In the beginning it was Persia, undisputed power already in the times of Cyrus and Xerxes; then it was Iran, the Land of the Arians. Whatever the name, the first Islamic Republic of contemporary history, the black sheep of the international community for 40 years, has managed to stay on its own with a path.
When the West turned its back on Khomeini's new-born theocracy, the Sunni Islamic world queued up and asked for the bill. For the choice to follow the Shiite branch of Islam started in the 1500, Teheran, godmother of the schismatics par excellence, was in fact isolated. The monarchies of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain in the head, terrified by the possible Iranian expansion made the 1979 revolution coincide with an integral political punishment. Iran has thus ended up as a geographical limit to a Middle East in which it has never really integrated.
Scorned by the taking of hostages at the Tehran embassy and by the clumsy failure of Eagle Claw in the 1980, the United States has over time become the biggest supporters of the Iranian regime's international suffocation. Attempt fully successful, but that did not change the substance of things. With the victory of reformist Rouhani in the presidential elections of the 2013 and the end of the Ahmadinejad era, Iran has demonstrated its institutional stability, capable of continuity and at the same time of reforms, with alternations worthy of countries with declared democracy.
Once the scenarios have changed, diplomacy has adapted. Iran at the heart of the axis of evil, a chain of rogue states and international terrorism, returns to a new political role and falls into the assembly of nations without paying too much pledge. From the cradle of integralism, in fact, it has become paradoxically the brake.
Symptomatic passage of the Persian limelight are the Vienna nuclear agreements of July 2015. A diplomatic victory at 360 ° for three basic reasons:
- the generic nature of the contents of the agreement and the previous laws of the Majlis (the Iranian Parliament) allow a mild management of the monitoring of atomic sites and a partial exclusion of military sites;
- the agreements have contributed to worsening the already cold relations between Israel and the USA, placing a gap between two historical enemies of Tehran;
- the American haste to reach an agreement has demonstrated the fundamental role that Iran plays on the Middle Eastern chessboard.
This last point seems to be the pivot around which all the new equilibriums of the Middle East theater revolve. Of Iran, willy-nilly, there is a desperate need.
From what depends the rediscovered weight of Tehran is soon said. Along the diagonal Mediterranean-Persian Gulf the Iraqi drift, the Syrian civil war and the development of Isis have destabilized an area of incalculable strategic importance. The risk of dissolution of state entities and the lack of recognizable interlocutors has been sharpened by the dispersion of Sunni jihadist phenomena along a global arc that ranges from West Africa to Central Asia: from Afghanistan to Nigeria, radical Islam and its Propagines have become since the middle of the '90 source of absolute precariousness. To this has been added the failure of the Arab springs, a suicide project fueled by the West. The implosion of historical cornerstones of the Arab world and the removal of rais laity has generated disorder. If from the end of the year 70 at the beginning of the millennium Iran was the loose cannon and the Arab countries the fixed points (even in the antagonist roles), in the last decade the system has been overturned. Today, by necessity, we must trust Iran more than the emptiness around us.
Subject to the exceptions made by Israel, naturally alarmed by Tehran's anti-Zionist colors, the need to reintroduce Iran into the international gotha is felt in many places.
First of all, the anti-Isis role is played by everyone, experienced by Tehran as a barrier to Sunni fundamentalism. The birth of the Taliban in Afghanistan first, the development of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood then, had already demonstrated the same principle in the past: a Shiite Muslim bloc hostile to global Sunni jihad is fundamental. It is not risky to hypothesize that if the Iranian filter were missing, today between Islamabad and Dakar we would perhaps have a long and uninterrupted Islamist green line.
In this regard, the collaboration with the ruling elites in Damascus, the historical sponsor of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the aid to the Iraqi Shiites (Sadr City in Baghdad is essentially an Iranian offshoot) and direct aid to the Houti in Yemen, have a great value: they create a solution of continuity to a possible integration of Islamism.
Almost 30 years have passed since the Iranian airbus was destroyed in the Persian Gulf, and now Iran and the United States have ceased to be openly threatening.
Today, Iran is in fact the only real regional power after Israel. Demographic data, oil reserves, military strength and political independence give it a key role in Middle Eastern and global geopolitics.
For different reasons, Arabs (except Shiite and Christian Muslims) and Israelis are holding back. The splendid relations with Moscow and the needs of an increasingly displaced America in the Middle East, however, guarantee Tehran a promising future with all aspects to follow.
