Those lucky enough to visit Persepolis will know that not far away is an impressive monument to the Persian king Artaxerxes I, who like his even more famous antecedent (and I think distant relative) Cyrus the Great, played an important role in the liberating the Jewish community in Mesopotamia and establishing them in Jerusalem. Since then, the link between Persia and the Jewish people has been strong right through the Pahlavi dynasty years up to 1971, which marked the 2500 anniversary of Cyrus’ establishment of the Persian empire.
This date is controversial for the lavish party that the Shah hosted to celebrate the anniversary, and by some accounts (notably the Guinness Book of Records), it was one of the great parties of all time – for instance nearly 300 red Mercedes were used to bus guests around a large, tented city and Maxim’s in Paris closed for two weeks so that staff could cater for the event. Many of the world’s royal families attended, as did a range of political figures from Tito to Imelda Marcos. It’s perhaps no surprise that this display of excess was followed a few years later by the Iranian Revolution.
Even at this time, there were over 100,000 Jews living in Iran, many of whom would soon leave for Israel, so much so that one quarter of the cabinet of Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak (1999) were born in Iran.
While I don’t intend to comment directly on the recent entanglement between Israel and Iran – which is the culmination of a lengthy covert conflict – the Iranian attack on Israel reinforces a number of emerging geopolitical trends.
The first is the problem of elites in the sense that Iran’s theocratic elite is stubbornly cut off from its people and the outside world, and to a worrying extent (this was especially the case under former prime minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) relies on heightened tension with Israel and other ‘enemies’ for political oxygen.
On the Israeli side, it is worth recalling that not so long ago its society was convulsed by a crisis of democracy, and that by any standards its government has in recent years veered to the extreme right, notably so in terms of its willingness to bend Israel’s institutions to their own will.
The extension of this thought is to highlight the values of well made, functioning democracies but to also worry about the damage that the likes of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump has caused to them, how little these individuals value democracy, and how easily they have been manipulated by autocrats.
It is increasingly clear that in a divided, technology driven world, it is very easy for bad actors to undermine other states (a recent BBC documentary ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ made the point that Russia’s foreign policy is to act as a ‘spoiler’), and equally difficult for the lynchpins of the democratic world to repair this damage. Whilst this makes for a testing diplomatic world for the US and EU, not enough attention is given to the lack of any effort on the part of China to improve the state of international relations.
In particular, many of the larger, populous emerging nations of the world should pay more attention to this, and question China’s rhetoric that it wants to be a world diplomatic power.
This group of nations, who suffer under the banner of the ‘Global South’ should rightly feel alarmed that the world is becoming a more dangerous place and that military exchanges between nuclear armed states risk an existential event. They might also be fascinated by advances in drone warfare (the war in Nagorno-Karabakh was instrumental in this respect), the use of AI in military systems and the evolution of covert warfare. The danger is that instead of being repelled by this trend, they want to be part of it and a world arms race begins.
Another trend worth commenting on is that the clubs and gangs of the geopolitical world are becoming more clearly defined. Last week we wrote about the ‘golf playing nations’, and in my view the attack by Iran should convince Israeli strategists that China and Russia are not friends, and that it needs to pursue the normalisation of relations with the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, and that it needs to be even more appreciative of the role that Jordan plays in the region.
Amidst all of this, the military exchange between Israel and Iran has obscured the fate of Gazans where a famine is deepening. For them, the best outcome of the events of last week is that it accelerates a durable peace process that encompasses the diplomatic realignment of the countries of the region.
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