Iran is big. At 636,000 square miles, it’s 20 times the size of Ireland. Its population is 90 million.
It has the world’s third largest proven oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves.
It has the potential to be an enormously wealthy and prosperous regional power, but first Britain, and then the United States, have prevented the country from reaching anything like its true potential.
What were the British doing there in the first place? Britain paid no attention to Persia, as it was then, until the middle of the 19th century. Then, as imperial Russia expanded its military conquests eastwards towards Siberia (and ultimately Alaska), adding more and more territories to its empire, Persia became a chess piece in what British diplomats called ‘The Great Game’.
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The Great Game was rivalry between the British and Russian empires, with the British manoeuvring to prevent any southern Russian movement from its central Asian lands towards India, and the Russians trying to find access to a warm water port (since all its other ports froze over for months each year) and the Indian ocean.
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