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........

© Dawn