Because there are people far more informed and skilled at interpreting the Middle East than I am, in these important hours, I quote from several points of view that relate to the US-Israel-Iran war.
“Trump has taken a bold step to rid the world of Iran's evil regime once and for all,” writes the editorial of the New York Post, the right-wing newspaper of the American metropolis. The New York Post has not spared Trump on other occasions. When the White House attacked the judges, the publication told Donald Trump to the cheek that this is not how a democratic president behaves.
Now, however, the newspaper writes that “having a clear vision, Trump stated that any agreement with the regime in Tehran is not worth the paper it is written on.”
And it says something else: Iran has always been against the Abraham Accords, which may even include formal peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel and the dramatic weakening of the Islamist movements (both Sunni and Shia) that are behind most of the world's acts of terrorism. War can sometimes be the price of peace.
The Abraham Accords have been sabotaged in recent years by terrorist movements such as Hamas precisely because they could no longer sell suffering to the people they exploit.
dictatorships
In the public space, after the attack, the argument against the US and Israel appeared: why do you say you want the overthrow of a dictatorship in Iran, while you support the autocracy in Saudi Arabia, to give just one example? What is with this hypocrisy? Saudi Arabia is the one who killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
It's true. From North Africa to the Middle East, no country can be called a democracy except Israel, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU) Democracy Index 2024.
Why is Iran given as a negative example? Because it is.
“The road to progress in the non-Western world is at odds with some of the ideals of the West”
This non-western part of the world is special. Here, the dozens of states bordering the Indian Ocean, from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia, confirm that “the path to progress in the non-Western world is indeed varied and at odds with some of the ideals of the liberal West and the Enlightenment,” as Robert D. Kaplan noted in Monnsoon.
Here, beyond the borders of the West, people fear not strong leadership, but the dissipation of leadership. Here, the antonym of freedom is not strong government, but endless chaos.
“What would America's position be in the Middle East without monarchs like those of Oman, Jordan, and Morocco, not to mention other undemocratic rulers who nonetheless fight anti-Western extremists? The future requires an understanding of other peoples' historical experiences, not just our own,” Kaplan writes.
All this is also a warning for the times to come.
Khamenei and Ceaușescu
The not necessarily imminent but probable fall of the criminal regime of Ali Khamenei does not guarantee either the stability or the democratization of Iran. No matter how permissively these terms are used, Iran has a long way to go.
We know how difficult the transition to a free society is. In a country like Romania, it took 20-30 years to see not the end of the tunnel, but at least the direction. And the Iranians start with an even bigger handicap.
Iranians have had a regime that has frozen another three and a half decades since the fall of communism. Coincidentally, Khamenei's reign as ayatollah began in 1989, the year Ceaușescu visited him. Ceaușescu was in Iran to honor the 1989 enthronement of Khamenei.
The visit “as between dictators” took place in December 1989, when the revolution had begun in Romania. It's a symbolic link not easy to decipher. The overtime arc helps us put ourselves a little in the shoes of the Iranians.
Regardless of what any of us think about Donald Trump, the Iranians are a people that almost the entire world is holding their fists against today.
