Quyền Lực Của Địa Lý PDF EPUB

" Quyền Lực Của Địa Lý PDF EPUB 🔙 Quay lại trang tải sách pdf ebook Quyền Lực Của Địa Lý PDF EPUB Ebooks Nhóm Zalo To the youth of Generation Covid who did their bit. Now is your time! CONTENTS Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Australia Iran Saudi Arabia The United Kingdom Greece Turkey The Sahel Ethiopia Spain Space Acknowledgements Bibliography Index INTRODUCTION The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; ‘The Second Coming’, W. B. Yeats I N THE MIDDLE EAST, THE VAST FORTRESS OF IRAN AND ITS nemesis, Saudi Arabia, face off across the Persian Gulf. South of the Pacific, Australia finds itself caught between the two most powerful nations of our time: the USA and China. In the Mediterranean, Greece and Turkey are in a contest that has roots going back to antiquity but could flare into violence tomorrow. Welcome to the 2020s. The Cold War era, in which the USA and the Soviet Union dominated the entire world, is becoming a distant memory. We are entering a new age of great-power rivalry in which numerous actors, even minor players, are jostling to take centre stage. The geopolitical drama is even spilling out of our earthly realm, as countries stake their claims above our atmosphere, to the Moon and beyond. When what was the established order for several generations turns out to be temporary, it is easy to become anxious. But it has happened before, it is happening now and it will happen again. For some time we have been moving towards a ‘multipolar’ world. Following the Second World War, we saw a new order: a bipolar era with an American-led capitalist system on one side, and on the other the communist system operated by what was in effect the Russian Empire and China. This lasted anything from about fifty to eighty years, depending on where you draw your lines. In the 1990s we saw what some analysts call the ‘unipolar’ decade, when American power went almost completely unchallenged. But it is clear that we are now moving back to what was the norm for most of human history – an age of multiple power rivalries. It’s hard to pin down when this began to happen; there is no single event that sparked a change. But there are moments when you catch a glimpse of something, and the opaque world of international politics becomes clearer. I had one such experience on a humid summer’s night in 1999 in Pristina, the ramshackle capital of Kosovo. The break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 had led to years of war and bloodshed. Now, NATO’s planes had bombed the Serbian forces out of Kosovo and its ground troops were waiting to enter the province from the south. During the day we heard rumours that a Russian military column had set off from Bosnia to make sure Russia maintained its traditional influence in Serbian affairs. For a decade the Russian bear had been out of the game, impoverished, uncertain and a shadow of its former self. It had watched haplessly as NATO ‘advanced’ on its western borders, as time and again the peoples of the nations it had subjugated voted in governments committed to joining NATO and/or the EU; and in Latin America and the Middle East its influence had waned. In 1999 Moscow had reached a decision vis-à-vis the Western powers – this far and no further. Kosovo was a line in the sand. President Yeltsin ordered the Russian column to intervene (although it’s thought the upcoming hardline nationalist politician Vladimir Putin had a role in the decision). I was in Pristina as the Russian armoured column rumbled down the main street in the early hours of the morning heading for Kosovo’s airport on the outskirts of town. I’m told President Clinton heard of their arrival, ahead of NATO’s troops, via my report ‘The Russians rolled into town, and back onto the world stage’. It was hardly Pulitzer Prize material, but as a first draft of history it did the job. The Russians had staked their claim to play a role in the biggest event of the year, and announced that the tide of history, which had been running against them, would now be challenged. In the late 1990s the USA was apparently unrivalled, the West seemingly triumphant in global affairs. But the pushback had started. Russia was no longer the fearsome power it had once been – now it was one among many – but the Russians would fight to assert themselves where they could. They would go on to prove it in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. Four years later I was in the Iraqi city of Karbala, one of the most holy places in Shia Islam. Saddam Hussein had been overthrown by the American- and British-led coalition, but the insurgency was getting under way. Under Saddam (a Sunni Muslim) many of the Shia ways of worship had been banned, including ritual self-flagellation. On a scorching-hot day I watched as more than a million Shia poured into Karbala from across the country. Many of the men were whipping their backs and cutting their foreheads until their whole bodies were covered in blood, which dripped down onto the streets turning the dust red. I knew that across the border to the east, Iran, the major Shia power, would now play every trick in the book to help engineer a Shia-dominated Iraqi government and use it to project Tehran’s power with even greater force westwards across the Middle East, connecting to Iran’s allies in Syria and Lebanon. Geography and politics made it almost inevitable. My take that day was along the lines of: ‘This looks religious, but it’s also political, and the waves from this fervour will ripple out as far as the Mediterranean.’ The political balance had changed, and the increasing reach of Iranian power would challenge US dominance in the region. Karbala provided the backdrop to begin to paint the picture. Sadly, one colour would dominate – blood-red. These were just two seminal moments that helped to shape the complicated world in which we find ourselves, as myriad forces push, pull and sometimes clash in what in previous times was called ‘the great game’. Both gave me a glimpse of the direction in which we were headed. It started to become even clearer as events unfolded in Egypt, Libya and Syria in the 2010s. Egyptian President Mubarak was deposed in a coup d’état by the military using violent street theatre to hide their hand; in Libya, Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown and then murdered; and in Syria, President Assad hung on by his fingertips until the Russians and Iranians saved him. In all three cases the Americans signalled they would not save the dictators they had done business with for decades. The USA slowly withdrew from the international scene during the eight years of the Obama presidency, a move continued under Trump for four years. Meanwhile, other countries such as India, China and Brazil began to emerge as new world powers, with rapidly growing economies, looking to expand their own global influence. Many people dislike the idea that the USA played the role of ‘world policeman’ in the post-Second World War era. You can make a case for both the positives and negatives of its actions. But, either way, in the absence of a policeman various factions will seek to police their own neighbourhood. If you get competing factions, the risk of instability increases. Empires rise, and they fall. Alliances are forged, and then they crumble. The post-Napoleonic Wars settlement in Europe lasted about sixty years; the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ lasted for just over a decade. It is impossible to know precisely how the balance of power will shift during the coming years. There are undoubtedly economic and geopolitical giants that continue to have huge sway in global affairs: the USA and China, of course, as well as Russia, the collective nations of Europe in the EU, the fast-growing economic power of India. But the smaller nations matter too. Geopolitics involves alliances, and with the world order currently in a state of flux, this is a time when the big powers need small powers on their side as well as vice versa. It gives these countries, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UK, an opportunity to strategically position themselves for future power. For the moment, the kaleidoscope is still being shaken and the pieces have not yet settled. In 2015, I wrote a book called Prisoners of Geography, in which I aimed to show how geography affects global politics and shapes the decisions that nations and their leaders are able to make. I wrote about the geopolitics of Russia; China; the USA; Europe; the Middle East; Africa; India and Pakistan; Japan and Korea; Latin America; and the Arctic. I wanted to focus on the biggest players, the great geopolitical blocs or regions, to give a global overview. But there is more to say. Although the USA remains the only country capable of projecting serious naval power into two oceans simultaneously, the Himalayas still separate India and China, and Russia is still vulnerable in the flatlands to its west, new geopolitical realities are emerging all the time, and there are other players worthy of our attention, with the power to shape our future. Like Prisoners of Geography, The Power of Geography looks at mountains, rivers, seas and concrete to understand geopolitical realities. Geography is a key factor limiting what humanity can and cannot do. Yes, politicians are important, but geography is more so. The choices people make, now and in the future, are never separate from their physical context. The starting point of any country’s story is its location in relation to neighbours, sea routes and natural resources. Live on a windswept island on the periphery of the Atlantic Ocean? You’re well placed to harness wind and waves. Live in a country where the sun shines 365 days a year? Solar panels are the way ahead. Live in a region where cobalt is mined? That could be a blessing and a curse. There remains among some people a disdain for this starting point as it is deemed deterministic. There has been talk of a ‘flat world’ in which financial transactions and communications through cyberspace have collapsed distance, and landscape has become meaningless. However, that is a world inhabited only by a tiny fraction of people who may well speak via video conference, and then fly over mountains and seas to speak in person; but it is not the experience of most of the other 8 billion people on earth. Egyptian farmers still rely on Ethiopia for water. The mountains to the north of Athens still hinder its trade with Europe. Geography is not fate – humans get a vote in what happens – but it matters. There are many factors that have contributed to what will be an uncertain and divided decade as we progress to a new era. Globalization, anti-globalization, Covid-19, technology and climate change have all had an impact, and all feature in this book. The Power of Geography looks at some of the events and conflicts that have emerged in the twenty-first century with the potential for far reaching consequences in a multipolar world. Iran, for example, is shaping the future of the Middle East. A pariah state with a nuclear agenda, it must keep its Shia ‘corridor’ to the Mediterranean open via Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut to maintain influence. Its regional rival Saudi Arabia, a country built on oil and sand, has always counted the USA as an ally. But as demand for oil declines and the USA becomes more energy independent, its interest in the Middle East will slowly wane. Elsewhere it is not oil but water that is causing turmoil. As the ‘water tower of Africa’, Ethiopia holds a crucial advantage over its neighbours, particularly Egypt. This is one of the key sites for the potential ‘water wars’ this century, but also shows the power of technology as Ethiopia uses hydroelectricity to change its fortunes. That is not an option in many parts of Africa, such as the Sahel, the vast scrubland at the southern edge of the Sahara, a war-torn region that straddles ancient geographical and cultural divisions, and where in parts Al-Qaeda and ISIS now hold sway. Many people will flee, some heading north towards Europe. What is already a major humanitarian crisis may worsen. As the gateway to Europe, Greece is one of the first countries to feel the effects of new waves of migration. Its geography has also placed it at the heart of one of the geopolitical flashpoints of the coming years: the eastern Mediterranean, where newly discovered gas fields are bringing this EU member to the brink of conflict with an increasingly aggressive Turkey. But while Turkey is flexing its muscles in the eastern Med, it has much wider ambitions. Its ‘neo Ottoman’ agenda derives from its imperial history and position at the crossroads of East and West. It aims to fulfil Turkey’s destiny to emerge as a major global power. Another nation that lost its empire, the UK, a group of chilly islands at the western end of the North European Plain, is still looking for its role. After Brexit, it may find one as a middle-ranking European power forging political and economic ties around the world. But the challenges it faces are internal as well as external, as it grapples with the prospect of an independent Scotland. To the south, Spain, one of Europe’s oldest nations, also faces the threat of break-up from regional nationalism. The EU cannot offer support to the Catalonian independence struggle; but rejection of a fledgling state could leave the door open to Russian and Chinese influence within Europe. Spain’s struggles epitomize the fragility of some nation states, and of supranational alliances, in the twenty- first century. However, perhaps the most fascinating development of current times is that our geopolitical power struggles are now breaking free of our earthly restraints and being projected into space. Who owns space? How do you decide? There’s never really a ‘final frontier’, but this is as close as it gets, and frontiers tend to be wild, lawless places. Above a certain height there’s no sovereign territory; if I want to place my laser-armed satellite directly over your country, by what law do you say I can’t? With multiple countries racing to be the pre-eminent power in space, and private companies entering the fray, the stage is set for a dangerous cutting-edge arms race, unless we can learn from past mistakes and accept the many benefits of international co-operation. But we begin down on earth, in a place which for centuries was considered isolated and unknown, but now, finding itself between China and the USA with the power to shape events in the Indo Pacific region, it is a key player in our story: the island continent, Australia. CHAPTER 1 AUSTRALIA ‘Play it tough, all the way. Grind them into the dust.’ Don Bradman, cricketer AUSTRALIA WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, BECAME A VERY big somewhere, and is now centre stage. How did that happen? The land ‘down under’ is an island, but an island like no other. It’s massive – so massive that it’s also a continent encompassing lush subtropical rainforest, baking-hot desert, rolling savannah and snow-covered mountains. Driving from Brisbane to Perth you cross one country, but a similar distance would be from London to Beirut via France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria. As for being in the middle of nowhere, well, from Brisbane looking north-east across the Pacific Ocean it is 11,500 kilometres to the USA, due east is South America 13,000 kilometres distant, and west from Perth across the Indian Ocean it’s 8,000 kilometres to Africa. Even Australia’s ‘neighbour’ New Zealand is 2,000 kilometres to the southeast and from there down to Antarctica is another 5,000 kilometres of water. Only when we look north do we see Australia’s true position in a geopolitical sense. There it sits, a territorially huge, Western-oriented, advanced democracy, and there above it is the world’s most economically and militarily powerful dictatorship – China. Put it all together and you see a national state/continent positioned right in the middle of the Indo-Pacific – the economic powerhouse of the twenty-first century. The story begins when the British decided to deport their convicts, wanted them as far away as possible, and then wanted nothing to do with them. Where better than the bottom of the world, a place from which they could never return? They were locked up and the key was thrown away. And yet eventually, as the faraway world changed, the prison bars of geography were bent, and Australia found itself a player on the stage of global politics. For a long time it was one hell of a hellish journey. In the quote at the start of this chapter Don Bradman may have been referring to playing England at cricket but his words are rooted in an Australian psyche that has been forged by the country’s geography. The popular concept of the egalitarian, straight-talking, no-nonsense, indomitable Aussie spirit may be a cliché, but it is also real. It has emerged from a vast, scorchingly hot land, much of which cannot be inhabited, out of which has sprung a flourishing modern society that has shifted from being virtually monocultural to one of the most multicultural in the world. Now Australia looks around at its neighbourhood and wonders what role it should play, and whom it should play it with. When it comes to foreign policy and defence, a country’s starting point is not what it intends to do but what it is capable of, and that is often limited by geography. Australia’s size and location are both a strength and weakness. They protect it from invasion but also held back its political development. They make it necessary to have extensive long-distance trade links, which in turn requires a strong navy to ensure the sea lanes are kept open. And Australia is isolated by distance from its key allies. Australia only became an island about 35 million years ago after it broke off from Antarctica and drifted northwards. It is currently on a collision course with Indonesia, but inhabitants of both countries should not be too alarmed as it’s moving at seven centimetres a year and they have several hundred million years to brace for impact. Comprising 7.5 million square kilometres, Australia is the world’s sixth-largest country. The bulk of modern Australia consists of six states; the largest is Western Australia, which accounts for a third of the continent and is bigger than every country in Western Europe combined. Then, in terms of size, come Queensland, South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and the island of Tasmania. There are two main territories, the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory, and numerous minor territories including the Cocos Islands and Christmas Island. Life in Australia presents many challenges. For starters, between becoming an island and the arrival of humans (about 60,000 years ago), there was ample time for the singularity of Australia’s animal life to develop. Given that so much of it appears to want to bite, sting, peck or poison you it’s a wonder that within 30,000 years of showing up humans had spread out across the whole continent. More challenging to avoid are the land and climate. Much of the terrain consists of vast, flat, arid plains, and only 6 per cent of it is above 600 metres in elevation. As a continent it experiences extreme diversity in its climate and topography, from deserts to tropical forests to snow-capped mountains. But the majority of it is taken up by what is known as the Outback, covering about 70 per cent of Australia, much of it uninhabitable. The great plains and deserts of the interior, where summer temperatures commonly reach 38ºC and there is little water to be found, stretch out over vast distances with no relief and no one to come to your aid if you get into trouble. In 1848 an attempt to cross the entire continent from east to west, beginning inland from Brisbane across to Perth, ended in failure when the expedition leader, Ludwig Leichhardt, and his team – a party of seven men, including two Aboriginal guides, fifty bullocks, twenty mules, seven horses and a mountain of equipment – simply vanished. The great Outback holds many secrets, among them Leichhardt’s fate. They are still looking for him to this day. Over millennia this geography has dictated where human activity has taken place. While the Aboriginals conducted the ritual ‘walkabout’ in the Outback, the European settlers tended to cling to the shoreline, a practice continued today. There’s a crescent-shaped belt of populated areas starting in Brisbane halfway up the east coast; it wraps itself around the coastline, running through Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and down to Adelaide on the south coast. Along the crescent heading west are the suburbs and satellite towns, which extend inland for about 320 kilometres before petering out once you are over the mountains and heading into the extreme remote regions. Right across on the west coast is Perth, and way up north is Darwin, but here also the populations are tied to the coastal areas. It’s likely to stay that way. Much of the Australian Outback is uninhabitable; the majority of Australia’s population is located in the south-east of the country along the coastline. A century ago the founder of geography at Sydney University, Griffith Taylor, caused outrage when he argued that due to Australia’s topography its population would be restricted to about 20 million people by the year 2000. He dared to state that the Australian desert was ‘almost useless’ for permanent settlement, a sentiment considered unpatriotic. ‘Jeremiah!’ howled the press, ‘Environmental determinism!’ grumbled the politicians, who preferred an American ‘sea to shining sea’ narrative of constant expansion. He was right; they were wrong. A hundred years on Australia’s population is still only 26 million. Even now you can fly the 3,200 kilometres from Sydney up to Darwin, or across to Perth, without seeing a town. Almost 50 per cent of the people live in just three cities – Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. By no coincidence, this is the location of the Murray–Darling River Basin. The Murray–Darling River Basin supported the early European settlements in south-east Australia. Most of the country’s rivers are seasonal in their flow, and so water links were never a major part of its development. The annual discharge of all the rivers on the continent amounts to less than half of that just from the Yangtze in China. If we exclude Tasmania, the only Australian rivers that have a permanent flow are in the eastern and south-western regions. The two biggest are the Murray River and its tributary, the Darling River. Fed by melting snows in the Australian Alps, the Murray has enough volume to run uninterrupted for 2,500 kilometres to the southern coast. Parts of it are navigable and it is the jewel in the crown of the Murray-Darling Basin. However, shipping cannot enter from the sea, which limits its ability to move goods. It was used in the nineteenth century to support upriver trade, but even these smaller vessels had problems with the lack of rainfall, and some would become stuck upstream on dried-out tributaries. Nevertheless, the Murray-Darling system contains the fertile lands which have fed and watered generations of Australians. Without it the first settlers would barely have got off the beach. It’s worth contrasting the history of Australia with that of another colonial experiment – the USA. It too grew from settlements on a fertile east coast and then pushed inland. But, once over the Appalachian mountain range, the fledgling nation expanded into the greatest river system in the world, situated in some of the most fertile land anywhere – the Mississippi River Basin. In Australia a similar-sized region contained next to nothing to sustain transport, farming and permanent settlement, and was far more isolated from the international trading system than was America: it was 19,000 kilometres back to the UK, whereas the thirteen colonies that became the USA were 5,000 kilometres away from Europe. It’s a common misconception that Britain’s Captain Cook ‘discovered’ the continent in 1770. Leaving to one side the problematic term ‘discovered’, the first recorded landing was in 1606 when Willem Janszoon and the crew of the Dutch sailing ship Duyfken went ashore in northern Australia. Janszoon thought he was on the island of New Guinea and, after a hostile encounter with locals, soon departed. Several more European expeditions came and went but no one bothered to explore inland. By the time Cook showed up it was clear that the fabled terra australis incognita had been found. The term, meaning ‘unknown southern land’, originates from the ruminations of the Greek map maker Claudius Ptolemy in about 150 CE. He reasoned that if the world was a sphere, and on the top of it was the land he knew of, it followed that to prevent it from toppling over there had to be land underneath. Some of this was spot on. Australia is still thought of as ‘down under’ in Europe. Cook’s maps were of course more up to date than those of Ptolemy. He became the first European to make land on the eastern coast. He went ashore in Botany Bay, now part of Sydney, and stayed for seven days. At the time his crew’s first encounters with the people who lived there must have seemed like minor incidents; in hindsight they were momentous and a harbinger of what would follow. Writing in his ‘Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks during Captain Cook’s first voyage in HMS Endeavour in 1768–71’, Cook’s chief scientific officer ruminated on this clash of civilizations and the differences between them: ‘Thus live these, I had almost said happy, people, content with little, nay almost nothing; far enough removed from the anxieties attending upon riches, or even the possession of what we Europeans call necessaries . . . From them appear how small are the real wants of human nature, which we Europeans have increased to an excess which would certainly appear incredible to these people could they be told it.’ This encounter was not enough to prevent Banks from later recommending that Botany Bay should be the location for Britain to establish a penal colony, the idea being both to alleviate its appalling prison overcrowding and to send the felons to a place from which they might never return. The strategic implications of planting the British flag 17,000 kilometres from the centre of the empire were also considered. Ships were readied, convicts assembled, supplies loaded, and the First Fleet set sail from Portsmouth on 13 May 1787, reaching Botany Bay on 24 January 1788. The eleven ships carried about 1,500 souls, 730 convicts (570 men and 160 women) and the rest free persons, mostly navy personnel. After two weeks the man in charge, Governor Arthur Phillip, decided the location was totally unsuitable for settlement and moved lock, stock and convict a few kilometres north to what became Sydney harbour. On the beach of this new location, in this land now claimed for the British Crown, he gave a speech in which, as recorded by a naval surgeon, George Worgan, ‘The Governor gave strict orders that the natives should not be offended or molested on any account . . . they were to be treated with friendship.’ It didn’t turn out that way. Governor Phillip was dealing with the Eora and Darug peoples in the region around Sydney. After first contact the early interactions were based on trade, but what the Eora and Darug didn’t know was that these new, strange people in their midst had come not for trade but for their land. Although many generations thought of the Aboriginals as a single people, there are numerous diverse groups and languages throughout the country, for example the Murri from Queensland, the Nunga from the south of South Australia and the Palawa from Tasmania, all of which can be broken into subgroups. In 1788 the populations are thought to have totalled between 250,000 to 500,000, although a few estimates go higher. In the following decades it’s estimated that at least tens of thousands of them died in what became a frontier war lasting into the twentieth century. As the settlements around Sydney expanded, and others grew in Melbourne, Brisbane and Tasmania, so did the ‘Frontier Wars’, as they became known. Historians argue over the levels of violence, but it’s estimated that about 2,000 colonists and many times that number of Aboriginals were killed, the latter suffering numerous massacres. It is a sorry tale of one side seeing the other as having no rights; indeed, many colonists regarded the Aboriginals as barely human. As early as 1856 the devastation of cultures had been articulated in a searing article written by the journalist Edward Wilson in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper: In less than twenty years we have nearly swept them off the face of the Earth. We have shot them down like dogs . . . and consigned whole tribes to the agonies of an excruciating death. We have made them drunkards, and infected them with diseases which have rotted the bones of their adults, and made such few children as are born amongst them a sorrow and a torture from the very instant of their birth. We have made them outcasts on their own land, and are rapidly consigning them to entire annihilation. The bleakness of their existence continued right through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, long after the killing stopped. From 1910 Aboriginal children from the surviving nations were taken from their families and raised either in the homes of white families or in state institutions; in both cases the idea was to force assimilation. The practice was only halted in 1970, by which time the ‘Stolen Generation’ numbered over 100,000. The right to vote in national elections had only been given them in 1962, and it took until 1967 for the Aboriginal people to be formally acknowledged as part of the Australian population. A referendum changed the constitution to allow them to be counted in the census and thereby gain greater access to state resources. As the civil rights activist Faith Bandler put it in 1965, ‘Australians have to register their dogs and cattle, but we don’t know how many Aborigines there are.’ The referendum was passed with a 90 per cent majority on a 93 per cent turnout. The vote is regarded by many as a turning point, even if the short-term practical effects were limited. It revealed a desire to extend equality, although there was a long way to go in a battle that is still being fought today. Aboriginal men and women are graduating from universities, entering the middle class and populating all aspects of modern Australia; however, their life expectancy is lower than the national average and incidents of chronic illnesses are higher, as are infant mortality rates and imprisonment. Unemployment, alcoholism and illness are rife among some communities, together with psychological problems partially brought on by a sense of alienation, accentuated by the drift from rural areas to the towns and cities beginning in the 1970s. There was a gradual change in attitudes towards the peoples of the ‘First Nations’ charted partially by symbolic moves. In the 1990s the name of the massive rust-coloured desert monolith known as Ayers Rock was changed to Ayers Rock/Uluru to acknowledge its original name in the language of the Anangu people, for whom it is a sacred site, and in 2002 was switched to Uluru/Ayers Rock. In 2008, recognizing the ongoing responsibility for more than 200 years of devastation, repression and negligence, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology to the Aboriginal peoples for the abuses they had suffered. Despite all the deprivations, the population grew during the twentieth century. Estimates in the 1920s put it as low as 60,000, whereas now there are about 800,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (who are ethnically different from Aboriginals), centred mainly in Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Most of the hundreds of languages are lost, and of those which survive there are perhaps 50,000 people who can speak at least one. The drive across the continent by the settlers who caused this havoc was slow but relentless. As more shiploads of people, mostly convicts, arrived from the UK the white population increased by several thousand each year. By 1825 explorers had already breached what was considered an impassable barrier – the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney – and discovered that beyond them lay the great Outback. The population then was 50,000; by 1851 it had grown to about 450,000, by which time penal transportation had dropped significantly as many of the newcomers were immigrants seeking a new life in a new world. They’d arrived in time for the first Australian gold rush, which began to transform Australian society as hundreds of thousands of people came from abroad to try their luck. Most of them were from Britain, but also China, North America, Italy, Germany, Poland and a smattering of other countries. Thanks to the ‘gold generation’, Australia’s population not only rocketed to 1.7 million in the early 1870s, but it gradually started to become more ethnically and culturally diverse. The madness of the early gold rush meant that the first few waves crashing onto Melbourne’s shores consisted mostly of young single men. They gave rise to a ‘Wild West’ atmosphere but gradually prosperity led to a change in the nature of immigration, attracting skilled craftsmen, traders and professionals such as accountants and lawyers who began to arrive with their families. They all contributed to the emerging Australian character, but there is a theory that ‘the diggers’, as the prospectors were known, forged the resourcefulness, can-do attitude and friendliness for which Australians are known. The Old-World social niceties meant little up in the rugged, muddy prospecting regions, and the independent, yet simultaneously collegiate, spirit of the diggers contributed to an identity with less respect for British colonial authority than before. As it approached the twentieth century Australia was becoming a modern country, albeit comprised of colonies that were almost like separate countries; they had few formal relations with each other and were often preoccupied with their own economic and political systems. The distances between the settlements had proved a challenge. The rivers, as we’ve seen, were not suited to trade and transport, and so initially, in order to move anything by land humans usually had to drag it over rough tracks as there were few beasts of burden available. The early transport systems concentrated on each individual port sending goods inland, or back out to the mother country, the UK. As each region was a separate colony, connecting them along the coastline was not a priority; so these early ‘roads’ led inland but not, at least for significant distances, along the coast. With such limited options, each colony continued to develop as a separate entity. In the second half of the nineteenth century a fledgling railway system began to emerge, some of which linked the coastal towns and paved the way for a connected economy. As the transport and communication systems developed, so did the idea of the different regions coming together as a federation. A referendum was held in 1899 and passed but with significant opposition, and on 5 July 1900 the British Parliament passed the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 which was signed by Queen Victoria four days later; on 1 January 1901 the six British colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Half a million people lined the streets of Sydney to celebrate. Australia had not become a sovereign state, only a ‘self-governing colony’ (it wasn’t until 1986 that full independence was declared via the Australia Act) but a great leap forward in self-determination had been achieved. By this time the population was past the 3 million mark and Australia had started to become an urban society, with Sydney and Melbourne each boasting populations of just under 500,000. The majority of immigrants arriving were still from the UK, but wherever they came from almost all were white. One of the first laws the new government passed was the Immigration Restriction Act, which became known as the ‘White Australia’ policy. The wording of the act is not explicit on the page but is clearly racist in intent, barring ‘Any person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of the officer a passage of fifty words in length in an European language directed by the officer’. In the extraordinary circumstance that, say, a would-be immigrant from China could write out fifty words dictated in Portuguese, he or she could always be asked to do the test again, this time in, let’s say, Flemish. As stated, the language was chosen ‘by the officer’, and the application of the test was usually to put a legal stamp on a decision already made. Most people refused entry were non-white, but the act could also be used to deport immigrants who were not naturalized if they were jailed for a violent crime. None of this fitted with the words of the popular song ‘Advance Australia Fair’, played at the inauguration ceremony for the new commonwealth and later to become the national anthem: We’ve boundless plains to share; With courage let us all combine To Advance Australia fair. The overwhelming political and popular opinion was that the boundless plains should only be shared with white people, preferably British white people. The new law was aimed mostly at Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians and anyone else from the wider neighbourhood who might not only come and undercut wages, but also dilute the racial ‘purity’ of Australia. The White Australia policy continued up into the 1970s. At all times it was viewed extremely negatively by Australia’s Asian neighbours, especially those emerging from the colonial era. The post-Second World War period saw the ‘Ten Pound Poms’ arrive in droves. Australia still needed to grow its workforce, and so for just £10 Britons could sail to Australia to start a new life. The full fare was about £120, almost six months’ wages for many working-class people, and the offer was one that many in drab, post war, class-bound Britain could not refuse. Between 1947 and 1982 more than 1.5 million set out for ‘down under’, opportunity, sunshine and at first, frequently – hardship. My aunt, uncle and four cousins were among them. Ann was a nurse and Dennis worked in a shoe shop. Sailing from Southampton docks in 1972, they swapped Leeds for Melbourne and (after moving from a hostel) relatively low wages for a significantly higher standard of living. They and the others were ‘Poms’, shortened from pomegranate, sometimes spelt pommygrant, which was close enough to the word ‘immigrant’ to be incorporated into Aussie slang. During this period, ‘Brits’ were still the main source of labour, but gradually the demographic of the country began to change as world events drove increasing numbers of Europeans to Australia, opening the floodgates and gradually relaxing the White Australia policy. Italians, Germans and Greeks arrived to join the communities established in the late 1900s. Following on were many Hungarians who had escaped after the 1956 revolution, then Czechs after the Soviet occupation in 1968. Gradually people from South America and the Middle East came, many fleeing persecution. In the 1970s thousands of ‘boat people’ from Vietnam were allowed in, and in the 1990s refugees from the Yugoslav Wars. This resulted in a pronounced cultural shift from what was essentially a British, or perhaps Anglo-Celtic, society to a multicultural country. It was a remarkably rapid conversion into what we see now in modern Australia – a nation of people whose heritage can be traced back to 190 countries. In the 2016 census the proportion of the total population born abroad was 26 per cent, but where they come from shows the changes in policy, attitudes and global economics since the start of the twentieth century. Of the foreign-born the British were still the most numerous, but in the top ten were New Zealanders (8.4 per cent), Chinese (8.3 per cent), Indians (7.4 per cent), Filipinos (3.8 per cent) and Vietnamese (3.6 per cent); five of the top ten nationalities are Asian. This is a long way from 1901, even further from 1788, and not just in terms of time. As in every other country racism and inequality still exist, but the change was summed up in a speech by Kevin Rudd in 2019: ‘Our definition of Australia’s national identity must be grounded in the ideals, institutions and conventions of our democratic society, not in its racial composition.’ The country remains an attractive destination for outsiders, including migrant workers and refugees. It is so popular, and people are so desperate to get there by any means, that successive governments this century have enacted tough laws against those who seek to enter illegally. In 2001 the Australian navy began intercepting boatloads of refugees and migrants. The boats are either forced to turn round, taken to a third country or, if people are allowed on board, they are transferred to the remote Papua New Guinea islands of Nauru and Manus. The policy was halted in 2008 but resumed in 2012. Since then well over 3,000 people have been detained. Some have returned to their own countries, while several hundred have been granted refugee status in the USA. In 2020 about 290 remained in what Australia calls ‘processing centres’ on the islands where they have been subjected to violent attacks by local people. The policy has been vilified as inhuman and illegal by human rights activists, but it is still popular enough with the Australian electorate for it to remain in place. The number of boats arriving has declined, and the number of people arriving by air, who then claim asylum, has increased. They come because to a great extent modern Australia remains the ‘lucky country’. The phrase comes from a 1964 book of the same name by Donald Horne. He meant it somewhat sarcastically, but it has stuck as a positive description and with reason. The land ‘down under’ is among the richest in the world and looks destined to remain that way. It has abundant natural resources including many that are perfectly suited for selling around the world. Its wool, lamb, beef, wheat and wine industries remain world leaders, it holds a quarter of the world’s uranium reserves, the largest zinc and lead deposits, it is a major producer of tungsten and gold, has healthy deposits of silver and it is still a major producer of coal. And there we see how the country is caught between an Ayers Rock and a hard place. Australia is acutely aware that fossil fuels are driving climate change. Global warming was a significant factor in the devastating wildfires of 2019/20 which were exacerbated by record temperatures and water shortages. The direct human fatality toll was in the dozens, but thousands of koalas, one of the symbols of the country, were killed along with hundreds of thousands of other creatures. The flames did not reach the urban areas, but clouds of acrid smoke hung over Canberra causing the capital’s air quality temporarily to sink to one of the lowest in the world. Flakes of white ash moved across the land like warm snow and travelled on as far as New Zealand. On 4 January 2020 Sydney was one of the hottest places in the world – the temperature was measured at 48.9ºC. Who can live in such conditions? At the moment the answer is 25 million people, but if the Australian Bureau of Statistics medium growth prediction is correct then in 2060 the answer will be about 40 million. If the climate-change modelling is correct Australia will continue to suffer record-shattering heatwaves, drought and forest fires, creating a scorched, uninhabitable landscape. The more the suburbs of the great cities sprawl out into the countryside, the greater the number of people at risk. This means Australians are likely to continue to cling to the coastline, creating ever more densely packed urban areas, even as sea levels may be rising. The country could require a slow retreat from some areas and a long-term building plan for locations designated as lower-risk. Australia has an abundance of one potential energy source, sunshine, but a lack of another – water. Hydroelectric power generation is restricted because of the mostly flat topography of the regions through which its rivers flow, and because of their variable volume of water. The exception is in Tasmania, where the terrain and climate have already allowed a hydroelectric industry to flourish. Water scarcity, already an issue, may become a top priority, and the nation will have to have a frank discussion about sustainability. That will include talking about coal. Given that all the states have coal mines, and that the AU$69.6-billion industry employs tens of thousands of people, that won’t be easy. Before he became prime minister, Scott Morrison caused uproar in parliament when he brandished a large lump of coal and exhorted the House: ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.’ Australia could close down its industry tomorrow and not significantly reduce global pollution – it is part of a problem that will not be resolved without each country working to reduce their carbon footprint – but it would have a profound effect on the Australian economy. As such, coal is likely to remain king for years to come even as the country looks to alternative sources of energy. Access to energy is a major concern for Australia – and, given Australia’s geography and location, it’s unavoidably linked with security issues. Economically, modern Australia is increasingly tied into its location. Its politicians declare it is part of the Asia-Pacific Community, but tend to shy away from the debate about whether the Community considers it is part of them. In its ‘near abroad’ this former colony and ally of the West is the main power and is respected, but not loved; in the wider region it is one of several major powers and a potential ally or enemy. Strategically, most of Australia’s focus is to its north and east. As a first line of defence it looks up to the South China Sea area, below that it views the Philippines and the Indonesian archipelago, and then the seas between it and Papua New Guinea. To its east it focuses on the islands of the South Pacific such as Fiji and Vanuatu. It does have some advantages: Australia would be difficult to invade – not impossible, but difficult. The bulk of any invasion force would have to conduct amphibious assaults, and because of the islands to Australia’s east and north the probable lines of attack are narrow. Once ashore it would not be feasible to occupy the whole continent, and places of value would be fiercely contested. If enemy troops landed in the Northern Territory they would still be 3,200 kilometres from Sydney, the supply lines would be a nightmare, and getting there would be difficult. However, it is vulnerable to blockade. Most of its imports and exports flow through a series of narrow passageways to the north, many of which could be closed in times of conflict. They include the Malacca, Sunda and Lombok Straits. The Malacca Strait is the shortest route from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Just this one passageway sees 80,000 vessels pass through it each year, carrying about a third of the world’s traded goods including 80 per cent of the oil heading for Northeast Asia. If these straits were closed then alternative routes would have to be found; for example the oil tankers feeding Japan could try to sail further south, cut across the north of Australia, past Papua New Guinea and out into the Pacific. This would add hugely to transport costs but would keep Japan and Australia open for business. In the event of a successful blockade Australia would quickly be in a state of energy crisis. It holds about two months’ oil supply in its strategic reserves onshore, and at any one time there’s another three weeks’ worth or so making its way there on tankers. Canberra took advantage of the oil price crash in 2020 to top up with a few extra days’ supply, but stored it in the USA’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve stockpiles and so might not be able to access it. Australian defence strategy is partially focused on this scenario. It has ships and submarines which could be used to protect convoys, and planes capable of long-range maritime patrols. It has six air force bases north of the 26th parallel, three fully staffed and three mothballed for emergencies. The 26th parallel is the line dividing the north and south of the continent. It begins about 100 kilometres north of Brisbane and runs across the continent to Shark Bay on the Indian Ocean. Only 10 per cent of Australia’s population lives above the line and there are theories, never acknowledged, that, in the event of invasion from the north, they would be abandoned as the military concentrated on defending the main population centres. But that is a theoretical last-ditch scenario, one the government seeks to avoid by having what it hopes is a robust ‘forward defence’ posture in the shape of the airbases and the navy. However, given the size of the country, its population and its middle-ranking wealth, Australia cannot operate a navy capable of protecting all of the sea approaches to its shores. Simply patrolling the seas closest to Australia is a challenge. The mainland has 35,000 kilometres of coastline and there’s an additional 24,000 kilometres of island coastline to keep an eye on. To deter any of the above scenarios from taking place, as well as investing heavily in its navy Australia has concentrated on diplomacy, choosing its allies carefully. Canberra has always had an eye on who is the dominant sea power. When it was Great Britain, the old imperial power was the most important ally, but when it became the USA it was obvious whom to choose as the new number one political, military and strategic priority. When the First World War broke out, Australians rallied to the cause in huge numbers. But the Second World War was the turning point in the military relationship between Australia and the UK. It was obvious the British could not defend Australia, and, as the tide of war turned, it became ever clearer who the world’s dominant power would be in the aftermath. As early as December 1941, following Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister John Curtin spelt it out in an article titled ‘The Task Ahead’: ‘The Australian Government, therefore, regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies’ fighting plan. Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’ With characteristic Aussie bluntness he laid out the realpolitik of the message: ‘we know too that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on.’ It was a watershed moment – the Yanks were coming. The advance parties were already on the ground, and by mid 1943 150,000 US military personnel were in Australia, the bulk of them in Queensland, where General Douglas MacArthur established his headquarters. Ships from the US navy were anchored in Sydney and Perth, and ‘made in America’ put down roots. Coca-Cola, hamburgers, pizza, hotdogs, Hollywood films and American consumer goods began to displace the more conservative British based imports of previous decades. The war also came to Australia. On 19 February 1942 the Japanese air force unleashed a devastating attack on the Allied military port of Darwin using the same aircraft carrier group which had attacked Pearl Harbor ten weeks previously. A month before, the Japanese had already launched an invasion of New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea/part of Indonesia), and they quickly took over the north of the massive island. The land mass is the second-largest island in the world and it is directly above Australia. Had it fallen it could have been used either as the launchpad for an invasion of Australia, or to blockade it. However, a planned amphibious landing at Port Moresby was thwarted by the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese plan was turned against them and New Guinea was used as the springboard for General MacArthur’s retaking of the Philippines as part of the island campaign leading to the defeat of Japan. Since then Australia’s relationship with America has been similar to the one it had with the British. Australia contributes parts of its military (especially its well-trained Special Forces) and the US navy keeps the international sea lanes open, and holds a nuclear umbrella above the Australians. Canberra sent troops to fight in the Korean War (1950–53), Vietnam (1955–75), the first Gulf War (1990–91) and the invasion of Iraq (2003), just as they had during both world wars. The Americans meanwhile remain resolute in their determination to maintain their control as the greatest sea power. They have established a major base in Darwin. It hosts 2,500 US Marines, not enough to keep the Chinese military awake at night, perhaps, but more than enough to send the signal that the Americans are in town, and willing to defend Australia. For now . . . And there’s the dilemma for Australia. With the rise of China, the USA is having to make choices in the West Pacific region. It can resist China’s push to control what Beijing sees as its backyard, it can attempt to create an understanding of regional spheres of influence, or it can make a long, slow retreat, pulling in its horns all the way back to California. After all, between there and the Chinese coast is 11,000 kilometres of ocean. American military and diplomatic officials assure Australia that the alliance is rock-solid, but President Trump made Australia nervous, often giving the appearance that he preferred authoritarian strongmen from tinpot dictatorships such as North Korea to long-standing democratic allies. The change in president brought a change in tone. President Biden’s victory in November 2020 was followed a month later by a stark warning from the chiefs of the US Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard that, of all the world powers, China represents the most ‘comprehensive, long-term’ threat to America and its allies. More alarm bells had begun to ring in early 2020 as the Chinese started to scope out Papua New Guinea’s Daru Island following an agreement to build a huge fisheries complex there. The island is just 200 kilometres from the Australian mainland, and while the seas around it are not renowned for their commercial fishing potential, Chinese trawlers are known to be frequently used as spy ships. Perhaps this is a simple commercial enterprise; then again, perhaps the port will be built to accommodate Chinese warships. It’s an example of the constant vigilance Australia must now keep when it comes to China’s activities in the region, and why it must also constantly assess the USA’s commitment to joint security. Australia knows it is probable that by the mid-century the USA will not outspend China on defence. The difference between the Cold War and now is stark: a declining Soviet Union fell massively behind the USA in economic terms and eventually could not compete in the arms race. China is a rising power expected to exceed America’s GDP by mid-century, if not sooner. America’s decisions on these issues will impact on Australia’s ‘China choice’. We tend to think of China and Australia as being relatively close to each other, and this is probably for two reasons. Australia is so far from any other major land mass east, west, or south that we tend to look north on the map, see China, and mentally associate the two. But the classic map most of us use, the Mercator, distorts our view as it portrays a curved distance on a flat surface. If you want to see how much Mercator influences our idea of where things are take a look at the Waterman maps, which take a little getting used to but offer another perspective. We never think of China as being geographically close to Poland, but Beijing is as close to Warsaw as it is to Canberra. This is why China has a constant 360-degree concentration on the map, while Australia looks mostly north. Put simply, China has more choices than Australia. When it comes to China, Australia must walk a difficult line between economic interests, defence strategy and diplomacy. China is by far its biggest trading partner, although levels of investment fluctuate sometimes in line with those of diplomatic warmth. In recent years about 1.4 million Chinese arrived annually for holidays, and Chinese students made up 30 per cent of people from abroad studying in the country. China buys almost a third of Australia’s exported farm produce, including 18 per cent of its beef exports and half its barley. It is also a major market for Australia’s iron ore, gas, coal and gold. But China’s wider interests in the region, its attempts to expand its territorial claims and influence, don’t always align with Australia’s. The region off China’s coastline is a complicated place. China claims geographical and historical rights over 80 per cent of the South China Sea. A quick look at the map suggests that might not be entirely fair, as Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei are always ready to point out. They hold different geographical and historical views which explain their often overlapping territorial claims. But Beijing is still busy pouring concrete onto small rocks sticking out of the water more than 1,600 kilometres from the mainland, calling them islands, and then constructing runways, radars and missile batteries on them. Much of the rapid military progress shown by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army suggests a medium-term ambition to extend the range of its ‘area-denial capability’ – a concept meaning the ability to prevent enemy forces from coming into, staying in, or even crossing a defined geographical area. In recent years that has meant developing weapons which could, in case of war, try to push the Americans, or others, out of the South and East China Seas and past the First Island Chain, the string of islands stretching from Japan down to the Philippines. Australia now worries that China hopes eventually to project the ‘area denial’ region even further – south of Indonesia and the Philippines. If so, this would take it into the Banda Sea and the shores of Papua New Guinea. In Australia, memories of the Japanese invasion of New Guinea remain strong. There are minor concerns about the slim possibility of an Islamist takeover of Indonesia, but what worries the military strategists more is the Chinese moving down towards them. One scenario to deter this is the rapid movement of Australian forces. But where to base most of them? Putting them in the north of the country means that further northward movement goes through various choke points where an enemy can lie in wait. Putting them in the south means that it takes longer to transport them, although they can head out in into open seas. Southward expansion by China might be considered as stretching territorial sovereignty to its breaking point; exactly where this elasticity would snap is for the international lawyers, but it’s certainly north of the Coral Sea. There China cannot make territorial claims, nor, without provoking conflict, can it go in for island building and military construction. What it can do, though, is use its economic muscle to try and gain a foothold, but that’s where it runs into the region’s only major power. Australia can’t feasibly prevent China from dominating the South China Sea, but it can try to ensure Beijing has limited influence when it comes to the South Pacific. Battle has commenced. Australia is the largest aid donor to the Pacific Islands, but China has been increasing financial aid and loans and, as it did elsewhere, was quick to move in when the Covid-19 virus struck. In April 2020 a Royal Australian Air Force plane carrying aid to the island of Vanuatu was approaching Port Vila airport when it spotted a Chinese plane on the single runway which had arrived carrying PPE and other Covid-19-related equipment. Despite being cleared to land, it turned round and flew the 2,000 kilometres back home. Everyone argues about whether it was, or was not, safe to land, but the point remained – the Chinese were on the ground. What’s in it for them? Influence equals access, and China wants access to fishing zones, ports for its fleets, possible mining of seabeds, and something else which is often overlooked: votes at the United Nations and other world bodies. The Chinese have successfully picked off many African countries and persuaded them not to recognize Taiwan, and are now attempting the same in the Pacific. In 2019, despite intense American and Australian lobbying, Kiribati and the Solomon Islands severed ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with China. Canberra has been engaging in what is dubbed the ‘Pacific step up’ policy, but has to move carefully. The Pacific islanders are keenly aware of Australia’s colonial history and take a dim view of anything that might hint at paternalism. It helps to refer to places such as Vanuatu not as ‘small island nations’ but ‘large ocean states’, as the islands now prefer, based on their large, exclusive maritime zones. Depending on how you define the region the islands, including maritime zones, make up about 15 per cent of the world’s surface. In 2018 Australia beat off a challenge from China to fund the main military base in Fiji, signed a bilateral security treaty with Vanuatu and donated twenty-one new military patrol boats to several of the islands. It also used its aid budget to build an underwater high-speed communication network called the ‘Coral Sea Cable System’ linking Australia, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Despite this, and many other measures, China is making inroads especially in Fiji, the Cook Islands and Tonga, but given its own problems back home it often insists on Chinese- sourced materials for infrastructure projects and, as it does in Africa, brings in its own workers, causing local resentment. So far Australia remains the major player, but it will have to concentrate hard to stay that way. China’s technology and power exceed Australia’s. The range of Beijing’s ballistic missiles has also made the water-filled moat around Australia less useful, as have cyberweapons, because it is no longer necessary to send large pieces of metal to targets in order to blow them up. Any country could be horribly damaged by a cyberattack on its critical infrastructure – the electricity grid, water, food supply chains, transport system, etc. Australia is still a long way from anyone who might come to its physical assistance but technologically the world has moved closer. Covid-19 made Australia more aware of the limitations of the ‘just in time’ economic system, and, like many countries, has hardened its attitude towards being China-dependent and allowing China into critical infrastructure projects, freezing out China’s Huawei company from Australia’s 5G network – a bold move. The relationship can be fragile. In the summer of 2020, when Prime Minister Morrison called for an international inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 virus, this was seen in Beijing as an attack on China. Within days Chinese customs officials noticed ‘issues’ with the labelling on some imported Australian beef products and imposed a ban on supplies. As Canberra stood firm, Beijing began muttering about barley and iron imports and made a thinly disguised threat via its English-language mouthpiece the Global Times. It wrote that the economic measures ‘don’t necessarily represent China’s economic punishment for Australia, though they may serve as a wake-up call for Australia to reflect on its economic links with China’. The diplomatic ‘don’t necessarily represent’, when translated into plain English, appeared to be ‘do represent’. In early 2021 the figures for Chinese imports of Australian copper concentrates were released. They had dropped from 100,000 metric tons in December 2019 to zero in December 2020. Six months prior to that Australia had suffered a sustained cyberattack on government, education, health and other critical infrastructure sites. Prime Minister Morrison didn’t identify the attacker but said, ‘There are not a large number of state-based actors that can engage in this type of activity.’ It was clear who he meant. Managing the relationship will be difficult: handle it wrong and you risk being part of an Indo-Pacific Cold War, being too weak risks allowing a People’s Liberation Army base in your backyard. The Covid-19 crisis magnified and accelerated existing trends. The Indians, Japanese, Taiwanese, Malaysians, Australians and others all saw their underlying anxieties about China come into sharp focus. While they were busy battling Covid-19, China embarked on a series of provocative moves, including sailing their aircraft carrier fleet in a full circle around Taiwan. The timing was interesting: one of the US carrier fleets normally in the area was in dock for repairs, the other was in dock with hundreds of its crew stricken with the virus. A Vietnamese fishing vessel was rammed and sunk by the Chinese coastguard, and a Malaysian oil-drilling survey ship was harassed. Beijing’s increasingly assertive stance over Hong Kong also concentrated minds. So far Australia is sticking close to its best friends. Its diplomats work overtime on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and CIA headquarters in Langley to maintain the ties forged over 80 years. Australia is also an enthusiastic member of what is probably the world’s most efficient intelligence-gathering network – ‘Five Eyes’ – along with the USA, the UK, New Zealand and Canada. It hosts the Pine Gap military base near Alice Springs, which is among the most important US intelligence-gathering facilities in the world. It is the ground station for CIA satellites which hoover up intelligence communications, it provides battlefield intelligence for US troops operating in places such as Afghanistan, it detects ballistic missile launches, supports the US and Japanese missile defence systems, and increasingly plays a role in the newly formed US Space Command. This is not a piece of real estate the Americans want to leave and is among the bargaining chips Canberra has as it measures the US commitment to the Pacific. The world now is very different from when Five Eyes and other defence structures were set up. Then the US commitment was considered rock-solid, Japan had been defeated, and China was incapable of mounting a threat. The centre of the Cold War was a world away and Australia’s defence posture assumed there would be a ten-year horizon for anticipating a regional threat. Now the advance notice of probable conflict has shrunk, and China is a major player. So while Canberra is investing heavily in its relationship with Washington it is also making a few side bets, although they are not substantial and some are merely prudent. Australia and Japan are developing a military relationship which includes joint air and sea combat exercises and a ‘Visiting Forces Agreement’. Both are acutely aware of their lack of self-sufficiency in energy supplies and the consequent dangers of supply routes being blocked. Japan imports 85 per cent of its crude oil from the Middle East and South Korea imports over 60 per cent from the same source. Both countries have well-developed refining industries and they sell Australia almost half of the refined petroleum it imports. As we have seen, if the routes from the Middle East into the South and East China Seas and across to Japan are blocked, Australia would run out of energy and grind to a halt within weeks. All the countries in the wider Indo-Pacific region agree that the international sea lanes must be kept open. To do that means pushing back every time China lays claim to the South China Sea as its sovereign territory, or says that the islands it constructs in the area are as much part of China as is Sichuan. Beijing is busy buying friends and influencing people, and the only way in which the other major players (apart from the US) can compete is to stick close to each other. Both Japan and Australia also co-operate with the Indian navy within the ‘Quad’ (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), which includes the USA in order to prevent such a scenario. The Quad is not quite an alliance, it’s more a strategic framework for the navies of the four countries to collaborate in the Pacific. It is not openly stated, but the rationale is to work together to ensure the sea lanes remain open and to curb Chinese influence. It was given a boost in 2020 during the Covid-19 crisis, when countries became more concerned about Chinese belligerence and after the brutal hand-to-hand fighting between Chinese and Indian troops on their border. As its naval power has grown, India is buying into the idea that the Indo-Pacific region needs to be thought of as one space within which Australia plays a key role. There’s now talk of extending to a ‘Quad Plus’ drawing in New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam, although the latter two are treading carefully due to their proximity to China. The Australians have never waited for their hand to be held and have always attempted to have a military capable of at least mounting a solo defence of the country, preferably as far away from its shores as possible. Realistically that means trying to ensure that the islands to its north and east are not aggressive and/or dominated by a superior power. Australia faces tough choices, a careful balancing act in which a misstep could have serious and lasting consequences in a region now considered to be the most economically important in the world. Some analysts define the Indo-Pacific as stretching from the east coast of Africa across to the west coast of the USA. It’s an old fashioned view which is coming back into fashion as the world has turned. An early advocate in the modern era was Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who in 2007 quoted a book written by a Mughal prince called Dara Shikoh, The Confluence of the Two Seas (1655). In his speech to the Indian parliament Abe said: ‘The Pacific and the Indian Oceans are now bringing about a dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and prosperity’ and then spoke about ensuring that they would be ‘open and transparent to all’. Sitting between the two great bodies of water is Australia, with the Indian Ocean to its west, the Pacific to its east, and to the north – China. For now Canberra will attempt both to forge a constructive dialogue with Beijing with one eye on the economy and maintain defence and other ties with the USA, and it’ll ‘play it tough, all the way’. CHAPTER 2 IRAN ‘Islam is political, or it is nothing.’ Ayatollah Khomeini, former Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran THE IRANIANS MAKE A VARIETY OF WONDERFUL BREADS; one of the best known is the crispy, wheat-based nan-e barbari, which contains sea salt, is sprinkled with sesame and poppy seeds and eaten at breakfast. It is usually formed into a long, roughly oval shape with a crust and a few interior parallel lines cut across the top. Inadvertently, its appearance often resembles the country in which it is made. Iran is defined by two geographic features: its mountains, which form a ring of crust on most of its borders, and the mostly flat salt deserts of the interior, along which run lower-range hills roughly parallel to each other. The mountains make Iran a fortress. Approaching it from most angles, you soon bump up against rising high ground which in many places is impassable. The mountains encircle the desolate interior wastelands of the Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut. The Dasht-e Kavir is known as the Great Salt Desert. It’s approximately 800 kilometres long and 320 kilometres wide – about the size of the Netherlands and Belgium combined. I’ve driven through parts; there’s not much to see other than dull, flat scrubland. But it’s not necessarily wise to try to find something to see. In some parts layers of salt on the surface conceal mud deep enough to drown in – and drowning in a desert seems a particularly stupid way to die. The other main desert may sound more attractive, until you learn that the Dasht-e Lut is known as the ‘Plain of Desolation’. This is why, even if you are of a warlike nature, you really don’t want to invade Iran, especially in the modern era of large, professional armies controlled by strong states. The country is rarely out of the news: it’s a key Middle East power; a repressive regime linked to terror and bloodshed across the region; a potential nuclear state in a tense stand-off with Israel and regularly seems to be close to blows with the USA. And yet the Americans – and everyone else – are loath to send in the troops. Some of the hawks in the Bush administration of the early 2000s pushed the president to attack Iran; wiser heads prevailed. Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that air power alone would have limited success and the ensuing war might require ‘boots on the ground’; he fell back on the old adage, ‘We do deserts, we don’t do mountains.’ The USA and Iran have history, but Iranian history is littered with foreign soldiers dying in large numbers in the country’s mountains. For most of that history the land was known as Persia. It was only renamed Iran in 1935 in an attempt to represent the country’s non-Persian minorities, which comprise about 40 per cent of the population. Its borders have shifted around through the centuries but the shape of the nan-e-barbari is the basic geographic frame. To follow this, it’s useful to go clockwise from the 1,500- kilometrelong Zagros Mountains, beginning on the coast along the Strait of Hormuz. The mountains run north along the parts of Iran which face Qatar and Saudi Arabia across the Gulf, then head further north along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, up the land borders with Iraq and Turkey, before swinging north-east along the frontier with Armenia. This is the wall which faces any enemy west of Iran almost as soon as it crosses the border. The exception is the Shatt al Arab waterway, where, on the Iraqi side of the border, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet. But even this is not necessarily a weak spot for Iran. It is the main gate out of Iran, leading to anywhere valuable for its leaders. A gate can be opened in either direction, and so the Persians have always sought to advance out of it, close it, or create a buffer zone between the gate and potential enemies. On the Iranian side of the border much of the terrain is swampland, giving the defender a natural advantage; and even if an aggressor made it off the soft, low ground they would soon run into the Zagros Mountains a few kilometres inland. Where the Zagros end, the Elburz Mountains begin. Again, moving clockwise, the Elburz run briefly along the Armenian border before taking a sharp turn south, where they overlook the Caspian Sea. The coastline is 650 kilometres long and the 3,000-metre-high mountains are never more than 115 kilometres from it, usually much less. As in the west of the country, any hostile invading force cannot get far before hitting the mountain wall. The mountains then curve again, running along the Turkmenistan and Afghanistan borders. Lower mountains taper down almost to the Arabian Sea before meeting the Central Makran Range, which takes us back to the Strait of Hormuz. This means that if you want to invade and occupy Iran, you have to fight on marshland, over mountains and across deserts, or make an amphibious landing and do the same. Overall, this terrain is a formidable obstacle for a would-be invader and occupier; the price to pay for breaking through the mountain wall is considerable, and the occupier ends up going home. However, this geography has not deterred all hostile forces during Persia/Iran’s long history. Alexander the Great made headway, but within a few years of his death in 323 BCE Persia again controlled its own affairs. In the 1200s and 1300s the Mongols, and Tamerlane, arrived from across the vast Central Asian Steppe, wrecked the place and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, but didn’t stay long enough to significantly influence the Persian culture. The Ottomans ventured into the Zagros several times from the 1500s, but only skirted the periphery of the country. The Russians did the same, then the British arrived and decided the best bet was to co-opt some of the minority groups and buy their way to influence. Conversely, this geography also restrains Iranian power. The Persian Empire came down from the mountains and pushed outwards; but for most of its history it has been contained within the territory described above. On rare occasions it has dominated the plains to its west, but usually other powers – Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, British and most recently American – have been the controlling influence there, and some have used the territory to try to manipulate what happens inside Iran. This is one reason why Tehran is on constant guard against interference from outside. Internally, the desolate and unforgiving landscape is why almost all Iranians live in the mountains. Because they are difficult to traverse, populated mountain regions tend to develop distinct cultures. Ethnic groups cling to their identities and resist absorption, making it harder for the modern state to foster a sense of national unity. Because of its mountains, Iran’s main centres of population are widely dispersed and, until recently, poorly connected. Even now, only half of the country’s roads are paved. So although the population are all Iranians, they are from many different ethnic groups. Persian (Farsi) is spoken as a first tongue by about 60 per cent of Iranians and is the official language of the Islamic Republic. However, Kurds, Balochis, Turkmen, Azerbaijanis (Azeris) and Armenians all use their own languages, as do a host of smaller groups such as the Arabs, Circassians and the semi-nomadic Lur tribes. There are even a few villages in which Georgian is spoken. The tiny community of Jews (around 8,000) can be traced all the way back to the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE. This diversity, especially among the larger groups such as the Kurds and Azeris, means that the country’s rulers have always attempted to have a strong, centralized and often repressive government in order to keep its minorities under control and ensure that no region can break away or assist outside powers. This is as true of the ayatollahs as it was of their predecessors. The Kurds are one of the best examples of a mountain people retaining their culture in the face of the state’s aggressive assimilation policies. Exact population numbers are difficult to pin down, as the government prefers not to disclose statistics on ethnicity; but most sources suggest that the Kurds form about 10 per cent of the population – perhaps 8.5 million people. They are the second-largest minority after the Azeris (16 per cent). Most live in the Zagros Mountains adjacent to the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, with whom many share a dream of an independent Kurdish state. Their ethnicity, language, independent spirit and the fact that most are Sunni Muslims in a Shia-dominated country have brought them into conflict with the central authorities for centuries. Amid the confusion at the end of the Second World War, a small Kurdish region declared independence, but survived less than a year once the central government had stabilized the country. Their most recent uprising, which followed the Islamic Revolution of 1979, took the Iranian military three years to crush. The Azeris are concentrated in the northern border regions near Azerbaijan and Armenia; the Turkmen live close to the Turkish border, and the Arabs, of whom there are about 1.6 million, are clustered near the Shatt al-Arab waterway across from Iraq and on small islands in the Gulf. Most Iranians live in urban areas, many of which are built on mountain slopes, concentrated in just one-third of the country. If you draw a line from the Caspian Sea, running west through Tehran and down to the Shatt al-Arab, the majority of people live to the left of it. Elsewhere, urban centres are few and far between. Tehran sits below the Elburz Mountains. It is a feature of Iranian towns that, due to their lack of water, many are at the feet of hills and get their water supply from tunnels dug on the mountain slopes which feed small canals running down into the urban areas. I fell into one once while being chased by the Tehran police – more of which later. This lack of water is one of several factors which have held Iran back economically. About one-tenth of the land is cultivated, a mere third of which is irrigated. There are only three large rivers, and the Kārun alone is navigable and able to transport cargo. Air travel has enhanced internal and foreign trade, and there are now international airports in Tehran, Bandar Abbas, Shiraz, Abadan and Isfahan. In a country larger than the UK, France and Germany combined, air travel is the only way to connect quickly with the dispersed urban areas. Given that Iran holds the world’s fourth-largest reserves of oil and second-largest of gas, it should be a rich country; but the Iran– Iraq war (1980–88) saw the refining facilities in Abadan destroyed, and only recently has production recovered to pre-conflict levels. The country’s fossil-fuel industries are notoriously inefficient, a situation exacerbated by international sanctions which make modern equipment difficult to access. The pool of foreign experts willing to work in Iran is limited, as is the number of countries willing to buy Iranian fuel. Energy is Iran’s most important export. Its oilfields are in the regions facing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq, with a smaller field inland near Qom. The gas fields are mostly in the Elburz Mountains and the Persian Gulf. One of the main export routes is into the Gulf of Oman via the Strait of Hormuz. This is Iran’s only way out to the open ocean lanes and at its narrowest is just 34 kilometres across. The width of the shipping lane in either direction is just over 3 kilometres, with a 3-kilometre buffer zone between them to avoid accidents. For Iran this is a two-edged sword. One of the reasons it has never been a sea power is because it can easily be prevented from reaching the ocean. However, the width of the strait means that Tehran can threaten to close it to everyone else. Given that one- fifth of global oil supplies pass through it, closure would mean a world of pain. It would hurt Iran as well, and probably mean war; but it’s a card it can play, and the regime has invested in means by which to try and make it a trump card. Iranian forces frequently practise ‘swarming’ large vessels using dozens of fast attack boats, some armed with anti-ship missiles. In the event of a full-scale conflict Iran might also use suicide squads as it did during the Iran–Iraq war. Its conventional naval forces, including a handful of submarines, would probably be quickly found and easily disabled, but a combination of shore-to-ship missiles, special forces operations to mine oil tankers, and the swarming tactics could be enough to both temporarily close the Strait and bleed an enemy to the point of retreat. It would also cause massive disruption to oil and gas shipments from Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, leading to a huge rise in energy prices and potentially a global recession. When Tehran feels under pressure, especially when its oil exports are threatened, it uses a variation of a warning issued in 2018: ‘We will make the enemy understand that either everyone can use the Strait of Hormuz or no one.’ It is not known if it would go that far, but that’s the nature of gambling at this level. To hedge against it the Americans have advanced plans to try to wipe out as much of Iran’s offensive capabilities as they can within hours of a major conflict breaking out, and the Gulf States have been building pipelines to take oil and gas to the Red Sea, from where tankers can access the Indian Ocean – hopefully without being targeted by the missiles Iran has given to their Houthi allies in Yemen. Modern Iran is a troubled nation, but one with a great history. The Persian Empire was a leading civilization in the ancient world. Iranian history has a similarly glorious, magnificent and murderous sweep to that of Greece, so it’s no surprise they collided, nor that Persia went on to clash with Rome. First, though, there was a little ‘local difficulty’. Persian origins begin about 4,000 years ago, with the migration of tribes from Central Asia. They settled in the southern Zagros Mountains adjacent to the Medes peoples, with whom they shared ethnic roots. It’s a lot easier to come down the mountain and attack the plain than it is to climb up from the plain and attack the mountain, and in 550 BCE the Persian leader, Cyrus II, took over the Medes kingdom, merged it with the Persian Empire and announced the arrival of the Achaemenid Persian Empire on the world stage. Cyrus created the greatest empire the world had known, reaching all the way across Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) and on to Greece, before coming to a sticky end in 529 BCE at the hands of a sort of ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ figure named Tomyris. She was queen of a region in Central Asia to which Cyrus had a taken a fancy and was most put out when he captured her son. She warned him: ‘Restore my son to me and get thee from the land . . . Refuse, and I swear by the sun . . . I will give thee thy fill of blood.’ In a subsequent battle most of Cyrus’s army were slaughtered, and he suffered the indignity of not only being killed, but having his head dunked in a skin filled with human blood. She did tell him. Cyrus was succeeded by his son, who added Egypt and parts of what is now Libya to the empire before Darius I took over in 522 BCE and pushed the empire’s borders into parts of what is now Pakistan and northern India, and up into the Danube Valley in Europe. He authorized the Jews in Israel to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and encouraged the religious beliefs of Zoroastrianism. The world’s first postal service was created via a network of relay horses, and he undertook a huge construction project that included paved roads running for thousands of miles. He didn’t have it all his own way. Irritated with some of the Greek kingdoms for not showing enough respect (or paying him protection money), he invaded mainland Greece. It went a bit wrong at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, a runaway victory for the Greeks. Darius died four years later and was succeeded by his son Xerxes, who also lost to the Greeks, marking the beginning of the end of the first Persian Empire 150 years later. Cyrus and Darius named themselves ‘The Great’, but their empire was destroyed by an even bigger name from history – Alexander the Great of Macedonia. In 331 BCE he smashed the Persian army and then burnt its capital, Persepolis. It took almost 100 years before the next Persian Empire rose. The Parthians fought the Roman Empire for control of Mesopotamia and to prevent it entering Persia from the north in modern-day Turkey and Armenia. This culminated in a victory – and a horrific ending to a career made famous by Laurence Olivier. In the film Spartacus (1960), General Crassus of the Roman Empire demands to know which man in the defeated slave army is Spartacus. He then crucifies everyone. What goes around comes around. In 53 BCE he took on the Parthians, lost, and because the Persians thought he was greedy, they poured molten gold down his throat. Some 500 years on, the Parthians were overthrown from within by the Sasanians. They continued to fight Rome, and then the Byzantine Empire, leaving them exhausted and open to the next challenge which arose from the west – the Arabs, and Islam. The seventh-century Sasanian defeat was the result of unprecedented political weakness being vanquished by an enemy with the light of God in their eyes. Persia lost its buffer zone in Mesopotamia, and then most of its heartland. However, it took the Arabs twenty years to capture the urban areas; they never fully controlled the mountains, and there were frequent uprisings. Eventually the Arabs lost, but Islam won. Zoroastrianism was suppressed, its priests murdered, and Islam became the dominant religion. Persia was incorporated into the Caliphate, but the sheer size of the country, and the strength of its cultures, meant that the people never assimilated and always thought in terms of the borders between them and the outsiders. This would be amplified several centuries later when Persia converted to Shi’ism. Before this, we see waves of migration by Turkic and Mongol warriors. Again, invasion came after central power had collapsed and Persia was divided into small kingdoms. It was only when the Safavids (1501– 1722) united the country that it regained the strength to govern itself and defend its border. The Safavids are a key turning point in history. In 1501 King Ismail announced that Shia Islam was the official religion. The origins of the Sunni–Shia split within Islam go back to the dispute over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad following his death in 632 CE and the Battle of Karbala in 680. Many historians argue that King Ismail’s motivation was mostly political. Just as Henry VIII needed to define his kingdom in opposition to Rome and created the Church of England, as we’ll see in the UK chapter, so Ismail needed the Safavids to be defined in opposition to their arch rival – the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Its conversion to Shi’ism created deep hostility towards Persia, which helped form a nationalist identity, a strong central government and a suspicion of minorities which has been passed down through the centuries. It helped Iran become the country it is and contributes to the tensions in Lebanon, the wars in Yemen and Syria, and has been a factor in the clash between Iran and Saudi Arabia since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This is not to say that political state rivalries can be dismissed in these events, but the religious split was fundamental in forming identities, and Iranian religious identity goes back to the Safavids. You may have seen footage of processions of shirtless Muslim men beating themselves on their chests and whipping their backs to draw blood. This is during the festival of Ashura, and they are feeling the pain of the martyred Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, killed at the Battle of Karbala. The remembrance of the Battle of Karbala goes deep in Iranian culture: you see it in poetry, music and plays, and it is intrinsic to the people and their flag. In the centre of the flag you see a red tulip – a symbol of martyrdom. When Hussein was killed, it is said, a tulip sprang from his blood. The Safavids were overthrown in 1722 by clerics on the grounds that only a learned religious man should rule, and they in turn were removed by an Afghan warlord who said that religion could control religion, but that ‘politicians’ had the power of taxation and lawmaking. This division of power between secular and religious institutions remains an issue in modern Iran as many people believe the clerics again wield far too much power in the political arena. After the Safavids lost power, the next couple of centuries saw the cycle of internal weakness and foreign threats return. Persia’s declaration of neutrality in the First World War didn’t prevent British, German, Russian and Turkish forces using it as a battleground. In the aftermath, the Russians were preoccupied by their revolution, the Germans and Ottomans were defeated, and that left the British. Following the discovery of oil prior to the First World War, the British ensured that they won the exclusive rights to get the stuff out of the ground and sell it. As Winston Churchill wrote later, ‘Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.’ The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP) had been formed in 1909, and the British bought the controlling share. After the war London fully intended to make Persia a protectorate, but an officer from the Persian Cossacks Brigade had other ideas. In 1921 Reza Khan marched into Tehran at the head of 1,200 soldiers and effectively seized power. In 1925 the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, voted to depose the then shah, and Reza Khan was appointed Reza Shah Pahlavi. The country was on its knees. Centuries of weak misrule had left it on the verge of disintegration and so when this military man arrived in the capital, talking about restoring Persian power, people listened. In 1935 he renamed it Iran to reflect the country’s many ethnic groups. His mission was to drag it into the twentieth century, and he embarked on a building programme that included a cross country rail network connecting some of the major cities. However, what Reza Shah Pahlavi did not do was take control of the Anglo Persian Oil Company, and as long as the British controlled that they still had a huge say in Persian affairs. The British had built the world’s biggest refinery at the port of Abadan, and from it flowed cheap oil for the British Empire. In the Second World War Iran again attempted to be neutral, but once more fell victim to outside powers. On a pretext about the shah’s pro-Nazi sentiments the British and Soviets invaded and, after forcing him to abdicate, achieved their aim of securing the oilfields, constructing a supply line to Russia. He’d built the railway system; they wanted to play with it. The shah was replaced by his twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. In 1946, with foreign troops gone, the young man set about trying to continue the economic reforms, but in foreign policy threw his lot in with the British and Americans to establish Iran as an ally in the developing Cold War. But these were new times. The winds of anti-colonialism were blowing and turned into a storm over what was now called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Demands for it to be nationalized grew, and in 1951 a vehement supporter of nationalization, Mohammad Mossadegh, became prime minister. A bill was soon passed as a result of the promise that money from Iranian oil would now go only to Iran. The reaction was swift. Iranian assets in British banks were frozen, goods destined for Iran were held back, and technicians at the Abadan refinery were withdrawn. To no avail: the Iranians held firm. In 1953 London and Washington sent in MI6 and the CIA to help organize a military coup, the trigger for which came when Mossadegh dissolved parliament, intending to rule by decree and effectively stripping the shah of power. It’s often said that the British and Americans overthrew Iranian democracy; it is fairer to say that they helped Iranian factions overthrow a democratically elected government. American motives were driven by fears that the chaos in Iran could lead to a communist takeover; British profits from Iranian oil were not high on their list of priorities. The shah, who had run away to Italy, returned, and all was right with the world. Except it wasn’t. To some the coup seemed a success, but it threw a long shadow. Iran’s emerging democracy was halted in its tracks as the shah spun into a spiral of increasing repression. He soon faced opposition from all quarters. Conservative religious groups were enraged when he granted non-Muslims the vote; the Moscow-sponsored communists worked to undermine him; the liberal intelligentsia wanted democracy; and the nationalists felt humiliated. The coup had reminded people of what happened when the country was subject to outside influence. The result of the nationalization of oil meant more revenue for the state, but little of it trickled down to the masses. The coup was a fork in the road of Iranian history, and the country accelerated towards the revolution of 1979. The current regime likes to tell a tale about masses of fervently religious people taking to the streets desperate for a new age when the ayatollahs would rule the land. It wasn’t quite like that. The demonstrations in the lead-up to the shah’s overthrow involved secular groups, the communists, trade unions, and the religious establishment centred on Ayatollah Khomeini. The latter quickly murdered thousands of the former, and thus got to tell the story. Khomeini was a well-known figure. In 1964 he’d accused the shah of reducing ‘the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog’. For his troubles he was banished, living first in Iraq and then in France. By 1978 there were massive demonstrations across the country. The shah reacted with savagery, and the SAVAK (secret police) became a byword for torture and murder. At the year’s end, after hundreds of demonstrators had been killed, martial law was declared. The demonstrators kept coming and in January 1979 Reza Pahlavi fled the country. He was the last of the shahs, and the last Iranian leader influenced by the Americans. They quickly switched their support to Iraq. Khomeini had been busy during exile. Broadcasts on the BBC’s Persian Service meant his voice was familiar to many, and thousands of cassette tapes had been smuggled into Iran to be played in mosques. Two weeks after the shah fled, the ayatollah arrived to a rapturous welcome as more than a million people lined the streets to greet him. What most did not know was that they had exchanged the crown for the turban. Those who did not understand revolutionary Islam assumed the elderly ayatollah would be a hands-off figurehead helping to guide the country towards a less repressive future. They were soon put right. The radical Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in Cairo in 1966, may have been a Sunni Muslim but his writings influenced the religious Shia revolutionaries in Iran. His seminal work Milestones had been translated into Farsi and fed into the idea that the answer to the problems in the Muslim world was Islam. Qutb had more influence in Arab countries, where the systems of royalty, nationalism, socialism and secular dictatorship had failed to better people’s lives, but when Khomeini declared that ‘Islam is political, or it is nothing’, he was saying what Qutb’s followers in the Muslim Brotherhood had been promulgating for more than a decade. Qutb believed in violent jihad to defeat ‘Crusaders and Zionists’; this, fused with the strain of martyrdom in Iranian Shia culture, was central to the fanaticism that gripped the religious masses during and after the revolution. The secular intellectuals, dazzled by the sombrely charismatic figure of Khomeini, put aside their disdain for the religious establishment and joined forces to oust the shah. As so often in revolutions, the liberals failed to understand that what the true believers said, they meant. On the day he landed in Tehran Ayatollah Khomeini informed the people: ‘From now on it is I who will name the government.’ Almost before anyone could say, ‘Who voted for you?’ the terror began. Ten days after the crowds welcomed Khomeini, the military declared neutrality. The prime minister went into hiding before making his way to France, where he was assassinated in 1991. Minor religious groups, and the communists, were swept aside amid waves of torture, executions and disappearances. To ensure that there was no counterrevolution, Khomeini set up the IRGC – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This thuggish militia excelled at intimidating opponents. It has become the country’s most formidable military force, while its senior personnel have grown wealthy since it branched into construction and other businesses. Desperate to reverse freedoms for women, the new regime banned co-educational schools, protections within marriage were reduced, and gangs of ‘Komitehs’ – committees – roamed the streets enforcing the wearing of hijab. Religious freedoms for minorities such as Jews and Christians were maintained in law but came to an end in spirit, and people of the Baha’i faith were subjected to particularly harsh persecution. Those in the liberal middle class who could afford to leave did so in a hurry, followed by hundreds of thousands of others in a massive brain drain. Among them were about 60,000 of the country’s Jewish population after the Republic became Israel’s most virulent, and usually deeply anti-Semitic, critic. The new leaders were not keen to win friends, but they did influence people to regard Iran as a pariah state. As well as the repression at home there were terror attacks abroad, and the infamous fatwa was placed on the British author Salman Rushdie over his book The Satanic Verses. Justification lay in Khomeini’s concept of Velayat-e faqih – guardianship of the religious jurist. The idea, embedded within Shia belief, is that the most learned religious man should have political and religious control. So Khomeini became Supreme Leader, a position enshrined in the constitution. Subsequent leaders would be selected by an Assembly of Experts made up of senior clerics. In a way, the system of choosing the top figure is not dissimilar to the way in which the Roman Catholic Pope is elected, but the Pope doesn’t get to be commander-in-chief of a country’s armed forces, nor does he have the power to declare war – a task the Ayatollah had to undertake a year after he came to power. In Iraq, the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein saw the creation of a Shia Islamic republic next door as both a threat and an opportunity. He was alarmed by Khomeini’s call for Islamic revolutions in Arab countries and cracked down on Iraq’s already embattled Shia majority. He then tried to invade Iran – which, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, is not a good idea. Saddam hoped to use the chaos of the revolution to make a land grab of the east bank of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and the oil producing, ethnically Arab province of Khuzestan. What he didn’t want was an eight-year bloodbath ending with each side where they started. Declassified recordings of Saddam and his advisers on the eve of war show that he felt he could get away with a brief conflict and hoped the Iranians ‘do not go further than what we want, dragging both of us into a situation that neither we nor they possibly wants’. Instead he wanted ‘to bombard military targets, twisting their arm until they accept the legal facts . . . However, if it becomes a full-scale war, then we will land wherever we need to.’ It was carnage. Saddam expected a quick victory, a disastrous miscalculation contributing to more than 1 million deaths. The Iraqi army advanced along a 644-kilometre front and made early gains, including the city of Khorramshahr, where they used mustard gas against the defenders. But they failed to capture the oil port of Abadan, and the assault ground to a halt within weeks. Nowhere were the Iraqis able to penetrate further than about 100 kilometres before they ran into the Zagros Mountains and out of morale. Within a few months a counter-offensive drove the Iraqi forces back across the border. Both capital cities were hit with air raids as the Iranians pushed on into Iraq in a bid to capture Shia strongholds such as Karbala. In 1988 Iraqi counter-offensives reversed Iranian gains and Khomeini, realizing his country was exhausted, accepted UN brokered ceasefire terms. The two sides withdrew to their pre-war positions. The Supreme Leader died the following year, and the position passed to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Limited economic progress was made, but the clerics retained an iron grip on society as they determined to bring the revolution into every aspect of people’s lives. The political system was rigged. To run for parliament (the Majlis) you must be approved by the twelve-member Council of Guardians, half of whom are chosen by the Supreme Leader. A list of some of the parties represented in the Majlis gives a clue as to how to get on the ticket – they include the Militant Clerics Society and the Society of Pathseekers of the Islamic Revolution. With that lot in front of them, you can see how the Pervasive Coalition of Reformists would have trouble finding their way. When the Majlis passes legislation, it must be approved by a majority of the Council. So in 1997 the hardliners were shocked when a relatively moderate religious scholar, Mohammad Khatami, won the presidency in a landslide. During his term the clerics vetoed more than one-third of the bills proposed, most of them liberal measures that Khatami and his supporters had been elected to introduce. The ultra-conservatives also continued their campaign of terror to destroy ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Liberal media outlets were closed down and journalists jailed. Reform-minded intellectuals were murdered, and when students protested they were beaten off the streets, chased into their dormitories and beaten again. Over the next decade the economy still struggled, the religious thugs still enforced their beliefs on society, and Iran’s confrontational attitude on the international front ensured isolation. In 2005 Khatami lost power to the former Revolutionary Guard Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but in the 2009 election campaign another reformist emerged: Mir Hossein Mousavi. After a record turnout, and amid concerns over voting irregularity by the authorities, Mousavi made the first move and said he’d been informed by the Interior Ministry that he’d won. Almost immediately there was an announcement on state media channels contradicting him. Ahmadinejad was declared the victor. The streets erupted in violence. I’d managed to get a rare journalist visa to report on the election and the following day was on the streets of the capital with an Iranian colleague. As we walked down one of the boulevards, I noticed several people murmuring something under their breath as they passed. ‘What’s going on?’ I enquired. My colleague explained that people were saying the name of a particular street, and a time of day. At the time of day, on a particular street, I watched as dozens of people began to gather, then hundreds. As they gained confidence, anti-government chanting broke out, and within a few minutes thousands of people had arrived. So did the riot police and thugs from the Basij militia. Scuffles turned into fights, bottles and stones began to be thrown by both sides, and the battle lines were drawn. The riot police had adopted a successful tactic of riding two to a motorbike with the passenger carrying a large club. When a group of these accelerated into a crowd it quickly scattered. As I phoned in live reports, I found myself between the lines as several motorbikes readied for another charge. As they came down the road I stepped up onto the pavement, only to find one of the bikes mounting it and heading straight for me. There was no escape. As an officer lifted his baton in the air, I raised my hands in the surrender pose. Just as he began to swing for my head, he stopped – I can only assume because he saw a foreigner who perhaps had been caught in the chaos. I’ve never been so grateful for having freckles. The bike sped past, the officer whacking other less fortunate people with fewer freckles, before roaring back to the police lines. I dived into the crowd for cover as they began attacking symbols of the regime, including a Bank of Iran building which had its windows smashed. Again, I found myself at the front of the crowd as another police charge began. As I turned to run, a large rock, thrown by the security forces, hit me in the back with enough force to send me tumbling into one of the narrow water canals that run through the city, scraping the skin off the entire length of a leg as I went down. A group of protestors dragged me out and I staggered into a side street before deciding that was quite enough live reporting for one day. ‘That’s the last time I’m turning my back on a policeman,’ I thought. Five years later I received very minor injuries when shot with bird pellet in the back in Cairo. By a policeman. But that’s another story. The demonstrations continued for several days, during which dozens of people were killed; but the regime’s grip was easily strong enough to ensure that Ahmadinejad served a second term. However, the fault lines had not gone away; indeed, they are magnified each year as the population grows younger, and enough of the youth grow up wanting change. This was reflected in the 2013 election when a moderate cleric, Hassan Rouhani, won power by a margin the establishment realized was too big to change. This was not entirely because everyone longed for a liberal Iran, although that was a major factor. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ translates into many languages, including Farsi, and the 2013 vote was also a rebuke to the wasted years under Ahmadinejad, who had increased the country’s international isolation and witnessed the economy shrink yet further. Rouhani won again in 2017, but then for the election of 2020 the fix was in months before the vote. The Council of Guardians flexed its robes and disqualified almost 7,000 candidates from running, among them ninety sitting members of the Majlis. Millions of Iranians asked themselves, ‘What’s the point?’ and on election day stayed at home. The lowest turnout since 1979 resulted in a landslide for the conservative hardliners. The message was clear: one way or another, the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard are staying in charge. Which brings us to the present. Its leadership sees Iran as an isolated country beset by enemies. They’re not wrong. Some of the ideologues talk about a ‘Sunni circle’ surrounding Iran, with countries such as Saudi Arabia, encouraged by the Americans, actively working to undermine the Islamic Republic from within and without. This also has some validity, which is why the ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard commanders could scarcely believe their luck when the Americans unknowingly delivered the historic Persian dream and secured their western flank by invading Iraq in 2003. The USA removed the Sunni-dominated regime that had invaded Iran, and now once again the flat land of Mesopotamia is a buffer in front of Iran deterring potentially hostile forces and acting as a space within which force can be projected. The Bush administration’s naïve belief that democracy would flourish resulted in the leaders of Iraq’s majority Shia population manipulating the system to ensure they now dominated the country. They were helped every step of the way by Iran, which drove out foreign forces by backing a variety of Shia militias in the civil war following the invasion. The roadside bombs which killed so many US and British troops were often made in Iran, and the militias were financed, armed and trained by Tehran. Iraq is not an Iranian poodle, but now its leadership often looks sympathetically towards its neighbour to the east. It was a major step in Iran’s ongoing battle with many of the Arab states. The ebb and flow of history has left many Arab countries with large Shia minorities, notably Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen, although there are also sizeable communities in Syria, Kuwait and the UAE. Often, they are less well off than the majority Sunni populations and many feel discriminated against. Iran has sought to use this to gain influence throughout the region. In Yemen’s civil war, for example, it sided with the Shia Houthi faction against Saudi-backed Sunni forces. And Tehran has spent twenty years creating and holding a corridor to the Mediterranean, giving it access to the sea and allowing it to supply its proxy – Hezbollah. In Baghdad it now finds a Shia-dominated government; in Damascus it dominates President Assad, who is from the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Iran came to his rescue in the Syrian civil war to keep this corridor open. From there it is a short hop to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, where the strongest military force is not the Lebanese army but the Iranian-financed Hezbollah militia. Hezbollah controls the Bekaa Valley, south Beirut and most of southern Lebanon all the way to the Israeli border. This is the Islamic Republic’s way to project its force in Mesopotamia and the Levant, just as its predecessors in previous centuries had done. Most of the Muslim-majority countries surrounding Iran have Sunni majorities; however, Iran is sometimes able to look for allies within the Shia minorities in these countries. While Iran clashes with the Sunni-led states, the country it despises most is Israel. Prior to the 1979 revolution Iran had a cordial relationship with Israel and was not noted for its anti Semitism. Since then it has engaged in a forty-year campaign of hate against not just the state of Israel but Jews in general. There is a steady stream of anti-Semitic rhetoric in which the hand of the ‘Zionists’ is seen everywhere, and the mainstream Iranian media routinely publishes cartoons featuring the sort of stereotypical caricatures used by Nazi Germany. World leaders are frequently depicted with a Star of David on their sleeves, suggesting they are operating on behalf of their Jewish masters. Tehran has sent death squads to Argentina, Bulgaria, Thailand, India, Kenya and many other countries to kill Jews, the worst attack being the murder of eighty-seven Argentinians in a Jewish community centre in 1994. It is useful for the Islamic Republic’s leaders to blame Israel and Jews for the world’s woes in order to deflect from their own shortcomings, but it seems likely their hatred runs deeper than politics. As early as the 1960s Ayatollah Khomeini demonized Jews, calling them ‘impure creatures’ and saying that they ‘have faces that manifest debasement, poverty, indigence, beggarliness, hunger, and wretchedness . . . This is nothing but their inner poverty and spiritual abasement.’ He also enjoyed suggesting to the Iranian people that the shah was a Jew. His successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said: ‘Israel is a malignant cancer gland that needs to be uprooted.’ These rantings suggest a pathological loathing, one rooted in religion, and dangerous not just because they are made by people in power, but because despite being led by Shia, the Iranian Revolution has inspired people with similar views in the Sunni Arab world to believe that they too can achieve power through religious violence. In the minds, and indeed voices, of the Iranian leadership, the USA is almost always linked with Israel and portrayed as a puppet of Israel. Iran’s hardliners believe the American role in their region is to keep its decadent Satanic jackboot on the heart of the Muslim world in order to steal its wealth and protect the evil Zionists, who are behind every dastardly plot against them. Although they do sometimes get a bit mixed up as America is known as the ‘Great Satan’, and Israel as ‘Little Satan’. In 2001 President George Bush engaged in his own labelling, describing Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’, and claiming that its nuclear energy facilities were a cover for building a nuclear weapons arsenal. Tehran already had missiles capable of reaching targets more than 5,000 kilometres away, so the idea that they might be nuclear-tipped alarmed everyone within range. In 2002 an Iranian dissident group revealed that Tehran was building a uranium-enrichment complex and a heavy-water facility, both of which can be used to make nuclear weapons. The government insisted its nuclear activity was only for peaceful purposes. Few in the international community were convinced, especially after an International Atomic Energy Agency report said that the enrichment process suggested Iran was seeking weapons grade material. UN, EU and US sanctions followed, limiting Iran’s ability to produce and sell oil or gas. Rouhani did make efforts to establish an international agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, leading to a deal with global leaders in 2015. He even had contact with President Obama – the first direct dialogue between the countries’ political leaders in almost forty years. This was not well received by the hardliners of the Islamic Revolution. Diplomatic relations between Iran and the USA were cut in 1980 and have yet to be restored following the taking of hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran, the event which set the course of the relationship. A mob attacked the embassy in November 1979 and took over fifty Americans hostage. The 444-day crisis haunted President Jimmy Carter and helped usher in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Tensions between Iran and the USA have been a constant, but there was a temporary ‘ceasefire’ of sorts during the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria that was linked to the nuclear deal of 2015. Tehran realized that the more powerful ISIS became in the region, the greater the risk of Iranian influence being blocked. If ISIS defeated either the Iraqi Shia government or Assad in Syria, the corridor to the Mediterranean would be cut off. The Americans, exhausted by their losses, could get Iran to do some of the fighting against ISIS in Iraq. Tehran knew that agreeing to the nuclear deal would open the door to discreet co-operation with the Americans; President Obama desperately wanted a foreign-policy success – and the nuclear deal could provide it. So Iran agreed to give up 98 per cent of its highly enriched uranium. It was an example of how a marriage of convenience to solve a short-term problem can override deeper differences – temporarily. ISIS was on the back foot, but tensions quickly returned, especially after Donald Trump came to power amid fears of war. He took the USA out of the nuclear deal, reimposed sanctions and bullied European companies so that they were too wary to do deals with Iran. There followed a series of incidents that raised the temperature. Two oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz were mined and suspicion quickly fell on Tehran. There was no solid proof of who was responsible though, and the Iranians had what diplomats call ‘plausible deniability’. Nobody wanted a shooting match in the Strait of Hormuz, so no action was taken. It was the same when missiles hit a Saudi oil refinery; the Houthis in Yemen said they fired them, but the evidence suggested the most likely finger on the trigger was Iranian. It looked as if the Iranians were probing the USA’s tolerance levels. In 2019 they almost went too far. A US spy drone was shot down and the US Air Force was readied for air strikes, which were called off at the last minute. When Trump came to office some analysts made a number of interesting claims, among them that he’d never wanted to be president, that he’d resign within months, that he’d be impeached and out of office within two years, and that he would start wars. They were all something of a stretch, but the idea that in 2019, with a year to go before the presidential election, he actively wanted a war which could trigger a global recession was beyond elastic. And that’s not the only reason why a war was unlikely. The USA’s losses in Iraq and Afghanistan are among the factors reducing the American public’s tolerance of military adventures. Iran knows this and so can gamble on pushing back against what it sees as unwarranted American aggression to a certain, but unknown, level. Tehran knows that if tensions boil over Iran might suffer air strikes, but the Americans are not coming to the Zagros Mountains from Iraq, nor going ashore in force from their ships in the Gulf. Iran’s military may be poorly equipped, but it can draw on millions of men who have been through conscription and 600,000 active personnel, including 190,000 in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. However, none of this alters the effects of sanctions on Iran. The economy nosedived, unemployment and inflation rose, and as winter approached in late 2019 the Iranian government raised fuel prices, triggering more huge nationwide demonstrations. The establishment had been surprised by previous protests; now they were shocked and nervous. What particularly worried them was that the bulk of protestors were often no longer students and the liberal classes: now the working class, the backbone of the 1979 revolution, was coming out against them. Chants of ‘Death to Khamenei’ were heard, and in a rebuke to Iran’s foreign policy crowds shouted, ‘Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran’, and ‘Get out of Syria’. People were signalling that they were sick of their young men being sacrificed in Arab civil wars. It was also noted that when the authorities painted huge American flags on roads and squares, demonstrators went out of their way not to tread on them and so disrespect the USA. There was a respite after the USA assassinated Qasem Soleimani, commander of the elite Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, in early 2020 as he arrived in Baghdad to meet a militia leader. He was a nationally known figure who had orchestrated Iran’s involvement in Syria. A few days later Iran retaliated by firing missiles at Iraqi military bases hosting US troops; but on the same night, while on high alert for US air strikes, it accidently shot down a civilian passenger jet leaving Tehran airport, killing all 176 people on board. After denying involvement the government eventually accepted responsibility, sparking another wave of protests. It had squandered any political capital it might have made in uniting the country over Soleimani’s killing. Then came Covid-19, and respect for the government took another blow. President Rouhani’s administration consistently played down the threat of the virus and, when it spread, covered up the number of cases and botched public-health messages. The Revolutionary Guard didn’t help. Its chief claimed the Guard had invented a device that could detect coronavirus symptoms from 100 metres away. Amid nationwide hilarity, the Physics Society of Iran ridiculed the idea as a ‘science-fiction story’. The clerics played their part. The learned Ayatollah Hashem Bathaei-Golpaygani announced he’d tested positive but had cured himself using an Islamic remedy. He died two days later. Another ayatollah told his followers to eat onions and brush their hair more to ward off the virus. There’s a large market in Iran for the remedies of ‘Islamic medicine’, but probably a bigger one which subscribes to the idea that laughter is a good tonic. The clerics were thoroughly ridiculed on social media with a variety of memes, jokes and cartoons which spread more quickly than the virus itself. This is dangerous for the regime because laughing at the revolutionaries is a revolutionary act in itself, and one it cannot prevent. However, this does not mean the fall of the regime is necessarily imminent, nor that, when it does fall, what follows will be an enlightened democracy. That said, as a highly educated and sophisticated country, with borders not drawn by Europeans, Iran has a better chance of becoming a genuine democracy than most other countries in its neighbourhood, but probably not for some time. We must look at the internal challenges facing the regime and the power it has to meet them. Economically it is in a hole which may yet get deeper, but the government appears to have officials with doctorates in getting around sanctions, and the economy staggers on year after year. Iran has forged good economic relations with China, which is more willing than many countries to ignore a number of the sanctions, as indeed is Russia. There will be more demonstrations, but the regime has shown a willingness to slaughter its people in their thousands to suppress dissent, and when you’ve gone that far, it’s hard to turn back. The Kurds have risen up in the past, but are unlikely to make a move as long as the regime’s grip remains tight. In the south-west the Arab minority of Khuzestan are angry that Iran’s oil riches have not made their lives better. They are among the poorest of the minority groups, and low-level resentment of this has resulted in occasional bomb attacks against government targets. In the south east the huge province of Baluchistan is restive. Its 1.5 million population is mostly Sunni and poor, and many identify more with the Baluchis next door in Pakistan than with Iran. It is a busy drug and people-smuggling route from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Europe; there have been bomb attacks against the Revolutionary Guard and government officials, but neither Khuzestan nor Baluchistan is an existential problem for the regime so long as it ensures that foreign powers are not organizing a revolt. What of the middle class, the intelligentsia and the arts? They continue a low-level campaign to retain an alternative civic culture in the country and are the inheritors of the centuries-long struggle to wrest control of power from royalty and religion. Music and films continue to be outlets for ideas and social commentary, and many younger people are no longer prepared to tolerate the hurtful interferences in their lives, such as how much of their hair they can show. During some of the recent anti-government demonstrations an incendiary chant has been heard on the streets: ‘O Shah of Iran, return to Iran’. It doesn’t mean there is a genuine yearning for a return to rule by the old system – the liberal struggle has always been to escape the grip of royalty and religion – but it is one of many signs of discontent. Such protest worries the establishment; it chips away at their authority, but it has its limits. It is magnificent to see a young woman atop a monument, waving her headscarf in the air and challenging the police to stop her. It makes YouTube, it makes a difference – but it doesn’t yet make a counter-revolution. Eventually there will either be an uprising which replaces the current establishment, or the establishment will slowly wither, but at the moment the authorities still have the upper hand. I’ve seen at first hand the incredible bravery of young Iranians in challenging their tormentors, and the concept of martyrdom runs deep in their culture; but there are limits to how many people will sacrifice themselves. The dynamic would change if enough young soldiers and militia members were no longer willing to open fire on protestors. So far, the true believers, especially in the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, appear to be holding firm. The regime keeps close watch on its armed forces, the secret police are inside law enforcement agencies, and units of the Revolutionary Guard accompany the army when it is deployed. Finally, there are the reformers working from the inside. For twenty years they have been trying to use elected institutions which were set up to give the appearance of democracy to counterbalance the real power – that of the clerics and Revolutionary Guard. They have tried to preserve the country’s strong Islamic traditions and at the same time build a democracy. It remains a work, but not in progress. In 2020, versions of a new phrase began to do the rounds. Instead of power flowing from the ‘crown to the turban’ it was seeping from the ‘turban to the boots’, meaning the military – specifically the Revolutionary Guard. The Majlis is full of ex-Guards, as are the boards of some of the big companies. Chief executives know that with a Guard on board, a contract might follow – after all, the elite force is not just full of influential generals, it is itself a major company. Its construction wing is called Khatam al-Anbia, and in addition to many other projects it built parts of the Tehran Metro. This is akin to the Royal Marines making profits from extending the Northern Line of the London Tube, or perhaps the US 82nd Airborne Division moving into manufacturing cars. The Guards talk the revolutionary talk and walk the moneymaking walk. The Revolutionary Guard even has its own media arm, which runs dozens of newspapers, TV and radio stations, social-media outlets and film production companies. Over the past few years, by no coincidence, all seem to follow three broad narratives: that the Revolutionary Guard and the Supreme Leader are really great guys and anyone who disagrees is a very bad person; that any economic or political failure or security excess is the fault of the reform administrations; and that outside forces are, at every waking moment, working to destroy the great nation of Iran. Too often foreign news reports from Iran feature interviews with English-speaking university students and portray them as the voice of the youth. Things are far more complicated than that, as shown by the fact that many young people volunteer to join the Basij and the Revolutionary Guard. The reports should also point out that for every young dissident they find, there are other educated youngsters queuing up for jobs as graphic designers, script writers, video editors and film production roles at Revolutionary Guard-related companies. They pay well. If this side of Iran is not explained, the viewer might have trouble understanding why, when they’ve seen all these young people demanding change, change isn’t happening. This is not to say that people employed by the Revolutionary Guard necessarily support the system, but it does show how the system is co-opting everyone it can in order to survive. Some of the tech savvy younger generation are at the forefront of Iran’s cyber-warfare project and are busy trying to spread Iran’s point of view across the world or attempting to hack into hostile powers’ military, commercial and political computer systems. They’re quite good at it. This is how you do joined-up government: the Revolutionary Guard media arm employs thousands of people and keeps an eye on them via its intelligence wing. It sells its programmes to the state broadcaster to amplify its message. It links its media operation with that of the Basij militia. And the head of one of its biggest media outlets, Martyr Avini, is the Supreme Leader’s representative in the Basij, which is subordinate to the Revolutionary Guard. Nice work, and they get it. This doesn’t mean the Revolutionary Guard intends to take over; it’s more fun pretending you are not in politics, but it’s an example of how intertwined it is with the state, and how, should the clerics have to retreat, it is an alternative, with guns. The Revolutionary Guards could ‘course-correct’ the revolution, but their name tells you what their job is, and their name and their job are why the regime has not bent despite four decades of internal and external pressure. One of the most important aspects of the Iranian regime is often the one which is not taken as seriously as it should be. It was, is, and will remain a revolutionary theocracy. As such, it has fundamentalist principles and cannot change them without undermining itself. Imagine a French president declaring that he or she is no longer in favour of the equality part of the country’s national motto, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. It’s not going to happen. Now imagine that the ayatollahs, whose ideology is that Iran’s Shia Islam is the manifestation of God’s plan for humanity, announce a massive compromise with the ‘Great Satan’ and a tolerance of sexual freedoms, conversion to other faiths, and a genuinely pluralistic political system. If you think you are enforcing God’s will on Earth – that’s not going to happen either. Every American president since the 1979 revolution has tried the stick-and-carrot approach to achieve a ‘grand bargain’ with the Islamic Republic. Such a deal would require each side to make what they would regard as huge compromises. Iran would have to allow robust UN verification that it was not building nuclear weapons, limit its ballistic-missile programme, stop funding terrorist groups, end what the USA regards as destabilizing behaviour in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, and no longer oppose a negotiated settlement to the Arab–Israeli conflict. That’s a ‘big ask’. Iran prides itself on being revolutionary and has always sought to export its revolutionary principles, to become the leader of like-minded movements. However, there is a scenario in which it might abandon that role in order to save the revolution at home. In return the USA would guarantee that it was not seeking regime change in Iran, end its unilateral sanctions, and, after diplomatic relations were restored, work with Iran economically to modernize its energy industry, and diplomatically to ensure regional stability. It sounds great, but tentative moves towards even agreeing a framework of how to achieve these aims are consistently undermined by hardliners on each side and mutual suspicion of each other. Barack Obama opened a few doors in his presidency but is accused of allowing the Iranians to continue working on a nuclear bomb due to the perceived weaknesses in the nuclear deal of 2015. President Rouhani walked through some of those doors, but was hammered by the hawks in Tehran. Under President Joe Biden the Americans, and others, have given up on ‘regime change’ and instead seek to simply ‘change regime behaviour’. The ayatollahs can hold on to ‘Fortress Iran’ as long as they let go of ideas of becoming a nuclear-armed state and pull back from the Arab world. The Arab governments may never warm to Tehran, but if it no longer interfered in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain, they could come to terms with it. Conversely, if Iran looks to be close to having nuclear weapons, the Arab states will close ranks against it, seek ever closer ties to the USA, and failing that, shelter under the umbrella of a future nuclear armed Saudi Arabia. The Islamic Republic, under its current system, is stuck in a Catch-22 situation. It cannot liberalize, as that undermines the foundations of what legitimacy it has left among the millions of people who still support it. But if it does not, as each year passes the increasingly young population will chafe against a system more in tune with the sixteenth century than the twenty-first. The class of 1979 know that time and demographics are against them, but they have many cards to play. The nuclear issue remains live and the Strait of Hormuz remains narrow. They have a range of proxy actors in the region they can call on in the worlds of politics and terrorism. To counter internal subversion organized from within and without they have much-feared and brutal security services. And they are doing God’s work. Therefore, to compromise is sin, to resist is divine. The religious revolutionaries do not intend to give up their revolution. CHAPTER 3 SAUDI ARABIA ‘If you keep walking, they have to follow you.’ Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, first Saudi female ambassador IF YOU WANT TO SOLVE OR MANAGE A PROBLEM, YOU NEED TO define it. In Saudi Arabia the problem is defined by two words: Saudi and Arabia. In 1740, parts of the Najd region in central Arabia were controlled by a local emir called Muhammad ibn Saud. By 1930, one of his direct descendants had vastly extended that territory and renamed it Saudi Arabia. If a family names a country after itself, what about everyone who is not in the family? All citizens of Brazil are part of the Brazilian ‘family’ and are equal in law, but not all Saudi citizens are from the House of Saud, nor are all equal. If I were to take over the United Kingdom and call it Marshland, some people might accept that it reflected the climate, but I wouldn’t be confident of their loyalty to the country – by which I would mean me. (I hasten to assure Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith that I harbour no such treasonable ambitions.) This identification of self with state creates difficulties, because historically the Sauds could make a reasonable argument to call parts of the Najd after themselves, but the rest of Arabia? Not so much. A large part of today’s population has been under Saudi control for less than a century. If, 120 years ago, someone had told the Shammar tribe that the Emirate of Shammar would soon be turned into a mere province of the kingdom of the Sauds, they may have found themself at the wrong end of a scimitar. The Shia, most of whom live in provinces facing the Gulf, would also have questioned the idea that they would be ruled by Saud Sunni Wahhabi fundamentalists, with whom they had clashed down the centuries. This does not mean that the modern kingdom cannot survive, but it does explain the tensions which run beneath its surface. The centre must hold the periphery if the ruling family is to retain its grip on power. A century ago, the population of what is now a state with 34 million people was about 2 million, most of them nomads. Covering much of the Arabian peninsula, the country is mostly desert. There is still not much there except oil and sand. It was fossil energy sources that catapulted Saudi Arabia into the twentieth century and made it a major player. Oil is also the basis of the country’s relationship with its major ally and protector: the USA. Oil has given it vast wealth, and that wealth, in an oil-thirsty world, has allowed it to survive even though elements within the power structure export a violent interpretation of its extreme brand of Islamic fundamentalism. The most famous Saudi of recent times is not a king or an oil multi-billionaire, he is a terrorist – Osama Bin Laden. But there’s a problem: the world is slowly weaning itself off oil. What is the ruling family to do, in a desert land with only sand and oil, a restive population, contested legitimacy and beset by enemies within and without? It must modernize, and use technology to harness renewable energy to adapt to the twenty-first century. It will not be an easy path, and its success or failure will affect the wider Middle East and beyond. Saudi Arabia was created in the twentieth century using transport and communication technology, but the geography of the country meant the regions had distinct differences, many of which remain. Until recently, huge areas were uninhabitable. This is, after all, the world’s largest country without a river and the interior is dominated by two vast deserts. In the north is the An-Nafud, which is connected to the Empty Quarter by a smaller, narrow corridor of sand. The Empty Quarter’s official name is the Rub’ al-Khali, although to the few nomadic Bedouin who live there it is simply called Al-Ramlah – ‘the Sand’. It is the largest continuous area of sand in the world, covering a region bigger than France, with dunes as high as 250 metres, and stretches into the UAE, Oman and Yemen. Summer temperatures in the deserts are frequently over 50ºC in the shade, not that there’s much of that. Conversely, if you’ve ever been in the desert at night in the winter, you’ll have felt how bitterly cold it can be. Even now few people venture into it, and much of it remains unexplored. It’s known that beneath the """