Chapter One: Persian Empire?

Abstract

At the current volatile geopolitics of the region, the ruling regime in Iran has survived against all odds—under severe pressure, both internal and external to its borders. The politics of crisis management is definitive to this state. A postnational account of the nation, as I propose to do, does not abandon the national frame of reference, or its entanglement with the state that claims it, but embraces the nation within a larger transnational frame of reference that contrapuntally makes the national scene more meaningful. In this chapter, I begin with a panoramic view of the region at large, where the role of Iran has become consistently more dominant, to the point that some observers in the Arab and the larger Muslim world are speaking of a resurrection of “the Persian Empire.” This is a false analogy, I will argue, and a red herring. There is only one flagellant empire in our world, the US Empire, and it is not particularly a potent or competent empire. Instead of fishing for flawed metaphors, we need to reconfigure the geopolitics of the region, in which the ruling regime in Iran has amassed considerable soft power, waging a successful asymmetrical warfare to protect its domestic and regional interests. What we see as a result is not an “empire” but a new geostrategic reality in which Iran is dominantly mapped out not by virtue of any inherent hard power or a particularly powerful political leadership but mostly by virtue of the follies of the USA and its European and regional allies and their misbegotten imperial vagaries. Beginning with the geopolitics of the region will enable us to frame the Iranian national scene in a far better frame of reference.