Some thoughts about Iran

Spengler wrote in part in April, 2015,

Demographically, Iran is in a position comparable to that of France in 1914: its military-age population is now approximately half that of three most important Sunni states combined (Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt). By 2020 the ratio will shift to only one-fourth, due to the collapse of Iran's fertility rate from 7 children per female in 1979 to only 1.6 in 2012. Its 125,000 Revolutionary Guards constitute the best fighting force in the region after overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Although Iran lacks a modern air force, it is the dominant land power in the Levant. Saudi Arabia's new Sunni coalition is an attempt to respond to Iran's depredations in Yemen and elsewhere, but the fractious and divided Sunnis are far from acting in concert. Pakistan is too preoccupied with India and its internal extremists to send soldiers on foreign adventures, and Turkey has no desire to commit to Saudi leadership in the region. Iran's strength will peak during the next several years, especially if the lifting of sanctions gives it the money and authority to modernize its armed forces.

...I do not propose to argue that belligerence is a mechanical function of demographics. The point, rather, is that all the factors that contributed to European bellicosity in 1914, and above all to German aggression in 1939, apply a fortiori to Iran: national messianism, the perception of historical injustice, the willingness to sacrifice arbitrary large numbers of lives, contempt for the humanity of neighboring states and–above all–the entirely rational perception that time is running out, and that an inevitable war with neighboring states will become impossible to win not very far into the future.

Even if the proposed agreement with Iran succeeded in suppressing development of nuclear weapons–in my view an unlikely outcome–it will have given Iran the resources to prepare for the final settling of accounts with the Sunnis on what ultimately will be an horrific scale. If European diplomats were deluded in their attempts to maintain the balance of power in the years before World War I, today's diplomats are mad to believe that a balance of power can be established between Iran and its Sunni neighbors. War is already joined in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Lebanon and Libya. War is not a choice. It is an event. If Iran were to triumph in the relative short-term, Sunni revenge would be all more terrible in the aftermath. A generation hence, a third of Iranians will be older than 60, the first time in all of history that a poor country will carry such an enormous burden of dependent elderly. The younger populations of its Sunni neighbors will overwhelm it. One has to go back in history before the Thirty Years War, perhaps to Tamerlane, to conceive of the carnage that this will cause. If Iran has nuclear weapons they will be used, and others will use nuclear weapons as well.

The balance of power in the Middle East fell apart when the United States forced a Shia majority government on Iraq through the elections of 2006. That was a catastrophic error. Nothing will quite restore it. But the next best thing, and the best alternative under the circumstances, is to suppress Iran's ambitions and reinforce the conservative Sunni states as a bulwark against chaos. I continue to believe, as I have argued since 2005, that an American preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities is the best course of action.

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