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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/22/iran-politics-purity-absolutism-decline/
Iran's Long History of Purity Politics and National Failure
(Washington Post) Sohrab Ahmari - A half century under the Islamic Republic has left Iran more vulnerable than ever to foreign invasion and even internal dissolution. The Islamic Republic is in retreat on nearly every front. Its nuclear program lies in rubble. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Israel has degraded a ring of Iranian proxies. At home, the Tehran regime struggles to uphold Islamic morality norms. Iranians like me, who are part of the diaspora, can cheer the unraveling of a cruel and irrational order under the weight of its internal contradictions and external hubris. Iranians haughtily view such nations as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as their civilizational inferiors, yet they are the countries pulling ahead, achieving prosperity, stability, or, at the very least, normality. Despite its civilizational pedigree, Iran today is poor, repressive, dysfunctional, corrupt, and suffering one of the world's most severe cases of brain drain. Why do Iranians have so little to show for their last revolution? How has it ended up wasting 50 years? The answer lies, in part, in the absolutism of Iranian political culture and statecraft. A yearning for purity drives the country toward passionate idealism. After the 1979 revolution, Iran's purifying ambitions included cleansing the wider Middle East of what the Islamists deemed "pollutants" - the Jewish state, the U.S., and Arab regimes judged guilty of accommodating both. The Islamic Republic's leaders chanted "Death to America" at the global hegemon, while fielding an air force largely frozen in the 1970s. By contrast, comparable powers in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, sheltered their aspirations for development and independence within the reality principle and under Western alliances, even tutelage. The citizens of these countries today enjoy rising living standards, relative security, and passports that open access to many international destinations. The writer is the U.S. editor of UnHerd.