A Potential Historical Parallel With Iran

So, I’m not going to recapitulate all the hair-on-fire takes you’re probably already sick of by now.

But I’m going to write about what may be an underappreciated angle. After all, one of the most interesting developments of the last several days has been the deafening silence from China and Russia, the ostensible senior partners of the Axis of Autocracy (or whatever we’re calling it these days).

The immediate question is… why would they leave Iran out to dry?

For one, some of our assumptions might be wrong here. Perhaps this axis isn’t really all that valid, and China and Russia simply see no reason to intervene absent an axis of common interest. Perhaps they are planning to intervene, but not in ways we can see immediately — however ridiculously unlikely, it’s entirely plausible that China has a surprise cyberattack waiting any day now.

But a secret plan is unlikely even without silly speculation about cyberattacks: setting Trump’s bluster and lies aside, Iran is on the ropes right now, and the ref is getting ready for him to fall and start the KO count. Even without us needing to assert any strong axis of mutual support, Iran has been a buffer state for Russia and China for a while now, and neither has hesitated to help Iran when they’ve needed it. If Iran falls, the Middle East is liable to consolidate behind a Trump-Netanyahu-MBS-led “Axis of Corruption”, and then China and Russia lose one of the single largest distractors of the US in the last several decades. It would be “peace in the Middle East” through corruption, but the main dividend to the US would actually be that without Iran’s nuclear program and terrorism to distract our foreign policy blob, we would turn more of our attention to the rest of the world.

But let’s return to our question: Why? Well, one possibility is that Russia and China can’t. Maybe they don’t see any particular course of action with a high payoff! Maybe they have assets in place, but they don’t want to expend them. Russia is certainly hamstrung by its own quagmire in Ukraine, so much that they had to beg for help from North Fucking Korea. China has the resources, but has a long history of refusing to venture beyond its immediate neighborhood. Their leadership aren’t short-sighted in the sense that they prefer to think of themselves as taking an extremely long view, but they are definitely blinkered by simply never having had the mental habits of thinking of themselves as a major actor on the world stage.

(Think of them like having a rich cousin from the rural Deep South who can do anything they want, and doesn’t shy from considering business interests in Alabama or as far as Texas, and although they might accidentally order something online or sell a car to someone in New Mexico, they wouldn’t lift a finger to help a New Mexican, let alone take an exotic trip overseas.)

Another explanation could be that they see Iran as a liability. Russia had Iranian drones at the start of the Ukraine war, and they haven’t helped much. Besides oil, which any regime will happily keep flowing, Iran doesn’t have anything either senior partner wants.

Perhaps also the seniors truly are planning a counterstrategy. Since Russia is barely able to keep its MIC running, this mainly applies to China, but the scariest possibility is that the Chinese already have a plan for a knockout blow in the works, it’s humming along just fine, but they don’t mind losing Iran because they’re plenty happy with the broader context of Trump gutting American power, and don’t want to reveal their Death Star just yet — never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake, after all.

Ultimately, the real reason for bringing all this up is that we may have a historical parallel with the decades before WWI.

World War I’s immediate causes always get written up in the textbooks as “entangling alliances” but that’s the version middle schoolers can barely understand when they bother paying attention. It wasn’t just that the alliances were entangling, but that each senior partner in each coalition had had a junior partner who they had previously disappointed. On the eve of WWI, each major power’s leadership was saying “never again!” about the previous crisis where they’d been forced to sell out a junior ally; they didn’t want to do it again and lose all credibility — and thus all potential partners who would help keep them in the club of elite nations.

Now, today, there aren’t really any major sets of entangled alliances to worry about. The Russians and Chinese don’t feel embarrassed here; most likely, they’re alarmed but also sneering in disgust at Iran’s ultimate weakness.

But it’s entirely possible that this develops into a dangerous pattern. Trump will continue building his Axis of Corruption; if he consolidates the Middle East, he’ll turn to Latin America and start building from El Salvador outward; maybe he’ll also start looking at the vast pit of opportunities for corruption in Africa later on. China and Russia may feel emboldened by temporary progress on Ukraine and Taiwan, but if Trump starts boxing them out of Africa because he’s willing to make the more corrupt deal, they may start to feel pressed.

And that’s the dangerous part. A pattern of costly minor losses could start threatening their credibility with any client state. At which point, they might feel like they need to make a stand somewhere. And just imagine if that mindset is setting in right around the time that a Democrat finally makes their way back into he White House, and is on the prowl to start fixing up Trump’s trail of atrocities, while also unifying his Axis of Corruption into a more formalized power bloc, redirecting all of his corruption into rebuilding America’s military industrial complex.

It’s all just speculation, a thought experiment. But this is what a recipe for a WWIII actually looks like. It doesn’t have to start “in the Middle East” just because some Boomer wrote a shitty book predicting that forty years ago and they all believed it. Mutually assured destruction keeps the dumbest escalation spirals from happening like that. Leaders find ways to back down from Cuban Missile Crises. What does happen is that leaders get emotionally tied up in this or that “lesson” that they think they’ve learned, and how it supposedly proves that they can’t afford to compromise this time.