IRAN-1

 

https://youtu.be/u5EIKoMiA70?si=ZOip0FWC9QQSLyo8

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When we look at the greater Middle East, we see that it is an easily definable area existing between the Greek world, the West, the Chinese world, and the Indian world, separated from all three. And at the center of this region, Iran stands out by far. a nation that is home to the extremely ancient Persian civilization which has resisted for thousands of years to the most diverse changes, aggressions, and influences. In today's video, we'll discuss Iran's geopolitics. But before that, don't forget to subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell, and join our Telegram group, which is in the video description. That way you'll stay updated all the time on everything that happens on the channel and also help the channel by sharing it with everyone you know so I can keep bringing you genuine geopolitics content. Your support is essential for me to continue this work. My name is Adillian Peter and this is World Geopolitics. [Music] Iran is the great divider between east and west, standing at the crossroads of the Islamic world, connecting the Middle East, the Caucusesus, and Central South Asia. Because of this, Iran has struggled to balance the advantages and disadvantages of its position and geography. The region's topography pushes the forces here toward unity. That is in geopolitical literature it is what we can call a centripal force meaning a force that promotes unity. This is because since ancient times in the center of this region where the so-called Persian corps or the geopolitical corps of Iran is located in the so-called Iranian plateau, the most varied political forces have established themselves from the mess who were Aryan tribes that would serve as the basis for the formation of the ancient Persian Empire in 550 before Christ. This is due to the fact that the region is surrounded by mountainous topography which protected the Persian civilization with the Zagros mountains to the west, the Albos mountains to the north, the Cavier and Lud deserts to the east and to the south the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea and a little further north the Caspian Sea. Its only flat area is in the southwest in the Kuzan region on the border with present-day Iraq which has served as a bridge between the two countries since ancient times. Since the formation of the Persian Empire up to the present day, the challenge for Persian and Iranian leaders has been to protect themselves from the most varied forces coming from both the east and the west with their history being one of conquest by many different peoples. From the Greeks, Mongols, Turks, Arabs, and English, all of them conquered ancient Persia several times. This made the leaders of this region always seek to conquer as much territory as possible around their plateau to use them as buffer zones against external aggression. In practice, the Iranian plateau is synonymous with just one country, Iran, which also has one of the largest populations in the Middle East. Iran is the third country in the world in oil reserves and the second in natural gas reserves. But it is Iran's location south of Mckinder's continental heart or heartland and within Spikeman's rimland that is more than any other factor something to take note of. Most of the oil and natural gas in the Middle East is located precisely in the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea region and the only country that covers both areas is Iran. The Persian Gulf holds 55% of the world's crude oil reserves and Iran dominates the entire Gulf from the border with Iraq to the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian coast within the straight of Hormuz is the longest of all the countries in the region and has many excellent places to hide fast attack boats to strike oil tankers in case of war. A factor that if it happened would heavily affect the world economy. In addition, Iran has a large coastline on the Arabian Sea, including the port of Shabahar near the border with Pakistan, which makes it vital for providing access to the landlocked countries of Central Asia. Meanwhile, the Iranian coast on the Caspian Sea in the far north is surrounded by forested mountains. Looking at the map of Eurasia, you can see the Agros mountain range which stretches from Anatolia in Turkey in the northwest to Baluchistan in southeastern Iran and part of Pakistan. To the west of this mountain range, the roads lead to the region of Mesopotamia. While to the east and northeast, they open up to Corusan, a region that covers part of the countries of Central Asia. Thus, Iran's geographical position is privileged since it borders both the Middle East and Central Asia, and no Arab country can claim this geographical and energy position. Iran also influences Central Asia and the Caucases where there are significant populations of ethnic Iranians. Iran's influence in Turkey and the Arab world is well known, but its influence to the north and east is equally important. The country has an enviable political position in the Mediterranean, controlling areas of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and the Alawite government in Syria. In ancient Persia, the Sassined emperors reserved empty seats for the leaders of the Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire, and the Central Asian nomads. These ambitions have not disappeared in the modern era and should be taken into consideration by neighboring countries such as Russia. Iran is a country with an ancient history and an influence that extends throughout the region and even beyond it. Ancient Persia was the world's first superpower and the dynamics of its civilization extend to this day. The country was not artificially created in the 20th century like most countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, but corresponds almost entirely to the Iranian plateau. Therefore, Iran's geographical position, its history and cultural influence must be taken into consideration by neighboring countries and the world. As the linguist Nicholas Osta said, "Among the ancient peoples of the Middle East, only the Hebrews and the Iranians have cultural texts and translations that have survived through the ages to the present day. The Persian language Farsy was not replaced by Arabic as happened with many other languages in the region and remains in the same form today as it was in the 11th century although it adopted the Arabic alphabet that is Arabic script. Iran has a much stronger record as a nation state and urban civilization than most places in the Arab world and all places in the fertile crescent including Mesopotamia and Palestine which are extremely ancient regions. There is nothing artificial about Iran. In other words, the very centers of power within its regime indicate a higher level of institutions than almost anywhere else in the region except perhaps Israel and Turkey. Just as the Middle East is the pivot area for Mckinder's world island, Iran is the universal hinge of the Middle East itself. Precisely because of this, Iran has been getting closer and closer to India and China, whose navies may at some point in the 21st century share dominance with the United States over the Eurasian maritime routes. Although Iran is much smaller in size and population than these two powers, than Russia or Europe, Iran because it possesses the key geography of the Middle East in terms of location, population, and energy resources, is fundamental to global geopolitics. In terms of culture, there is also what we could call the idea of Iran, which would be as much about culture and language as about race and territory. Iran being a civilizational hub just as ancient Greece and China were attracts other peoples and languages into its linguistic and cultural orbit. Greater Iran began around 700 before Christ with the Mes, an ancient Iranian people who with the help of the Cyians established an independent state in the northwest of what is now Iran. By around 600 before Christ, this empire stretched from the center of Anatolia, where Turkey is today, to the Hindu Kush, where Afghanistan is now, and even to the Persian Gulf. In 549, before Christ Cyrus the Great, a prince of the Persian house captured the Median capital in western Iran and set out for further conquests. This map of the Aimemened Empire ruled from Pepilolis in southern Iran shows ancient Persia at its height from the 6th to the 4th century before Christ. Stretching from Thrace and Macedonia in the northwest, from Libya and Egypt in the southwest to Punjab in present-day India in the east and from the Caucasus, Caspian Sea and Arrol Sea in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea in the south. This included the Bosphorus and the Indis River as well as the Nile, points that were not only strategic but also of great symbolic value in antiquity. No empire until then in world history had matched this in size and power. Although the wars of the fifth century before Christ between Persia and ancient Greece dominate the western imagination regarding ancient Iran with our sympathy for the Greeks in opposition to the Persian Empire. It is also the case that the Persian reign took place under relative peace, tolerance, and sovereignty of the Akimmined Persia and the empires that followed. In particular, the Parththeians who knew how to manage the cultural and religious complexity of the region were always an obstacle to Roman hijgemony in the Middle East. The Paththeians ruled from the 3rd century before Christ to the 3rd century AD, generally from Syria and Iraq to the center of Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Armenia and Turk Manistan. There are great and curious similarities between the ancient Paththean kingdom and present-day Iran. Because instead of trying to dominate from the Bosphorus to the Indis River like the Acummenid Persia, the Paththean Empire had a more realistic vision similar to 21st century Iran focusing on the Middle East towards the Mediterranean Sea and also in direct and indirect disputes over what is now Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Kuwait with the great power of the time, the Roman Empire. conflicts that are very reminiscent of the current disputes between Iran and the United States. As if the world had changed a lot just to stay the same. Starting from the 1500s, the region would be dominated by the Safavid dynasty, a dynasty of mixed cultural and geographical origins, Turks, Azeris, Georgians, and Persians that at its height stretched from Anatolia and Mesopotamian Syria to central Afghanistan and Pakistan. In order to build a stable state on the Persianspeaking Iranian plateau, these new rulers adopted Shia Islam as the state religion. The Persians may have been a great state and nation since antiquity, but it was with the Safavidids with their introduction of Shyism to the Iranian plateau that Iran would finally be re-equipped for the modern era. Compared to the upheavalss and revolutions in the Arab world during the early and middle phases of the cold war, the Iranian revolution of 1978 and 1979 was remarkable for its vitality and relative modernity. The revolutionary order of Thran established a governmental structure developed as a diffusion of centers of power and was never a one-man autocracy like the one Saddam Hussein commanded in his neighboring country, Iraq. The originality of the Iranian revolution lies in the alliance between the clergy and let's say the Islamic intelligencia. The Shiite clergy is unquestionably more tolerant and open to the non-Islamic corpus than the other Arab Sunni countries. In Iran, the Shiite imagination is more easily adaptable to the idea of revolution because of its modernist and advanced orientation. This is due to the western influence the country experienced at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, allowing its religious leaders to base their moral superiority on a historical understanding. In contrast, the Sunni Arab world lacked this exposure to Western political philosophy. Iran maintained a strong organized state with a presidential system and universal suffrage. The clerical regime in Iran became stronger by joining with the Iranian state, becoming effective in pursuing its interests throughout the Middle East. Because of their modernist orientation, they had a great capacity for pragmatism in their foreign relations. Iran's geopolitical destiny lies in what would be the greater Middle East and by extension Eurasia, which will be critically affected by Iran's own political evolution, for better or for worse. Iran's geography, as we have observed, is as vital to Central Asia as it is to Mesopotamia and the Middle East. However, the disintegration of the Soviet Union brought limited gains to Iran when considering the entire history of greater Persia in this region. The suffix dan itself used for the countries of Central Asia means place in Persian. The conduits for Islamization and civilization in Central Asia were the Persian language and culture. However, after 1991, Shiite Azarbaijan in the northwest adopted the Latin alphabet and moved closer to Turkey. As for the republics northeast of Iran, like Sunni Usuzbekistan, for example, they leaned more towards a nationalist base rather than an Islamic one, fearing that their own native radicals might reject closer ties with Iran. Sunni Tajikistan, although Persian speaking, draws closer to Iran, but Iran is limited by the fear of making an enemy out of many Turkspeaking Muslims in other parts of Central Asia. Furthermore, with their nomadic and semi-nomomeatic influences, Central Asians were rarely devout Muslims, and seven decades of communism only strengthened their secular tendencies, making them avoid adopting a more radical or conservative version of Islam and as a result distancing them from Iran. In recent years, Iran has developed infrastructure projects in Central Asian countries which include the construction of hydroelectric plants, roads, and railways. The country also has advanced nuclear technology and is rich in natural gas and oil, which makes it an important export route for these resources to other regions of the world. In addition, Iran has established alliances with countries like Kazakhstan and Tokenistan, which enables the sharing of natural resources and the construction of oil and gas pipelines. However, despite being an influential country in some parts of the Arab world, Iran still faces obstacles in expanding its influence in Central Asia. Part of this is due to the fact that many countries of the former Soviet Union maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, which limits Iran's actions. Another factor that limits Iran's influence is its clerical leadership, which suppresses any kind of democratic opposition and puts pressure on the country's cultural diversity. In other words, the same political leaders who are responsible for the country's cohesion, making Iran a powerful, stable, and influential nation are also responsible for the difficulties in winning the hearts and minds of people in other Central Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Due to this same restrictive political and religious leadership, in a way, Iran's Shia regime was able to inspire for some time oppressed Sunni groups throughout the Middle East to rise up against their own governments, some of which even ended up falling. Through its highly efficient intelligence service, Iran has long managed a post-modern empire of substate entities, including Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and insurgent movements in northern Iraq, where it waged an indirect war against the United States. Geography determines that Iran will be crucial for trends in the greater Middle East and Eurasia, but it cannot dictate for what purpose it will be crucial. After all, that depends on the decisions of its leaders and the leaders of other countries with interests in the region. Currently, Iran has built a powerful and unusual empire without colonies and without tanks, armor, or aircraft carriers, but developing one of the most efficient indirect war machines in the world. Instead of classic imperialism through invasion and occupation, Iran is a power within the Middle East through a three-pronged strategy of war, proxy warfare, asymmetric weapons, and propaganda. In particular, legions of young and frustrated men. Hezbollah, a powerful political actor in Lebanon, is controlled by Tehran and is the de facto state in the region with more military and organizational power and more community commitment than the official authorities themselves in Beirut. In the Gaza Strip, Iran's financial and military aid has seduced poor Palestinians who were alienated and far from the influence of other Sunni Arab states. In the region, in Syria and Iraq, there are governments friendly to Thran, with the latter being a strong political ally intertwined with Iranian intelligence services. Finally, in the Persian Gulf, Iran is the only major power with its long and fragmented coastline in opposition to small and relatively weak Arab principalities, each of which Iran can militarily defeat alone or undermine through local Shia populations, especially in Bahrain, or economically damage the global economy through a possible blockade of the Strait of Hormus. At the beginning of the 2020s with the war in Ukraine, the Iranians have actively supported Russia because they see the conflict as a way to militarily weaken NATO while also testing their military technology. On the other hand, through China, they have tried to reduce their tensions with Saudi Arabia, which could drastically change the dynamics of the entire Middle East and even isolate Israel in the future. However, for that future, Iran's situation is also complicated due to its dependence on external food supplies, inflation, deglobalization, and future shortages. Food shortages could put enormous pressure on the country's elites, especially the Ayatollas. And this, combined with its demographic stagnation, could push the cost of living in the country to increasingly higher and perhaps unsustainable levels in the future. These are enormous challenges that could put the very existence of the country in doubt, especially because the fact that Iran is at the center of the Eurasian heartland machine will only increase the pressure on the Iranians and never decrease it. Thank you all. I hope you enjoyed it and don't forget to help the channel by sharing this video with everyone you know. And if you can help even more, consider becoming a member to get early access to videos and other exclusive content where I'm gradually releasing courses for members. There are also exclusive live streams with me. But if you can't, that's okay. Just share and it will already help a lot. Hugs and see you in the next video. [Music]