid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Mongol, and Mughal. Persian was the Mughal court language, as well as the diplomatic one for the Ottomans. In the medieval centuries, the Persians may not have ruled directly from Bosporus-to-Indus, as they did in antiquity, but they dominated literary life to the same extent. The “Iranian Empire of the Mind,” as Axworthy calls it, was the potent idea that served to magnify Iran’s geographically envious position, so that a Greater Iran was a historically natural phenomenon.22 Arnold Toynbee poses this tantalizing hypothetical: if Tamerlane (Timur) had not turned his back on northern and central Eurasia and his arms against Iran in 1381, the relationship between Transoxiana and Russia might have been the “inverse” of what they actually became in modern times, with a state roughly the size of the Soviet Union ruled not by Russians from Moscow, but by Iranians ruling from Samarkand.23

  As for Shiism, it is very much a component of this idea—despite the culturally bleak and oppressive aura projected by the Shiite clergy from 1979 through at least the first decade of the twenty-first century. While the arrival of the Mahdi in the form of the hidden Twelfth Imam means the end of injustice, and thus is a spur to radical activism, little else in Shiism necessarily inclines the clergy to play an overt political role; Shiism even has a quietest strain that acquiesces to the powers that be, and which is frequently informed by Sufism.24 Witness the example set by Iraq’s leading cleric of recent years, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who only at pivotal moments makes a plea for political conciliation from behind the scenes. Precisely because of the symbiotic relationship between Iraq and Iran throughout history, with its basis in geography, it is entirely possible that in a post-revolutionary Iran, Iranians will look more toward the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq for spiritual direction than toward their own holy city of Qom; or that Qom will adopt the quietism of Najaf and Karbala.

  The French scholar Olivier Roy tells us that Shiism is historically an Arab phenomenon that came late to Iran, but which eventually led to the establishment of a clerical hierarchy for taking power. Shiism was further strengthened by the tradition of a strong and bureaucratic state that Iran has enjoyed since antiquity, relative to those of the Arab world, and which is, as we know, partly a gift of the spatial coherence of the Iranian plateau. The Safavids brought Shiism to Iran in the sixteenth century. Their name comes from their own militant Sufi order, the Safaviyeh, which had originally been Sunni. The Safavids were one of a number of horse-borne brotherhoods of mixed Turkish, Azeri, Georgian, and Persian origin in the late fifteenth century which occupied the mountainous plateau region between the Black and Caspian seas, where eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and northwestern Iran come together. In order to build a stable state on the Farsi-speaking Iranian plateau, these new sovereigns of eclectic linguistic and geographical origin adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion, which awaits the return of the Twelfth Imam, a direct descendant of Muhammad, who is not dead but in occlusion.25 This development was, of course, not preordained by history or geography, and depended greatly on various personalities and circumstances. Had, for example, the Ilkhanid ruler Oljaitu, the scion of a Mongol khanate, not converted to Twelver Shiism in the thirteenth century, the development of Shiism in northwestern Iran might have been different, and who knows how events might have transpired henceforth. In any case, Shiism had been gathering force among various Turkic orders in northwestern Iran, laying the groundwork for the emergence of Safavid Shah Ismail, who imposed Shiism in the wake of his conquests, and brought in Arab theologians from present-day southern Lebanon and Bahrain to form the nucleus of a state clergy.26

  The Safavid Empire at its zenith stretched thereabouts from Anatolia and Syria-Mesopotamia to central Afghanistan and Pakistan—yet another variant of Greater Iran through history. Shiism was an agent of Iran’s congealment as a modern nation-state, even as the Iranianization of non-Persian Shiite minorities during the sixteenth century also helped in this regard.27 Iran might have been a great state and nation since antiquity, but the Safavids with their insertion of Shiism onto the Iranian plateau retooled Iran for the modern era.

  Indeed, revolutionary Iran of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a fitting expression of this powerful and singular legacy. Of course, the rise of the ayatollahs has been a lowering event in the sense of the violence done to—and I do not mean to exaggerate—the voluptuous, sophisticated, and intellectually stimulating traditions of the Iranian past. (Persia—“that land of poets and roses!” exclaims the introductory epistle of James J. Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.)28 But comparison, it is famously said, is the beginning of all serious scholarship. Compared to the upheavals and revolutions in the Arab world during the early and middle phases of the Cold War, the regime ushered in by the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution was striking in its vitality and modernity. The truth is, and this is something that goes directly back to the Achaemenids of antiquity, everything about the Iranian past and present is of a high quality, whether it is the dynamism of its empires from Cyrus to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who can deny the sheer Iranian talent for running terrorist networks in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, which is, after all, an aspect of imperial rule!), or the political thought and writings of its Shiite clergy; or the complex efficiency of the bureaucracy and security services in cracking down on dissidents. Tehran’s revolutionary order has constituted a richly developed governmental structure with a diffusion of power centers: it was never a crude one-man thugocracy like the kind Saddam Hussein ran in neighboring Arab Iraq. Olivier Roy tells us that the “originality” of the Iranian Revolution lies in the alliance between the clergy and the Islamist intelligentsia:

  The Shiite clergy is incontestably more open to the non-Islamic corpus than the Sunni [Arab] ulamas. The ayatollahs are great readers (including of Marx and Feuerbach): there is something of the Jesuit or Dominican in them. Hence they combine clear philosophical syncretism with an exacting casuistic legalism.… The twofold culture of the Shiite clergy is striking: highly traditionalist … and yet very open to the modern world.29

  In fact, it is this relatively advanced and modernist strain that makes the “Shiite imagination,” in Roy’s words, “more easily adaptable to the idea of revolution”: an idea which, in turn, requires a sense of history and social justice combined with that of martyrdom. The Sunni Arab world, though it has had its reformers and modernizers, like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, simply lacked for too long the exposure to Western political philosophers such as Hegel and Marx to the degree of Iran: whose mullahs, in the vein of Hegel and Marx, base their moral superiority on an understanding of the purpose of history. Unlike the conservatism of the Afghan mujahidin or the suffocating military regimes of the Arab world, revolutionary Iran in the 1980s saw itself as part of a fraternity that included the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the African National Congress in South Africa.30 Though clerical rule descended in recent years to mere brutal repression—the mark of a tired regime in its decadent, Brezhnevite phase—the very doctrinal and abstract nature of the infighting that still occurs behind closed doors is testament to the elevated nature of Iranian culture. The Iranian state has been stronger and more elaborately organized than any in the Greater Middle East, save for Turkey and Israel, and the Islamic Revolution did not dismantle the Iranian state, but, rather, attached itself to it. The regime maintained universal suffrage and instituted a presidential system, even if the clerics and security services abused it through an apparently rigged election in 2009
.

  Again, what made the clerical regime in Iran so effective in the pursuit of its interests, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, was its merger with the Iranian state, which itself is the product of history and geography. The Green Movement, which emerged in the course of massive anti-regime demonstrations following the disputed election of 2009, is very much like the regime it sought to topple: greatly sophisticated by the standards of the region (at least until the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia two years later), and thus another demonstration of the Iranian genius. The Greens constituted a world-class democracy movement, having mastered the latest means in communications technology—Twitter, Facebook, text messaging—to advance their organizational throwweight, and having adopted a potent mixture of nationalism and universal moral values to advance their cause. It took all the means of repression of the Iranian state, subtle and not, to drive the Greens underground. Were the Greens ever to take power, or to facilitate a change in the clerical regime’s philosophy and foreign policy toward moderation, Iran, because of its strong state and dynamic idea, would have the means to shift the whole groundwork of the Middle East away from radicalization; providing political expression for a new bourgeoisie with middle-class values that has been quietly rising throughout the Greater Middle East, and which the American obsession with al Qaeda and radicalism obscured until the Arab Spring of 2011.31