US-Russia confrontation may be inevitable in 2018

One month into 2018, despite the appearance of calm and an apparently more resounding global economic recovery, the most dangerous international dispute - that between the United States and Russia - is ripe for major escalation.

The specific and immediate reasons for this are variegated, but the overarching cause of a confrontation that neither Washington nor Moscow wants is beyond their control - an ideological East-West conflict that is no closer to resolution today than it was in 2014, when the impasse began with the Ukrainian Maidan revolution, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and the subsequent outbreak of civil war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and the pro-Western Kiev government.

The maverick US presidency of Donald Trump, far from reducing tensions with Russia as both sides had hoped, has actually introduced what may well be the spark that lights up the powder keg: an aggressive American leader keen to demonstrate his credentials as defender of the free world and the increasingly shaky US-led global order in the face of accusations of being soft on Russia and overly cozy with the Kremlin of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Indeed, the most worrying aspect of potential US-Russia conflict in 2018 is that domestic political restraints against it are steadily eroding in both countries; not only is the nationalist base of Putin's United Russia party set to capitalize on the atmosphere of deteriorating relations with America in the upcoming presidential elections, but the slow but steady resurgence of Russia's communist and far-left socialist parties - a development which has almost completely eluded Western observation - is poised to add a further element of general anti-Western sentiment to the Russian sociopolitical environment. If anything, the option Russians will likely exercise in 2018 may not be between pro-Western and anti-Western worldviews - but between anti-Western and even more anti-Western ones.

Meanwhile, the climate in America is becoming little short of outright Russophobic: a fact exacerbated by the stunning reversal of Democrat with Republican parties in the national outlook on Russia. Largely because of Russiagate and the ongoing special counsel investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with the Kremlin during the 2016 election and his subsequent alleged obstruction of the counterespionage investigations that threatened to ensnare his aides, even traditionally dovish Democrats have effectively conspired to create and escalate what could be dubbed as a kind of hysteria with respect to any and all American links (both public and private) with Russia. In a time of escalating actual tensions with Moscow, this could hardly be more inopportune and possibly even dangerous: it virtually ensures that the most powerful elements of both parties - especially in the globalist-leaning Senate, whose interventionist members disproportionately set the tone for US foreign policy - will be in a race to the bottom in terms of the depth and breadth of measures to take to contain and roll back perceived malign machinations worldwide by Putin and the Kremlin.

And this brings us to the most troubling and salient feature of US-Russia relations of all: the very real retreat of American influence across the board in the Eurasian supercontinent in the face of an increasingly powerful Russo-Chinese challenge to its supremacy in all facets of national and international strength.

As it becomes clearer that the North Korean nuclear crisis simply cannot be resolved on terms even remotely palatable to it, Washington will instinctively seek to impose costs on China but even more so Russia for the pair's real and perceived collusion in engineering such a dramatic reversal of US fortunes in East Asia through their rogue client. The problem is, at this late stage in the game, there is little chance of American escalation in the region not provoking an instant, more powerful counterescalation by the Eurasian heavyweights: they are able and willing to not only match but considerably exceed the military, diplomatic, and economic muscle the US will find itself capable of bringing to bear. Just as South Korea has already buckled to North Korea's escalation dominance on the Korean peninsula by reopening peace talks with the regime of Kim Jong-Un largely on the latter's terms, so will all regional US allies - South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines - fold quickly before Chinese pressure (especially if backed up by Russia) at the prospect of a new arms race in the Western Pacific that could quickly exacerbate the security of all parties involved, but leave America's friends on the maritime periphery of the Asian landmass particularly exposed and vulnerable.

Unable to push back against the Sino-Russian axis in the Far East, Washington will then turn to constrain Russia in the Middle East; but here too, the hour is late and US resources increasingly ineffectual and American resolve even more questionable. With the Turkish invasion of Syrian Kurdistan being only the latest in a series of strategic setbacks for the US and its allies against the regional ambitions of Iran - coming quickly on the heels of the failure of the bid for independence by Iraqi Kurdistan, the meltdown of a Saudi-Israeli bid to whip up a war against Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fracturing of the Saudi-led Gulf coalition with the defection of Qatar to the Iranian-Turkish camp, and last but not least the steady consolidation of Iranian influence in the core of both Iraq and Syria post-ISIS - there is less and less room for maneuver that Washington can afford as it seeks to salvage its position in the region. And this is not even to include the declining US outlook in Afghanistan in the wake of its falling out with Pakistan (sending the latter even deeper into China's orbit).

A real possibility exists that, with the likely collapse of the Iran nuclear deal sometime in spring, the US and Israel will seriously consider or even threaten a massive preemptive strike on suspected illicit Iranian nuclear facilities. The problem with this is the same that plagued US and Israeli planners during the Obama years, when the accord with Tehran was being negotiated: Washington and its Arab allies are ill-positioned in the region to fight a general war across multiple fronts against the Ayatollahs and their powerful cross-border Shiite proxies. The diplomatic fallout from any such preventive war - which may well require tactical nuclear attacks to be effective - will be massive, and could well isolate America and Israel in the region and the broader Islamic world for an entire decade or generation, only hastening the ascent of China and Russia to dominance of Eurasia.

Nonetheless, it could well be that only Russian resolve to block such a cataclysmic move by the precipitously declining American empire - i.e. a preemptive nuclear assault on Iran - will ensure it doesn't happen. Even should things not come to this, Washington will inevitably realize - when push comes to shove on the Iran nuclear deal - that it has been sidelined by Moscow far faster and far more completely than it could have ever hitherto supposed in a part of the world it has treated as its prerogative sphere of influence since the 1970s.

When this happens, calls to penalize Russia - as suicidal and fantastical as they practically and realistically are - could then approach fever pitch in an increasingly panicked imperial Washington. Much as American support for the 2013-14 Ukrainian revolution against a pro-Russian leader was largely a retaliation for Putin's original sin of entering the Syrian conflict by warding off a threatened US military action against Bashar al-Assad (triggered by his crossing the Obama administration's "red line" of using chemical weapons on civilians), so will a more advanced reversal of the US position in the Middle East trigger what could quite possibly be a substantially bigger response against Russian interests that are more core to the Kremlin.

Although the possibility of a renewed large-scale conflict in eastern Ukraine cannot be ruled out - especially now that the latest US-Russian attempt to broker a UN peacekeeping mission in the Donbas has fizzled - the gravest danger is not military escalation but a broader financial and economic war.

The likelihood of such an East-West exchange of monetary hostilities has quietly but definitively shot up dramatically in the last year. The key catalyst has been the nascent ascent of a new Eurasian economic order with China at its axis and Russia its security enforcer; the combination of Beijing's vaunted "Belt and Road" initiative and Moscow's Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) since the second half of 2016 has already fundamentally sidelined the EU and even to an increasing extent the US from the major geopolitical decision-making processes of the Eurasian supercontinent. Though this is best exhibited by the virtually complete evisceration of the Western-sponsored Geneva peace process for Syria by the Russian-led trilateral deescalation track for the nearly seven-year-old Syrian conflict in conjunction with Iran and Turkey (in that order), the effects of the massive rebalancing of the global economic order are increasingly evident in various other developments.

With the rise of the Chinese yuan as a reserve currency as the dollar weakens - partly by market demand, but also partly by the Trump administration's design - the long untouchable petrodollar is in real danger of being partly supplanted by an incipient "petroyuan" in the Chinese-dominated global commodity trade. As Russia switches to yuan for hydrocarbon payments from Beijing, deteriorating US relations with the Islamic world - the loss of Pakistan and increasingly Turkey to the pro-Iranian camp having accelerated greatly just since the December decision by the US to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital - mean that a good chunk of the resource-rich, 1.4 billion-strong community of majority Muslim nations could in relatively short order add the Chinese "redback" to their list of both reserve and transaction options.

Additionally, evidence has accrued for years that Beijing intends to back the yuan with the only surefire store of value proven by history to humanity - gold - and since 2016 reports have grown of Russo-Chinese cooperation in linking their bullion commodity markets and reserve infrastructure to form the basis of a Eurasian currency system independent of the dollar. As a final critical factor in the reshuffle of economic power from West to East, China enjoys an increasingly dominant, even market-making position in the $10 trillion market for offshore dollars or "Eurodollars" - centered on the hub of London but with key spoke points in Sinosphere East Asia such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and increasingly (needless to say) Shanghai.

All this means that the close strategic partnership with China - even well short of any formal security alliance beyond the limited Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - affords Russia a great deal of autonomy and leverage in its fraught relations with the West and particularly the US; but Washington and its European partners are yet to even remotely fully realize this.

Instead, even as the central frontline state against Russian revanchism - Ukraine - turns to Kazakhstan and away from Belarus to mediate with Moscow, the Anglo-American-led Western coalition is loathe to recognize that it's approaching the brink of losing all of Turkic-speaking Central Asia, emerging as it is as the next great region of economic dynamism and development, to a collection of Islamist regimes eager to balance and play off Russian and Chinese interests against one another to maximize their decidedly un-Western (even increasingly anti-Western) developmental models and international strategic outlooks.

But it has become ever more apparent in recent years that the Anglo-Zionist postwar and especially post-Cold War order is at a stage of perhaps terminal maturity (read: decline); unwilling or simply unable to connect the dots of what can only be assessed to be a grimly receding and deteriorating overall situation, it prefers to dwell on the bits of good news in their isolation - and there's plenty of that to go around lately, what with the "Trump boom" fueled by the short-term boost of high stock prices and a tax cut for the wealthy and large corporations that promises to bring such an influx of foreign investment into the US that the trade deficits with Mexico and China will soon be a thing of the past (as if a shrinking trade surplus were intrinsically bad for China, even should it transpire, which to date it's done just the opposite). In the geopolitical realm, perhaps the most ludicrous manifestation of this wishful thinking by Washington is its renewed attempt to promote a so-called "Info-Pacific" alliance of "free democracies" with India as the key linchpin and counterweight to an assertively anti-Western China - never mind that Delhi is in cahoots with both Russia and Iran to an extent that actually concerns Beijing.

As such, one can only expect the Anglo-Zionist empire to continue to vastly overestimate its relative strength against the Russian Federation, whose own relative weaknesses and imbalances it has replayed in its own mind so instinctively and with such religious repetition that it can't rationally weigh them against its own deficiencies or Moscow's already proven resilience and toughness - while capable of doing this in strict objective terms, definitely not soberly enough to conclude that directly threatening Russia at this juncture, if even just financially and economically, could be little short of suicidal.

Ultimately, Washington and its European partners which are still liable to do its bidding - think Poland, Lithuania, and the residual security deep state of the UK - may just decide that however bad or long the odds are, not standing up to Putin in the most drastic manner could well be even more costly because no damage or pain, if even short-term, will have been inflicted on the enemy. For because the hour is so late to reverse imperial decline, the US and its remaining loyalists with much skin in the game must make the ultimate measurement of the scale: the price of guaranteed loss of something major via inaction versus the price of likely loss of something even more via action.

Given the "extend and pretend" nature of the Trump presidency in particular - just look at its approach to the immigration and border security impasse - this can mean only one thing: when the chips are down and it's time to bet the farm or just fold without bluffing, there can't be much confidence, let alone any degree of reassurance, that widening a localized crisis (i.e. Donbas) by enticing a violent Russian reaction - such that global-level sanctions (i.e. kicking Russia off SWIFT) can then be considered commensurate by parties (i.e. Brussels and Berlin) far less interested in conflict with Moscow - will not be the course of action pursued by Washington.

Which brings us to the final question mark: Trump himself. If The Donald's ultimate decision in a Russia crisis hangs on the then current state of the Russiagate investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller - assuming he still hasn't been fired or otherwise emasculated by an enraged Republican Congress - then the world may have to brace itself for the possibility that a US-Russia confrontation in 2018 is already inevitable.

The only question then is how badly it will end for the US, its allies, and for Trump personally - and how seamlessly or not so seamlessly the world will simply reset through the outcome.

With Turkish-Kurdish war, Russia has checkmated US in Syria

A long-feared war between Turkey and the Kurds has finally erupted over the past ten days in northwestern Syria, with the former having launched a combined air and ground assault across its Syrian frontier in the euphemistically dubbed "Operation Olive Branch", threatening to eventually engulf the entire northern border of Syria with Turkey in a brand-new phase of conflict in what was once a unified state under the Baathist rule of the Assad family, but which now appears on the verge of a permanent partition of some kind. Such a partition, however, is highly likely to cement Russia's dominant role in the country - at the expense, of course, of the United States.

The latest developments have transpired, it seems, as a consequence of Washington ignoring the objections of all the sovereign states involved - Turkey, Iran, Russia, and Syria itself - in announcing its intent to set up a large new Kurdish border security force in northern Syria drawn from the YPG Peshmerga militia that formed the cream of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which liberated most of the eastern bank of the Euphrates in the country from ISIS (with US air support) since 2016. Though Washington wasn't diplomatically forthright about its reasons, the universal assumption was that the Pentagon had won the argument with the State Department about the absolute necessity of keeping both US special forces and US-backed Kurdish militants in charge of an essentially independent Kurdish state as a check on Iran's designs in Syria and the Levant.

In doing so, the US killed Russia's plans to include the Kurds in peace talks with Iran and Turkey on the future of Syria which Moscow hoped would result in a kind of permanent Kurdish federation within the country similar to that of Iraqi Kurdistan - one that gave the Kurds a large degree of local autonomy in terms of law enforcement and basic security functions, but which required them to ultimately defer to Damascus for national legitimacy, recognition, and defense.

Tellingly, the unilateral US move to create the 30,000-strong Peshmerga frontier force occurred despite what must have been intensive behind-the-scenes diplomacy by the Russians to ensure that American troops would be allowed to remain in the Kurdish federation even as it was reintegrated into the Syrian state - over vehement Syrian government objections and needless to say Iranian concerns.

In the end, it seems that the relevant planners in Washington determined that they simply could not share any real estate with Assad - whom they regard as ever before as Iran's proxy on the Mediterranean whose rule must be undermined in any way possible, however long it takes.

But this calculus has now backfired on the US spectacularly - and things may only get worse for them if the Americans and their allies in Syrian Kurdistan, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), don't reverse course. Despite having retracted the proposal for the Kurdish border force, Washington can't take back what clearly remains its intent - an open-ended de facto Kurdish state under its own protection - and this fact simply isn't lost on Turkey, whose increasingly autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increasingly stunned his nominal American ally and patron with his bellicosity towards the PYD for its supposed sympathies with the anti-Turkish separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK); a hostility so deep it has led him to willingly collude not just with Russia but also (albeit in a small and mostly covert manner) Iran.

It now appears that Ankara is demanding a 20-to-30 mile-deep security buffer zone inside Syrian Kurdistan beyond its southern border across the entire length of the Syrian Kurdish federation known as Rojava - which is principally east of the upper Euphrates River as it descends towards Mesopotamia from the Anatolian highlands. This would necessarily uproot Kurdish militias and untold numbers of Kurdish civilians that don't want to live under Turkish rule and basically enshrine Turkey's role as a preemptive invader and occupier of a neighboring sovereign state - despite the fact that it will most likely utilize its Syrian Arab rebel proxies, who have mostly fought to overthrow Assad since the onset of the 2011 Syrian revolution and civil war, to put a Syrian face on its activities in a sizeable area that it has no desire to formally annex.

But because the US simply cannot accede to such an outlandish land grab even by a critical regional ally, Turkey is ratcheting up the pressure by threatening to first expel the entire Kurdish presence west of the Euphrates - that is to say, that which is a more proximate irritant to its frontier. Hence, Erdogan has moved first to liquidate the small Kurdish pocket in the extreme northwest of Syria of Afrin Canton - which has been boxed in by his forces since their late 2016 "Operation Euphrates Shield" that drove ISIS out of the section of Syrian frontier immediately west of the great river, as well as a more recent minor thrust to cut off the Afrin sector from the main Turkish-backed anti-Assad rebel enclave of Idlib province to the south.

But Afrin would appear to be just the start: Turkey now appears eager to complete the Euphrates Shield gambit altogether - by taking the city of Manbij just beyond its Syrian enclave on the western bank, the first major urban area that the US-led SDF retook from ISIS over the objections of Ankara, which viewed the predominantly Sunni Arab city as fit to be liberated only by its own proxies, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the "moderate" jihadist rebels. In recent days, Turkey has brazenly issued threats to US forces still stationed in and around Manbij in support of their Kurdish YPG allies: should Americans be caught in the crossfire, so the Turks seem to be declaring, it will be their fault for not recognizing that Kurdish militants must now be entirely confined to the east of the Euphrates.

This would appear to be Erdogan's final warning to the Trump administration that its demands for a border-long anti-Kurdish buffer must be taken seriously, or else Turkey will make US efforts to contain Iran in Syria all that much harder - the fall of Manbij would rob Washington of its only real foothold that could put pressure on Assad's "useful Syria" of the western spine, given that it's in eastern Aleppo province; the only other significant US-Kurdish presence west of the Euphrates is considerably further downstream to the east and south, around former ISIS capital Raqqa, which poses less of a direct threat to the regime core.

But even more than signaling his extreme displeasure, Erdogan is also seeking to call the US and especially the Trump administration out on what could well be Washington's last bluff in its long involvement in the Syrian war - the actual lengths to which the tottering Anglo-Zionist empire is willing to go to contain Iran. In Erdogan's view, if the US were actually serious about checking Iran, it should have no problem sacrificing the Kurds on the northern Syrian frontier on the altar of Turkish anger in order to keep a far more powerful partner - Turkey - on board against Assad.

To drive home this point, Ankara is now making no secret of its collusion with Tehran in the Afrin operation and threatened thrust at Manbij as well; in both cases, it has appeared to coordinate its air and artillery attacks with agreed-upon pullouts of token Syrian regime forces as well as Russian special ops which also happen to be present. Because of the close military operational unity of the Russian, Iranian, and Assad regime war efforts on the ground - even despite Moscow's divergent diplomatic push to resolve the conflict compared to the latter two - this is a clear signal to Washington that Turkey now actually holds the biggest trump cards (no pun intended) to scuttle its seemingly desperate bid to keep Iran from doing most whatever it pleases in Syria.

But it's quite easy to see who the real winner is: Putin's Russia. As events continue to unfold, few Syrian Kurds will not help noticing that America's promises of protection to them post-ISIS are turning out to be largely hollow; automatically, this forces them to reconsider their options of a deeper partnership with the Russians instead.

Because the US has so little leverage to rein in its unruly Turkish ally - alienating it from NATO would be a massive self-goal to Russia - it's highly unlikely that Ankara can be sufficiently appeased in any way that does not leave the Syrian Kurds' hard-won Rojava federation effectively at its mercy. Should the Kurds be disarmed, they will be defenseless against chronic harassment on the frontier by Erdogan's forces; should they remain armed, Erdogan almost certainly requires in exchange that his own troops - or at least his Syrian Arab rebel proxies aided by Turkish special forces and air power - be allowed to utilize and traverse the Kurdish territory freely in order to bolster the anti-Assad (i.e. anti-Iranian) front along the Euphrates further south and east within Syria (most of which is Sunni Arab tribal territory that should have been retaken from ISIS by Turkish-backed Sunni Arab rebels, not Kurds, in the first place). In coming days, if the Turks compel a US withdrawal from Manbij, not only would it mean that their demands haven't been met in a last-minute deal, but it would also give them the green light to force the US out of sections of the main Rojava boundary with Turkey as well.

That would leave the Kurds nowhere to go but the Kremlin to enlist a counterweight against Erdogan's neo-Ottoman expansionism - for obvious reasons, they are too fearful of returning outright into Assad's fold. But all Putin can do is rehash what he's pretty much been telling them all along: make your peace with Assad as soon as possible, to secure the best possible terms to return final rule over your federation to Damascus - because hell will have to freeze over before the Americans are willing to fight to save you from both Assad and Erdogan. The two may utterly despise each other, but when they collude against an even more hated common threat - Anglo-Zionism and its local proxies - they'll quickly forget the bad blood as they work in hammer-and-anvil fashion against the hapless victim sandwiched between them.

Alas, the Syrian Kurds - like their Iraqi brethren last October - are now finding out the hard way that Washington has been talking a much bigger game than it's actually willing or even capable of playing, and that Moscow is the new power broker to truly reckon with in the region. With the new Turkish-Kurdish war, Russia has checkmated the US in Syria - and the ramifications will be felt far beyond it and for quite some time.

Origins of Iran's Crisis, Part 3 (2009-present)

In the aftermath of the ill-fated "Green" uprising of 2009, which was put down at the cost of many hundreds killed and untold thousands beaten, tortured, or imprisoned, Iran's long-simmering sociopolitical polarization steadily deepened despite the apparent success of the regime in fending off the most severe challenge to its rule since the Iran-Iraq War.

The protests had exposed the discontent of post-revolutionary young Iranians aged 30 or below who had no memory of any other system but an arch-conservative Islamic republic: as a whole, they were anything but liberal by Western standards, and were in fact often patriotic to the point of being nationalistic, yet they felt that Islam had been the exclusive political ideology for too long, and had become a suffocating influence on the nation's public space. The time had come for the aging Ayatollahs to relinquish at least some of their prerogatives in setting the boundaries of acceptable discourse and behavior among the country's leaders and elites.

Pitted against them, however, a new generation of mid- to senior-level hardliner leadership was also emerging. Mostly military and security officials and IRGC commanders in their forties and fifties, they had come of age in the baptism of fire that was the 1980s conflict with Iraq, subsequently ascended the ranks as the regime further consolidated its rule in the nineties, and spearheaded efforts to upgrade and modernize Tehran's domestic security apparatus and foreign defense capabilities as the 2000s brought unprecedented new pressures of a rapidly evolving society at home and the massive presence of high-tech US-led forces fighting the post-9/11 "War on Terrorism" throughout the region.

Having risen to and remained in power since the early 2000s largely through deftly playing off the hardliners' fidelity to the Islamic revolution against the more unpredictable undercurrent of post-revolutionary neo-Persian populism, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was fundamentally weakened by the Green Movement and its aftermath, even though this was not readily apparent for some time: he lost the support of much of the secular, moderately nationalist, urban under-40 population that had propelled his political fortunes earlier, and was now vulnerable to over-dependence on the more rural, religiously conservative, and typically older electorate that did not share his own ideological hybridity. Thus, long before being replaced by the reformist Hassan Rouhani in 2013, he was losing his grip on the country, and more significantly was already being sidelined by more pure and rigid hardline figures, especially those in the IRGC.

Ironically, the fact that the population was now more politically conscious than ever, even after the failure of the Green uprising, meant that foreign adventurism was the best way for Tehran to keep itself on top of things: thus, in the aftermath of the Arab spring's initial promise of ushering in Western-style democracy to the region in early 2011, Iran would fervently throw its weight behind long-suppressed mass Islamist movements in the Middle East, notably the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt - with whom it had collaborated for decades - but opportunistically any other organization it found was open to partnering with it as well (after all, the Muslim Brotherhood had long been a template and guide for all such Islamic dissident groups in the Arab world).

This quickly upset the brief calm that had settled in Iran's relations with its US-allied Sunni Arab neighbors on the other side of the Gulf since post-Saddam Iraq had finally stabilized: led by Saudi Arabia, they began a systematic effort to push back against Persian Tehran's perceived meddling in what they viewed as internal Arab affairs; as Iran pushed back in turn, by late 2011 and early 2012 the renewed rivalry had become a bona fide regional proxy war.

The hardliners in Tehran now had the decisive upper hand in foreign policy, yet the regime had no choice but to continue loosening social and economic controls domestically to the extent that it could, in order to appease a populace still smarting from the 2009 riots. It succeeded so well in this essentially bipolar approach to foreign and domestic affairs that Iran's foes - especially Israel and Saudi Arabia - were apoplectic that US president Barack Obama would not adopt a more aggressive stance against the Islamic republic's increasingly brazen gambits to reshape the regional order.

Thus, in 2011 the twin issues that would define Iran's relations with the world throughout the 2010s - its nuclear weapons program and support for the embattled Shiite-Alawite minority regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria - came to the fore: Tehran's hardliners viewed both as their due from a hand-tied President Ahmadinejad, who could not bring to heel the secular and even overtly progressive forces they viewed as poisoning the atmosphere in domestic society; Ahmadinejad for his part renewed his own ploy of channeling Persian nationalist-populism into universal Islamist-populist militancy, but both secular nationalists and reactionary Islamists were now far harder to manipulate than before.

The pursuit of an atomic device - dating as far back as the late Iran-Iraq War - was now approaching its final stages before producing a testable weapon. Increasingly alarmed, Iran's neighbors as well as the international community tried to dissuade Tehran from following through, but domestic hardliners would have none of it. President Obama determined that only a united effort to sanction the regime would impose a concrete cost on the nuclear program that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei himself would have to choose whether or not to incur. Khamenei was no fool, obviously: he knew that neither Ahmadinejad's populism nor the hardliners' fanaticism could change the fact that Iranian society was now dominated by the socially and culturally looser and freer post-revolutionary generations, whose desire for full reintegration with the global economy was only bound to grow.

But Khamenei, who without doubt has always viewed younger Iranians' warmer pro-Western sentiments as too feeble to constitute any sustained political influence, bided his time. Once sanctions were slapped on the Islamic republic in 2011-12, freezing tens of billions of Iran's foreign assets as well as drying up foreign trade and oil export revenues, he did not fold to the international pressure as Obama hoped, but instead allowed the hardliners to build up their strength - partly by increasing their role in the critical sectors of the economy in a time of commercial warfare - before any eventual concessions to the reformists. Doing this also tightened his leash on Ahmadinejad until a new presidential election in 2013, as the latter became even more dependent on religious conservatives for support.

Thus, by the time the moderate Rouhani replaced Ahmadinejad as president in 2013, the hardliners were in an ironclad position both domestically and regionally; and they have not looked back since.

As of 2013, both US and Israeli intelligence were certain that Iran had reached a mature stage in its uranium enrichment processes to be on the virtual brink of a nuclear bomb; only massive airstrikes against known and suspected nuclear facilities throughout the expanse of Iranian territory could now deny Tehran entry into the nuclear club, but the prospect was growing that this would trigger a regional war which would tilt the Middle East more in favor of the emerging "Shiite Crescent."

Iraq and Syria had changed everything. In no small part due to Iranian pressure, Iraq had refused to conclude a permanent troop hosting agreement with the US upon Washington's withdrawal of its 2003 invasion force in December 2011; this gave Tehran unimpeded westward access across its democratic Shiite-majority neighbor to supply its partners on the Mediterranean, Assad's Syria and the adjacent Lebanese Hezbollah.

Prior to the Arab spring, Israel had been in negotiations to return its Golan Heights frontier to Assad in exchange for the complete eviction of both Hezbollah fighters and Iranian military advisers from the IRGC foreign legion, or Quds Force, from Syria. Now, however, Assad had become heavily dependent on these old Shiite allies of his father for his very survival, not for some war of liberation of Palestine against the Zionist entity. By early 2012, he had already lost so much territory to the Syrian rebels and, more significantly, so much of his own manpower via defections from his army to the insurgency, that he was compelled to turn to Hezbollah and Iran for assistance.

Initially, this took the form of limited battlefield reinforcement by the former and stepped up arms deliveries and military advice and supervision by the IRGC, which, drawing from Tehran's extensive firsthand experience fighting and organizing unconventional and hybrid warfare since the 1980s, stabilized Assad's lines and even began rolling back the rebels. In response, though, the rebels themselves were increasingly radicalized, as the secular nationalist opposition forces such as Free Syrian Army - upon whom the Obama administration and its European allies had pinned their hopes for a new democratic Syria after Assad - were steadily overshadowed by Sunni jihadist groups of varying degrees of extremism, which ultimately came to be dominated by authentic Salafist outfits such as Al Nusra Front, which became Al Qaeda's Syrian branch.

By the end of 2012, then, the Syrian civil war had become nothing short of a sectarian proxy war between Iran and its two main Sunni regional rivals, Turkey (which supplied many of the advanced rebel and jihadist arms) and Saudi Arabia (which with its fellow Sunni Gulf monarchies largely funded the jihadist insurgency against Assad). As Al Nusra and its affiliates consolidated control over entire sectors of the country's Sunni Arab-dominated north and northwest - not coincidentally along the "Hezbollah model" of its sectarian archrival - and once more threatened to overwhelm Assad's loyalist forces, in early 2013 the conflict truly reached a point of no return as Hezbollah committed fresh battalions from Lebanon into the Syrian fight, just as Iran dramatically increased the number of its advisers in Damascus to organize brand-new local Shiite militias to bolster the regime's front lines.

Iraq now came to prominence as Iran's key direct link to Syria: its democratically elected government, led by the US-installed Nouri al-Maliki, was dominated by the latter's Islamic Dawa Party, which traced many of its roots to Iraqi Shiites' exile in Iran in the early 1980s. To the dismay of Washington and its allies, Baghdad not only refused to support the proxy war effort to topple Assad, but at least tacitly assisted Tehran's own efforts to arm and supply its allies Assad and Hezbollah. The famous Baghdad-Damascus highway - frequented but less than a decade earlier by Sunni extremists and terrorists who traveled eastward from Syria into Iraq to attack the US-led coalition and US-supported Shiite government - was now a convenient artery in reverse for Iranian materiel and advisers to reinforce Hezbollah and newer Shiite militant groups in Syria against the US-backed rebellion.

It was in this context of a still faint but indeed looming specter of Iranian ascendancy across the heart of the Middle East - the historic Fertile Crescent - that the Western powers, led by a circumspect Obama administration, had to open negotiations on Tehran's nuclear program with the new Rouhani government in summer 2013; the Ayatollahs, who without doubt kept a tight lid on the concessions that Rouhani's diplomats could even offer, let alone make, had every advantage because of their improving regional position - and no amount of smokescreen put up by Obama's own and other Western participants in the talks could really hide this over the course of the two years until the nuclear deal was finally reached in 2015.

In the meantime, Iran did have to deal with the consequences of its blatantly sectarian and indeed hypocritical support for Assad, who, on top of being a secular Baathist butcher of political Islamists (Sunni, but Islamist nonetheless) in the stripe of his father and his father's archnemesis Saddam Hussein, was also - as an Alawite - considered an infidel by the strict Twelver Shiism of Iran and Iraq. When the Syrian despot crossed Obama's infamous "red line" on the use of chemical weapons on civilians in August 2013, although post-Benghazi fears of the unknown consequences of regime change in an Arab dictatorship plus worries that the nuclear negotiations with Iran could be scuttled were enough to dissuade Washington from immediate retaliation, Tehran was suddenly in a bind nonetheless: its critical ally came under intensive diplomatic pressure, crimping its own maneuvering room in the nuclear talks. Of course, Russia bailed everyone out, as Vladimir Putin got the UN to pass a resolution eliminating Syria's declared chemical stockpile, thereby warding off sharper Western sanctions or actual airstrikes; but Moscow's dramatic reentrance into the region would be a double-edged sword for Iran's hardliners, because it meant that their leverage with the West on either Syria or the nuclear program now ran through the Kremlin, which as yet was still a ways off from seeing eye to eye with them (and has ever remained so, to at least some degree).

A far bigger challenge came in early to mid-2014, as the virulent splinter group from Syria's Al Nusra, the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS), suddenly and drastically seized control of nearly the entire Syrian desert hinterland and in short order poured across the border into Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, where its stunning June 2014 capture of the northern city of Mosul heralded the establishment of a serious Sunni caliphate to deny both Western and Shiite control of upper Arabia. Iran was seen as the big loser from the rise of ISIS - its direct land route to Syria was now cut - and it has since been confirmed that powerful Sunni fundamentalist elements in Saudi Arabia's Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were largely behind the rise of ISIS to create a necessary counterweight to the Shiite stranglehold on Iraq and the Mediterranean Levant, even at the price of terrible publicity in the wider world.

The rest, of course, is history. With the rise of ISIS, the sectarian character of the worsening conflict in the Middle East was now undeniable; it had become clear that the unleashing of Western-inspired democratic forces in the region since the Arab spring had not produced Western-style liberal democracy in place of originally Western-influenced secular nationalist regimes that had decayed into corrupt neo-patriarchal police states. Rather, the lid had been blown on generational, perhaps even epochal, ethnic and religious identitarian pressures and fissures deep within Arab-Islamic Middle Eastern societies, some of which now appeared as though they'd simply been patched together into merely nominal states by their European colonial administrators nearly a century earlier - which had in turn been a rework of the polyglot federation of the defunct Ottoman Turkish empire.

But Iran - being a maturing Islamic republic and demonstrably quite stable by the region's standards - was now the key to the region's future and to the Muslim faith more broadly. Even with Russia's entry into the Syrian conflict in 2015, the subsequent reassertion of US military might in Iraq to defeat ISIS, the power scramble against ISIS by the Kurds both in Iraq and Syria, and last but not least the belated emergence of Turkey as an autonomous regional actor shifting between NATO and the Russo-Iranian camp, Tehran is the pivot upon which southwestern - and eventually probably even southern - Eurasia will turn.

As the Ayatollahs and their jihadist shock troops of the IRGC see it, the generational warfare that their form of Islam is waging is truly multifaceted and truly long-term; they see clearly that the West and its proxies - and even the Russians, to be honest - do not apprehend the deep nexus between Islamic revelation, ideology, and political thought which forms the solid foundation of all aspects of social, cultural, political, economic, and of course military and security activity within the ever expanding Iranian-Shiite sphere of influence in the heart of the 1.6 billion-strong Islamic world that is the Middle East. In the grand scheme of things, they care little for the costs of their peculiar type of quasi-imperialist (some would qualify as neo-Persian imperialist) expansionism, for whether measured in finances or in human lives, these are considered negligible in view of the ultimate prize - which is nothing less than perpetual peace and justice established worldwide in accord with the Heavenly ordinances and strictures revealed by the Prophet himself.

Until the Judeo-Christian West first summons up and then translates into concrete, coordinated action a vision of universal human destiny that exceeds and surpasses that of the Ayatollahs in both the realm of collective thought and that of collective deed, Iran's march will continue unabated.

Origins of Iran's Crisis, Part Two (1991-2009)

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are seen as the watershed in the history of the post-Cold War era, and especially in that of the Middle East. Because they culminated in the October 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan and the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq, they marked the beginning of a dramatic American attempt to democratize, even to some degree Westernize, both flanks of the Islamic Republic of Iran - hardly a coincidence, given that Tehran was viewed as the heart and locus of the global radical Islamic terrorist movement.

Iran had remained largely diplomatically isolated throughout the post-Cold War decade of 1991-2001, yet even it had been caught up in the global tide of commercialization and secularization of mass culture to some extent: it had gradually reestablished partial relations with Europe, despite a continued deep freeze of links with the US. By the late nineties, the first wave of post-revolutionary liberalization had taken hold, as the openly reformist scholar Muhammad Khatami was elected president in 1997, launching a series of economic and cultural initiatives that opened Iranian society to the extent that was permissible under the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs who continued to ultimately rule the country, led by Khomeini's successor to this day, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Despite this new air of moderation and partial thaw with the West, the Islamic Republic remained militantly theocratic in its identity and defiantly posed itself as one of the few true holdouts of resistance against the US-led and US-dominated post-Cold War "New World Order", as it had been coined by President George H. W. Bush. The best expression it found for this reactionary posture was in opposing widely perceived Israeli imperialist aggression in the Levant: not only did Tehran provide material and financial support to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but more fervently it supported its Shiite coreligionists in Lebanon, where it would score its first victory abroad against the Zionist entity when its IRGC proxy, Hezbollah, effectively pressured occupying Israeli forces to withdraw from the south of the country in 2000.

Despite the widespread perception of it as a terror-sponsoring rogue state, Iran always viewed its support of perceived terrorist activity as measured and legitimate: Western or Israeli civilians were targeted only in retaliation for what were thought to be unjust crimes committed against Palestinian or Muslim civilians, as in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, which was undertaken as vengeance for the allegedly accidental downing of an Iranian jetliner by the US Navy the previous year; on the other hand, US or Israeli military personnel in the region - be it the Marines in the deadly 1983 barracks suicide bombing in Lebanon or the 1996 Khobar Towers attack that blasted another American barracks in Saudi Arabia - were always considered fair game if the opportunity presented itself. After all, even after the Iran-Iraq War, well into the nineties, the US and Iran would stare down at each other tensely and occasionally lightly skirmish in the Persian Gulf, though it never again rose to the level of actual intensive firefights that cost Tehran both naval vessels and oil installations during the "tanker war" with Iraq and its Western backers in the mid-to-late 1980s.

This meant that, for practical purposes, Iran was still the primary sworn adversary of the US and Israel even as the 9/11 attacks confirmed that Sunni extremists drawn primarily from disgruntled Arab populations of US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not Shiite militants like Hezbollah, were the immediate actual threat to both American and Western civilian safety. Iran's own links with such groups as Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, while always extant, rarely appeared to approach the level of operational collusion; but there was little doubt that Tehran shared the opposition to the US military presence in the region that animated such dissidents from Washington's Arab world allies, and more generally that Iran would always be something of a godfather state for all aspiring Islamist and jihadist groups whether Sunni or Shiite that wanted the US out - or at least its puppet regimes punished for treason to their faith.

And so, in the aftermath to 9/11, after a lightning US air campaign purged the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, the neoconservative hawk faction that had risen to ascendancy in the young George W. Bush administration saw fit to set in motion their real project: remaking the entire Middle East according to the free-market, liberal democratic model by sheer force of American high-tech arms, with one of the key ancillary objectives being the complete military encirclement of Iran.

This meant first and foremost toppling Saddam Hussein's withering Baath regime in Iraq, implanting a permanent US troop presence there to establish a dependable pro-American ally, and thereafter exerting such multifaceted diplomatic, economic, and military pressure on the neighboring regime in Tehran that the latter - now facing a US military with bases to its west (Iraq), east (Afghanistan), north (ex-Soviet Central Asia), and south (Sunni Gulf US allies) - would inevitably fold to American hegemony.

Of course, history had other ideas. While Saddam was easily toppled in the spring 2003 US invasion, the Bush administration was ill-prepared for the long-term pacification of the post-Baathist country: a Sunni Arab insurgency which erupted that summer would essentially consume the remainder of his two-term presidency (2001-09); in the lowest points, the US and its allies lost complete control of entire swathes of the Sunni Arab hinterland - the power base of the previous minority regime - to radical Sunni jihadists, including Al Qaeda with its infamously bloodthirsty Iraqi head, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But the true significance of the US invasion was that, far from weakening Iran, it wound up substantially improving the regional position of the Shiite theocracy by effectively giving a liberal democratic boost to political Islam of the Shiite Ayatollahs' variety: in the security and political vacuum that emerged in post-2003 Iraq, Iran-linked Shiite clerics and political parties emerged as the new power brokers not only in Shiite-majority southern Iraq, but nationally. This was only natural: Shiite Arabs were nearly two-thirds of Iraq's population, and the US occupation was so thinly manned on the ground that Shiite militias - some aided or even sponsored by Iranian regime intelligence and paramilitary like the IRGC - practically controlled large swathes of the country's center and south that were more or less at peace with the post-invasion order, even if no longer welcoming of the US military presence (and by 2004 had even begun armed clashes with it).

As such, the US had little means to prevent the new freely elected Iraqi government from becoming in effect a Shiite majoritarian one; when time came to hand power over from its occupying multinational coalition's provisional government to native Iraqis, Washington's attempts to steer the new Iraqi constitution along the path of a regional caucus system - thereby preventing Shiites from dominating nationally through their numbers - were met with large protests that crucially received the blessing of the powerful Ayatollah of the holy shrine city of Najaf, Ali Sistani: any system that diminished the Shiite bloc's strength was unacceptable, given such recent history of US betrayal of them and even the ongoing US failure to sufficiently secure Shiite civilians from Sunni jihadist terrorist attacks.

The Bush administration had, in any case, badly overestimated the domestic Iraqi traction that its own preferred prospective leaders - secular, technocratic Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds - would have once Saddam Hussein was gone and the country could start over. And so, the great irony is that by empowering Iraqi Shiites with the simple majority ballot box, the US gave a democratic stamp of approval to what was essentially a theocratic mode of governance emanating from Iran - in effect, the precise opposite of the Iran policy it had intended by going into Iraq.

A decade and a half after the US invasion, there can be little doubt that the emergence of a powerful Shiite-led order in Baghdad has been the greatest boon to Iran in modern times - not merely in the post-1979 revolution period. At just the moment when religious conservatism seemed like an increasingly difficult relic to preserve within Iran itself, suddenly the historic spiritual heartland of Shiism - southern-central Iraq - was opened to free two-way exchange with the leading Shiite country. Even as the forces of secularism and even Westernization seemed to continue their advance in Tehran and other relatively cosmopolitan Iranian cities, such key Iraqi cities as Baghdad, Basra, and Nasiriyah experienced quasi-revivals of Shiite worship and culture that reverberated east across the Iranian frontier - a process that was also greatly facilitated by the reopening of pilgrimages to important Iraqi shrines like Najaf, Karbala, and Samarra.

Tellingly, that all this took place under the nose of a great Western-sanctioned democratic experiment and the watchful gaze of occupying US forces only served to bolster the Islamic Republic's confidence that it could not merely survive, but prosper in an environment that supposedly catered to Western political and cultural preferences. In practical terms, the opening of Iraq definitely refined the Iranian regime's own domestic governance in typically subtle but concretely tangible ways: Iranian religious and political figures saw in their Iraqi counterparts useful examples of theocratically sound governance that relied less on coercion and fear and more on consultation and consensus, and were able to adopt and adapt such methods for their own subjects.

But what helped Iran most, in the grand scheme of things, was that the newfound Shiite ascendancy in Iraq was also viciously targeted for destruction by a small but fiercely determined clique of Sunni fanatics: Al Qaeda and its Salafist affiliates, heavily funded by renegade Saudi Wahabbist clerics and oil princes, armed by a vast cache of weapons stashed away throughout the country from the Baath era or smuggled in through the neighboring Syrian or Saudi desert, and manned by young recruits from across the entire Sunni Arab Middle East and North Africa, switched from primarily attacking the US occupation and its collaborators in 2003-04 to sowing mayhem and destruction among newly mobilized Shiite communities after the first free post-invasion elections of 2005 swept into power a Shiite majority government. Their aim was to convert the Sunni Arab minority's anger at its loss of privilege under Saddam Hussein and fear of being singled out by the new government's US-led counterinsurgency to turn them to a hostile sectarian jihadist banner.

The key turning point was 2006, when a series of attacks on Shiite holy sites such as the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra finally provoked a systematic Shiite backlash. Baghdad became a full-blown sectarian war zone as existing Iranian-linked Shiite militias were joined by far better trained and equipped Iranian-led police and paramilitary units in a coordinated effort to clear Sunni Arab neighborhoods in the capital of militants; the resulting bloodbath heralded the end of a mixed Sunni-Shiite Baghdad and its transition to a predominantly Shiite Arab city, though in the immediate term the complete removal of Sunnis was ironically forestalled by US forces, which now typically found themselves caught in the crossfire.

Thus, in 2006 and 2007 Iran effectively conducted a proxy war against not only Saudi- and Gulf-sponsored Sunni militants and terrorist groups which tried to roll back the rise of Shiite power in Iraq, but also at times US troops which got in the way of its efforts to expand and consolidate its allies' control of key contested areas. Though direct battlefield participation of Iranian operatives against US personnel appears to have been rare if it did occur, the Iranian regime is known to have supplied large numbers of the deadliest improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of the 2003-2011 Iraq war, commonly called EFPs (explosively formed projectiles), to Iraqi militias and paramilitaries that its liaisons oversaw. These are estimated to have killed several hundred US servicemen - a high ratio of the 4,000-odd total American troops to die in combat in the eight-year conflict, especially in light of the fact that the Sunni Arab insurgency spearheaded by Al Qaeda was also (quite understandably) at its very deadliest for US forces in this period of intensive sectarian warfare across all of central Iraq.

It was also against this backdrop of Sunni-Shiite fratricide in Iraq that Tehran racked up another regional strategic success, if even primarily a political and propaganda one: its ally Hezbollah fought the mighty Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to a virtual standstill in the summer of 2006, when the latter attempted a full-scale re-invasion of southern Lebanon but was met with fierce and effective resistance that not only punctured the image of Israel's high-tech battlefield prowess, but also entrenched the Shiite militant group as a political as well as guerrilla force in the Levant - and very useful forward proxy in any potential future conflict right on the Zionist entity's doorstep.

Taken together, Lebanon and Iraq in 2006-07 cemented Iran's emergent role as a regional spoiler for all US (and thus Israeli) security and geopolitical plans; America's Sunni Gulf allies led by Saudi Arabia now worried that a so-called "Shiite Crescent" would emerge that would span from Lebanon across Shiite-Alawite minority-ruled Syria (the Assad Baathist regime) and newly Shiite majority-ruled Iraq, curve across Iran itself, and bend back down across the Gulf to the heavily Shiite-populated eastern coastline of Arabia (notably Bahrain). While tensions flared between Tehran and Riyadh on account of the sectarian turf war in Iraq, they were at this stage far from creating real acrimony; yet it was now unmistakable that the Middle East was beginning to exhibit a fracture along a general Sunni-Shiite, i.e. Saudi-led and Iranian-led, sectarian fault line.

By the late 2000s, though, the internal situation had also changed markedly in Iran. As Iraq receded into the background in 2008-09, domestic concerns became more prominent. Consistently high oil prices throughout the first decade of the 21st century had buoyed the Iranian economy, but the country remained badly short of investment, capital, and advanced foreign technical know-how - which would only come with an improved perceived business climate stemming from religious moderation. Meanwhile, the dependency on petroleum exports inevitably ensconced a corrupt economic rent class, even if nominally supervised by Islamic law and principle.

Meanwhile, secular Persian nationalism had clearly emerged as a more powerful mass current in Iranian politics than its conservative rival, Arab-Islamist religiosity. While the two were skilfully and often symbiotically managed or manipulated by the country's populist president of the mid-to-late 2000s, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - especially when events in Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine were prominent and conveniently gave his government a means to blend the cause of national self-determination under the aegis of divine ordinance - the nationalist strain of public opinion was mistrusted by the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs as being too fickle and too easily swayed by the unpredictable winds of change.

The 2008-09 global financial crisis - coming as it did right on the tails of Iran's regional foreign successes in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (Tehran's hand there was strengthened by the 2008 electoral victory of Hamas that, among other things, turned the Gaza Strip into another proxy outpost) - was just such an event that caught Iranian government and society largely unprepared. With oil prices and exports crashing and the national economy and financial stability suddenly far more precarious, the same force that had propelled Tehran abroad now threatened to upset its delicate sociopolitical equilibrium at home.

Though the "Green Movement" of 2009 is best remembered in the West for being quashed in a bloody crackdown by the regime - one that appeared to presage the autocratic repressions of the Arab spring protests less than two years later - it was in fact the start of a more nuanced realignment of Iran's sociopolitical contracts, one that would effectively create the seemingly bipolar combination of increasingly assertive Islamic militancy in the region yet increasing eagerness to open to the wider world, including the West and the US, in the economic realm.

After all, as of early 2018, this paradox is precisely what makes Iran such a formidable nation-state to reckon with: much like China in the early 1990s, it appears to be a civilization-state determining that it truly wants to update and upgrade itself for the third millennium, yet will fiercely guard its autonomy from the dominant rival cultures and creeds of the day in doing so.

Origins of Iran's crisis, Part One (1979-1991)

Given the momentous events in Iran and the latest botched US-Israeli response to them (i.e. Trump and Netanyahu's ignorant support for the protesters despite the likelihood that the whole thing was a setup by Iranian hardliners), it's important to recall the much longer-term factors and forces at play both in Iran and also the entire region more generally - these factors have never been properly understood by the US and Israel even as the Islamic Revolution approaches its 40th anniversary, but they will become increasingly prominent as the Trump-Netanyahu strategy to contain Iran begins to backfire more and more visibly in the form of ever greater Iranian influence within the Arab-Islamic world.

With the benefit of hindsight - though far from 20-20, much clearer than the muddled picture that is always the present as it unfolds in its own day - we see now that the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution was the key marker in the history of the Arab-Islamic Middle East that has set the tone for all other events since.

The rise of political Islam - or more popularly, "Islamic fundamentalism" - was a foregone conclusion by the mid-1970s, after a whopping four failed wars to drive Israel out of the region and the contemporaneous flat outcomes of secular Arab dictators' attempts to modernize their economies and societies along Western and Soviet-inspired socialist models.

Tellingly, Iran had always been an outlier - not only geographically more peripheral, but politically and culturally, it had long been assumed to be a fundamentally Western-leaning or even pro-Western country, ever since the Allies had accorded the oil-rich Persian kingdom special status in their war against the petro-hungry fascist expansionists.

In that sense, while the 1979 revolt is best remembered in the West for the 444-day US hostage crisis that consumed Carter's remaining presidency until the accession of Reagan in 1981, what happened that year was actually much more of a post-monarchic, post-aristocratic free-for-all involving initially allied coalitions of secular socialists and republicans on the one hand, and Shiite fundamentalists on the other.

The Shah's long rule since WWII had swept the increasing polarization of Iranian society under the rug (no pun intended), especially since the infamous CIA-backed coup against President Mossadegh in 1953, which though widely viewed in the West as having formed the basis for much of the '79 revolution's animus towards America, was at the time actually tacitly blessed by the religious conservative establishment, which feared the rapid secularization of a progressive leftist agenda.

Because the Shah took down with him so many of the prior structures and hierarchies of the modern Persian state, it was inevitable that both the radical socialist and reactionary fundamentalist strains of the anti-Shah insurrection would rush to fill the void with their more fringe ideas and influences - giving the entire combined movement a sense of disorder at times bordering on outright chaos from its earliest days exercising actual authority from Tehran.

What changed all this was the September 1980 invasion of Iran by its predatory neighbor, Saddam Hussein's Western-backed Iraq. Fearful that increasingly dominant Islamic fundamentalists openly hostile to the US and Israel were about to seize full control of one of the world's largest oil supplies, Washington gave Saddam its effective blessing to seize portions of Iran's border region with Iraq adjacent to the critical, oil-rich Shatt-al-Arab estuary where the combined Tigris and Euphrates empty into the Persian Gulf.

Saddam rightly saw himself as the secular republican bulwark against a rising tide of not merely Shiite, but generally Islamic, radicalism that would quickly turn the region's most energy-rich sections into a springboard for deeply pocketed militant or terrorist movements - a view that was only bolstered by his interactions with US and other Western officials who also seized the opportunity to grease their military-industrial complexes with massive sales of sophisticated weaponry to an oil-rich client buffer state.

Three decades after its conclusion, we can view the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War as something of a last stand of secular republicanism and secular nationalism in the entire region: by the time the armistice was forced upon the stalemated combatant powers in August 1988, it was clear to astute observers that whereas Saddam had won the immediate victory, he had only temporarily delayed the ascent and spread of Islamic fundamentalism even within his own borders.

In the conflict's early years, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini - the virtual face of Islam to the Western world in the eighties - rose from something of a moral and spiritual figurehead of revolution to an actual autocrat exercising true despotic powers. This he gained only by stages until 1983 or '84: the point at which all residual socialists and communists were finally purged from the post-revolutionary government, which, combined with dramatic battlefield successes against Saddam's overrated invading Iraqi forces, led Tehran into an ill-fated gambit to go on its own offensive, greatly prolonging what was already a grinding war of attrition - but ultimately only cementing the main undercurrent that would later underpin the basis of Iranian regional ascendancy to this day, namely its sponsorship of downtrodden Shiite masses in Sunni-ruled Gulf oil states amidst an environment of increasingly harsh repression by their corrupt and kleptocratic elites, monarchic or republican alike.

The Iran-Iraq War also demonstrated a deep Iranian flexibility in dealing pragmatically with all manner of neutral or even unfriendly actors - in marked contrast to Saddam Hussein, who spent much of the war capitalizing on what amounted to a blank check from the West to indulge in all manner of power excesses, be it surreptitiously pursuing an atomic bomb (conveniently ended by the famous June 1981 raid on his main nuclear reactor by the Israelis) early on or gassing untold thousands of innocent Kurdish civilians towards the end (the 1988 Anfal campaign). Tellingly, this manifest itself best in how the respective armed oppositions of both countries conducted and established themselves within their domains of exile: the main Iranian dissident movement, the secular republican People's Mujaheddin (PMI or MEK), grew so checkered by its association with Saddam's atrocities against disobedient Shiites and Kurds that it lost much of its moral and material support in the West, whereas the Shiite religious parties expelled from Iraq, notably Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, became key players both in civil Iranian politics and later on a useful intermediary between Tehran and the West whenever tensions flared between the latter and Iraq, as they finally would explode with Saddam's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The 1991 Gulf War to eject Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait was the true turning point of the region's cross-border, intra-Shiite religious political consciousness. In the wake of a massive defeat by the US coalition's Operation Desert Storm and retreat from the occupied oil sheikhdom in February, a mutiny within Saddam's military in the southern Iraqi port of Basra quickly mushroomed into a broader Shiite Arab insurrection across the entire southern half of the country.

Though the precise role and nature of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) early involvement in staging and coordinating the '91 rebellion against Saddam remains the subject of debate, the undisputed fact is that for days or even weeks on end, the Sunni minority Baathist regime in Baghdad lost effective control of its southern Shiite dominions, which hosted not only the nation's most abundant proven oil reserves, but also its lucrative sole access to the Gulf for exports. The critical decision seems to have come to Washington when it became clear that the permanent displacement of Saddam from southern Iraq would create a "Shiastan" that would be too uncomfortably cozy with Iran, however free or democratic it might in theory become. Where the US and the West may have been willing to take such a risk anyway, the decisive opposition almost certainly came from their Gulf allies led by Saudi Arabia: these Sunni hereditary monarchies, including the royal family that had just been restored to Kuwait, were in no hurry to offer any democratic hopes to their own large Shiite populations which had been heavily imported from Iraq or Iran to begin with to bolster the thin petroleum sector workforce.

And so, after initially encouraging the Shiite revolt against Saddam, the US withdrew all support, inviting the Baathist tyrant to return to the south with a vengeance: not only did he do so, in the process massacring (through various ruthless means) up to an estimated half-million or even full million Shiite Arabs over the remainder of 1991 into '92, but he almost certainly did so only with covert assurance from US president George H. W. Bush's intelligence that any Iranian attempts to come to the rescue of their beleaguered coreligionists would be met with US retaliation in support of Baghdad. (This would go a long way to explaining why, even a dozen years later, Saddam thought the younger George W. Bush was actually bluffing about invading Iraq up to the very moment he was targeted for assassination by the opening airstrike.)

But needless to say, the depths of Shiites' sense of betrayal by America and the West - not only those in Iraq and Iran, but throughout the Middle East - would form yet another solid pillar in the subsequent edifice of an emergent regional pan-Shiite bloc; from henceforth, post-1991, Iran would steadily implant itself as the true power lurking beneath the oil-rich sands and shores of its Sunni Arab-ruled neighbors to the west. Long before 9/11 and the consequent US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Ayatollahs were sowing the seeds through every available crack of an Iraq and indeed an entire western shore of the Persian Gulf that would nominally answer to their official Sunni leadership, but in reality was tilting ever so imperceptibly yet no less actually towards Tehran's brand of theocratic fundamentalism.