The Iranian military will remain a pivotal force in 2025, even as it undergoes a significant change in its force posture and strategy. Engrained in Iranian identity is a self-perception of Iran as inheritor to a grand civilization and as a regional power. Iranians root their special status in a near contiguous history dating back more than two millennia and Iran’s status as a successor to a great pre-Islamic Empire. While Iran’s neighbors fell victim to colonialism and conquest, Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896) and his successors managed to play the Great Powers off each other and thereby preserve Iran’s independence.

The army became the backbone of the state under Reza Shah, himself a veteran of the Persian Cossack Brigade. While the Iranian army fought no external battles, it was essential to preserve the unity of the state from a succession of twentieth century secessionist movements and to assert the legitimacy of the central government in the face of tribal resistance.

After Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941, his son and successor Mohammad Reza assumed the throne. In the years after World War II, he faced populist unrest which led, in 1953, to a U.S. and British-sponsored coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddiq. After Mosaddiq’s ouster and continued challenges from both left and religious right, Mohammad Reza Shah grew increasingly despotic and dependent upon the Iranian army. Military spending skyrocketed and, while conscripts filled the rank-and-file, the Shah appointed trusted lieutenants–mostly family members–to the officer corps.

That the Islamic Revolution succeeded in 1979 when the conscripts stood down or joined the swelling revolutionary ranks. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, distrusted the Iranian army: many of the conscripts were opportunists who waited on the fence until they could predict victory. There followed a bloody purge; Khomeini ordered senior officers arrested and scores executed, a decision which would prove disastrous as Iraq invaded Iran. . . .

The full text of this speech is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Go to AEI.

What to do about Iran, especially now that the international community can no longer deny the nuclear ambitions of the theocratic state that has implicitly promised to destroy Israel? It appears that hopes for a self-generated revolution from below against the Islamic Republic have been dashed for now: the regime succeeded in containing massive protests planned for February 11, the anniversary of the 1979 revolution that brought it to power, and is proud of its methods, which included arresting student leaders and family members of prominent activists, “texting” warnings to the cell phones of Iranian activists, and blocking e-mail and multimedia messaging in order to prevent opposition coordination or handheld video of paramilitary abuse leaking to Western media. Go to original article.

There is no reason why the White House and the State Department can’t speak up for broad principles, such as democracy, justice, free speech, and free association. Go to AEI.

At the height of the Cold War, successive administrations struggled with the balance between national security and desire to criticize human rights abuses. Congress inserted itself into this debate with passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, signed into law by President Gerald Ford on January 3, 1975, which denied most-favored-nation status to countries that restricted emigration.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment was furious. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger saw the amendment as an impediment to further detente.  But with the end of the Cold War, historians generally credit the amendment with stripping the Soviet Union of legitimacy and emboldening internal dissident. IND:  Realpolitik politicians were wrong then as they are wrong now!

…As Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov explained, “A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.” Forcing the Islamic republic to be accountable to its people can catalyze diplomacy’s success. Go to Radio Free Europe.

…Proponents of diplomacy may chafe at labeling Obama’s rush to engage as naive. After all, President Richard Nixon flew to China and, at the height of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan talked to the Soviet Union. The comparison, however, underlines Obama’s weakness. Even as they talked, neither Nixon nor Reagan suspended military preparations. Indeed, it was Reagan’s willingness to build and use both the U.S. military and covert capacity that catalyzed Soviet defeat.

If the world is to avoid war or a nuclear Iran, talk is not enough. Engagement is a tactic, not a strategy. If Obama waits to prepare militarily until talks run their course, then the United States will fail. Military preparations take months.

The Iranian leadership will not engage sincerely until faced with a credible threat, nor will European allies–let alone Russia and China–make concessions if they see the commander in chief twiddling his thumbs. The military option should be the last resort. The irony is that without a finger on the trigger, diplomacy will fail. Go to AEI.

About the Islamic Republic the Secretary of State said, “We know that refusing to deal with the Islamic Republic has not succeeded in altering the Iranian march toward a nuclear weapon, reducing Iranian support for terror, or improving Iran’s treatment of its citizens.”  Secretary Clinton is correct to note the challenges the Islamic Republic poses, but is incorrect to blame her predecessors rather than the Islamic Republic itself for the failure of diplomacy. Go to AEI.

Part of Obama’s reticence may be reflect his advisers’ tendency to conflate the Islamic Republic’s longstanding and somewhat limited “reform movement” with Iranian civil society as a whole. True, many of the pre-2009 reformists have said that U.S. assistance taints them. On the op-ed page of the New York Times, for example, Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan blamed Bush’s advocacy of democracy for a backlash that culminated in Ahmadinejad’s 2005 victory. This theory conflicts with claims from unsuccessful candidates in the 2005 election that Ahmadinejad won that vote through widespread fraud–claims whose credibility the most recent election has heightened.  Go to AEI.

The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post have dubbed it a “Twitter Revolution,” speculating about whether new technology will enable Iranian protesters to overcome government forces. The role of technology in the current unrest is well-covered elsewhere. What is lacking in much of the coverage, however, is a sense of context.

Technology has been essential both to empire formation and preservation, and to state degradation in the Middle East. The late historian Marshall G.S. Hodgson described the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires as “gunpowder empires.” Their sultans and shahs consolidated control over expansive territories by controlling weaponry which potential aspirants to power along the periphery did not have. Once the central government lost monopoly over guns and cannons, however, the empires fractured–devolving into fiefdoms or dissolving completely.

In Iran, technology played a particularly important role in state preservation Looking at 18th and early 19th century atlases, borders are all over the place. Discrepancies of dozens if not hundreds of miles mark frontiers on maps published by different gazetteers. Whereas today imperialism is presented in almost cartoonish terms as a free-for-all, in reality there were huge debates during the 19th century whether or not to expand imperial control over various territories. Imperial rule was an expensive prospect, and so many imperial powers preferred to advance informal control.

Over the weekend, both conservative columnist George Will and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan argued that conservative criticism of President Obama’s rhetorical restraint amidst the Iranian protests was unwarranted.

“The president is being roundly criticized for insufficient rhetorical support for what’s going on over there. It seems foolish criticism,” Will said. Go to AEI.