CORONAVIRUS AND THE TRAGEDY OF IRAN

The Islamic Republic has missed out on global prosperity and is now in its decadent, late-Soviet stage

By Robert D. Kaplan

The Wall Street Journal
March 1, 2020

Nowhere other than in China is the coronavirus epidemic more severe than in Iran, where authorities confirmed Sunday that at least 54 people, including an 81-year-old former ambassador, have died from Covid-19. The real death toll may be considerably higher than that; on Friday, BBC Persian tallied 210 deaths from individual hospitals. Seven prominent officials have contracted the disease, including Vice President Masoumeh Ebtekar, who in her youth served as a spokesman for U.S. Embassy hostage-takers. Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi broke out in a sweat Feb. 24 as he assured the public that the epidemic was under control; the following day he announced he was sick.

President Hassan Rouhani has lamely insisted the epidemic is “one of the enemy’s plots.” His government, meanwhile, has inspired unprecedented apathy. Turnout in February’s parliamentary elections was the lowest in the Islamic republic’s history: 43% nationally and 25% in Tehran.

These are symptoms of a broader malaise. The world-wide material and human progress of the past few decades has largely left Iran behind, despite conditions that should encourage success. It sits at the crossroads of Eurasia and has a highly educated population of 85 million. Perhaps the greatest cultural, economic and geopolitical tragedy of our time is the near-absence of the Iranian nation in a world perfectly suited for its human potential.

History often moves on a hinge, and there were many hinges in the late 1970s. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi suffered from lymphatic cancer: that, and his prednisone regimen, adversely affected his judgment and decisiveness. President Jimmy Carter was prone to vacillating and misread the intentions of the Iranian clerical movement. Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein expelled the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from the Shiite holy city of Najaf, forcing Khomeini into exile in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château. There he sat cross-legged beneath an apple tree, rallied his followers, and methodically seduced the world media.

If these hinges had not worked together as they did, Iran today might look like South Korea—a vibrant, pulsing economic engine at the forefront of globalization. The Pahlavis might have gradually been reduced from absolute rulers to constitutional monarchs. Instead, Iran went backward politically, while barely crawling forward economically.

In 1977 Iran’s economy was 26% larger than Turkey’s, 65% larger than South Korea’s, and almost 5.5 times the size of Vietnam’s—all countries with somewhat larger populations. In 2017 on the eve of the Trump administration’s sanctions, Turkey’s economy was nearly 2.5 times the size of Iran’s, South Korea’s more than seven times, and Vietnam’s had gone from less than 20% to 70%, according to Nadereh Chamlou, a former World Bank official. While poverty has declined in Iran, 40% of the population earns less than $10 a day, which the bank classifies as “near poverty.”

What went wrong? “Domestic policies to promote entrepreneurship could have helped to capitalize on Iran’s young and educated population,” Ms. Chamlou concludes. “A foreign policy geared to regional and global integration could have permitted Iran to benefit much more from its unique economic geography.”

Imagine the geopolitical clout a stable Iranian constitutional monarchy would have today. Iran would enjoy strategic cooperation with Israel and stable, nonconfrontational relations with Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab world. Iran is economically, culturally and demographically suited to be at the crossroads of Central Asia: Only its relative backwardness and extreme religiosity prevent the secular, vodka-drinking leaders of former Soviet republics from being more attracted to it.

Instead, Iran is a pauperized and lonely nation. Its only allies in the Greater Middle East are the murderous proxy militias it supports and Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria. Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not Iran, now have de facto security relationships with Israel, though the Persians have had better relations with the Jews for millennia.

At the same time, the clerical regime has worked to obscure the memory of historic Persia, which preceded Islam by more than a thousand years, reducing a rich civilization to a bleak lumpen proletariat. Theocracy has promoted cynicism about religion. Mosque attendance has been down for years. As the French political scientist Olivier Roy puts it, “the political victory of Islamism is the end of true devotion.” Instead, crowds gather in Shiraz at the tomb of Hafez, the 14th-century poet of wine and romance. Many an Iranian bookshelf holds a volume of his sensuous verse, a quiet symbol of defiance against the Islamic authorities.

In the Islamic Revolution, one bureaucratic power structure—that of the shah—quickly gave way to another, that of the clerics. In this and other ways, the Islamic Revolution was far more sophisticated than the formless, leaderless uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring. But Iran is in the decadent phase of its revolution. Like the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, the regime seems stable yet is widely seen as illegitimate by the population, and thus is in danger of unraveling—perhaps with disastrous aftershocks.

The Soviet collapse under Mikhail Gorbachev led to social and economic upheaval, with violent ethnic conflicts on the Russian imperial periphery and the eventual re-establishment of dictatorship under Vladimir Putin. Iran, like late-Soviet Russia, has a deeply corroded political culture. Prompt establishment of constitutional order may be too much to hope for.

A regime collapse could give way to even more tyrannical rule by the Revolutionary Guards, and to uprisings in the Kurdish, Azeri, Turkman and Baluchi peripheries. Apart from the Revolutionary Guards, there would be no pre-existing bureaucratic power structure to replace the clerical one. Civil society has been decimated for decades. It’s not clear if any faction would have complete control of Iran’s formidable missile arsenal, which may extend to sites in Iraq and Syria.

The Trump administration is trying to bring Iran to its knees, but it needs to focus on what will come afterward. With a declining economy, a raging coronavirus epidemic, and an aged and ailing supreme leader, Iran in the coming years promises to be more interesting—and more dangerous—than at any time in recent memory.