Putin visited the future of Russia: the president personally saw what awaits us
The Hidden Meaning of VVP’s Visit to Iran
Vladimir Putin has visited Iran — the significance of this news goes far beyond the fact that in recent months, for obvious reasons, the master of the Kremlin has rarely travels outside of Russia. Iran now is not just the closest ally, ideological ally and political partner of the Kremlin. Today's Iran is also a kind of mirror of the Russian tomorrow, a country based on whose experience we can understand and calculate what awaits us.
Vladimir Putin and Ebrahim Raisi in Ashgabat Photo: Global Look Press
Of course, any political analogies are conditional, and any political mirrors have a certain amount of “curvature”. Moscow's new (or not entirely new) “privileged partner” is a state with almost the most unique political system in the world.
How about the following passage from the Iranian Constitution: “The Islamic Republic is a system government based on faith in… the Last Judgment and its constructive role in human perfection on the path to God.”
The strengthening of the role of the religious factor is now a pronounced trend in Russian politics. But it seems that our country will not reach the point of making similar changes to the Basic Law. However, that is not what matters now. Now the following is important: the decisive political turn that Russia made in 2022 took place in Iran 42 years ago.
From the moment of the coup d'état organized by the CIA in Tehran in 1952 until the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 Iran was, to use Russian political jargon, “the long nineties”: a period during which the country played the role of a junior political partner of the United States.
But that period of drift from allied relations with the West to absolute antagonism towards the same West, which in Russia took at least 15 years – from Putin's Munich speech in 2007 to the start of a special operation in Ukraine in 2022 – fit in Iran only in a few months or even weeks. Since 1979, the country that Putin has now visited has officially been the most anti-American state on the planet.
This thesis of mine may seem somewhat “voluntaristic”. Are there few other countries in the world whose bosses pursue an anti-American political course and please the population with anti-American political rhetoric? The answer is obvious: a lot (although not as much as Moscow would like). But even against the background of the unofficial “global anti-American front”, Iran is something completely exceptional.
Iran is the country that made the American political elite forget their favorite principle of nothing personal (“nothing personal”). Iran has made the US leaders feel a sense of deep humiliation. Iran de facto toppled one American president (Jimmy Carter lost the election in 1981 as a result of the failure of his policy towards the new authorities of Tehran) and almost toppled another (during his second term, Ronald Reagan miraculously avoided impeachment due to the scandal ” Iran-Contra).
Too much history? Please, here is the present for you. Breaking news from the news feed: “The West is ready to crack down on countries that are abusing or disrupting the global economic order. This was stated by US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen during a visit to South Korea.
Fresh legend, but hard to believe – or at least partially unbelievable. The West has been taking tough, very tough, exceptionally tough, cruel measures against Iran since 1979. So what?
Photo: Global Look Press
Of course, I would not dare to say that nothing at all. Having visited Iran four years ago, I personally saw all the hardships of life under a permanent economic blockade by the United States. But I also saw something else – a country whose economy was not thrown back into the “Stone Age”, but continues to function more or less successfully at the modern level. In conditions when Russia is just getting used to the total economic blockade by the West, this fact can serve as a very important intellectual “foothold”.
In our recent past, the following anecdote was popular: an optimist in Russia studies English, the pessimist is Chinese, and the realist is the Kalashnikov assault rifle. Judge for yourself how exactly in our current realities it is worth “modernizing” this joke. But here is what must be part of such a “modernization”: a realist in our country is simply obliged to study the Iranian political, economic and social experience in detail.
Russia and Iran are very different powers in their caliber and in their weight . However, we have been “colleagues” since February 24 of this year.
The United States will “punch” Moscow with no less tenacity than they “punch” Iran under its eighth president. It's even a pity that Vladimir Putin decided to make his Iranian visit very short. It is clear that under the conditions of a special operation, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief cannot leave his country for too long. But visiting Iran is definitely not just a “diplomatic courtesy visit”.
