As the war against Iran and Iranian military strikes against the Gulf sheikhdoms enter the end of the second week, it remains unclear which template will best fit its final outcome. Many have pointed to the obvious: Iran is not Venezuela.
The ruling architecture in Iran retains many features of a revolutionary regime. It is in the nature of such regimes that they engender deep fault lines and opposition to them is passionate and strong. But they also have equally deep roots of support. Iran has been successful in constructing an architecture that may not be open or inclusive, but is certainly participatory. Therefore, other templates and precedents for likely outcomes, some hope others dread, also crowd the discourse: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and others.
What kind of Iran will emerge from this conflict defines only one set of questions. What kind of region will do so is an even more pressing issue for us. Will the traditional Persian versus Arab divide now get further accentuated? Or the Shia-Sunni fault line? None of the options that arises is even remotely good for us. That is where the parallels with that landmark year — 1979 — come in. Then, as now, wider conflict had pressed even closer to and into South Asia. The overthrow of the Shah and the Shia revolution in Iran; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan; and a two-week-long takeover and siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist radicals — each of these transformed both us and our regional environment irrevocably and negatively.
The war in Iran has pushed the ongoing Afghanistan-Pakistan clashes away from the headlines but they are at the most intense that this ever-fractious relationship has been in 50 years. The long shadows of 1979 are visible in the Iranian missile and drone attacks on the Gulf Cooperation Council states and on the United Arab Emirates in particular — a reminder of how regional alliances shaped up as the Iran-Iraq war began within months of a revolutionary regime taking power in Tehran in 1979. The continued incarceration of Imran Khan in Pakistan recalls the major setback that the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was to Pakistan’s political class. But the central message of all this is also that conflict vectors are pressing closer to us much as they did in 1979.
But 1979 apart, 2026 evokes other memories and pointers to our current predicaments. Last month, in February, was the 250th anniversary of the appearance of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The sixth and final volume would appear 12 years later. The six-volume set captured the imagination of subsequent generations of readers because it appeared to extract from history those very values that nurture greatness and political achievement and, equally, how the absence or erosion of these values leads to the decline of once-great powers. In an age of empire, in the 19th and a good part of the 20th centuries, Gibbon’s work appeared to be history with real pedagogic value. Incidentally, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is also observing its 250th anniversary this year. But somehow Gibbon looking back at the fantasies and the fragilities of ancient Rome seems to approximate the ethos of 2026 more than Smith’s insistence on the inbuilt logic of free markets.
In a few months, the United States of America will observe and celebrate its semiquincentennial or the 250th anniversary of its founding and the end of its colonial status. At 250, is the American Republic now poised on the threshold of a new and even more powerful hegemonic phase as the protagonists of the Make America Great Again movement would like to believe? Or is it that an irreversible decline and decay have set in amidst an erosion of older values and an all-consuming hubris that is ultimately self-destructive, as Gibbon showed in the case of the ancient Romans?
This latest great power intervention in our immediate neighbourhood takes place amidst a general sense of the world lurching towards a kind of no man’s land in interstate behaviour: an absence of and disregard for international law, the lack of observance of even the minimum norms quite apart from the growing irrelevance of the United Nations. All this naturally engenders a sense of gloom and doom as equally a great deal of polemical dust and fury about the positions we have or have not taken. Has India’s traditional reticence on taking sides gone too far this time? Is there genuine geopolitical pragmatism at work here or a simple reluctance to be on the wrong side of the US, given the maverick and temperamental nature of its presidency? There is a final question which is being asked with a surprising frequency in different parts of the world: will 2026 be a future fable of US hubris or of US military power?
Amidst this gloom and doom, news from other parts of South Asia is surprisingly positive.
In Bangladesh last month, a difficult transition was accomplished smoothly and a new elected government has taken over. The elections may not have been inclusive —
the Awami League was not allowed to contest — but it was fair and open. Given Bangladesh’s recent history and the intensity of its ‘Monsoon Revolution’, this is not a small achievement. Similarly, in Nepal, within months of the Gen Z revolt and a violent insurrection, a smooth electoral process is leading to a new-look government that is quite different from the ones led by plutocrats who have dominated its polity so far. Both these cases had an earlier precedent in Sri Lanka. Its 2024 polls saw the election of a new government but the process also meant that the mass protests that had caused the then government to be swept away in 2022 had been channelised into an orderly process of significant political change.
These are not small positives. In the midst of so much turbulence and the haze that surrounds global politics, these serve as a useful pointer that a sharper policy focus on South Asia is one way of navigating through the storm we are in and emerging with at least some positive takeaways.
T.C.A. Raghavan is a former High Commissioner to Singapore and Pakistan
