Iran and the Little Satan/Great Satan Con
Iran is Persia. The name changed in 1935. The civilization didn’t.
Every few years, Washington discovers the Middle East is complicated.
However, the Middle East is not so complicated if you look at it the right way. The confusion arises from not understanding its history and the through lines, some of which are more than a thousand years old.
In respect to Iran’s relationship with the rest of the Middle East, there are two schisms.
Schism One: Persian vs. Arab
This one is ethnic and civilizational. It has nothing to do with religion.
Persia was a great empire before Islam existed. Cyrus the Great. Darius. The Achaemenid dynasty. A civilization that stretched from the Aegean to the Indus, that wrote law, built roads, and governed a hundred peoples — all of it centuries before Muhammad was born.
In 651 CE, Arab Muslim armies destroyed the Sassanid Empire, the last Persian dynasty, and overran the country. Persia was Islamized. It was never Arabized. The Persians kept their language. They kept their culture. They kept their identity. Every other nation the Arabs conquered — Syria, Egypt, North Africa — eventually became Arab in language and self-conception. Persia did not. It is the only one.
That resistance was not accidental. It was the expression of a civilization that remembered being great before the conquerors arrived. A civilization that absorbed the new religion on its own terms and built something the Arabs couldn’t dissolve. In the 8th and 9th centuries, Persian scholars, poets, and bureaucrats mounted a deliberate cultural resistance inside the Islamic Caliphate itself — staffing its administrative machinery while preserving their own language and literature. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh — the Book of Kings — kept the memory of Cyrus and Darius alive for centuries. The Arabs brought the religion. The Persians kept the empire’s memory.
The ethnic rivalry — Persian pride and imperial ambition versus the Arab world — predates Islam. It existed before the conquest. It survived the conquest. It runs underneath every conflict in the region today.
This is the axis where “Iran wants to dominate the Middle East” lives. Permanent loss of regional dominance is not a settled issue for Iran.
Schism Two: Sunni vs. Shia
This one is religious, internal to Islam, and has nothing to do with ethnicity.
Muhammad died in 632 CE without clearly designating a successor. The community split immediately over who should lead. Most backed Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close companion, selected by community consensus. A minority held that leadership belonged by right to Ali — Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law — and to the line of descendants from Muhammad himself.
That minority became the Shia. The majority became the Sunni.
The split hardened into permanent fracture at Karbala in 680 CE, when the Sunni caliph’s forces killed Ali’s son Husayn. The massacre became the founding wound of Shia identity. It is commemorated annually. It is not forgotten.
Iran is Shia. Most of the Arab world is Sunni — but not all. Iraq is majority Shia Arab. Bahrain is majority Shia, ruled by a Sunni monarchy. Lebanon’s Hezbollah is Shia Arab.
Where They Fuse
In 1501, the rulers of Persia made Shia Islam the official state religion.
The move was strategic. Persia was squeezed between Sunni powers on both flanks — the Ottoman Empire to the west, Uzbek powers to the east. Adopting Shiism was a declaration of difference. It gave Persia a distinct religious identity that set it apart from every Sunni neighbor threatening its borders.
It also gave Persia something more durable: a civilizational claim. The rulers of Persia became simultaneously the heirs to ancient Persian imperial ambition and the champions and protectors of Shia Islam worldwide.
From that moment, the two schisms became one. They braided together inside the Persian state and have not separated since.
Two Engines, One Vehicle
Modern Iran is the product of both fault lines running at once.
The “Shia crescent” — Iran’s network of proxies and aligned forces across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen — runs on the religious axis. Shia solidarity. The defense of the faith against Sunni powers.
The drive for regional hegemony — the insistence on Iranian primacy, the resistance to any outside power dictating terms — runs on the ethnic-imperial axis. Persian memory. The empire that was. The regime calls it revolution. The map calls it empire.
Saudi Arabia fears Iran on both tracks simultaneously. It is Sunni facing a Shia power. It is Arab facing a Persian one. Two overlapping anxieties, neither of which disappears when you address the other.
Shia Arabs throughout the region feel the same tension in reverse. The religious axis pulls them toward Iran. The ethnic axis reminds them that Tehran is Persian — and Persian hegemony has historically come at Arab expense.
The conflict is overdetermined. Remove one engine and the other keeps running.
The Little Satan/Great Satan Con
The Iranian theocracy has a stated goal: destroy the Little Satan — Israel — and the Great Satan — the United States. It says so openly. It has said so for decades.
Cons employ misdirection. This stated goal is pure misdirection.
When Khomeini took power in 1979, Iran was isolated — a Persian Shia state in a region overwhelmingly Arab and Sunni. The regime needed a cause no Sunni leader could openly oppose. They found it in Palestine. Khomeini declared an annual Jerusalem Day that first year, and in the decades that followed Tehran built Hezbollah and backed Hamas — pivoting from Persian outsider to pan-Islamic champion. Sunni Arab leaders quietly accommodating Israel were suddenly the traitors. Tehran was suddenly the resistance. The con was running.
The real agenda is not the destruction of Israel or America. The real agenda is to dominate the Middle East and dominate Islam — on Iranian terms, with Iran’s brand of it. The two satans are a useful story. They unite Sunni and Shia against a common enemy, paper over the Persian/Arab rivalry, and dress up regional imperialism as righteous religious resistance.
Keeping Israel as the enemy of focus helps mask the con. Harassing Israel forever serves a greater purpose at this time than destroying it. Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey. It is not logical for a country to spend fifty years and all its money trying to erase a tiny speck on the Middle Eastern map. It is, however, worth every bit of that trouble if Israel is the vehicle for achieving something far larger.
The United States is the other half of the equation. It is the outside power whose presence in the Middle East directly obstructs Iranian dominance. Label it the Great Satan and you have a second villain that unites the faithful.
Strip away the billboard and you find the two schisms running underneath. That’s the real story. That’s what this piece is about.
The Arab world leadership itself uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for other purposes, which I have outlined in part earlier in op-eds on the conflict.
What Diplomacy Cannot Buy
Now look at what the US is demanding Iran give up.
No nuclear weapons. That kills the hard power instrument of Persian imperial ambition. Without it, Persia is a medium-sized country with oil and a long memory. With it, Persia is the regional hegemon its civilizational identity demands it be.
No proxy network. That kills the Shia crescent. Dismantle Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and the Shia religious axis collapses. Iran is no longer the champion and protector of Shia Islam across the Arab world. It’s just another country.
Washington is asking Iran to surrender both engines simultaneously. From Tehran’s perspective that isn’t a negotiation. It’s a civilizational extinction event. Not the regime — the entire 2,500-year project the regime exists to advance.
This is the real story unmasked.
Iran’s nuclear bomb is the ultimate declaration that “Persia is back.” They are not going to give that up — or any of the rest of their goal of Middle Eastern dominance.