As Italian, you don’t need many web news to position the geopolitical potential of Iran. It was sufficient to me to contemplate the enormous rock sculpture near Persepolis, representing Roman Emperor Valeriano as prisoner of Sassanide king Sapur I in 260 after Christ: never a Roman Emperor was imprisoned by a Roman enemy, not even from the famous warriors Germans. And by the way he had an army of 70000 soldiers, marching to Syria from Turkey: final battle in Edessa, near to border. So we are very conscious that Rome,China, Persia were the only big empires in Euroasian continent 500 years before and until 1000 years after Christ. Today political American elites, with all our technology, didn’t understand too much about the imperial culture and geopolitical factors favouring Iran renaissance. Iran was never a colony, it kept its independence through centuries with different dynasties of kings, until the last Shah, abandoned from USA in a plane in Egypt in July 1980. The theocratic regime of ayatollah its an islamic artificial cover on a traditional rich and not islamic culture of the country, already transitioned in modern era, with a lot of universities, gender parity, more than 500 start upper in Silicon Valley, very open youth with a lot of emigrated in USA.
The culture in Teheran , Shiraz, Kerman, Esfahan and other cities is more similar to Western World, and more European then in Turkey, whereas the farmers and poor people in the country are dominated by priests. The new regime tried immediately to leverage on traditional positioning of Persia, moving to influence ex URSS central Asia countries, arriving to Chinese Uiguri of islamic religion, always rebelling to communist regime. And also tried to focus energies against external enemies, Sunni of Irak and Saudi Arabia and Jewish Israel. Ayatollah Komeini, returning from his exile to Paris, was saying all this to Gorbaciov visiting Iran in ’80thies : “Now you finished and it’s up to us”. Through this power policy supported by new atomic weapon research, the theocratic group tried to lead the country, keeping on the revival of the past pushed by Shah Reza Pahlavi with Persepolis renovating archeological works and Universities diffusion for updating the country. But the economic and social results of this leadership have been very poor, with the excuse of USA sanctions, drugs and misery are diffused in the 81 million population, pushed from the regime to grow after one million dead in Irak war.
Again the American lobbies continued to misunderstand the real motivations of Iran, preferring to represent it as a devil because of the nuclear research and the possible threat to Israel existence, losing Syria and under evaluating the Yemen problem and supporting the middle age government of Saudi Arabia for crude oil interests. Notwithstanding all these events, I keep on the pressure of geopolitical factors which ever positioned Iran in an independent and not aggressive attitude in the area, where in any time and any configuration it will exercise a leadership culturally and technologically. When the present islamic aggressive regime, which must be aggressive to survive internally, will disappear, the Persian traditions will return to a pacific and progressive development of this important civilisation. I am sure that this way of islamic manipulating geopolitical deterministic factors will not prevale in the future because the basic Persian roots, founded in one of the most rich and open minded old empire, which attracted also Alexander the Great, will in the medium term rebalance the Iran strategic positioning to a leading power of Central and Southern Asia, but engaging to revive its civilisation as a contribution to human development in the area.
