On Iran

A post I just made in a private forum: 

So who’s running Iran right now? Some kind of transitional council which includes the elected president (in charge of civil administration, but with no say over strategic or military matters), head of the judiciary (a mullah and former intelligence minister), a representative of the mullahs (who have their own political process responsible for e.g. selecting the next supreme leader)… and Ali Larijani, who is described not only as a representative of the security forces, but who is said to have masterminded the January crackdown and massacre, and who has held many elite positions in the Iranian system. He was at one time the chief nuclear negotiator, and he’s currently the head of their NSC, for example.

So this is probably apparatus of the Iranian deep state, laid bare by the killing of Khamenei and so many other officials. I’ve never read it, but I think Tom Clancy has a novel in which a terrorist attack destroys the Capitol and wipes out most of the American leadership including Congress, leaving his protagonist to be suddenly elevated to the presidency. Something like this has happened for real to Iran.

Their priority right now has to be, to stabilize the situation and reassert their authority. Larijani seems to be the one who’s actually running things, but I doubt that they will elevate him to supreme leader, he’s too useful as the strategic brain.

In a way what’s more interesting is whether there will be a reshuffle in the hierarchy of charismatic authority among all the different leaderships in Iran. Khamenei was a comrade of Khomeini himself, he belonged to the revolutionary generation that resisted and then overthrew the Shah, and so while he lived, he was able to give the office of supreme leader the charismatic pre-eminence that it is also supposed to have institutionally.

But after his death, I can’t think of anyone who has the same aura. The supreme leader is supposed to be selected by an assembly of ayatollahs, but Khamenei’s opinion (or alleged opinion) on who his successor should be, should also count for something. I’m actually wondering if this ex intelligence minister has a chance, because he was a student of Mesbah-Yazdi, a senior ayatollah who was both “ultra-conservative” and also an academic philosopher, and who always had a faction pushing him for the position of supreme leader. He died a few years ago, but I wonder if the ex intelligence minister has sufficient religious qualifications, that the Mesbah-Yazdi faction could propose him for supreme leader…

But like I said, whoever gets in, I can’t see them having the same aura as Khomeini or Khamenei, and this may imply a demotion in the supreme leader’s power - ironically, something that reformist mullahs have wanted for years (there has been plenty of religious opposition among Shiites to the unique system that Khomeini created, which elevated one ayatollah to absolute ruler, just like the shah). There’s also a tactical value to having a weak interim spiritual leader for a while - right now American and Israeli planes are swarming overhead, and it would weaken the system to have a series of supreme leaders installed and then assassinated. Better to leave the realpolitik guy, Larijani, in charge - the Americans probably don’t want to kill him just yet, they will want to hear what he has to say, and whether they can arrive at a Venezuela-style deal.

So Larijani will continue as the de-facto interim leader, juggling diplomacy, internal politics and security, defiant rhetoric, and modulating any counteroffensive. If he can outlast this attack without losing authority, then he can save the Islamist system, and Iran will once again gain some time to rebuild. The situation would be analogous to Iraq in the late 1990s.

The situation also reminds me a bit of Iran in the immediate aftermath of the Shah’s abdication. Just as the supreme leader had a president who was just a civil administrator, the shah had a prime minister (Mohammed Bakhtiar), and after the shah’s final abdication, Bakhtiar was briefly in charge, freed all the political prisoners, and let Khomeini into the country. Khomeini appointed his own rival prime minister (Mehdi Bazargan), and the Bazargan government soon replaced the Bakhtiar government as the one that was actually running things. Bakhtiar went into exile and was assassinated years later in France, while Bazargan (who had been a liberal opposition leader) couldn’t control Khomeini’s Islamist zealots, and eventually retired from politics to become an academic.

After that Islamist politics was fully in charge, there was a new hierarchy with Khomeini on top as supreme leader, then a president, then a prime minister. Iraq invaded Iran, trying to annex its Arab province (Khuzestan), Bazargan’s successor was assassinated, and Khamenei entered the scene as the president, a position he held throughout the war and until Khomeini’s death in 1989, at which point he was elevated to the new supreme leader.

As we know, the son of the last shah has proposed to return to Iran as a figurehead for a secular democratic transition. It would be an ironic unwinding of 1979’s Pahlavi-to-Khomeini exchange, but I really don’t know if he has the support. The British originally installed the Pahlavis, the Americans restored them to power after the Mossadegh interlude, and now a Pahlavi once again has some support among the Iranian diaspora. But don’t forget, Iran has a very pluralistic political scene. Whenever there was an election, large numbers of people stood as candidates, it’s just that most of them were then vetoed by the mullahs. It may well be that Iran’s politics will be dominated by people not known to us outsiders, but already well-known to Iranians.

American power in 2026

As of February 2026, the most significant event in world politics remains the ongoing American strategic revolution under Trump 2.0. 

In the 1990s, the United States emerged from the Cold War as what the French termed a "hyperpower", the world police of a planetary order whose utopia was a borderless world of capitalist democracies. But the eclipse of the socialist alternative merely paved the way for a "clash of civilizations", pioneered by the Muslim jihad of Al Qaeda, then joined in the mid-2010s by nationalist leaders in Russia, India, and China. Donald Trump proved to be flagbearer of an American response, whose full form became apparent only in his second term: a new American nationalism, unchallenged in the western hemisphere, and overshadowing even the great powers of the eastern hemisphere, thanks to control of the oceans, skies, and outer space. 

This was still a world pursuing economic growth. America led the way, the dollar value of its tech companies ballooning into the trillions, followed by China, transitioning to a high-tech industrial power at the center of the material economy, and India, believing that with time, it could equal and surpass China. The rest of the world pursued whatever comparative advantage they could find. 

But war was not forgotten. Europe, the former conqueror of the world and now the junior partner in America's liberal imperium, pursuing its dreams of affluent comfort and social justice, expanded east into Russia's near abroad. Russia having shed its status as the center of world socialism, hung onto its superpower military strength, and saw NATO expansion as simply another attempt at subjugation by the West, in the footsteps of Napoleon and Hitler. Emboldened by the American loss of Afghanistan under Biden in 2021, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, declaring itself the champion of multipolar resistance to American world hegemony. Ukraine did not fall, but China and India bought Russian oil, and the world outside the West remained neutral, and that was enough for the war to drag on. 

Meanwhile Trump returned at the end of 2024, this time with a much more radical intent. Domestically he set about eliminating policies of a liberal or progressive nature: foreign aid packaged with progressivism, diversity policies in employment, laxity regarding illegal immigration. The new government promoted vaccine skeptics (a nod to post-Covid discontent) and cut scientific research. The neoliberal shibboleth of central bank independence was also put on notice. 

In addition to the tariff wars, betting on AI as the new industrial revolution became the center of the American economy. The top seven stocks (the "Magnificent Seven") were all involved in AI, either as software or hardware. The automotive and space tycoon Elon Musk, whose thousands of Starlink satellites were central to American control of near-earth space, crafted his own post-liberal AI and social media that worked with the new regime. Trump's AI czar focused on deregulation, Biden's regulators retreating to positions within Anthropic, the company most identified with AI safety. OpenAI and Google DeepMind were the other leading competitors. 

Along with the Ukrainian war, the other geopolitical problem that Trump inherited from Biden was Israel's war in Gaza. Since its creation, opposition to Israel was led first by Egypt, then by Iraq, and now by Iran. The 2023 attack by Hamas led swiftly to an Israeli-American counterattack against the Iranian-led coalition. Lebanese Hezbollah was decimated in mid-2024, Baathist rule in Syria fell at the end of 2024, while much of Gaza was levelled in the course of 2024 and 2025, with Israel killing over 70,000 Palestinians in response to the 1,000 Israelis killed in October 2023. In America itself, opposition to Israel was suppressed in media (through new ownership) and on campus (through legal and financial pressure). 

In mid-2025 under Trump, there was a "12-day war" during which Israel bombed Iranian missile infrastructure and America bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. In January 2026, Iran bloodily suppressed a national uprising stoked by Israeli and American intelligence, and by month's end America was threatening Iran with war again, unless Iran shut down its missile and nuclear programs. The other powers of the region, notably Turkey and Saudi Arabia, kept their distance while angling for power on the edges of the conflict. 

By comparison to America, the Eurasian powers stayed in character and were mostly reactive. 

China, America's biggest rival, concentrated on political stability and technological development. They had most of the world's manufacturing, they had their own space station, they were less than a year behind America in AI, and even rivalled Musk in areas like electric cars and humanoid robotics. 

China does not have elections, but its ruling party still knows from history that a dynasty can collapse. Since coming to power in 2013, Xi Jinping has bet the party's domestic legitimacy on an anti-corruption campaign, meant to show the people that party officials govern in the interest of the nation, and he has bet its geopolitical legitimacy on keeping Taiwan within the Chinese sphere. Rising China has made territorial claims in all directions, but above all it cares about Taiwan, the westernized island province that maintains a de-facto independence and which manufactures the advanced computer chips central to the AI economy. To this end he has set 2027 as the year by which the Chinese military must be capable of defeating Taiwan (and any support from America or Japan) should the province declare independence. (In early 2026, his old comrade Zhang Youxia, China's most senior general, was retired and placed under investigation; it was widely believed that this was because he resisted keeping pace with the rigorous 2027 deadline.) 

China also gave Japan a warning when its new female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, declared that war over Taiwan might require Japanese involvement, China threatening to cut off Japan's access to technologically crucial rare earth materials. Combined with economic dominance in Indonesia and the other nations of ASEAN, and friendly relations with both North and South Korea, and careful study of the Ukrainian war, China was doing what it could to be ready for a Pacific war with America over Taiwan, should that ever happen. 

While managing all these legacy conflicts, Trump 2.0's America began to take new steps in its own hemisphere, by abducting the leader of Venezuela and bringing him to America for trial. Oil-rich Venezuela had cultivated ties with China, Russia, and Iran, but Trump and his secretary of state (foreign minister) Marco Rubio declared that Venezuela now needed to follow American diktats if it hoped to stay out of further trouble. 

Meanwhile NATO, previously America's most valuable alliance, was shocked by Trump's insistence on dominance of the entire North American continent. Post-Trudeau Canada was already on guard thanks to Trump's insistence that it should become America's "51st state", and then in January 2026, Trump began to insist that Greenland, a Danish territory next to Canada, must also become American. The European powers supported Denmark's claim while trying to negotiate with America. But on the economic front, the erratic imposition of tariffs led them to build ties with the Asian powers. Australia and Canada had already been to China to make new economic deals; now France, Britain and Germany all followed suit. 

The European Union also negotiated an extensive trade deal with India. India had been alienated from America since mid-2025 when Trump took credit for ending a short shooting war between India and Pakistan, to which Trump responded by imposing tariffs until India stopped purchasing Russian oil. India ignored this, and went on to negotiate an economic deal with Russia. After the European deal, Trump quickly made his own deal with India's Modi, bringing down tariffs on India in return for a reduction in Indian purchases of Russian oil, and an increase in Indian purchases of American goods. 

Strategic flux

2025 so far is seeing a high-speed strategic revolution unfolding within the world's greatest power, with consequences for the rest of the world too. 

The central strategic factor in world geopolitics is the relationship between America, on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. They were all on the same side in World War 2; they were on opposite sides in the Cold War; but Chinese economic reform allowed pragmatic cooperation with America, while Russian political reform eventually ended the ideological basis of the conflict. 

For a decade or two, America was the premier power in a world system that lacked serious conflict between great powers. The world was a borderless marketplace in which the most vigorous rival to western ideology was neo-medieval Islam. However, new problems emerged between America, on one side, and China and Russia, on the other. 

They both felt threatened by American export of democracy, and were repelled by the progressive values that were increasingly packaged with it too. Russia also felt threatened by the expansion of America's European military alliance, and by Ukraine's attraction to Europe's economic union. China, on the other hand, provoked American fears simply by its own continuing economic and technological success. China became the world's main industrial and manufacturing power, and the main trading partner for most of the world, something which naturally turns into political and geopolitical influence. 

The conflict took shape in the mid-2010s, when Ukraine's Euro-revolution prompted Russia to seize Crimea and sponsor separatism in two eastern provinces, while strengthening strategic ties with China's new leader Xi Jinping. Meanwhile in America, Trump came to power for the first time, treating China as an economic rival rather than a partner. His policy agenda was frustrated by institutional resistance, and then the Covid years saw him lose office. Geopolitics was also on hold for two years while the world dealt with the crisis. 

Trump's successor Biden did, however, retain the more adversarial economic attitude towards China. And then in 2022, fooled by the swift collapse of the American-backed regime in Afghanistan, Russia invaded Ukraine, expecting a quick victory. In the end, Ukrainian resistance, with western backing, kept the war going for three years. Russia, for its part, benefited from long cultivation of ties with the non-western world, which remained neutral in the conflict. And that was long enough for Trump to return to power, this time in sufficient strength to enact his conservative nationalist agenda forcefully. 

Trump's domestic agenda includes the reversal of the progressive revolution of values. Russia views this positively, as a sign that they will be able to communicate with America again. Trump had also declared his desire to end the Ukrainian war quickly, and cast doubt upon America's NATO alliance with Europe. This led the European powers to discuss how they could defend themselves and support Ukraine, independently of America. On the battlefield itself, fighting continues, but Ukraine and Russia have been showing a new interest in ceasefires and peace talks. A realignment is therefore occurring, which may well lead to an end to the fighting in the near future. 

On the Chinese front, however, there was an escalation that began in April 2025, when Trump imposed major tariffs on America's trade with the entire world. This was part of a radical attempt to change America's economic position - bring back jobs, reduce the debt and the trade deficit, deal with the downsides of having the world's reserve currency, and reduce dependency on China in particular. Amidst the initial burst of trade diplomacy and turbulent tariff changes, it looked as if China and America would be unable to make a deal at all. Just lately, they have held talks in Switzerland that promise de-escalation. But the fact that China has emerged as a rival to America on every economic and technological front is still there, so this story isn't over. 

AI interlude, early 2025

I'm working on an update! Meanwhile, you may wish to read my assessment of the current state of the AI race. 

Elections and wars of 2024

The world is one week into 2024. It is still divided between an American-led bloc, a bloc centered on Russia and China, and a neutral bloc who play both sides, India being the biggest such country. 

There are many elections scheduled for this year. There are ongoing wars too. The biggest is still Russia versus Ukraine, almost two years old, Putin's gamble that he can halt the eastward expansion of NATO. The newest is Israel versus Palestinian Gaza, Netanyahu's war to uproot Hamas. There are also civil wars in Sudan, Myanmar, and elsewhere. 

All these wars have a geopolitical context. The war in Ukraine is obviously a war of Russia against the American bloc. Less obviously, the Palestinian war with Israel is also part of a long Iranian-led war to drive the American military out of the region too. Russian access to the Red Sea and Chinese access to the Indian Ocean are at stake in Sudan and Myanmar. Wars around Israel and Iran affect Indian trade routes to Europe and Russia. 

The political calendar is busy. Already, as 2023 ended, the conservatives lost power in Poland and a radical libertarian was elected in Argentina. A presidential election will be held a few days from now in Taiwan. Pakistan and Indonesia will hold elections in February, with Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan in jail, and Indonesia's popular Joko Widodo having reached the limit of ten years in office. 

In March, both Russia and Ukraine are due to have elections, though Putin's victory is preordained, and Zelensky might delay a vote because of the war.  China will also be having its annual "two sessions" of public political deliberation and consultation. 

India's vote, the world's biggest by number of voters, is so big that it will take two months to unfold, throughout April and May. Mexico will vote in June. And America's vote, the most geopolitically consequential, will take place in November, potentially a rerun of 2020's Biden versus Trump, if Trump can overcome the numerous legal challenges to his candidacy. 

Asymmetric war in the holy land

October's attack on Israel by Hamas may begin a new period that eclipses the war in Ukraine. But first, let's review what else was happening in the world. 

In America, supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia remained the main concern of Biden’s Democrats, while Trump’s Republicans wanted the southern border closed to illegal immigrants. 

For India, 2023 was the year it was in charge of the G-20. Arguably its main achievement was to get the African Union admitted to the grouping, alongside the European Union. Modi traveled everywhere except China. 

For Russia, the focus was the war against Ukraine, still framed as a war against America, Europe, and NATO. The revolt of the Wagner military unit against the Ministry of Defense produced a few days of drama, but ended anticlimactically. Then, during the significant BRICS meeting in South Africa, word came that the Wagner leadership had all died in a plane crash north of Moscow. 

For China, it was a year of post-Covid economic recovery, building towards the tenth-anniversary Belt and Road summit in October. Xi attended the BRICS meeting in South Africa but stayed away from G-20 meetings in India. 

In the Middle East, the Palestinian issue was long dormant. The biggest development was perhaps the imminent admission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Emirates and Egypt to BRICS in 2024 (along with Ethiopia and Argentina). It will be another big advance of multipolar geopolitics into a region where America is still the hegemon; building upon the restoration of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, that Russia and China midwifed early in 2023. 

Israel itself was still working through its long western-style culture war between religious conservatives who believe that God gave them all the land, and secular liberals more open to sharing it with an Arab state. Its external diplomacy was focused on cultivating the alliance with Gulf Arab states against Iran. Prime Minister Netanyahu even had time to travel to America and muse about future artificial intelligence with Elon Musk. 

Then came “Al Aqsa Flood”, the devastating October 7 surprise attack by the Palestinians of Gaza, a small enclave between Israel and Egypt run by the Islamic movement Hamas. While a barrage of missiles flew overhead into Israel, Palestinian paramilitary forces broke through the border, grabbed hundreds of hostages for transport back to Gaza, and otherwise killed as many Jews as they could find - over 1400 in the end. 

The Hamas leadership called on all Arabs and Muslims to join the struggle until the Jews were defeated, and Israel could become Palestine. But for Israel, the massacre awakened deep fears of genocide, and the country mobilized with the intention of eradicating the Hamas party from Gaza at any cost. Gaza was cut off, heavy bombardment killed thousands of Palestinians, and Israeli tanks and soldiers gathered in preparation for an invasion.   

World opinion is largely divided along unipolar and multipolar lines. The countries of the American bloc support Israel’s actions as essential self-defense. Their perception is that Israel can do anything to prevent a second Holocaust. Countries outside the American bloc call for a ceasefire and a “two-state solution”, in which a sovereign Palestine would exist alongside Israel. Their perception is that Palestine is fighting for its freedom from foreign colonizers. 

Opinions within the Arab and Muslim worlds have particular significance. After fifty years in which opposition to Israel’s existence was led by Arab nationalists in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, Saudi Arabia led the Arab League in agreeing to recognize Israel, if Israel could agree with the Palestinian state on borders, a shared capital, and the return of refugees. Meanwhile, dedication to the complete defeat of Israel was maintained by Islamic groups in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.  

As with the war in Ukraine, the end state of the war in Gaza might be found somewhere among the many peace plans and military scenarios that exist. But we do not yet know which of these will prevail.

Multipolarity in the 2020s: an update

Personal matters, and the rise of artificial intelligence, held me back from updating this blog. But let's see if I can say something meaningful about the state of the world. 

America is still the military and financial superpower of the world, first among equals in Europe's NATO; dominating the Indian and Pacific oceans via its "Quad" partnership with India, Japan, and Australia; and working through regional allies in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. 

China is still the manufacturing superpower of the world, still trading with the West despite ideological and geopolitical tensions, but also working with Russia to create blocs and institutions - the BRICS economic alliance, the SCO security alliance - independent of Euro-American power. 

Russia has long lost its economic rivalry with America, but it still has its military might, and it now proposes to be the armory of a multipolar world, and a defender of traditional values and civilizational autonomy worldwide, against the border-dissolving individualism of the West. 

India is arguably the newcomer among great powers, economy still only a fifth of China's, but population already greater; building the new institutions of the global "East" and "South", but also with a deep and growing presence in the Anglo countries of the West. 

Russia has been led by the same man since 2012, China since 2013, India since 2014; but America saw the populist nationalism of Trump in power from 2016 to 2020, before Biden managed to restore the liberal progressivism of the Obama years. 

This restoration took place against the backdrop of the worldwide Covid pandemic, which from 2020 to 2022 killed millions, and saw a state of emergency involving mass vaccinations, lockdowns of daily life, and massive economic disruptions, in most countries of the world. 

In the two Internet superpowers, America and China, the pandemic left its mark on the digitalization of daily life. In the West, the big tech companies grew even richer, as the upper classes preferred to work from home, until the public health emergency was gradually retired throughout 2022; while in China, a strict Zero-Covid policy was maintained for three years, adding a new layer to the state's close cyber-management of society, until the policy was suddenly abandoned at the end of 2022. 

The Chinese change of policy may have produced the last big wave of Covid anywhere in the world. In a few months, there were 100 million cases, and life was very difficult for a few weeks. But then it died out, just like the mid-2021 outbreak in India that produced a few weeks of national crisis, and resulted in the Delta strain. 

For most of the world, Covid itself slowly faded away, but the economic repercussions remained, with price rises, and unpredictable shortages of goods and workers, all around the world; and they continued with the next big event of the 2020s, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. 

According to the former prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, who was in Moscow when the invasion began, Putin estimated that it might take a month to win the war. 16 months later, tens of thousands are dead, millions have fled Ukraine, and the war is still going, fed by Ukrainian resistance, NATO weapons, and Russian refusal to give up annexed territories or allow NATO into Ukraine. 

The comprehensive severance of economic ties between Russia and the West is of a piece with the more selective tariffs and sanctions directed at China, first under Trump, and then continued under Biden when Xi's third term as president was confirmed. America wants to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, and to keep China in second place technologically. Russia hopes to win in Ukraine by hanging on until America loses interest, and China intends to master 21st-century technologies on its own, e.g. making its own advanced computer chips, if it is denied access to those made in Taiwan. 

America's close allies in Europe (the countries of the European Union) and East Asia (Japan and South Korea) have, more or less, gone along with the ever-sharper policies directed at Russia and China; but the rest of the world has declined to take sides. India is the exemplar here, dealing with both sides according to independent national interest; but the long queues of countries eager to join SCO and BRICS show that outside the West, there is a lot of enthusiasm for the multipolar world.