Listen to the article
The politics of intentional prevarication are part of the repertoire of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The simulation, the doublespeak, and the outright dissembling are essential keys to understanding the subtexts of its political strategizing. Observers have difficulty pinpointing the true motivations and sifting through the multilayered agendas.
However, the political gyrations and the state of zero gravity are based on the mental restrictions mandated by “Taqiyya” (concealment of one’s intentions) and the state of pervasive insecurity of the Islamic regime that was never able to address its endemic legitimacy crisis throughout 45 years of revolutionary rhetoric and stifling repression. The overlapping dynamics between the endogenous instability, the militarization of security and imperial politics are central to coming to terms with the new Cold War conflicts highlighted by the Iranian regime and its ilk.
The Iranian regime partakes of the systemic traits that characterize the rising totalitarian alliance structured around China, Russia, and its junior partners recruited erratically among rogue states (North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc.) and fake illiberal democratures (Islamist Turkey) experiencing an endemic crisis of legitimacy caused by the incremental liberalization, the strengthening of civil society platforms and the dissemination of democratic aspirations. These dictatorships are united around a set of common rules of governance: internal repression, dismantling of democratic institutions, rigged elections, international and regional politics of destabilization, militarization of security issues and dismissal of diplomatic arbitrations. Nonetheless, their Achilles heel lies at the crossroads between their structural political impairments, their hazardous imperial ventures, their economic shortcomings and entanglements and the rickety foundations of their projected illiberal international order. The big narratives are flawed and pointless, the overriding destabilization politics are erratic and non-performing, and the international power balances are quite asymmetrical and unable to uphold the attempted power projections (Ukraine, Gaza, South Lebanon).
The Iranian regime under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joined ventures with Hugo Chavez to create an international counter-order made up of political wastelands, organized criminality and ideological humbug recycling the old Cold War trash. The ideological throw-up is residual, and what’s left is organized criminality, fierce political repression and totalitarian regimentation in both countries, where the respective regimes are loathed. Oppositions are brutally squashed, organized criminality is well entrenched and in political control and trying to tie itself to an inchoative counter-political order unable to emerge and take shape.
The military cooperation between Iran and Russia, while complicating the military equation in Ukraine, undermines the chances of political cooperation with the US in the Middle East to deal with the cumulative imbroglios of the Gaza war and its sequels. This political trail is self-defeating by definition, since it proceeds through irreconcilable contradictions whose sole function is to procrastinate and set a process of continuous deferments until the course of military nuclearization is completed. Russia and Iran have found their common platform: sanctuarize their imperial politics, smother internal oppositions and operate destabilization politics in a discretionary manner. There is no need to find solutions for the war in Gaza, put Syria on the road of negotiated political settlement and reconstruction, or allow Lebanon to overhaul its state matrix intentionally subverted in the three aforementioned cases.
The purported obstructionism of Yahya Sinwar is part of the procrastination politics instrumented indefinitely by the Iranian regime. The eventual success of the truce depends on the unconditional liberation of the hostages, the shuttering of the extraterritorialities piloted by Iran in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, the internationalization of Gaza Strip governance, the rehabilitation of Lebanese sovereignty and the enforcement of international law in South Lebanon, the Bekaa area and North-East Syria. Reverting to October 7, 2023, is a political oxymoron that can never serve as a platform for working diplomacy. As long as the Iranian regime is in control of Palestinian politics, there is no chance for a diplomatic breakthrough. Iranian diplomacy is regulated by ideological strictures, imperial objectives and the vested interests of a clerical-military conglomerate that has no other compass but its survival, safeguarding its maneuverability and its colonies.
The same equation holds in Lebanon’s case. The destruction of Lebanese statehood is no coincidence, it’s a major springboard in the Iranian playbook of political subversion in the Middle East. The conditionalities set by Hezbollah are, by definition, antithetical to Lebanese sovereignty, to effective statehood, and to the ability of Lebanon to negotiate independently the conditions of a working truce based on the implementation of international resolutions (1949, 1701, 1559, 1680), the demilitarization of the borders and the dissolution of the illegal paramilitary formations, be they Lebanese (Hezbollah and its ancillaries) or Palestinian (Hamas, PLO, and rivals) and whichever grafted terrorist organizations. Iran and its associates are operating on the interfaces between destabilization politics and diplomatic meandering. Without initiating a steady and cumulative course of political disentanglement, this whole diplomatic jockeying is a mere bluff.
We have reached a watershed whereby diplomacy has to put an end to the empty gesticulations and come up with tangible results in terms of truce, hostage vs. prisoners swap, agreement on the future of Gaza’s governance, the prospects of a peace agreement and the internationalization of security issues on the Lebanese and Syrian borders with Israel. Otherwise, we are on the road to major war upheavals, geopolitical realignments and a new power relationship configuration.
