This is not a good question to ask. It's not for what. It's to prevent what.
Even if you don't care about how Iran treats its own population, you should care about how it treats others because one day it might be you.
Iran's ideology is expansionalist. They want to export their ideas far and wide. While also physically suppressing their opponents.
Since the emergence of two global superpowers after WW2, most armed conflicts were, essentially, between those two. Directly or indirectly. If the two could find a peaceful solution, the world at large had a good day. And for a while it seemed like we might be left with just one superpower, and so no conflicts at all. Only policing.
The whole "multipolar" spiel you might hear from powers that challenge this policing is what is going to result in a long and bloody struggle for world domination. It won't be like the world wars we remember, where most of the world had to choose one of the two sides. It will be a quagmire of more local conflicts with very volatile alliances and a lot more casualties overall. More like Italian city states.
It's necessary to police Iran and similar bad countries because if their challenge of the power monopoly succeeds, the world will be hurled into anarchy equipped with very deadly weapons...
Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.
There is only one country in the Middle East with an aggressive expansionist mentality, and it’s not Iran.
And what’s with the superpower commentary, you neglected to connect it to Iran and are you saying Russia is bigger than China?
It's what uncritically consuming propaganda does to a person. A whole world view and belief system that has no relation to reality.
> Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.
I keep hearing from consumers of Islamofascist narratives about the “aggressive expansionism” of Israel. Can you tell me by how many square miles Israel expanded control over in total in the past 50 years?
I live (with a short intermission when I lived in the EU) in the Middle East, so, outside of reading the local news, sometimes I can just look out of the window.
I don't understand the question about Russia vs China: bigger in what sense? Geographically, it surely is, but that's not likely what you were going for.
To comment on expansionism: there are several ideologies in the region that seek to establish some sort of a "center of gravity" to attach more territory / resources to it. Islamic Revolutionary Guards is one of them, it's been "copied" by others s.a. various Hezballah organizations in different countries or Ansarallah. If eg. Hezballah wins in Lebanon, they will become a sort of a copy of Iran. Think like Warsaw Pact countries were "copies" of the Soviet Union.
Another such ideology / force is Muslim Brotherhood. Broadly, any Al-Qaeda affiliates belong there. This is a more popular / organic Arab thing as opposed to Islamic Guards, who are a foreign influence. They, however, lack a "center of gravity", but, potentially, they can take over Egypt as the current government is unpopular, while Muslim Brotherhood is. Eventually, there might be a popular revolt that will topple the current military government and then it's very likely that Egypt will try to expand its influence over the Middle East by violent means.
And there's a list of failures / non-threats, s.a. BAAS (Arab Communists, essentially): they used to be popular during the Cold War but now nobody cares about them. Wahhabi ideology that was propped by Saudis for a while, but now it's basically forgotten. Western liberal news like to mention "Greater Israel": this idea is about as popular in Israel as Scientology is in the US. It does exist in some form in the very fringe part of Israeli society, but it has zero chance of having a popular support. It makes the news domestically mostly because of how unrealistic and out of touch it is. It has about as much influence on Israeli foreign policy as Scientology does in the US.
Multipolarity is inevitable. You can’t forcefully hold most of the world’s population down, especially when you already shipped off your manufacturing capacity to earn a few bucks.
As always, the question for the declining hegemon is whether a new order can arise peacefully or not. The UK managed to go peacefully in the end, but only after two brutal and deadly world wars sapped them of their remaining strength. Still, their acquiescence allowed them to retain an outsized seat at the table.
China doesn’t seem interested in becoming a unipolar hegemon, at least based on public statements and openly published policy/position papers, so perhaps they have learned that it’s bad to be the hegemon from watching both the UK and the US take it on the chin. Rather than the Yuan becoming the default international currency, it’s possible that Keynes’s Bancor (or something like it) may finally replace the notion of a singular reserve currency, which always fails in predictable ways.
Well, if it's inevitable, then we are facing a long stretch of history when everybody is having a bad time... And by that I mean that it's going to be worse than it is today. War will become a new normal for most people in the world, just like it was before the world wars.
War is the historical norm. The relative quiet of the Cold War across Western Eurasia, Japan, and Anglo nations was an aberration. Most of the world still experienced major conflicts during and after this period, including Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and of course the Middle East. After the Cold War, conflict spread into Russia and Eastern Europe.
The false “norm” of peace and quiet in Western suburbs will finally be ending, that’s all. We may even have our own Yugoslav moment, although I hope that’s not the case.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't like where this is going :)
Oh, and I have an anecdote, somewhat relevant to the situation.
So, my grandma lived through the Nazi occupation of the Western Ukraine. She died in the early 90s, so, the events I'm describing must've happened some time between the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union. I was an elementary school student and had a very simple picture of the Great Patriotic War: Nazis were bad, we were all around good, and we showed them...
One day she took me to the local farmers' market. On our way there we had to come by a liquor store, and there was, prostrated on the ground alcoholic who must've fallen asleep waiting for the store to open.
Holding her nose, my grandma uttered "had Germans been here, this would never have happened!"
Her admiration for Nazis came to me as a bit of a shock, but I made this mental trick, explaining it away by describing my grandma as "strict and law-abiding" and didn't think much of the incident until much, much later. Eventually, by talking to others who lived through the occupation and trying to understand what was so attractive about the Nazis that a lot of people welcomed them with open arms, I realized that the Nazis, beside the bad things they are known for today, leaned heavily into upholding law and order. In a Doctor Doom sort of way, but still. A lot of people were willing to give away their freedoms in exchange for the very "radical" law enforcement... And this is the aspect that doesn't get a lot of attention when the Nazis are mentioned in the history class...
So, there's a part of me that wants law and order at any cost, be it the US bombing the shit out of some country (it could be my country, if necessary! although, understandably, I'd rather it be some other country, better yet none at all). Just so that, by and large, there'd be peace and stability... On the other hand: fairness and all that... :)
How can something "always fail" if it's never been tried? Negativity much?
Maybe I wasn’t clear, I mean that singular, nation-state issued (but internationally held) reserve currencies always fail, whether they are backed by “hard” currency or not. Keynes’s idea is an attempt to solve the problem, and as you mentioned it has not been tested.