The mutual hostility between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other since the 1978 Islamic Revolution and the establishment of the unique political system known as Vilayat-e Faqih or guardianship of Faqīh (an Islamic jurist) is almost half a century old. The new political order of Islamic democracy pivoted on Iranian nationalism posed an unprecedented challenge and perceived threat to the US and the regional states in its strategic orbit, including the petrodollar monarchies, for whom the very idea of representative rule based on the doctrine of justice, fairness, and resistance was anathema. 

But that is not the whole story. Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic, had another explanation. One night as he was walking the streets of Tehran that were heaving with the birth pangs of the Islamic Revolution, Foucault encountered a stranger who told him, “They (Americans) will never let go of us of their own will. No more than they did in  Vietnam.” 

Foucault wrote later in his famous essay What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?, “I wanted to respond that they are even less ready to let go of you than Vietnam because of oil, because of the Middle East. Today they seem ready, after Camp David, to concede Lebanon to Syrian domination and therefore to Soviet influence, but would the United States be ready to deprive itself of a position that, according to circumstance, would allow them to intervene from the East or to monitor the peace?” 

This much recapitulation of history becomes useful today, since the backdrop of the current showdown between the US President Donald Trump and Tehran remains quintessentially the same — the geopolitics of oil in........

© Eurasia Review