Robert D. Kaplan, Columnist

A Democratic Iran Is Coming and It Will Lead the Middle East

If the mullahs fall, the US may find it has a better ally in Tehran than it does in the Gulf monarchies.

December 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM UTC

Robert D. Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power."

Mahsa Amini, martyr.
Photographer: Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

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A 44-year epoch in the greater Middle East may be coming to an end, as the region begins to turn on its axis.

In early 1979, a radical Islamic regime under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini toppled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran, spreading revolutionary turmoil throughout the Levant and challenging the conservative Gulf Arab monarchies. The region was never the same, as Iranian-backed militias aggravated existent civil wars and started new ones.