Giving an appearance of solidity

Mani Basharzad has an interesting CAPX piece on events in Iran. Worth reading.


Iranians are ready for their final battle

• The Islamic Republic was never a regional superpower; it was a regional thug
• Ordinary Iranians now have an opening to reclaim their future
• The 'no war with Iran' crowd fails to grasp that dictatorships do not change through shifts in opinion alone

For years, Iran’s Islamic Republic tried to sell a picture to the world, as George Orwell once put it, by ‘giving an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. Its negotiating technique was never complicated; it was simple stonewalling. Yet it is striking how different administrations interpreted that posture. Barack Obama saw them as complicated, sophisticated negotiators. Donald Trump thought they were fools. What happened on February 28 seemed to vindicate Trump. The tyrant who dreamed of total victory in a civilisational war fell on the very first day of it.