Global Issues 2021 Edition. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ this past spring as warning shots. And the highly destructive attack on Saudi oil facilities, they say, was meant to provide Washington and its Arab allies a taste of what Iran is willing to do if war breaks out. To make sure the Trump administration got the message, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif pledged “all-out war” if Iran is attacked, putting at risk the rest of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure and the roughly 70,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and the Arab sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf.²³

      Patrick Theros, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, said the attack on the Saudi oil facilities was consistent with Iran’s asymmetrical warfare doctrine. Unable to defeat U.S. forces using conventional means, Iran aims to hurt the United States indirectly by targeting the world economy’s dependence on Persian Gulf oil and gas.

      As the standoff with Iran intensifies, some military analysts say the Trump administration still has several options short of war to pressure Iran into compliance. Sabahat Khan, a senior analyst at Dubai’s Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, said these include Trump’s standing offer for negotiations, a proposal Iran adamantly refuses to accept unless sanctions are lifted first. Another is more sanctions, Khan said, and a third is cyberattacks targeting Iran’s oil production and critical economic infrastructure.²⁴

      But Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says without a diplomatic breakthrough, punitive measures will only draw increasingly belligerent responses from Iran, especially now that they believe Trump will not respond militarily. At some point, Freeman worries, Iran’s actions will cross a line that will leave Trump no option but a military response.

      Freeman compares Trump’s maximum pressure strategy against Iran to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s embargo on oil and rubber sales to Japan in the 1930s, aimed at halting Tokyo’s military expansionism in East Asia. As with Iran, Freeman points out, the sanctions hardened Japan’s resolve to resist U.S. intervention in regional affairs. Eventually, in a desperate bid to remain a major Asian power, Japan attacked the U.S. Navy in Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II.

      Freeman calls Iran’s escalating provocations against Trump’s sanctions “a very clear warning of what we know from past history—namely that if you corner a country, even if it’s not your military equal, at some point you pay a price for that.” At some point, he adds, “You get attacked.”

      Background

      Repeated Invasions

      The United States has never fully understood modern Iran, neither as a monarchy nor as the Islamic Republic. The most glaring example is the unquestioning faith that successive U.S. administrations placed in the durability of the Iranian monarchy and its role as America’s policeman in the Middle East.

      In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter memorably praised Iran as “an island of stability” in the turbulent region. Within days the first demonstrations erupted in what became a revolution that eventually would end the monarchy, send Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into exile and transform Iran into the virulently anti-American Islamic Republic.

      Iran scholars rank the Iranian revolution as one of the three most consequential events in the Middle East during the 20th century, the other two being the collapse of the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire after World War I and the creation of Israel in 1948. And like those events, the shock waves from Iran’s revolution continue to reverberate across the globe.

      “Virtually no part of the world has been untouched by the revolution’s repercussions because of its effect on oil prices, on the patterns of terrorism and modern warfare, on Third World politics and on the emergence of religious fundamentalism, not only within Islam,” wrote Robin Wright in her 1989 book on post-revolutionary Iran, In The Name of God: The Khomeini Decade.²⁵

      Today, 40 years after the revolution, the crisis over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile development and its push for Middle East dominance underscore the revolution’s enduring impact and Iran’s geostrategic importance.

      For Iranians, however, that is nothing new. Since ancient times, Iran—a geographic and cultural bridge between the Middle East and India—has been central to the military, religious and cultural history of the region. Many scholars say modern Iran’s deep suspicion of outsiders is the legacy of centuries of repeated foreign invasions and meddling in its internal affairs.

      That history began in the fourth century B.C. when the Persian Empire, Iran’s predecessor, stretched from modern day Bulgaria in the west to northern India in the east and Egypt in the south. Alexander the Great conquered Persia as he drove his armies east to India. In the seventh century A.D., the Arab conquest of Persia opened the way for the spread of Islam to Central and East Asia.²⁶ The Turks overran Persia in the 11th century, followed by Genghis Khan’s Mongol army in the 13th century and Tamerlane in the 14th century.

      In the 16th century, Persia’s Safavid monarch, Ismail, claimed to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, Ali, and declared Shiism the country’s official religion. It was a transformative move that gave Persians a separate religious identity from their mostly Sunni Arab neighbors.²⁷

      Since then, Persians established close clerical bonds with Shiite communities in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq—a relationship that has helped the modern Islamic Republic enlist them as proxies in its struggle against rival powers.

      Modern Meddling

      In the early 20th century, the British and Russian empires targeted Persia in their “Great Game” competition for dominance over Central Asia, forcing the Persians in 1905 to cede a sphere of influence in northern Iran to Russian control and the oil-rich south to the British. But by the end of World War I, Britain emerged as the sole colonial power in Persia.²⁸

      To secure its control over the oil fields, London offered to make Persia a British protectorate, but the Persian parliament rejected the plan. Britain withdrew its personnel from the country in 1921, after supporting a coup by Col. Reza Khan, commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade and an ardent nationalist.²⁹

      In 1925, Reza Khan became shah, or monarch, and his eldest son, Mohammad Reza, heir to the throne. Shah Reza took the surname Pahlavi, establishing his new dynasty. In 1935, at the shah’s behest, the parliament changed the country’s name from Persia to Iran.³⁰

      Shah Reza pursued a vigorous modernization campaign and sought closer relations with Nazi Germany, which, unlike Britain and Russia, had not meddled in Iranian affairs or occupied its territory. When World War II began, Reza declared neutrality.³¹ But British and Soviet forces occupied Iran in 1941 to secure the Trans-Iranian Railroad for carrying critical British and U.S. military aid from India to the Soviet Union. The British remained suspicious of Shah Reza’s pro-German sympathies and forced him to abdicate, putting his pro-British son on the throne.

      Middle East scholars say the young shah’s willingness to assist the Allied war effort laid the foundation for Iran’s close ties with the West, particularly the United States.

      Roots of Revolution

      The first major crisis in Iran’s relations with the West began in 1951, when the lawyer Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected prime minister. Soon after taking office, he introduced a wide array of political and economic reforms and nationalized Iran’s British-controlled oil industry. After diplomacy failed to obtain a compromise, the CIA, convinced by the British that Mosaddegh was a communist sympathizer, helped to overthrow him in a coup that became a turning point in Iran’s modern history.³²

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