Afghanistan, One Year After the Fall The Last Place Left Online for Real Conversation What the U.S. Gets Wrong About Iran empires tended not to last beyond three generations. The founders of the first-generation are rough men united by hardship, grit and group solidarity, a concept he called asabiyyah. The next generation preserves the achievements of their forebears. By the third or fourth generation, however, the comforts of wealth and status erode ambition and unity, leaving them vulnerable to a new generation of power seekers with fire in their bellies. ........... few nations have spent a greater percentage of their finite political and financial capital to try and topple the U.S.-led world order than Iran ......... The country’s successful entrenchment of powerful proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, coupled with America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, have further convinced Iran of its own success as well as America’s inevitable decline. .......... U.S.-Iran normalization could prove deeply destabilizing to a theocratic government whose organizing principle has been premised on fighting American imperialism. ........ the long-term goal of a representative Iranian government that is driven by the national interests of its people, rather than the revolutionary ideology of its rulers. ........... .
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started a bunch of startups, most of them failed
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In the zero-sum worldview of Iran’s revolutionary elite, opening up the country could bring in competition that would undermine their private mafias. For many among Iran’s political and military elite the battle for power is not about revolutionary ideology or Islam, but about who controls the country’s vast resources......... “Today it is the opposite: 20 percent are believers, and 80 percent are charlatans who flock around officials for wealth and privilege.” ........ The coercive policies needed to counter the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and regional ambitions — i.e., sanctions — may inadvertently serve to strengthen, not weaken, the regime’s grip on power. ........ When Mr. Trump tried to entice Kim Jong-un with a vision of the riches his country could have — “You could have the best hotels in the world right there” — the North Korean president wasn’t moved to end his nuclear program. There is often a fundamental tension between the self-interest of dictatorships and the well-being of the people they rule. .......... “Fidel likes to joke that if America were to ever remove the embargo against Cuba, he would do something provocative the next day to get it reinstated. He understands his power is best preserved in a bubble,” sequestered from international capitalism and civil society. ........... Like Castro, Mr. Khamenei too understands that the greater danger to his theocracy is not global isolation but global integration. ........ Liberals often argue that engaging Iran could soften its revolutionary ideology or empower regime moderates. Conservatives have argued a tougher U.S. approach could either force Iran to abandon its ideology or risk the implosion of the regime. Neither approach, on its own, has worked.
