Iran’s emergence

Iran’s emergence

AN especially dangerous moment is opening up as the war in the Middle East transitions gears. The war launched by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu back in February has effectively ended. It devolved into a stand-off around Hormuz. What is opening up now is something new. And where this takes us is the big unknown. A big power is emerging to our west. Shackled by sanctions for decades, and threatened incessantly with war, Iran had been walled away from the rest of the world since 1979. But now that America has demonstrated its impotence by failing every military objective it had laid in the war since February, the country that was tied down behind a wall of sanctions is emerging as a big power in the region. In that sense, what is happening with Iran today is similar to what happened with China following détente. That country, too, was tied down and shackled and shunned by the global community ever since its revolution in 1949. Détente was its negotiated re-entry into the community of nations, and since then, the reforms undertaken within China propelled it to becoming a global power. Iran’s story differs from this in the sense that it is not going to be a global power. However, it is certainly going to emerge as a regional power in a very important region of the world. Second, Iran’s re-entry into the world community is going to be far more disorderly than that of China, mainly because it has had to fight its way out of the oblivion into which it was banished since the revolution of 1979. Short of an attempt to destroy its infrastructure, Iran’s emergence as a big power in the region is unstoppable. But emergence is now underway. It will be a very disorderly, and possibly violent, affair. A lot depends on which faction within Iran manages to rise to the top and take over decision-making. In China, an internal reckoning took place within the Communist Party first, before the reform-minded elements around Deng Xiaoping could rise to the top and take control of the post-opening up trajectory. That is a fraught history, from the Cultural Revolution and the purge of Deng in 1966, to the attempted coup by Lin Biao and his death in a plane crash in Mongolia in 1971, to the rise of Zhou Enlai and the so-called Gang of Four that was ranged against him and the eventual emergence of Deng as the successor, his second purge after Zhou Enlai’s death, and eventual restoration following Mao’s death in 1976. That is when China firmly embarked on its reformist course and broke its moorings to Mao’s thought. What followed was a carefully calibrated set of measures designed to open the Chinese economy up to the outside world — slowly and experimentally. That trajectory eventually propelled China towards becoming a global power, even if the process took many decades to complete. Iran is now at a similar point in its trajectory. Following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and its victory in the war against the Zionist alliance of America and Israel, it now has to go through the internal process of wrangling between rival factions, who must decide whether to remain wedded to the past or break out into a new future. This process will take years to unfold; what makes the Iranian trajectory different from the Chinese one is that in Iran the process will unfold in the context of a war. It is evident that within Iran there is a pragmatic faction that wants to see the war come to a close and the task of rebuilding the country to begin. But equally important, there is a faction that wants to press ahead with the fighting to deliver a humiliating defeat to the aggressors. This faction wants to do to the Americans in the Middle East what the Taliban, too, did to them in Afghanistan: force a hurried and disorderly flight from the region. The real game begins after that. Once the Americans leave the region, the Iranian military machine will turn its attention towards the Gulf monarchs. There will be reparations to pay. The bill for the war has already been served. In July 2025, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told the Financial Times that there could be no return to nuclear talks until Iran had been compensated for the damage caused by the June war. America scoffed at the demand. In March 2026, the demand was made again in the counter-offer that Iran made to the American proposal for talks. In April, they added an amount — $270 billion — while another figure of $300bn was written into the US-Iran MOU in June 2026. Nobody should be scoffing at the demand now. In addition to retaining control of Hormuz, Iran will press this demand in the days to come and it is the Gulf monarchs who will be left to pay the bill once the US decides the conflict no longer serves any of its interests. And once the Gulf monarchs settle this amount, another will surface. And then another. Iran’s emergence as a big power in the region is now unstoppable, short of an attempted catastrophic destruction of the entire country’s infrastructure by the Zionist alliance. This may be an unlikely outcome at this point in time, but it cannot be ruled out. The emergence as a big power is already underway. After consolidating their control on Hormuz, they will next turn their gaze to the riches of the Gulf monarchs. Those riches are now imperilled. China’s story is instructive here because it tells us that a post-revolutionary polity can manage its affairs to secure its re-entry into the global system of trade, finance and diplomacy to procure maximum benefits for itself. Whether Iran manages this moment similarly, or whether they decide to press their military advantage to the hilt and use their newfound centrality to avenge the past rather than build a future, is the big question hanging over all of us today. The writer is a business and economy journalist. khurram.husain@gmail.com X: @khurramhusain Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2026