THE IRANIAN PIVOT - The Revenge of Geography - page 195

is that whereas Iran's influence to the west in nearby Turkey and the Arab world is well
established, its influence to the north and east is equally profound; and if the future brings
less repressive regimes both in Iran and in the southern, Islamic tier of the former Soviet
Union, Iran's influence could deepen still with more cultural and political interactions.
Moreover, Iran, as we know from the headlines, has had, at least through 2011, an en-
viable political position by the Mediterranean: in Hamas-controlled Gaza, Hezbollah-con-
trolled southern Lebanon, and Alawite Syria. Yet one interpretation of history and geo-
graphy suggests an Iranian breakout in all directions. In the palace of the sixth-century Sas-
sanian Persian emperors at Ctesiphon, south of modern-day Baghdad, there were empty
seats beneath the royal throne for the emperors of Rome and China, and for the leader of
the Central Asian nomads, in case those rulers came as supplicants to the court of the king
of kings. 12 The pretensions of Iranian rulers have not lessened with modernity; in this way
the clerics are much like the late shah. That is ultimately why Moscow must tread carefully
regarding its relations with Iran. A century ago Russia had a zone of influence in northern
Iran. Though Russia is comparatively weaker now, proximity and contiguity do matter.
Iran, furthermore, is not some twentieth-century contrivance of family and religious
ideology like Saudi Arabia, bracketed as it is by arbitrary borders. Iran corresponds almost
completely with the Iranian plateau—“the Castile of the Near East,” in Princeton historian
Peter Brown's phrase—even as the dynamism of its civilization reaches far beyond it. Iran
was the ancient world's first superpower. The Persian Empire, even as it besieged Greece,
“uncoiled, like a dragon's tail … as far as the Oxus, Afghanistan and the Indus valley,”
writes Brown. 13 W. Barthold, the great Russian geographer of the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, concurs, situating Greater Iran between the Euphrates and the Indus, and identifying
the Kurds and Afghans as essentially Iranian peoples. 14
Of the ancient peoples of the Near East, only the Hebrews and the Iranians “have texts
and cultural traditions that have survived to modern times,” writes the linguist Nicholas
Ostler. 15 Persian (Farsi) was not replaced by Arabic, like so many other tongues, and is in
the same form today as it was in the eleventh century, even as it has adopted the Arabic
script. Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than
most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopot-
amia and Palestine. There is nothing artificial about Iran, in other words: the very compet-
ing power centers within its clerical regime indicate a greater level of institutionalization
than almost anywhere in the region save for Israel and Turkey. Just as the Middle East is the
quadrilateral for Afro-Eurasia, that is, for the World-Island, Iran is the Middle East's very
own universal joint. Mackinder's pivot, rather than in the Central Asian steppe-land, should
be moved to the Iranian plateau just to the south. It is no surprise that Iran is increasingly
being wooed by both India and China, whose navies may at some point in the twenty-first
century share dominance with that of the United States in the Eurasian sea lanes. Though