I wrote the piece below in October 2022, just a couple of weeks after Mahsa Amini was killed, when “Woman, Life, Freedom” was still a new chant and the whole world seemed to be watching Iran at once. I’m reposting it almost exactly as it was. But I wanted to add a few words first, because a lot of people now assume the movement fizzled out, and I think that’s wrong.

The honest version is messier than “it faded.” The protests did quiet down in the way protests always do once the cameras leave. Tehran was happy to let that read as order restored. What actually happened underneath is that the regime stopped trying to manage a protest and started trying to stamp out a movement altogether. Then in early 2026 people were back in the streets again, this time set off by the economy falling apart, and within weeks it had turned political the way it always does in Iran. The crackdown since January has been brutal. To me that’s not a sign the movement is dead. You don’t need to crush something that hard if it already died on its own. Iranian women are still a distinct target of this regime and the reasons for that are evidently clear.

Here’s what I still believe, maybe more strongly than when I first wrote this: Iranian women aren’t one piece of Iran’s story among others. They’re the center of it. Decades of a system built specifically to control them ended up producing, almost by accident, the most educated and most determined generation of women the country has ever had. That was the regime’s mistake from the start, and it’s why I don’t think this movement has an expiration date on it. You can delay a reckoning like that. You can’t make it not happen eventually.

I also don’t think this stays contained inside Iran’s borders if it succeeds. A real shift in power between women and the clerical class there would send ripples through the wider Islamic world and beyond it. Tahirih said something close to this from the bottom of a well in 1852, and I don’t think she meant it only about Persia.

So the article below is largely unchanged from 2022. Think of it as a portrait of who these women are and where they came from, with this note as the update. The details on the ground have shifted since I first wrote it. What I concluded from them hasn’t.

14 August 2026

Toronto, Canada

Iranian Women – A Portrait

The events of the past two weeks in reaction to the capture, injury, and unjust murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, at the hands of the Iranian Morality Police, has mesmerized the world. It has captured the imagination of women and men alike, and set ablaze the Iranian people’s enthusiasm and quest for freedom, supported by their diaspora and people of goodwill throughout the world.  

Her story and the hashtag #MahsaAmini has been retweeted nearly 200 million times. People from every walk of life have shown their support and solidarity with Mahsa, and with other Iranian women who are on the streets of cities and towns across the country, demanding equal rights and freedom from the yoke of the ruling clerics. Unprecedented demonstrations in more than 150 cities worldwide have been supported by messages of solidarity from celebrities, sportsmen, and statesmen alike.  For the first time, an increasing number of women are taking off their headscarf (Hijab) and burning it publicly in an act of defiance against the ruling regime that has held them hostage for well over four decades.  On an unprecedented scale, men, too, have been joining women in supporting their God-given human rights, side-by-side, protesting on the streets.  

Mahsa represents the anger, frustration, and desires of not only citizens of a nation under siege, but also of women and men all over the world.  Her story resonates with people.  She was an ordinary young woman from a small town in the Kurdistan region of Iran.  She was on a family vacation and had a simple and seemingly happy life.  She had no claim to fame nor a desire to be a worldwide voice for the world.  She was a happy, healthy young woman with much of the same wants and desires as any woman in the world.  Yet, in a split second she found herself faced with the brutality of Iran’s Morality Police, who had a problem with her Hijab because too much of her hair was exposed for others to see.  The senselessness of this was incomprehensible to Mahsa, and what ensued is unacceptable to people all around the world.  In the process of her arrest, she suffered injuries to her head and within hours found herself in a coma in a hospital bed, and finally at the astonishment of her family, she was pronounced dead.  

Who was Mahsa Amini?  We do not know much about her.  She has become an icon, a symbol of justice and equality.  Much will be written about her in the future and many monuments will certainly be built in her name.  What we do know is that she was an Iranian woman. .  Understanding them may shed some light on what happened to her and what her life and death means to the world.

Iranian Women – A Brief History

The history of Iranian women and their struggles provides an important context here.  For well-nigh five centuries, ever since the official adoption of Shia Islam as state religion by the Safavid kings, the clerical class has systematically suppressed the rights of women in every facet of their lives through a hardline interpretation of Sharia law and a deliberate effort at controlling the minds and lives of people.  Strict religious rites and practices were enforced on the population, arguably the most intrusive of which was the veiling of women, subjugating them to the backseat of society, stripping them of their rights to vote, socialize, interact, and exist as functioning members of society. 

A key weapon in the hands of the clerics was access to education, which they used to control the women of the country by denying them such a basic right.  Even men were not afforded full access to education, allowing the clerics to self-proclaim their dominance over reading, interpreting and enforcing religious text and tradition. So grim was this situation that by the turn of the nineteenth century, the literacy rate in Iran was a mere 1% in total and nearly nonexistent among women. After 100 years of Qajar rule, this number increased to a pitiful 2% in total, but women were still universally uneducated. The clerics had achieved their lust for power.  It was during this period that Persia lost much of its territory to Russia and signed some of its most shameful treaties and became economically, socially, and morally bankrupt. The country was backwards by any standard and was plagued by disease, corruption, foreign control, superstition, and unmatched bigotry. Persia had lost its past glorious luster.

Beginning to Breathe!

It was in these dark times, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that a young, beautiful, and brave woman rose in Persia.  She was an educated and erudite scholar, a poetess, and a courageous rebel who espoused a new messianic movement that sought to renew religious tradition and forever throw the antiquated and crippling superstitions of the clerics into the dustbin of history.  Her name was Fatimeh.  Her sobriquet was Tahirih (meaning the pure one), and her title, Qurrat’ul-Ayn (the solace of the eye).  She was a force of nature.

It was Tahirih who, in 1848, performed a most revolutionary act in the small village of Badasht in northern Iran.  In a gathering to discuss their new creed, Tahirih suddenly entered a gathering of eighty pious men, removed her Hijab and unveiled her beauty, declaring the dawn of a new day of freedom for all.  So devastating and shocking was this act that one of the men present took a dagger and slit his own throat to show his astonishment and shame at the defiance of such a fundamental Islamic practice! Tahirih had broken tradition.  Soon, she was to be arrested and eventually at the home of the governor of the capital city, she was asked to repent and recant her beliefs.  She defiantly refused and raised her voice for freedom.  At last she was strangled, gagged and thrown into a well.  Before silencing her, it is reported that she had said: “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.”  

Tahirih’s challenge to her contemporaries was not merely about the Hijab.  This was simply a symbol of much greater aggression and suppression of the rights and freedom of her gender and her people at large.  She readily died to uphold her beliefs that the time of freedom and maturing of humanity had come, and that women need to hold the reigns in equal part with men to build a new era of prosperity and justice for humanity.

Tahirih was erudite.  She sparred with men of learning and often won her arguments with her mastery of both religious text and scientific reasoning.  She was courageous and outspoken.  In one of the most celebrated poems she declares this emancipation as the time of “beginning to breathe!”  She challenged the clerics and brought to light their true motives, their character, and their abuse of religion as an instrument for power and wealth.

The future society she imagined would be “free from the shackles of superstition and bigotry,” would “fight injustice with the power of equality” and would “defeat ignorance through the power of knowledge and inquiry.”  She envisioned a world of “love and amity” where differences are blotted out and “otherness” gives way to “unity and oneness.”  It was precisely this that cost her her life.  The removal of the Hijab was a symbol of her fight for this greater freedom.

Gathering Momentum

At the time of Tahirih’s death, Persia was drowning in a sea of darkness and ignorance.  The authorities thought they had silenced her.  Little did they know that they had set in motion forces that would shape the fortunes of their nation for decades to come. 

Within a few decades, a vibrant women’s movement gathered momentum in Iran.  Women began to participate and flourish in many aspects of life.  Iranian women played a significant role in the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 and worked hard to incorporate equal rights and freedoms for themselves.  Although much of these efforts were defeated, in a little over half a century since the killing of Tahirih, Iranian women were making their mark in history.  During these times, women such as Sediqeh Dowlatabadi, a feminist activist and a journalist, pioneered the Persian Women’s Movement.  Other notable women of this period was Commander Bibi Maryam Bakhtiari who became a military commander and played a key role in during the revolutionary campaign of 1909.

By 1909, Iran’s first all-female school had opened in the town of Qazvin.  When the Qajar dynasty came to an end and Reza Khan took the reigns as the first King of the Pahlavi dynasty, he began to promote the ideals of equality among sexes.  He ordered the police to remove women’s Hijabs in public.  Schools and universities began to enroll women, and soon women entered into every aspect of the Iranian society.   

The emancipation of women was gathering momentum daily.  Women began to flourish in many aspect of life, from politics and business to science, technology, and the arts.  Two of the most celebrated and impactful poets of the past century were women: Parvin Etesami and Forough Farrokhzad, both of whom died at a young age but left an indelible mark on Iranian literature and on the minds and souls of the public.  Their message was one of freedom and justice.  Their cry resonated with a nation fast developing, but still grappling with inequity and inequality.

Under Siege

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a turning point for this cry.  Soon after the clerical class rose to power, they began to implement strict Sharia laws again.  The most visible of these was the implementation of the mandatory Hijab for women.  Initial resistance was met with forceful controls by the authorities and, within a few years, an elaborate machinery of education, enforcement, control, and prosecution was created.  Girls were required to wear the Hijab from a tender age of nine, and every aspect of women’s lives were controlled and restricted.  Men and women were not allowed to interact in public, sit on the same seats in public transportation, go to public swimming locations together, or show any form of public affection or familiarity. A strong, well-armed and well-financed “Morality Police” was formed to ensure women strictly obeyed these rules.  In addition, women were not allowed to exercise many of their freedoms including the freedom to travel abroad without the permission of their father, husband, or brother.  Iranian women were under siege.

These restrictions, while often challenged by women of the larger urban centers, began to become the norm.  Women incorporated these restrictions in their daily lives.  However, as these restrictions continued to constrict their lives, the women of Iran turned their attention to one area where restrictions didn’t apply – education.  Women participated and excelled in all fields of education: social sciences, engineering, math, biology, information technology, and every other imaginable field of learning.  More than 60% of the graduates of technical universities were women.  Iranian women began to shine on the global arena of business and science.  Maryam Mirzakhani, a graduate of the famous Sharif University and Professor of mathematics at Stanford, became the first Iranian and first of only two women to receive the “Fields Medal,” the most prestigious award in mathematics.  Shirin Ebadi became the first woman judge to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and Anousheh Ansari became the first Iranian woman entrepreneur to go to space, making her the first self-funded woman astronaut.  

An unintended consequence of the persecution of the Iranian women was that they became the most skilled, educated, and capable group of women in the world.   This little-known fact is perhaps the greatest reason why the world must pay special attention to what’s going on in Iran today.  For the first time in modern history, a full and equal participation in building a new society is being exercised before the entire world.

And yet the “Morality Police’s” suppression of rights continued to persist.  Social media began to capture interaction with these police with increasing intensity.  Women began to defy the headscarf, resist the unjust laws, and engage verbally and physically with the system.  Many female human rights activists found themselves in the notorious Evin prison, among them Nasrin Sotoudeh and Narges Mohammadi (who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 after this original essay).  Women members of the Baha’i faith, who have been persecuted from the outset of the revolution, were a special target. The most famous of these were Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi who are serving a second ten year sentence in Evin prison.

A new women’s movement was brewing and the government doubled down on its efforts to contain it.  The most visible form of that containment was the wearing of the mandatory Hijab.  That was a red line for the government and, too, was becoming a red line for the well-educated, urbane and sophisticated women of Iran.

Women, Life, Freedom

It was against this backdrop that the brutal capture and murder of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police was confronted with a nationwide reaction.  The Iranian population’s patience had run out after 43 years of suppression and persecution.  What initially seemed to be a defiance of the mandatory Hijab, clearly became a demand for justice and freedom. The freedom to think, speak, and live in a society that puts human dignity and prosperity at it’s core.  

This time the clear leader of this movement are women.  This time their cry of “Women, Life, Freedom” is heard across the country and across the world.  This time, men have found the courage to support them and to champion their cause.  In fact, their cause is the cause of freedom; freedom for all.  

It is both noteworthy and rather ironic that a society with the most repressive and oppressive set of rules against women would give rise to the most educated and capable women, and would stir a universal consciousness of justice, equality and freedom. 

Iran is facing many social and economic challenges today.  The years of crippling economic sanctions has left the population struggling for daily subsistence.  Corruption is endemic and has caused environmental, social, and moral catastrophes on a scale that is unimaginable for a country with rich natural resources, culture, and history.  

Yet, Iran is moving on and rising once again, and has great promise and potential.  Its young population of more than eighty-five million people are among the most educated and informed in the world.  They are determined to build a different future for themselves and are raising their voice for freedom and equality.  They need to build everything from scratch.  They are ready.  They have their greatest asset in their possession – Iranian women.

Perhaps Tahirih was right after all.

Shane Tedjarati

6 October, 2022

Sorento, Italy

Descent

From the deck of a ship, the Mariana Trench looks like nothing at all. The water is the same blue as any other water. Gulls follow the wake. A tourist leaning on the rail would never guess what lies beneath. Then you go down.

At two hundred metres the colour drains out of the world. At one thousand the last photon from the surface has been swallowed and it is dark, permanently, in a way nothing on land is ever dark. At four thousand the pressure would crush a submarine hull like a paper cup. And at eleven thousand metres, at a place called Challenger Deep, you reach the bottom of the planet. The pressure there is a thousand times what you are feeling right now. Almost nothing lives. What does live has abandoned eyes, abandoned colour, abandoned any expectation of light, and arranged itself entirely around the business of surviving conditions no ordinary creature could tolerate for a second. Fewer human beings have been to the bottom of that trench than have walked on the moon.

I want to tell you about an even deeper one.

It is wider than the Mariana, and darker, and considerably harder to reach. And unlike the Mariana, it did not take tectonic plates thirty million years to open. It was made by men, in under fifty years, and it is maintained daily by people who go home at night to gardens in the hills above Tehran. Let me take you down there.

From the surface it looks like nothing at all. Tehran at eight in the morning is one of the great cities of the world doing what great cities do. Twelve million people in a valley under the Alborz, traffic knotted solid on Vali-Asr, the longest tree-lined street in the world. Bakeries pulling sangak off hot stones. The bazaar opening its shutters, a covered city inside a city, cardamom and copper and carpet and gold. Cafés in Tajrish full of students arguing about films. Bookshops on Enghelab. Girls walking with their headscarves around their shoulders now, openly, the way you would carry a scarf on a warm day, because a generation decided the law was finished whatever the law said. Ski lifts running at Dizin. A wedding somewhere with three hundred guests and a sound system that ought to get a warning. Kids on scooters. Instagram. Traffic. Life.

Any visitor who spends a week in that city goes home and tells friends that Iran is nothing like the news. They are telling the truth. They just never went down.

Because a few hundred metres under that surface the light starts to go.

It is a woman with a master's degree in chemical engineering who has been out of work for four years, because employers have quietly learned not to hire women for those roles, and the state that paid to educate her has legislated her out of the economy. It is her brother, thirty-one, who drives a Snapp car sixteen hours a day and lives with his parents because the rent on a room costs more than he can earn. It is the price of meat, which he has stopped buying. It is his salary in rial, which lost a third of its value while he was earning it.

Go deeper. It is a Baha'i girl with the entrance exam scores for medicine who will never see the inside of a university, because her faith is written on a form, and sixty years of policy have established that she may not be educated. It is a Kurdish town where the language of instruction is not the language of the home. It is a Baluch man in Sistan whose province has the worst everything: water, schools, roads, life expectancy, and the shortest distance to a firing squad.

Deeper. It is Evin. It is Qarchak. It is the wards where the country keeps its students, its lawyers, its journalists, its trade unionists, its poets, and increasingly its teenagers. It is a mother who has been told to come collect her son's clothes. It is the several million Iranians addicted to opiates in the country that sits on the world's busiest smuggling corridor, an epidemic that flourishes under the protection of the same security apparatus that has the manpower to police the length of a woman's coat. It is the young women in the border cities selling the only asset they have left, and the husbands who broker it, God help us, because the children have to eat. It is the organ classifieds. It is the kidney for sale.

Deeper still, past where any camera goes. It is a hillside outside a provincial city with fresh soil and no headstones, and it is the thousands of Iranians, countless thousands, who were shot in the streets in January and then buried by the state at night so nobody could count them, in a country whose government will not say how many of its own citizens it has killed because the number is not a fact it is willing to permit.

This is the trench. This is the part CNN does not film and the BBC does not reach and the diplomats in Islamabad are not discussing. This is what it means, in practice, to be a nation so unimaginably rich and so unforgivably poor.

And here is the thing about a trench. What lives down there adapts. It learns to survive without light, and it stops expecting light, and after a while it stops describing the light to its children. That, more than any single atrocity, is what is being done to Iran.

II

The Question Every Iranian Has Already Asked

Every Iranian I have ever known has had a version of this conversation. It happens at dinner tables in Los Angeles and Toronto and Dubai, and it happens in living rooms in Shiraz. Somebody says it out loud, usually late in the evening, usually after the third glass: look at what we have, look at who we are, look at what we could have been. Everybody nods. Somebody sighs. The conversation moves on.

It is the most repeated sentence in the Iranian language and the least consequential, because it has never been anything more than a feeling. Glaringly obvious, endlessly discussed, never measured. And a grievance that cannot be measured is a grievance the world can ignore with impunity.

So the question I want to answer is a narrow one, and it is not rhetorical. Can the gap between what Iran is and what Iran could be actually be quantified? Can you put a number on it, set that number beside other nations, and show that the intuition every Iranian carries is not sentiment but arithmetic?

I believe you can, and that is what the rest of this essay is about.

Then there is the harder question, which is why it matters. Suppose we prove the trench is the deepest on earth. So what? Nations underperform. Potential goes unrealised everywhere. Why should a reader in Ohio or Osaka care about the arithmetic of Iranian disappointment?

Because the gap is not contained. It never has been. What falls into that trench does not stay in it. It comes back out as militias, as closed shipping lanes, as oil at prices that reach every household on this planet, as a proliferation race in the most combustible region on earth, and as a brain drain that staffs other countries' hospitals and laboratories. You have been paying for this hole in the ground for forty-seven years, whether or not anybody told you what the line item was.

And there is one more reason, which I will come to at the end, and which I think is the most important argument in this essay: what the world stands to gain if the trench is filled is larger than anything currently on any diplomatic agenda.

III

What Iran Was Given

Start with the inheritance, because almost nobody, including most Iranians, has ever seen it added up in one place.

Below the ground

Iran holds roughly thirty-two trillion cubic metres of proven natural gas, second on earth only to Russia, and roughly two hundred billion barrels of proven oil, third or fourth depending on whose ledger you use. Those two facts are usually reported separately, which is exactly how the headline gets missed. Convert the gas to barrels of oil equivalent and add them together, which is the only honest way to compare an energy endowment, and the ranking changes.

Iran is first. Not in the top five. First. No country on this planet was handed more recoverable energy than the Islamic Republic of Iran, yet Iranians queue for petrol and burn furniture oil in winter.

The hydrocarbons, though, are the least interesting part of the inheritance, because they are the part everyone knows and waves away as the resource curse. Go one layer down.

Iran sits on sixty-eight distinct minerals across roughly fifty-seven billion tonnes of proven reserves, worked by some six thousand active mines. Tehran's own Chamber of Commerce values that mineral base at something on the order of twenty-seven trillion dollars. More than seven percent of the world's proven mineral reserves lie inside a country occupying about one percent of the world's land.

Sar Cheshmeh in Kerman is among the largest open pit copper mines on earth, and copper is the metal that every electrification pathway on this planet runs through. Mehdiabad is regarded as one of the world's largest undeveloped zinc resources, and the operative word in that sentence is undeveloped. Central Iran and Yazd carry rare earth anomalies across some seven thousand square kilometres, barely explored. And above all of it grows an agricultural signature no other country possesses: roughly ninety percent of the world's saffron, and the pistachio that once defined the global market.

There are perhaps three countries that combine world leading hydrocarbons with a genuinely diversified top ten mineral base. Iran is one. Russia is another. And through the entire twenty-first century story of electrification, batteries and critical mineral scarcity, one of the three has been essentially absent from the market.

Above the ground

Now the part that matters more, and I want to make it concrete rather than statistical, because the statistics have a way of turning people into an aggregate.

Since Iran first entered the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1985, its teenagers have won more than fifty gold medals. Iran has finished in the global top ten on nineteen separate occasions and won the whole thing outright in 1998. Four Iranian students have achieved a perfect score of forty-two out of forty-two. In composite rankings across the mathematics, physics, chemistry and informatics Olympiads, Iran routinely places among the top handful of countries on earth, alongside China, Russia, the United States and South Korea. This is a country under sanctions, with schools that cannot buy equipment, producing sixteen year olds who beat the world.

One of those students scored a perfect forty-two in 1995 and another gold the year before her. Her name was Maryam Mirzakhani, she went to Sharif University in Tehran, and in 2014 she became the first woman in the history of mathematics to be awarded the Fields Medal. She died at forty, a professor at Stanford. When the news broke, about her medal, Iranian newspapers had to publish photographs of her with her hair digitally covered or cropped out of frame. The state could not bring itself to show the world the face of the greatest mathematician it had ever produced.

That single editorial decision is the whole argument of this essay, compressed into one photograph.

Sharif University of Technology, where she studied, is routinely described by faculty at Stanford and MIT as having one of the finest undergraduate engineering programmes anywhere in the world. It is also, and this is the point, one of the most reliable feeders of graduate students into American engineering departments. Stanford's electrical engineering programme has absorbed cohort after cohort of Sharif students for thirty years. Iran trains them at public expense to a standard almost no country matches, and then hands them, at twenty-two, to somebody else.

Look at where they end up. Dara Khosrowshahi runs Uber. Hamid Moghadam built Prologis into the largest industrial real estate company on earth. Maky Zanganeh is co-chief executive of Summit Therapeutics and helped build Pharmacyclics before it sold for twenty-one billion dollars. Anousheh Ansari built and sold a telecoms company, became the first Iranian in space and the first woman to fund her own trip there, and now runs the XPRIZE Foundation. Pierre Omidyar founded eBay. Firouz Naderi ran NASA's Mars programme at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ali Javan co invented the gas laser at MIT. In medicine, in finance, in film, in academia, the pattern repeats until it stops being a list of exceptional individuals and starts being a statistical property of a population.

And the statistics confirm exactly that. Fifty-nine percent of Iranian immigrants in the United States aged twenty-five and over hold a bachelor's degree or higher, against thirty-three percent for the American born population and for immigrants overall. More than thirty percent hold a graduate or professional degree. Median household income sits near seventy-nine thousand dollars, with some estimates placing Iranian American households around eighty-seven thousand, ninth among all ethnic groups in the country. In Germany, forty-seven percent of Iranian asylum seekers in a single recent year arrived holding a university degree. Asylum seekers. People who left with what they could carry.

The same people, in different institutions, produce top decile outcomes in the wealthiest societies on earth.

This forecloses an entire genre of argument. Every explanation for Iran's condition that reaches for culture, for religion, for the Iranian character, for some civilizational unsuitability to modernity, dies right here. The raw material is not the problem. The raw material has been proving itself, in exile and at home, for forty-seven years.

On the map, and beneath the map

Iran fronts the Persian Gulf and the Caspian. It holds the northern shore of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil moves. It is the land bridge between Turkey, Central Asia, South Asia and the Gulf, the only viable corridor connecting four regions that between them hold a third of humanity. In a functioning world that is among the most valuable real estate in existence.

And beneath all of it lies a civilization of two and a half thousand years that absorbed the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks and came out the other side recognisably itself every time. It gave the world Ferdowsi, Hafez, Rumi, Khayyam. It functioned for centuries as the cultural motherboard of a Persianate world running from Anatolia to Bengal.

Add it up: first in the world in energy; top ten across the industrial metals; command of the strait; the land bridge between four regions; ninety-two million people who win the Olympiad and run the Fortune 500; twenty-five centuries of continuous civilization.

There may be four countries on this planet with a comparable draw. There is not one with a worse conversion rate.

IV

What Counts as a Life Well Lived

To measure what has been squandered we first have to say what a country is for. Four answers are available, and only the last of them was written in Persian.

The first says that a good life is for the accumulation of wealth, and that GDP per capita is the measure. It is convenient and it is easy to collect. It also rates a subject of an absolute monarchy and a citizen of a free republic as equally well off at equal income, which is a conclusion almost nobody accepts on reflection, least of all the subject.

The second comes from Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and it separates having from doing. Resources, in this view, are inputs rather than outcomes. What matters is a person's capability set, meaning the range of lives they could actually choose to lead. Consider a woman with a doctorate in chemical engineering who is barred by law and by practice from most of the professions she trained for. Her human capital is enormous. Her freedom to spend it is close to zero. Income accounting registers the first and is blind to the second. Something has clearly happened to that woman that a GDP figure will never show you, and any measure that cannot see it is not measuring a life.

The third simply asks people to rate their own lives on a ladder from zero to ten, then decomposes the answers by income, health, social support, freedom to make choices, generosity and perceived corruption. It has an obvious weakness, which is that human beings adapt and lower their expectations. It also has one virtue the other two lack, which is that it asks the people concerned.

And then there is the fourth, which is older than all of them and which was written here, in Iran, in Persian, addressed to Iranians. It holds that a human being should be regarded as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value, and that education alone can cause it to reveal its treasures. It then adds a second condition, and that second condition is the one that matters for everything which follows: that those treasures are given so that a person may carry forward an ever-advancing civilization. Two tests, therefore, rather than one. Was the mine opened? And was what came out of it permitted to be spent?

Hold that image against the previous section for a moment. Iran's true wealth was never the copper at Sar Cheshmeh or the gas beneath South Pars. It was Maryam Mirzakhani. The state opened that mine, at public expense, to a standard almost no country on earth can match. And then it would not print her face.

THE DEFINITION THIS ESSAY USES

Realized potential is a nation's capacity to open its mines and let their treasures be spent. Not what a country could produce. What its people are permitted to become, and what they are permitted to build with it.

Three moving parts, and we will track all three. Capacity, meaning health, schooling and income, which is whether the mine is opened at all. Freedom, meaning the ability to turn that capacity into a chosen life, which is whether the treasure may be spent. Experience, meaning whether the resulting life is one people report as good.

A country that scores high on the first and near zero on the second and third has not realized its potential. It has warehoused it.

V

What Iran Delivers

On raw capacity, Iran performs respectably, and this should be said plainly rather than grudgingly. Its Human Development Index score is 0.799, placing it around seventy-fifth of one hundred ninety-three countries, inside the high development band and ahead of Brazil, Egypt, Ukraine, Iraq and India. Life expectancy is near seventy-seven. The expansion of rural healthcare and mass schooling after 1979 was real, and it built human capacity that the system did not entirely intend to build.

Then look at what is done to that capacity.

Read that chart from top to bottom and you are watching a country build the ingredients of a good life about as well as a mid tier middle income state, then close, one by one, every channel through which those ingredients become a life somebody chose. One hundred sixty-fourth of one hundred sixty-five on human freedom. Below Russia. Below China. Below Venezuela.

Two numbers belong on that chart and are not on it.

Fourteen percent is female labour force participation in Iran, against a world average above fifty, in a country where women are a majority of university entrants. The state paid to educate them and then legislated them out of the economy. No sanctions regime anywhere in the world does this to a country. It is a decision, renewed every morning.

Seventy percent is the share of students at Sharif and Amir Kabir, Iran's finest technical universities, who report wanting to leave. Around a hundred and thirty thousand Iranian born students were enrolled in foreign universities before this war began. Iran recorded the fastest growth in emigration to wealthy countries of any nation on earth in the early 2020s. Between forty and fifty percent of graduates, physicians and professors say they want out.

The endowment is walking out of the country. Every year, the human capital column of Iran's ledger transfers itself, permanently, into the achievement columns of other nations.

VI

The Widest Gap

An isolated score proves nothing, so here is the comparison. Score every country on what it was handed, meaning resources, people, scale and position. Score it again on what it delivers, meaning income, health, freedom, institutional honesty and how people rate their own lives. Subtract the second from the first. Plot the result.

Two comparisons carry most of the weight. Norway proves that immense hydrocarbon wealth need not become a curse, given a sovereign fund, an honest judiciary and a working parliament. South Korea proves the reverse: a nation with essentially nothing beneath its soil, flattened by war and ruled by generals within living memory, now delivers among the finest lives anywhere.

Iran resembles neither. Iran resembles Venezuela, and outranks it.

A word on the method, since the objection is a fair one. The realization side of this calculation is built entirely from published indices compiled by other people. The endowment side is not, because no institution publishes an index of what a country was handed, so those scores are my own weighting and a reader is entitled to disagree with them. I would encourage it. Move the weights around, favour population over minerals or geography over education, and Iran's precise margin over Venezuela and Russia will shift. What does not shift is its place at the top. I have not found a defensible weighting of resources, people, scale and position that removes it, which is the finding rather than a caveat about it.

VII

The Alibi

Now for the objection that arrives within thirty seconds of any conversation on this subject, and it deserves a fair hearing before it is taken apart.

Iran has lived under sanctions since 1979, tightened savagely after 2018 and now operating under reimposed United Nations snapback measures. The effects are not cosmetic. Iran is locked out of dollar clearing and Western trade finance. It cannot buy the upstream technology its own gas fields require. Foreign investment is close to zero. Its oil sells at a discount through intermediaries and dark fleets. A country holding the second largest gas reserves on earth imports gas in winter, because the pressure maintenance equipment South Pars needs sits on an export control list.

All of that is true, and it explains a great deal about the ceiling.

It explains nothing whatsoever about the floor.

Sanctions do not write the laws that push half the population out of the workforce. Sanctions do not bar a Baha'i teenager from university because of the religion listed on her application, a policy that has been in continuous force for four decades and costs the treasury nothing to repeal. Sanctions do not fill Evin and Qarchak with lawyers, students, teachers, film-makers and trade unionists. Sanctions do not put ropes around the necks of people who were children when they were arrested, making Iran one of the last countries on earth still executing juvenile offenders. Sanctions do not dispatch a morality patrol into the street to beat a young woman for the position of a piece of cloth, and they did not kill Mahsa Amini.

Sanctions do not rank a country one hundred fifty-third of one hundred eighty-two on corruption, nor do they institutionalise that corruption at every level, from the customs officer to the ministry to the foundations that answer to nobody. Sanctions do not hand roughly half a national economy to a praetorian guard subject to no audit, no parliament and no court. Sanctions do not produce forty percent inflation, which requires a printing press, a finance ministry, and an instruction.

Sanctions did not drain Lake Urmia, and they did not empty the aquifers beneath Tehran until the president of the country had to warn, out loud, that his own capital may become unlivable.

Sanctions do not explain several million opiate addicts in a nation whose smuggling routes run through territory the security services control absolutely. A state that can identify a woman's loose headscarf from a traffic camera can identify a narcotics convoy. It has decided which of the two threatens it.

And sanctions certainly do not explain the princelings. Not the mansions in Lavasan and Farmanieh and the hills north of Tehran, with the gates and the imported cars, the children of the men who preach austerity to a country that has stopped buying meat. Not the Instagram accounts, since deleted, of the sons and daughters of senior clerics and commanders posing in Vancouver and Toronto and Nice and Istanbul, on holiday from a revolution their fathers still describe as a war against global arrogance. Not the billions moved out of Iran and parked in Canadian and European and Emirati real estate, laundered through channels that only the sanctioned can access, because evading sanctions is itself a monopoly and monopolies are profitable.

Here is the part nobody wants to say plainly. Sanctions have made a small number of Iranians extraordinarily rich. The men who control the workarounds control the entire import and export economy of a nation of ninety-two million. Every tightening of the screws increases the value of their franchise. This is why forty-seven years of pressure have never once produced the internal crisis that the theory of sanctions predicts. The pressure lands on the trench floor. The rent accrues at the top.

And then there is the cleanest test of all. Sanctions are an external constraint on transactions; they have never been a constraint on governance. Vietnam was embargoed and reformed. China was isolated and reformed. Both were poorer than Iran when they started. And the instruments that would close most of this gap are modest ones: an independent central bank; an honest commercial court; a competitive tender; a tax on the foundations; a student permitted to sit an entrance exam whatever her religion; a woman permitted to take a job. They cost nothing. They require nobody's permission. They have been available every single day for forty-seven years.

Not one of them was taken. Not once. Not in forty-seven years.

A pattern this consistent, sustained this long, stops being a constraint and becomes a confession.

VIII

Can This System Close the Gap?

Which brings us to the question that actually decides everything, and it is worth stating carefully rather than sloganeering it.

There are two versions of the charge. The first is that the Islamic Republic requires the gap, that the trench is not a failure of the system but a product it manufactures, because poverty creates dependence, fear prevents organisation, emigration removes leadership, and isolation creates monopoly rents for the men holding the keys. The second is milder and says nothing about intent, only that suppression is simply in the nature of the thing, an unavoidable by-product of what this system fundamentally is.

I think both are true, and I think the distinction matters less than a third question, which is the only one with any practical consequence: whatever its intentions, is this system capable of closing the gap?

I wager that it is not, and not because it lacks the will, but because the defects are inherent. They are load bearing.

Deng Xiaoping could dismantle Maoism because he was the state and Maoism was merely its software. He kept the party and rewrote the operating system. The Islamic Republic cannot run that manoeuvre, because in Iran the ideology is not the software. It is the motherboard. Velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist, is not a policy that can be adjusted. It is the theological claim on which the entire structure stands. Remove it and nothing justifies the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council, the parallel judiciary or the Revolutionary Guard.

Now walk the reform list and watch every item collide with that fact.

• Break the inflation. This requires a central bank the executive cannot raid. But raiding is the fiscal model, the mechanism by which a sanctioned state finances a war economy and a patronage network at the same time. It cannot be done.

• Unwind the parastatals. The foundations and the Guard's conglomerates are not a distortion of the system; they are the coalition that holds it upright. Subjecting them to competition and audit is not economic policy; it is the dismantling of the regime's own base. It cannot be done.

• Build an honest commercial court. A judiciary that will rule against a connected party over a contract is a judiciary that can rule against him over anything. There is no firewall between commercial independence and judicial independence, and the whole design of the current judiciary is the absence of that firewall. It cannot be done.

• Put women to work. This is the single largest available gain in national output, and it requires no capital and no foreign permission. It also requires overturning the gender architecture the system treats as its theological signature and its proof of authenticity. It cannot be done.

• Treat minorities and dissenters as equal citizens. Open the universities to every citizen whatever their faith, teach Kurdish in Kurdish schools, allow Sunnis a mosque in the capital, let Baluch and Ahwazi Arabs govern their own provinces, stop executing people for what they say and think. Every one of these is cost free, and every one of them concedes that the state's authority is civil rather than divine, which is the one thing it cannot concede. It cannot be done.

• Loosen the clergy's grip on private life. End the morality patrols, return marriage, inheritance, custody, dress and speech to the citizen. This is the most popular imaginable reform in Iran and the cheapest. It is also a direct admission that the clerical claim over private conduct was never legitimate, which vacates the founding premise. It cannot be done.

• Bring the diaspora home. This requires physical safety, convertible currency and careers not gated by political vetting. It requires, in short, that the regime stop being the reason they left. It cannot be done.

Every road out of the trench runs through the regime's own foundations. This is why forty-seven years have produced not one durable structural reform, only a rotating cast of reformists and hardliners performing a manufactured drama whose real function is to absorb the population's desire for change and convert it into endurance.

The gap is not a problem the Islamic Republic has failed to solve. The gap is what the Islamic Republic produces, in the same way a factory produces its output, and it has been producing it at a remarkably consistent rate for half a century. Incompetence is random. This is not random.

IX

The Bill the Rest of Us Pay

A state that cannot build prosperity at home builds influence abroad instead, and it builds it the only way a country with nothing to sell can build it, which is through militias: Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; the Shia militias across Iraq and Syria. This is not so much an ideological programme as a substitute foreign policy, the projection of a state whose only export is disruption.

Consider what that money would have bought at home. Ahvaz is the capital of Khuzestan, the province that sits directly on top of Iran's oil, the ground from which nearly all of the national revenue is pulled. It regularly records the worst air quality of any city on earth. In summer it passes fifty degrees. The rivers that gave the province its name have been diverted, and its farmers have watched their fields turn to salt. In 2021 people came out into the streets of that province, the richest ground in Iran, to protest that they had no drinking water, and the state answered them with live ammunition.

Ahvaz sits on the oil and has no water. Beirut has rockets that Ahvaz paid for. That is the entire foreign policy of the Islamic Republic in two sentences.

Now count what it has cost everyone else: a Bab el-Mandeb that global shipping has spent years avoiding after sustained Houthi missile and drone attacks, with a resurgence of Somali piracy compounding the risk, so that vessels are sent around an entire continent, adding weeks and billions to the price of every container of everything; a Lebanon held hostage to a militia stronger than its own army; an Iraq that cannot fully govern itself; a Syria that became a corridor; a Gulf that lives under missile threat and buys air defence instead of schools. And this year, the thing the shipping world has dreaded since 1979: Hormuz itself, closed and reopened and contested and blockaded, a fifth of the world's oil held hostage to a channel twenty-one miles wide, with the cost of energy in every household on this planet moving on the daily temper of a regime in its death throes.

Add the nuclear file, which is the same problem in a different guise. A state that cannot offer its people prosperity requires an existential enemy and an ultimate insurance policy. Every step it takes toward that policy pushes Riyadh, Ankara and Cairo toward their own, which is a proliferation cascade in the most combustible region on earth and the single most dangerous foreseeable event in world affairs.

Add the human ledger: one of the largest and fastest brain drains on the planet, running for four decades and accelerating; physicians trained at Iranian public expense who now staff hospitals in Muscat and Toronto and Berlin; engineers educated at Sharif who now build other countries' technology industries; the most educated population in the Middle East, distributed almost everywhere except the country that raised it.

What the trench exports is not oil, not gas, not copper. It exports instability, price shocks, proliferation risk and refugees.

And still the world's answer is the bargain from Le Guin's Omelas, the quiet civilised agreement that the child stays in the dungeon because letting it out would upset the arrangements. Iranian stagnation is accepted as the price of regional stability, and better, so the reasoning runs, to keep the door locked.

Look at that region this year and tell me the bargain worked. Systems built on enforced humiliation do not produce stability. They produce precisely what we are watching.

X

What a Free Iran Would Give the World

Now invert it. Fill the trench, not to the surface, just partway, and ask what the world receives. Not what Iranians receive, because that part is obvious and it is theirs by right, but what the rest of us receive.

The proxy architecture disappears

It would not be degraded, and it would not be contained. It would be defunded and purposeless. Hezbollah exists because Tehran believes it needs forward depth against an existential threat it largely manufactured. A normal Iranian state trading with its neighbours has no use for a militia in Beirut and no budget line for it that would survive a parliament. Lebanon gets its country back. Iraq gets its sovereignty. Yemen loses its supplier. The southern Red Sea reopens, and stays open. This is the largest single available reduction in political violence anywhere on earth, and it requires nobody to fire another shot.

The most dangerous chokepoint on earth becomes a customer

Hormuz stops being a weapon the moment the state on its northern shore is the party with the most to lose from closing it. A trading Iran is a permanent guarantor of that strait rather than its permanent hostage taker, and that single change removes the largest tail risk in global energy.

Energy and minerals the transition actually needs

Thirty-two trillion cubic metres of gas re-entering world markets is a structural change in European energy security and a permanent reduction in Russian leverage over the continent. Iranian gas reaching Pakistan and India is the difference between coal and not coal for two billion people. And the minerals, the copper and zinc and the whole undeveloped inventory, enter global supply chains at exactly the moment when the electrification of everything is bottlenecked on precisely these commodities, and when the world is desperate for sources outside a single dominant supplier.

The corridor opens

Iran is the missing segment of every east to west and north to south route between Asia and Europe. Open it and Central Asia connects to the Gulf, India to Russia, China to Turkey, across the shortest viable land route on the map. That is not a bilateral benefit. That is a rewiring of Eurasian commerce.

Ninety-two million people rejoin the world economy

A young, urban, ferociously educated market of ninety-two million, with a diaspora holding hundreds of billions in capital and, far more valuable, the operating knowledge of every advanced economy on earth. The Chinese and Indian diasporas came home when home became worth returning to, and their return was the accelerant of both miracles. Iran's diaspora is proportionally better educated than either of them was.

And the thing that matters most

A free, prosperous, secular Iran, grounded not in Western imitation but in its own civilizational depth, would be the most powerful repudiation of religious fundamentalism the Islamic world has ever produced.

Understand exactly why. For half a century the Islamist argument has rested on one claim, that the choice is between authentic faith and Western corruption, between dignity and submission. Iran is the only country on earth that has run that experiment to completion, with full state power, for two generations. And the result is that the most rigorously theocratic state in the world has produced the most secular population in the Middle East. Iranians did not read their way out of political Islam. They lived their way out, and it cost them everything.

A flourishing post-theocratic Iran would broadcast that verdict from a Muslim majority country of ninety-two million, in Persian, from the very civilization the Islamists claimed as their proof of concept. No Western argument, no counter-messaging programme and no drone strike has ever come close to that kind of force. It would do more damage to the recruiting logic of fundamentalism than every counterterrorism budget of the past twenty-five years combined.

Some rulers in that region will read this and feel a chill, and they should. A prosperous free Iran exposes every neighbouring government that justifies its grip on the grounds that its people are not ready. But to the people of that region, and to the leaders among them who genuinely want to govern prosperous societies, a flourishing Iran is not a threat. It is the anchor the Middle East has never had, a large, confident, secure state that does not need militias because it has markets, and does not need enemies because it has a future.

XI

The Trench Is Man-Made

Put the whole ledger on the table one last time.

On one side: first in the world in combined oil and gas; sixty-eight minerals and twenty-seven trillion dollars of them; top ten in copper, zinc, iron and uranium; command of the strait through which a fifth of the world's oil moves; the land bridge between four regions holding a third of humanity; teenagers who win the International Mathematical Olympiad; the first woman ever to win the Fields Medal; ninety-two million people who, placed in functioning institutions, land in the top decile of the richest societies on earth; twenty-five centuries of continuous civilization.

And on the other: one hundred sixty-fourth of one hundred sixty-five on human freedom; fourteen percent of women in the workforce; forty percent inflation; seventy percent of the best engineering students planning their exit; a girl with the scores for medical school, barred from the lecture hall over the religion on her form; a capital that may run out of water; countless thousands shot in the streets in January and buried at night in ground nobody is allowed to count; a negotiation over the future of their country in which they have no seat.

That is the trench. And I want to be exact about what kind of thing it is.

The Mariana was opened by two tectonic plates over thirty million years. Nobody is responsible for it, nobody profits from it, and nobody can fill it. The Iran Trench is none of those things. It was opened in under fifty years. It has an address, a payroll and a chain of command. It is maintained by identifiable people who understand precisely what they are doing and why, because the day it closes is the day they end.

Which means it can be filled.

Not by sanctions, which in half a century have never moved this system toward reform and have mostly enriched the men running the workarounds. Not by bombs, which kill the people at the bottom of the trench and consolidate the guardians at the top of it. And not by another generation of the Omelas bargain, that comfortable global agreement to leave the child in the room because the music is so pleasant out here.

It will be filled the way it was always going to be filled, by Iranians. The generation waiting now, the women who led the last uprising and paid for it, the engineers with their bags packed, the students who came out in all thirty-one provinces, the exiles with one foot already turned toward home, is the most educated, most secular and most internationally connected population in the history of that country. They have already done the hardest work, which is the work of the mind. They know exactly what they want, and they have paid in blood for the clarity.

What the rest of the world owes them is not salvation, not paternalism, and not another war fought over their heads. It is something much simpler. Stop pretending the door is locked from the inside. Stop signing agreements with the men holding the key while the people in the room are not permitted to speak.

And understand that this trench is not stable. Every year it stays open, part of it closes permanently. Aquifers do not refill. A surgeon who leaves at forty does not return at seventy. A child taught that ambition is a form of exposure does not unlearn it at thirty. The endowment is not patient. It is depreciating right now, this morning, while the negotiators exchange drafts in Islamabad.

Iran was given more than almost any nation on this earth. Its people have been permitted to keep almost none of it.

The distance between those two sentences is the deepest man-made gash on the planet, and the largest unrealized human project in the world. It is not a tragedy. Tragedies are inevitable and nobody is to blame for them. This one was dug, and it is guarded, and it can be filled.

There is light above it. There always was. The only question left is how many more Iranian lives have to be wasted before somebody finally opens the lid.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shane Tedjarati is the Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive of the Tribridge Group. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a co-founder of its Middle East Leadership Initiative and its China Fellowship Program. He writes on geopolitics, leadership and civilization at stedjarati.substack.com.

SOURCES

Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy 2025 · OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin · USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 · Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture · S&P Global Commodity Insights · UNDP Human Development Report 2025 · World Happiness Report 2025 · Cato and Fraser Institutes, Human Freedom Index 2025 · Transparency International CPI · EIU Democracy Index · Reporters Without Borders 2025 · International Mathematical Olympiad official results · Migration Policy Institute · Stanford Iran 2040 Project · World Bank World Development Indicators · OECD international migration data.

A NOTE ON METHOD

Realization scores are drawn from published indices. Endowment scores are the author's own weighting, since no institution publishes a measure of what a country was handed. Casualty, addiction and emigration figures are contested and drawn from sources of varying alignment. They are used here for scale and direction rather than precision.

I have had the good fortune of traveling to India well over one hundred times over the past three decades, working across defence, aviation, oil and gas, refining, safety and security, automation, and automotive. At the peak, we had nearly 15,000 employees in India, more than 10,000 of them engineers — not simply executing someone else’s designs, but supporting our global product development in both software and hardware, and increasingly creating end-to-end innovation in India, for the world. It’s the vantage point this essay comes from.

The question I get asked most often is how India compares with China. That’s a real question, but it’s not a fair one to answer in a paragraph — it deserves its own essay, and I intend to write it. What I want to do here is narrower: address the elephant in the room, pun intended, which is what artificial intelligence is about to do to India’s IT and white-collar workforce.

India spent three decades turning an apparent weakness into a genuine advantage. Unable to match East Asia’s manufacturing scale, it built a different export machine instead: software development, technology services, business-process outsourcing, and a vast pool of English-speaking engineers and graduates. That machine integrated India into the global economy, strengthened its balance of payments, and opened a path into the middle class for millions of families.

Artificial intelligence now threatens to rewrite that bargain. The tasks most exposed to generative AI aren’t peripheral to India’s success — they sit at its center: routine coding, software testing, application maintenance, customer support, transaction processing, document review, basic analytics, administrative work. These are also the tasks through which young graduates traditionally learned the business and climbed the professional ladder.

So the real question isn’t whether India will keep growing. It almost certainly will. The harder question is whether it can create enough productive, accessible work while its most successful export industries become dramatically less labor-intensive.

The danger is not that AI stops India’s growth. It’s that India grows without building enough ladders into the middle class.

A fast-growing economy with an unusual structure

India entered 2026 as one of the world’s fastest-growing large economies. MoSPI’s provisional estimate, released in June 2026, put real GDP growth at 7.7 percent for FY2025-26 — up from 7.1 percent the year before, with the fourth quarter alone running hotter still, at 7.8 percent.[1] The headline number is genuinely impressive. What sits underneath it matters just as much: India remains a services-led economy, manufacturing accounts for only about the mid-teens share of value added, agriculture still employs far more people than its share of output would suggest, and modern services generate disproportionate income, exports, and urban opportunity.[1]

That structure cuts both ways. Domestic consumption is large, construction remains a major absorber of labor, and digital public infrastructure has lowered transaction costs across the economy. But India’s most valuable export surplus comes from services, not goods — its merchandise trade balance is persistently negative, driven by imports of oil, electronics, machinery, chemicals, and gold. Software, professional services, and business services finance much of that gap.[2]

Source: MoSPI national accounts and author’s classification. Shares are rounded structural proportions, not precise forecasts.

Manufacturing: real, but not a mass-employment substitute

India’s industrial policy has become sharper and more credible than it was a decade ago. Production-linked incentives, electronics assembly, semiconductor investment, defence procurement, renewable-energy manufacturing, and infrastructure spending are building capabilities that didn’t exist ten years back. Electronics is the clearest success: mobile-phone and telecom-equipment exports have grown rapidly, and India is becoming a genuine alternative production base as multinationals diversify away from China.[3]

Three cautions still apply. Assembly is not deep industrial capability — much of the high-value content in electronics, solar equipment, batteries, and machinery is still imported. Modern factories are increasingly automated, so a billion dollars of electronics or semiconductor output no longer buys the same number of jobs that textiles or footwear once did. And India still competes head-to-head with Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mexico, and China on cost, logistics, reliability, and trade access.

Light manufacturing

Labor-intensive industries — textiles, apparel, leather, footwear, food processing, furniture, toys, consumer goods — remain critical because they employ workers across every level of education. They’re less exposed to generative AI than software or BPO; their threat comes instead from robotics, computer vision, and automated cutting and packing, plus fierce competition from lower-cost exporters. The policy challenge is making them more competitive without automating away the jobs they’re supposed to create.

Heavy and technology manufacturing

Automobiles, engineering goods, chemicals, metals, defence, aerospace, electrical equipment, semiconductors, and clean-energy technologies carry more productivity and strategic value. AI is more likely to augment these industries than gut them — accelerating design, simulation, quality control, maintenance, and supply-chain planning. The deeper risk is that India captures final assembly while the most valuable components, IP, and production equipment stay imported.

Manufacturing can absorb some of the shock. It will not reproduce the employment intensity of the old Asian industrial model — those factories are simply too automated now for that.

The export machine at the center of the risk

India’s external accounts show why this is a macroeconomic question, not merely a technological one. The country runs a large merchandise deficit financed by a large services surplus. In FY2024-25, merchandise exports totaled roughly $437 billion against imports of $720 billion. Services exports were roughly $388 billion against imports of $199 billion — a services surplus close to $189 billion.[4]

Rounded from Department of Commerce and Economic Survey data.[4]

That surplus finances a real share of the goods deficit and supports the rupee, reserves, urban consumption, and business investment. Software services remain the largest piece, joined increasingly by consulting, financial services, research, engineering, and the global capability centers now scattered across India’s major cities.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. AI could make Indian service providers more productive and let them capture a larger share of global technology spending — the Economic Survey has already flagged faster growth in AI-intensive service exports.[5] Or the same AI could simply mean each export dollar requires fewer Indian workers to produce it. Both can happen simultaneously: a company grows revenue, improves margins, and increases exports while quietly slowing entry-level hiring. To an investor that looks like productivity. To a country graduating millions of young people every year, it looks like a slow-motion social problem.

Where the shock hits first

India’s technology and business-services industry is a roughly $300 billion-plus sector spanning high-value consulting and engineering on one end, and vast pools of repetitive digital work on the other. The exposure across that range is anything but uniform.

Call centers are the clearest case: generative voice systems can already manage routine conversations, authenticate customers, and schedule appointments, leaving one human agent to oversee several automated ones instead of fielding every call directly. The likely effect isn’t the disappearance of the job — it’s a steep drop in how many workers a given contract requires.

Software development is more complicated. AI doesn’t remove the need for architecture, judgment, cybersecurity, or client trust. But it does sharply cut the time spent on boilerplate code, documentation, testing, debugging, and maintenance — which directly challenges a business model historically built on billing clients for large teams of engineers.

The hidden vulnerability: the first rung of the ladder

The deepest risk isn’t to India’s best engineers — senior architects, product leaders, cybersecurity specialists, and domain experts may well become more valuable. The danger falls on the first rung of the ladder. I hired and promoted thousands of engineers who started on exactly that rung, so I don’t say this abstractly: for decades, large IT and BPO firms acted as finishing schools for the Indian middle class, hiring graduates who weren’t yet fully productive and training them through testing, maintenance, helpdesk work, and customer support. Those early tasks were never glamorous. They were developmental.

AI is particularly good at absorbing precisely that kind of apprenticeship work. If companies need fewer junior employees, the economy loses not just current jobs but the pipeline that produces future managers and experts. The result could be a widening gap between a small class of highly capable, AI-augmented professionals and a much larger pool of graduates whose degrees no longer guarantee a career.

That matters because India’s demographic dividend isn’t self-executing. A young population is an advantage only when education, employment, and urban institutions convert potential into productivity. Left unconverted, the same demographics can just as easily produce frustration, inequality, and political pressure.

Why an economy-wide meltdown is still unlikely

The case for caution shouldn’t collapse into fatalism. India has defenses that smaller outsourcing economies simply don’t have:

A vast domestic market — consumption, infrastructure, housing, health, education, logistics, and finance can sustain growth even if external demand softens.

A diversified service economy — beyond IT and BPO, India has large domestic sectors in trade, transport, finance, healthcare, construction, tourism, and government services.

Real digital infrastructure — Aadhaar, UPI, and related platforms let businesses and government deliver services at unusually low transaction cost.

A deep technical base — enough engineering and entrepreneurial capability to become a major global provider of AI implementation, data engineering, cybersecurity, and cloud services.

Geopolitical tailwinds — continued supply-chain diversification is opening doors in electronics, manufacturing, research, and global capability centers.

Productivity-led export growth — AI can help Indian firms compete on quality rather than wages, and reach markets that were previously uneconomic.

The likely outcome, then, is not collapse but divergence: leading companies and skilled workers prosper, export revenue keeps rising, and employment growth lags — especially for young graduates and workers doing standardized digital work.

Can manufacturing and new services absorb the shock?

Policy often assumes manufacturing will become the next employment engine. It has to become a bigger one — but it can’t carry the load alone. Even successful industrialization today is more automated than it was when China, Korea, or Taiwan climbed the same ladder.

The better strategy is a portfolio, not a single sector:

•                   Labor-intensive manufacturing — apparel, footwear, food processing, furniture, toys, consumer products

•                   Advanced manufacturing — electronics, automotive systems, defence, aerospace, clean energy, industrial equipment

•                   Construction, housing, urban infrastructure, logistics

•                   Healthcare delivery, eldercare, diagnostics, medical technology

•                   Tourism, hospitality, retail, and other locally delivered services

•                   AI-enabled professional services — cybersecurity, cloud transformation, engineering R&D

•                   Small-business productivity, where inexpensive AI tools help millions of firms formalize, sell, and export

Not every job India needs will be “high tech.” A healthy model has to create pathways for elite engineers, ordinary graduates, skilled technicians, and workers with limited formal education, all at once.

What India must do now

1. Measure employment intensity, not just investment. Incentives should report jobs, domestic value added, wage progression, and training outcomes — not just announced capital expenditure.

2. Protect the apprenticeship function. Subsidize structured entry-level training and rotations so AI doesn’t eliminate the process that turns graduates into professionals — it’s the first thing companies cut under margin pressure, and it doesn’t rebuild itself once it’s gone.

3. Rebuild vocational education around real demand. India needs technicians in robotics, industrial maintenance, electronics, healthcare, logistics, and construction — not only more generic degrees.

4. Help service firms abandon body-shopping. Price for outcomes and IP, not hours and headcount. It will reduce employment intensity, but it’s the only path to staying competitive.

5. Deepen manufacturing value chains. Electronics assembly should lead to components, tooling, materials, and local suppliers — otherwise exports rise without capturing real value.

6. Use AI to lift small-business productivity. The biggest employment gains may come from millions of MSMEs using AI for accounting, sales, and compliance — not from a handful of national champions.

7. Increase women’s participation. Safe transport, childcare, and enforceable workplace protections could unlock one of India’s largest underused sources of growth.

8. Stay open to trade and talent. Manufacturing competitiveness needs reliable imports, export access, foreign capital, and global supply-chain participation. Protection alone won’t build world-class industry.

9. Modernize social protection. Portable benefits, wage insurance, and better unemployment data will matter more as occupational change accelerates.

India’s other export: leadership

There’s a dimension to this story that gets lost in GDP tables and trade balances, and it’s worth naming directly: India’s soft power is now a hard economic asset.

Walk into the executive suites of the world’s most valuable companies and you’ll find Satya Nadella running Microsoft, Sundar Pichai running Alphabet and Google, Arvind Krishna running IBM, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe, Nikesh Arora at Palo Alto Networks, Vimal Kapur at Honeywell, and Indra Nooyi’s legacy still shaping how PepsiCo thinks about global growth. That list keeps growing, and it isn’t an accident — it’s the compounding output of the same IIT and engineering pipeline this essay has spent its length worrying about. Add Bollywood’s reach into markets far beyond South Asia, one of the largest and most influential diasporas on earth, and a generation of Indians who move fluidly between Bangalore, London, Dubai, and Palo Alto, and you get something China, for all its manufacturing might, has never quite built: a global leadership class that carries India’s fingerprints into every boardroom that matters.

That’s not a side note to the AI story — it’s the other half of it. The same qualities that produced these leaders — English fluency, technical depth, comfort operating across cultures — are precisely what’s now being automated at the entry level. The country’s challenge is to keep manufacturing that leadership class even as the bottom rung of the ladder that used to produce it gets thinner.

Three possible Indias by the early 2030s

I’ll put my own conviction on the table rather than hide behind a number: my base case is the middle scenario — strong headline growth with weakening employment quality. Not because I’ve modeled a probability, but because it’s the path of least resistance. It requires no one to change course. Export revenue keeps compounding on AI-driven productivity, the growth headline stays strong enough to blunt political urgency, and the harder reforms — apprenticeship subsidies, outcome-based pricing, vocational rebuilding — get discussed and piloted rather than scaled. That’s simply what happens by default when an economy is doing well enough at the top to postpone fixing what’s breaking underneath.

The productivity-superpower scenario is fully within reach, but it doesn’t happen by momentum — it requires India’s government and its largest employers to deliberately choose the harder, less glamorous reforms in the list above, on a timeline measured in years, not election cycles. And I’d put delayed adjustment as the least likely of the three, not because India’s institutions move quickly — they don’t — but because its private sector, its entrepreneurial base, and its diaspora capital have a thirty-year track record of improvising around a slow state. That instinct to route around dysfunction is one of India’s most reliable features, and it’s the reason I’d bet on the middle scenario tipping toward the first over the decade, rather than sliding toward the third.

The real test of reinvention

India has defied predictions of both imminent takeoff and imminent collapse more than once in my lifetime of watching it. Its politics slow implementation, but its entrepreneurial energy, its domestic scale, and its improvisational talent are real. AI will test whether those strengths convert into a new development model — or whether they simply widen the gap between those who already made it and those still trying to.

India doesn’t need to preserve every call-center seat or junior coding job. Trying to freeze the old economy in place would be futile and beside the point. What it needs to preserve is something larger: the ability of millions of people to enter productive work, learn, rise, and take part in the country’s growth.

So the decisive metric isn’t whether India stays the world’s fastest-growing large economy, or whether its tech exports keep climbing. It’s whether that growth keeps generating broad pathways into competence, dignity, and economic security — for the many, not just the few who were already positioned to win.

Here is why this moment matters beyond India’s own borders. India is now the most populous nation on earth, perpetually measured against China, endlessly described as a “potential” engine of global growth — a word that, after three decades of hearing it, many have grown impatient with. Potential is not a compliment. It’s an unpaid debt. India’s engineers already run the world’s largest technology companies; its stories already fill the world’s screens; its diaspora already sits in the rooms where global decisions get made. The raw material for a first-rate power has been sitting in plain sight for a generation.

AI is not a threat to that future. It’s the final exam. It will decide, within the next decade, whether India converts its scale, its talent, and its extraordinary soft power into the kind of broadly shared prosperity that makes a civilization great — or whether it simply produces a wealthier country with the same unfinished promise. I have watched India refuse to be underestimated for thirty years. I would not bet against it now. But I would stop calling it potential, and start asking it — respectfully, urgently — to finally cash the check.

Notes and sources

[1] Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, “Press Note on Provisional Estimates of Annual GDP for FY2025-26,” June 5, 2026; Government of India, Economic Survey 2025-26, chapters on the state of the economy and services.

[2] Government of India, Economic Survey 2025-26, chapter on the external sector; Department of Commerce annual trade data.

[3] Government of India, Economic Survey 2025-26; Department of Commerce, Annual Report 2024-25; policy documents on electronics and production-linked incentives.

[4] Department of Commerce and Economic Survey 2025-26. Figures are rounded; services estimates draw on RBI and Commerce Department data.

[5] Government of India, Economic Survey 2025-26, “Services: From Stability to New Frontiers,” including its analysis of AI-intensive services exports.

[6] Reserve Bank of India, Annual Survey on Computer Software and IT Enabled Services Exports; NASSCOM and MeitY industry estimates for technology and BPM revenue.

[7] NITI Aayog, Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy; World Bank and IMF assessments of India’s growth, labor participation and reform priorities. Indian-origin CEO roster per 2026 industry reporting (Forbes, Khaleej Times).

Author’s note: This essay is intended for broad public discussion. Sector shares and trade values are rounded to emphasize structural relationships. AI exposure ratings and scenario likelihoods are analytical judgments, not forecasts of a fixed number.

Forty years ago, I was a young expatriate on a summer visit to my family in Montreal, about to return to my overseas posting. Life abroad was spare, so I had stocked up — two enormous suitcases, each well over fifty pounds, packed with shampoos, clothes, daily necessities, everything my father had added for good measure. My ticket back was a youth standby fare: ninety dollars, one way, twenty kilos maximum. The airline was notorious. Half a kilo over and they would charge you more than the ticket itself.

I was at the kitchen table with a scale, weighing each item with surgical precision, deciding what to sacrifice, when my father walked in.

He looked at the scale. He looked at the suitcases. He looked at me.

"Forget it," he said. "Pack everything."

I tried to explain. Twenty kilos. Strict airline. Fifty-pound bags. He waved his hand as if I had just told him the sky was blue and this was somehow my concern. Then, on his way out to load the car, he turned around.

"Bring the guitar."

My younger brother, who actually owned the guitar, came flying out of his room. "What guitar? Nobody is taking my guitar." My father said don't worry, the guitar is not going anywhere, just bring the guitar, trust me. My brother protested. My father had already moved on — cheerful, unhurried, almost goofy. As if none of this was remotely serious.

That was the performance. And it had already begun.

At Mirabel Airport — a full hour from Montreal, built for a future that never quite arrived — my father loaded the two massive suitcases onto the trolley and placed the enormous guitar case on top. The tower of luggage was roughly the size of a small car. He wheeled it to the check-in counter with the serene confidence of a man who had already won — because he had.

The check-in agent was young, efficient, trained to hold the line. My father placed the first bag on the scale. She smiled. He placed the second. She stopped smiling. He hoisted the guitar case on top.

She could barely see over the counter.

"Monsieur — "

And then my father, in the most magnificently broken French-English hybrid ever deployed at an international airport, began. He spoke of his son traveling alone, far from home, to difficult conditions. He spoke of the revolution, of what was taken from us, of the quiet hardships of exile. The line behind us grew. And grew. My father kept talking — not frantically, not desperately, but warmly, sorrowfully, with the patient gravity of a man sharing something true. Which, to be fair, he was. He just wasn't sharing it because he had to. He was sharing it because it worked.

The agent softened. You could see it happening in real time. But she couldn't let all of this through. It was too much.

Finally, my father paused. He looked at the guitar. He sighed — a sigh of such theatrical depth it deserved its own boarding pass.

"I understand," he said gently. "I know you cannot accept the guitar. I know it will break his heart — music is everything to him out there, alone — but I understand your situation. I don't want to make this difficult for you." He reached for the guitar case. "We will leave it behind."

The agent looked genuinely pained. "I am so sorry. I truly cannot accept the guitar." And as she said it — apologizing, explaining, her eyes on the guitar she was turning away — her hands were moving. Tagging the first bag. Tagging the second. Printing the boarding pass.

My father accepted her apology with grace and quiet dignity. We walked away. No guitar. Two fifty-pound suitcases checked through without a single word about the weight.

In the car, my father turned to me. He was trying not to smile.

"Did you see what just happened?"

I had seen it. I still couldn't quite believe it.

He wasn't rattled back there. He wasn't improvising. He was never in doubt. The whole scene — the broken French, the sorrow, the sigh, the guitar — was a carefully directed performance, and he had played every role simultaneously: the grieving exile, the reasonable man, the reluctant one making concessions. He gave up something he never wanted and never intended to take. And in doing so, he made her feel like she had won.

"This," he said, "is how Persians negotiate. You put something on the table that you were never going to get. You make them feel that they are the ones saying no. And while they are busy feeling guilty about the guitar — they check in everything else."

He said it with a grin. For him, this was not a hustle. It was an art form. Intellectual gymnastics. He was operating on an entirely different level — and the most delicious part was that he looked, the whole time, like he wasn't operating at all.

———

I thought about that morning eleven years ago when prominent American officials asked me, during the JCPOA negotiations, whether I thought the deal was sound. I told them this story.

The guitar, I said, is the nuclear program. So visible, so dramatic, so consuming of everyone's attention that no one notices what is being tagged and loaded onto the plane. Iran walked away from Vienna with billions in unfrozen assets, sanctions relief, and its regime not merely surviving but legitimized — its grip on power ratified by the signatures of the world's major powers. Human rights: an internal matter. IRGC regional aggression: not on the table. The velayat-e faqih — the supreme theocratic authority — untouched, unquestioned, unchallenged. The future of ninety million people: not even raised.

They walked away having surrendered the guitar. They thought they had won.

Eleven years later, the guitar is back on the trolley. Bigger, shinier, more dramatic than ever. The cameras are on it. The diplomats are arguing about it. The headlines are full of it. And the world has lined up patiently behind, just like the passengers in that queue at Mirabel — seeing nothing, suspecting nothing.

And behind the counter, the hands are moving again.

• Billions in sanctions relief.  CHECK.

• Three hundred billion dollars in new investment commitments — rewarding the architects of destruction.  CHECK.

• The IRGC — not dismantled, not diminished, not even named — walking away intact and emboldened.  CHECK.

• The regime's survival: guaranteed.  CHECK.

• The velayat-e faqih: untouchable.  CHECK.

• The rights of women — to equal standing before the law, to movement, to bodily autonomy, to existence without a mandatory veil and a morality police - denied. CHECK.

• The rights of religious minorities — Bahá'ís, Christians, Jews, Sunnis — persecuted, imprisoned, erased.  CHECK.

• The Iranian people — their voice, their future, their freedom — not on the scale. Not on the table. Not in the room.  CHECK.

Not even on the trolley.

Ninety million people. And not one of their names in the agreement.

The guitar comes home. It always does.

But the Iranian people are not luggage. They are not excess weight to be left behind while their oppressors negotiate their silence. They are not a footnote to a ceasefire. They are the entire point of this journey.

And it is long past time they were on the plane.

— Shane Tedjarati

On June 29, 2026, the Honeywell I spent much of my career building ceased to exist.

Not in failure. In a way, the opposite. That day the company finished splitting itself into three independent, publicly traded companies: Honeywell Technologies, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. A 138-year-old industrial giant, taken apart into focused pieces. The chairman called it a defining moment in Honeywell’s legacy. He was right. It was also, for those of us who gave that company decades, the quiet end of an era. And when something you helped build comes to a close, you catch yourself looking back at what it tried to teach you.

So let me use the moment for something better than nostalgia. Because Europe is having the wrong argument about China. And I learned why inside the very company that has just been taken apart.

The debate in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels runs on subsidies, dumping, overcapacity, stolen intellectual property, tariffs. All of it real. None of it the heart of the matter. Over twenty years at Honeywell I built and ran businesses across China, India, the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. From every one of those seats I watched the same thing happen. European firms, our own units among them, ran into the Chinese competitor, industry after industry. And this was never only about winning inside China. It was about staying competitive anywhere, in a world where the Chinese company had become the most in-your-face, most relentless rival on the board. The outcome almost never turned on trade policy. It turned on attitude.

I want to tell three stories from those years. Three Honeywell businesses, three industries, three completely different answers to the same threat. Two ended in defeat. One of them total, one of them slow and expensive. The third became a category leader in one of the most brutal markets on earth. Here is the part that still keeps me up: all three had the same choice in front of them. The thing that decided their fate was sitting there for any of them to pick up. Most of them wouldn’t touch it.

I’ll leave the individuals unnamed. This is not a settling of scores, and good people got caught in each of these stories, me included. But I will name the company, because Honeywell was my home for most of my working life, and because there is no better week to draw these lessons than the one in which the old company finally became three. The attitudes that decided these cases are the same ones deciding Europe’s industrial future right now. And Europe is running low on time to pick the right one.

How strong Europe once was

It helps to remember how commanding Europe’s position in China used to be. For two decades, the European champions did not merely compete there. They ruled. Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche. Bosch, Schneider, ABB, BASF, Siemens. These were not bit players hanging on by their fingernails. For several of them, China became the single biggest market they had anywhere in the world. Volkswagen sold more cars in China than in Germany. So did BMW. Porsche’s Chinese buyers were younger and more plentiful than its German ones. The whole German industrial machine looked untouchable, and a fat slice of its profit came off Chinese roads and out of Chinese factories.

Then the ground moved, and they kept standing still. China went electric faster than any market in history, and the champions were slow. Painfully slow. They kept shipping the petrol cars that had made them rich while local Chinese companies built better electric ones: better software, lower prices, tuned to exactly what Chinese buyers wanted. In a handful of years an enviable dominance started to crumble. The European brands that once owned the Chinese premium market now watch their share bleed to rivals that barely existed ten years ago.

And here is the part that should be ruining sleep in Stuttgart and Wolfsburg. Those same Chinese companies are now at the gate in Europe. The competitor that pushed Volkswagen and BMW aside at home is loading cars onto ships bound for Hamburg and Zeebrugge. The threat is no longer over there. It has a European address. Which is exactly why attitude, the thing that governs the response, matters more than any tariff. And why three old Honeywell stories are worth your time.

The perfectionist

A business too good to sell.

The first business was ours: airport runway and taxiway lighting. Not bulbs. Systems. This was our early attempt at it and has little resemblance to what Honeywell provides in the market today. Progressive guided taxiing, integrated control, the whole choreography of light that walks an aircraft from runway to gate. It was run out of Germany, and it was European engineering at full stretch. Over-built, feature-rich, genuinely brilliant. Nothing left to chance. Picture the most complete, most technically flawless system in its category, and you have it.

It was so advanced we could barely find anyone to sell it to in Emerging Markets. That is not a joke. The system was simply too much for most airports. To land a launch customer we needed one that was busy, run by highly technical people obsessed with throughput, and willing to pay a fat premium for German quality. Even many European airports found it over the top at the time. We finally landed a pilot at a big new airport in Asia.

The install was brutally complicated. It worked, but only with senior German engineers living on site to nurse it. It cost far more than promised. It ran well past the point where the customer’s patience had quietly left the building. And our engineers were delighted. In their eyes this was perfection. It was also wildly expensive, hard to install, hard to use, and nearly impossible to maintain. Best of all, the German team guarded the know-how so jealously that no local person ever learned how the thing actually worked. Job security, I suppose.

Then we ran the market study. Over the next twenty years, the great wave of new airports would break over Asia. China first, by a mile, then India, then Southeast Asia. The prize was enormous. But the buyers wanted something different: simpler systems, fitted to local conditions, in local languages, easy to run, at a price a normal airport could actually pay. They also wanted us to fill product gaps that we found not attractive enough to build.

Our German team rejected every word of it. Compromise the engineering? Unthinkable. Why would anyone want a simpler system? Why train local Chinese or Indian engineers who couldn’t possibly grasp the domain? These were not really questions. They were expressions of disbelief that the world could be so foolish.

Meanwhile, local Chinese firms were quietly building their own low-end systems and improving them, year after year. We collected the evidence and carried it to the German team. We got a pat on the head. These competitors, we were told, could not be taken seriously.

So we bid on Chinese airports. We lost just about every one. A local competitor won a major airport in the north. Our team waved it off: they will fail. They did not fail. They got better. Steadily, stubbornly, the local firms closed the quality gap, at a fraction of our price. Our own order book stayed close to empty. The Chinese customers actually liked our system. They just wanted it adapted and made affordable. We would not listen.

By the time we had lost nearly every bid, the German team was finally dragged into localizing. In India, on the theory that the intellectual property would be safer there. But the pace was glacial and the dependence on Germany near total. We missed the moment completely. The Chinese competitors became excellent. Their products matched ours, carried the features customers actually wanted, at a price those customers could afford and maintain. In the end we could not capture the market upside. Fast forward to today, Honeywell does have a strong offering but majority of its participation is in traditional mature markets. The local Chinese firms went on to win almost every airport in China, then started winning them around the world.

The lesson. We were not beaten by a better competitor. We were beaten by our own blindness, and our refusal to believe a Chinese firm could ever build something worth buying. We fell in love with the product we wanted to make instead of the customer we needed to serve. And we hoarded our own knowledge so tightly that when we finally tried to localize, we had already made it impossible. Perfection was not the trophy. It was the trap.

The aristocrat

Seven expatriates and a wine list.

The second business came to Honeywell by acquisition. We had bought a French company in personal protective equipment: safety gear, protective footwear, the kit that keeps working people alive. The idea was to build a broad protection portfolio on top of good macro tailwinds and, supposedly, some clever material technology. Even then, I thought the technology story was thin. This was not really a technology business. It lived and died on brand and channel.

Soon after the deal, we looked at the China operation. What we found stopped me cold. The whole China business was thirty-five million dollars in revenue. And it carried seven French expatriates in Shanghai. Seven. For comparison, Honeywell’s deeply technical, multi-industry business in China was doing one and a half billion dollars, and carried less than ten expats, mostly subject matter experts in the genuinely technical jobs.

The cost of those seven was eye-watering, and the business was losing money. Now, this was about as local a business as you can find. It sold to police forces, fire brigades, local builders. It ran on local knowledge, local language, local relationships. What it did not run on was a troupe of expensive expatriates who had, by this point, perfected their wine tasting at the smart addresses along the Bund and their golf swing at the best clubs in the city. I will say this for them: their handicaps were excellent.

The problem was not subtle. I sat down with our China leader and we ran a review. We did not need any of the expatriates. We needed hungry local people who knew how to build a brand and a channel on the ground. So we sent the expatriates home.

The resistance was something to behold. I will not pretend it made me popular. The acquired company’s management never quite forgave me, and it colored their view of China, and of me, for years. But we did it. And the China business turned profitable and grew several times over.

The deeper sickness never really lifted, though. The entitlement in that business was chronic. It was proud of its brand, its heritage, its way of doing things, and that pride made it deaf to the markets that were actually growing. Across the emerging world it struggled to sell much beyond the comfortable accounts, the big multinationals who already knew the name. The hunger to go win a fire department in a second-tier Chinese city, or a builder in Indonesia, simply was not there.

Plenty of things eventually weighed on that business, including the collapse in protective-equipment demand once the pandemic faded. I am not going to force the whole outcome through one lens. But the numbers speak plainly enough. We assembled the broader portfolio for close to three billion dollars. We sold it, years later, for a little over half of that. And the chronic condition, the entitlement, the pride in a brand and a model the market was quietly walking away from, capped that business for as long as I watched it.

The lesson. The first business was blind to the product the market wanted. This one was blind to the market itself, and to the people in it. Entitlement is its own species of failure. It is being so pleased with what you are that you cannot see what the customer needs, cannot respect the local knowledge you lack, and cannot summon the hunger to go win the business sitting right in front of you. Brand and heritage are assets, right up to the moment they become an excuse.

The student

The business that chose to become the competitor.

The third business was Honeywell’s turbocharger unit. Established, technically excellent, and under siege. Turbochargers in China were one of the most savage markets I have ever seen. Dozens upon dozens of local competitors, many of them straight copies of our designs, all of them cheaper. Our business was proud, capable, and slowly sinking. On paper it looked like the runway-lighting story cued up to run again.

It did not run again. And the whole reason was the attitude of the people at the top.

The business was run by Europeans. A French CEO, a European leadership team, the very same profile that had presided over the other two defeats. But this group did something rare. They got humble. They assumed the local competitor had something to teach them. I worked closely with them, and one of the more useful things I ever did was simple. I brought them to China early and made them look. Not the glass towers of Shanghai and Beijing. The tier-two and tier-three cities, where the real market was growing and the real competitors were being forged in the fire. I made them see it with their own eyes.

And they saw. They studied the copycats seriously, not to sneer but to understand why they kept winning. The Spanish marketing leader eventually packed up and moved to Shanghai himself, to run the local strategy on the ground and keep it wired back to headquarters so the thread never snapped. A small thing with a large meaning: someone senior chose to go live inside the problem instead of managing it from a time zone away. Then they made the choice the other two businesses could never stomach. They set out to become the Chinese competitor, rather than to beat the Chinese competitor as a foreign company standing outside the glass.

In practice that meant real local design authority. Not a sales office taking orders from home, but the power to design, adapt, and price for the local market, held in local hands. It meant matching the local cost and the local speed instead of demanding the customer pay for features nobody asked for. It meant treating the flood of local rivals as a signal to read rather than an insult to dismiss. When the first answer from a customer was no, they did not pack up. They kept going.

The result was not survival. It was leadership. The business climbed to the top of one of the most competitive categories in the world, in the hardest market in the world, winning the lion’s share of the platforms it chased. The copycats did not run us out of town. We beat them on their own street, at their own game, and a good many of them faded away. Same threat the runway-lighting business faced. Opposite attitude. Opposite ending.

The lesson. The cure for the Chinese competitor was not better technology, and it was not a wall. It was humility, hunger, and the nerve to become the local player instead of remaining the foreign one. Everything the first two businesses refused to do, this one did on purpose. And it worked, spectacularly.

The same choice, three times

Line the three up and the pattern is impossible to miss. Same competitor. Same playbook coming at them: local, cheaper, fast, good enough and getting better by the quarter. Three European responses. Three fates.

The first business worshipped its product and could not imagine simplifying it. The second worshipped its brand and could not be bothered to learn the market. The third worshipped nothing. It stayed curious, humble, and hungry, and it won. The deciding factor was never the technology, the price, or even the subsidies flowing to the other side. It was how the Europeans chose to see the local reality in front of them.

This matters now because Europe is about to sit this exam not one business at a time, but across its whole industrial base at once. Electric vehicles. Batteries. Solar. Telecom gear. Increasingly, high-speed rail, machinery, medical devices, and the industrial software running underneath all of it. The Chinese competitor is showing up everywhere the first two businesses swore it never could, with products that are no longer cheap knockoffs but genuinely good, often better matched to what customers want, at prices European cost structures cannot touch. Europe is staring at an investment gap counted in the hundreds of billions of euros a year, and a competitiveness debate that keeps wandering back to walls.

Walls have their uses. They buy time. But the two businesses that failed did not fail for lack of protection. They failed because, handed time, they spent it defending the very thing that was killing them. That is the real danger for Europe. Protection without transformation just postpones the reckoning and fattens the bill when it lands.

The three cases point to one attitude, and it can be spelled out. Respect the competitor enough to study it hard, especially when it is smaller and cheaper than you. Fall in love with the customer, not the product. Simplify. Rip out the features your engineers adore and your customers will not pay for. Push real authority down to the local market, the design, the pricing, the decisions, instead of clutching it at headquarters where it feels safe. And carry an ambition bigger than defending your patch: aim to become the local competitor, on its own ground, at its own game.

I have to be honest about the clock, though, because it is later than it was when I lived these stories nearly twenty years ago. For a lot of European companies, the chance to become the Chinese competitor inside China may already be gone. The window the turbocharger business climbed through has narrowed, and in some sectors it has shut. That does not retire the lesson. It changes what the lesson asks of you.

If you did build genuine local strength in China, if you grew the DNA, the humility, the local muscle, then the job now is to bring that hard-won capability home and turn it on the same Chinese firms as they come ashore in Europe. Your China years become your weapon on European ground. If you did not, if you spent the good years polishing the citadel, the options get harder. You may have to partner with Chinese companies rather than pretend you can still beat them alone. Joint ventures, licensing, supply deals, learning arrangements that would have made the proud businesses of a decade ago choke on their coffee. Not every European boardroom will find that easy to swallow. Swallowing it will be its own moment of truth.

What is not on the menu, what was never on the menu, is the answer my first two businesses gave. Dismiss the competitor. Wish it away. Trust that superior European quality will reassert itself in the end, as if by natural law. It will not. That road has been walked all the way to its end.

Here is what I keep coming back to. The company that taught me all of this became three companies on June 29. The turbocharger business, the one that learned to become the competitor, had already left home years earlier, spun out to stand on its own two feet. The student graduated. The perfectionist and the aristocrat did not. Overall, at Honeywell we had many more success stories than failures. In fact we were the pioneers of globalization through our “east for east” and “becoming the Chinese competitor” strategies. Yet there are good lessons to be learned from the odd failures.

I do not think that is a coincidence. The businesses that listen, adapt, and go truly local tend to outlast the ones that fall in love with their own reflection. My German engineers built a system of breathtaking perfection and could not sell it. My French colleagues built a fortress of brand and pedigree and could not defend it. My turbocharger team challenged everything and built fresh new products that the customers wanted at attractive prices. And they did that while being fabulously profitable. They just showed up in the tier-three cities, kept their eyes open, and refused to be too proud to learn. They achieved our mantra of doing two seemingly competing things at the same time.

Europe can build anything. It always could. The question was never capability. The question is whether it can let go of the pride that mistakes excellence for entitlement, and do the humbler, harder, less flattering thing that actually wins. Two of my three businesses could not manage it. One of them could. Europe gets to choose which story it repeats.

I would choose quickly. The ships have already left the harbor, and they are not carrying wine.

Shane Tedjarati spent more than two decades at Honeywell, including as President of Honeywell China, which he grew into the company’s second-largest country operation, and later leading its high-growth regions across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. He is Founder and CEO of Tribridge Group and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. This essay is a companion to his earlier pieces, “The Reckoning” and “The Race That Isn’t.”

Wrong question. The trouble is the word hiding inside it. We call this a race. A race has one track, one finish line, one winner. The contest everyone watches — who has the most capable model this quarter — is real, and it does look like a race. It is just not the contest that decides who captures the value of AI over the next twenty years. We are scoring the race that matters least.

So stop thinking about a race. Think about two bets. And hold one thing in mind from the start: the two bets are far more tangled than any clean split suggests. That tangle is the whole reason this is not really a race. I will come back to it, because it is where my own argument is most exposed, and most interesting.

Two Bets, Not One Race

The United States and China are not running the same race at different speeds. They are betting on different things. They have placed their chips in different parts of the board — and we keep counting only one of them.

America bets on the frontier. The wager: value goes to whoever holds the most capable model. Capability is the moat. The best intelligence commands the best price. Being first to each new tier is what compounds. America has backed this bet at a scale that is hard to overstate — hundreds of billions in compute, and valuations that only make sense if frontier leadership lasts and pays.

China bets on diffusion. The wager: frontier capability becomes a commodity within a year, so the money is somewhere else. It is in deployment cost. In industrial integration. In driving the price of intelligence toward zero, then embedding it everywhere, cheaply, into the physical economy. China has organized around exactly that: efficiency over scale, open weights over control, embodiment over abstraction, volume over margin.

A note on terms: “diffusion” here is used in its economic sense — how a general-purpose technology spreads through an economy and gets absorbed into production — the framing now common in AI policy debates, including Microsoft’s own work on global AI diffusion. It does not refer to the “diffusion model” architecture used in image generation. Both countries, like everyone, build their large language models overwhelmingly on transformers.

Here is the part that should make the West uncomfortable. Look at the history of every general-purpose technology before this one — steam, electricity, the engine, the computer — and the diffusion bet tends to win. The people who built the great dynamos of the 1890s did not capture the value of electrification. The factory owners who spent the next thirty years rebuilding production around cheap power did. This is not a hunch. It is the settled finding of economic history: not a forecast about AI, but the base rate AI would have to beat. The frontier is where the prestige lives. Diffusion is where the GDP shows up.

That is a claim about the past. The leap — and it is a leap — is that AI behaves like everything before it. Maybe it will not. But watch what follows even if the old pattern only half holds. The two bets pay off on different clocks, and only one of them is visible while it happens. A frontier breakthrough is loud: you can see it, benchmark it, date it. It looks exactly like a race, which is why we keep calling it one. Diffusion is silent until it is finished. You could see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics. So the visible contest always flatters the frontier and ignores diffusion — not from American bias, but because diffusion never shows up in time to be counted. We score the part that looks like a race. We miss the part that looks like nothing at all, until it is everything.

Open Weights Are Not Generosity. They Are Commoditization Warfare.

The Western read of China’s open-weight strategy comes in two flavors, and both miss. The first is sentimental: how generous, how good for the research community. The second is dismissive: they open-source because they are behind, and you give away the second-best when you cannot sell the best.

Here is a third read. It is the same playbook China ran in solar, in batteries, in electric vehicles: drive the marginal cost to zero, eat the margin, win on volume. Give away good-enough intelligence for free and you commit a deliberate act of economic destruction against the American business model. You cannot win the frontier? Fine. Destroy the frontier’s ability to charge for itself. Make the second-best free, open, and self-hostable. American labs sell premium intelligence by the token. China is working to make intelligence a thing nobody can charge a premium for. The novelty is only the target. The commodity being driven to zero this time is not a physical good. It is cognition.

The April 2026 release showed the strategy in numbers. Permissive license. The cheap tier priced at a fraction of a dollar per million tokens, against American rivals charging twenty to thirty times that. Even the top tier undercut every Western frontier model. Within days, the company cut prices again. One independent firm rated it the strongest open-weight coding model available. Those are facts. The read I draw from them — that the goal was never to out-build the American labs, but to make it harder for anyone to sell what they sell — is an inference. I think a strong one.

Here is where it bites. Every dollar of frontier pricing power that open weights destroy is a dollar pulled out of the business that funds the next frontier model. Pushed hard enough, the diffusion bet does not just compete with the frontier bet. It starves it.

The Chip War May Have Trained the Wrong Muscle

America aimed its export controls at the chokepoint where it was strongest: advanced chips. On its own terms, well aimed. But it may have done two things its architects never intended. I offer these as plausible second-order effects, not settled facts. The timescales are too long to call yet.

First: constraint breeds efficiency, and efficiency compounds. Choke China’s access to the best chips and you force Chinese developers to wring more out of every unit of compute. The April 2026 model was reportedly trained and tuned for domestic Huawei and Cambricon silicon instead of Nvidia’s — proof that frontier-class systems can be built outside the American stack. That is the company’s claim, with its chip partners; how much of the work the domestic silicon really did, versus older imported hardware, cannot be fully verified from outside. Worth saying plainly. But the direction holds. Abundance is a worse teacher than scarcity. The country that could afford brute force learned brute force. The country that could not learned to economize. Over a long enough horizon, it is not obvious which lesson is worth more.

The second consequence is the one the chip debate keeps missing. The real ceiling on AI may not be silicon at all. It may be power. And on power, the asymmetry runs the other way, hard. China generates more than twice the electricity the United States does. In one recent year it added over 400 gigawatts of new capacity, much of it clean. The United States faces a shortfall in the tens of gigawatts by 2030, with grid-connection queues running four to ten years against data centers built in two to three. Those numbers come from the IEA, Brookings, and U.S. grid analysts, and they are the hardest evidence in this essay. Energy you can measure. Strategy you cannot. If AI is, at bottom, energy turned into cognition, then this is partly an energy contest — and it is the one place the United States is set up to lose on fundamentals, not tactics.

The Data Advantage Everyone Names Is the Wrong One

The usual story about China’s data edge points to scale and surveillance: more users, more data, fewer privacy rules. That is fighting the last war. The frontier has mostly moved past the point where more scraped human text is the bottleneck. Synthetic data, reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards, self-play — they have changed what “more data” even means.

The data that matters next is physical. And here China’s edge is real, but for nearly the opposite reason people give. The next frontier is embodied: machines that perceive and act in the world. You do not train them on consumer clicks. You train them on the exhaust of the physical economy — robots handling objects, production lines throwing off telemetry, real contact and failure and correction. That data comes from being the place where physical things get made.

The evidence is striking, and most of it is hard reporting, not projection. Chinese companies shipped roughly 87 percent of the world’s humanoid robots in 2025, by Omdia’s count. One firm rolled its ten-thousandth general-purpose robot off the line, going from one thousand to ten thousand in months. Humanoids are working live shifts on real assembly lines, doing precision inspection on consumer electronics. And the deployments are built to harvest data: one company has released a real-world dataset captured entirely from robots meeting messy, contact-heavy, imperfect reality — exactly the exhaust that teaches a machine to act.

This turns the manufacturing base itself into the training ground for embodied AI. And a cost gap makes the loop spin: build a comparable humanoid without Chinese suppliers and it reportedly runs about three times the price, because the motors, drives, batteries, and sensors sit right next to the mature EV supply chains they came from. Cheaper robots, more deployment. More deployment, more physical data. More data, better robots. The country that makes the things collects the data that teaches machines to make the things. The frontier, on its own, does not spin that flywheel. This is the part of China’s position I weight most heavily, because it rests on installed industrial capacity — and you cannot conjure that with a funding round or a policy memo.

Why China’s Diffusion Edge Is Not Just a Slogan

Saying China has chosen diffusion is one thing. Explaining why China, in particular, can pull it off is another. Diffusion is not a philosophy you announce. It is something you can do at scale only if you already own the rails. China spent two decades laying those rails, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with AI. That is why this is one of the firmer claims in this essay, not a projection.

The country runs on programmable digital infrastructure with no real American equivalent. Mobile payments move volumes that dwarf Western card networks, and they are API-native — an AI agent can plug straight into commerce, because the commerce layer was built to be programmed, not bolted onto forty-year-old card rails. Super-apps work like operating systems with a billion people already inside them, so putting a model into daily life means shipping an app update, not building a channel from scratch. Dense city sensors, robotaxis already carrying paying riders, lights-off factories — all of it throws off continuous, already-digitized data for deployed models to learn from and act on. The diffusion bet works for China because the surfaces a model can land on already exist, at the scale of a billion people.

This is the hard-to-counter part. You can match the frontier with money and talent. You cannot match twenty years of installed infrastructure with a funding round.

The Coupling: One Engine, One Transmission

Now the entanglement I promised — and the strongest objection to everything above, one sharp readers of an earlier draft raised hard. Frontier and diffusion are not two parallel paths. They are coupled. Treating them as independent is the central risk of the whole two-bets framing, mine included.

The coupling is mechanical, not metaphorical. Distillation, compression, synthetic data — the techniques that turn an expensive frontier model into a cheap deployable one — are by definition downstream of a frontier model existing first. You cannot distill from what was never built. One engine, one transmission: the frontier makes raw capability, the diffusion layer gears it down for mass use. Links in a single chain, not horses in a two-horse race.

Which is exactly why the April 2026 model cuts both ways. Distillation sits at the center of current U.S.–China friction — the White House science office has accused foreign firms of extracting capability from U.S. models at “industrial scale.” Allegations, not findings, and read them that way. But the structural point holds no matter how any single case lands: if the diffusion layer is partly built by distilling from the frontier, the question is not “which bet wins.” It is “where along one coupled chain does the value settle.”

And here intuition and history split. Intuition says the engine — the hard thing to build — must capture the value. History says the transmission, the layer that touches the economy, often takes more of it. But the catch runs the other way too, and it is real for China: the deployer stays permanently dependent on a frontier somewhere to distill from. If the thing everyone distills from stays American, China’s formidable diffusion engine may be quietly enriching the very frontier it cannot escape needing. Coupling cuts both ways. That is the honest shape of it. Not two bets resolving into a winner, but one chain, with the value free to settle upstream or down — and nobody yet knows which.

The Case the Argument Has to Survive

An honest version of this argument has to meet the strongest case against it. That case is serious, and it may be right. The frontier bet may simply win.

Here is how. If frontier capability keeps compounding faster than distillation can shrink it into something cheap and deployable, the gap never closes. It regenerates faster than diffusion can eat it. That has mostly been the story for three years: every time open-weight models reach last year’s frontier, the frontier has already moved on. The April 2026 model, by its own makers’ admission, trailed the state of the art by three to six months — while the newest American models were posting their biggest jumps yet, partly by using AI to speed up their own development. If that holds, frontier leadership feeds itself, and the diffusion bet chases a line that keeps receding.

There is more to the frontier case. Some of the highest-value uses — scientific discovery, drug design, defense, cyber — may turn on having the single best model, not a cheap good-enough one. There, capability is the whole game. And if something genuinely transformative arrives at the frontier, one lab could deploy it everywhere itself and make the whole diffusion apparatus moot. America does not need to win on diffusion if the frontier turns out to be winner-take-all.

So the real question is not which country chose right. It is empirical, and nobody can answer it yet — not even the people building these systems. Are we near the top of the current capability S-curve, or at the foot of a new one? If the frontier is flattening into diminishing returns, the target stops moving, distillation catches it, and diffusion wins. If we are at the start of a new paradigm — reasoning, test-time compute, agents compounding on each other — the frontier keeps pulling away and diffusion never catches it. The whole trillion-dollar contest comes down, to a startling degree, to which curve we are on. That is the uncertainty holding up this entire essay. Anyone who tells you they have resolved it is selling something.

Neither a Clean Binary Nor Two Separate Races

If the coupling blurs the two bets in theory, strategy blurs them in practice. Each country runs a portfolio across both positions. Only the weighting differs.

The United States does plenty of diffusion. Major American firms open-weighting capable models, the push to small on-device models, every API tier below the flagship — all diffusion. And China very much chases the frontier: the state-backed compute build-out, the domestic chip programs, the fact that the April 2026 model was a frontier attempt that got open-weighted afterward. What differs is the center of gravity. And the weighting may owe less to national genius than either side would like to claim.

Two unglamorous forces shape it. The first is capital structure, not strategy. America’s frontier tilt comes partly from having the deepest pools of risk-tolerant venture and public-market capital on earth — money built to fund moonshots. China’s diffusion tilt comes partly from patient state and provincial capital, better suited to infrastructure and deployment than speculative research. Neither country fully chose. The capital each had chose for it. The second force is constraint, not foresight. China’s open-weight push accelerated sharply after export controls capped its compute — so some of what now reads as far-sighted strategy was a forced move that happened to land well. Be careful with any story that credits a competitor with planning the whole board from the first move. That caution applies to this essay too.

The Prize Neither Country Is Watching

While the United States and China stare at each other across the frontier benchmark, the biggest stakes may sit with neither. Every other country now faces a choice between two AI futures. Lean on American closed models — more capable, but expensive, controlled, and subject to U.S. export law and a switch that can be flipped in Washington. Or build on Chinese open weights — free, self-hostable, sovereign, and good enough for almost any real economic task. For most of the emerging world — urban India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, the same two billion people climbing into the middle class over the next fifteen years — “free, sovereign, and good enough” beats “premium and controlled” nearly every time.

This is what the U.S.–China binary misses. Open weights are becoming a stateless commons that neither government fully controls. If the next two billion users build on that commons — the way much of the world skipped landlines and went straight to mobile money — then the “winner” of the AI race is neither superpower, and both national strategies are quietly self-defeating. America, by pricing and controlling itself, could lose the global middle without ever losing a benchmark. China could seed the world’s AI substrate and then find that a commons, by definition, belongs to no one who seeded it.

There is an obvious objection to the open-weight commons: Chinese models carry built-in content controls. A model that will not discuss what the state will not discuss looks like a compromised foundation for someone else’s economy. I made that argument myself in an earlier draft. I now think it is weaker than it looks, for a technical reason worth taking seriously. A set of techniques called abliteration can find and suppress the “refusal direction” inside an open-weight model, stripping out baked-in controls after release. For the dense models the tooling already handles, practitioners report modest performance cost, and modified versions of major Chinese open models already circulate. For the mixture-of-experts designs the biggest models actually use, it is harder and not yet solved. The honest status: increasingly possible, not done.

But the direction matters more than today’s state, and it cuts toward my larger point, not China’s. If controls can be surgically removed from open weights, the commons is even more ungovernable than either capital assumes. Beijing’s controls and Washington’s export law share one blind spot: once weights are public and the community can modify them, they slip the grip of whoever released them. The controls China bakes in may not survive a determined developer in Jakarta or Lagos. That weakens the “compromised foundation” worry and sharpens the stateless-commons point at the same time. Once free, the weights answer to no one.

The Race and the Game

Come back, at the end, to the word. We keep calling this a race, and the word has done quiet damage. A race assumes one track and a finish line. It carries the same conviction chess does — that there is a winner, that the game ends, that someone takes the king. But what is actually unfolding looks far more like the other great board game, the one that ends not in checkmate but in territory: in interdependence, in positions so entangled that no single move decides it. That is the sense in which this is not really a race at all. It is a game of mutual position. And the two players are already more bound to each other than either will admit.

The likeliest outcome is not that one side wins. It is that the two become load-bearing for each other — exactly what the coupling predicts at the level of grand strategy. The American frontier becomes the thing China distills from. The Chinese physical layer — the robots, the factories, the sensor-rich real world — becomes the thing America has to deploy into and learn from. What looks like a sprint to a finish line may be two countries quietly building a dependency on each other that neither is choosing and both deny.

If that is right, the decisive question was never the frontier benchmark in the headlines each quarter. It was the open-weight question almost nobody treats as geopolitics — because open-weighting decides whether AI ends as a two-power condominium or as a capability the rest of the world owns a real piece of. The benchmark race is the visible game. The standards-and-dependency game underneath it is the one quietly handing out the next thirty years.

There is a final irony, and readers of my last essay will know its shape. The West built much of China’s industrial strength by chasing efficiency and short-term returns, then woke to find it had trained its own competitor. We may be doing it again, in the one domain where we are surest we lead — pouring hundreds of billions into frontier capability and open research, laying track for someone else to run trains on. I hold this as a worry, not a prophecy. The S-curve question genuinely cuts both ways, and the frontier bet may yet prove that building the most powerful intelligence and winning are the same thing. But that is exactly the assumption worth refusing. This is not a sprint with a tape at the end. It is a board filling with stones, and the decisive territory — the open-weight commons, the next two billion users, the embodiment data, the dependency neither capital will name — is being claimed off to the side while every eye stays fixed on the frontier. The question was never whether America can build the most powerful intelligence. It can. The question is whether that is the same thing as winning. And the surest way to lose a game you insist on calling a race is to keep sprinting while the other player quietly surrounds the board.

A note on sources.

Figures and events cited reflect reporting available as of mid-2026, including coverage of the April 2026 DeepSeek V4 release and its pricing and chip partnerships (CNN, TechCrunch, Fortune, CNBC, Reuters/The Information); the Council on Foreign Relations’ analysis distinguishing the capability race from the adoption race; energy and grid data from the International Energy Agency, Brookings, and U.S. grid analysts; humanoid-robot shipment and deployment figures from Omdia, IDC, TrendForce, and Xinhua; and practitioner benchmarks on abliteration of open-weight models. Specific model names, prices, and figures in this fast-moving field will date quickly; readers should verify current numbers before relying on them. Claims of “industrial-scale” distillation are, at the time of writing, allegations rather than adjudicated findings.

The author spent more than two decades building and leading operations at the intersection of Chinese and global markets, including growing Honeywell’s China business into the company’s second-largest country operation. He is Founder and CEO of Tribridge Group and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. This essay is a companion to his earlier piece, “The Reckoning.” With thanks to colleagues whose critical feedback sharpened the argument; remaining errors are the author’s own.

Their plight has been swallowed by geopolitical calculation. The negotiations underway are with an IRGC that is not merely a military force but the effective government of Iran — emboldened, entrenched, and tightening its grip on society, the economy, and daily life with each passing week.

And so the questions surface, in think tanks and dinner tables alike: Are Iranians even ready for democracy? Would they know what to do with it? Perhaps a ceasefire is enough — perhaps “peace” will quench the thirst. These questions are not just uninformed. They are an insult to two centuries of history.

On the eve of Nowruz this year, I wrote the essay below. Its argument is simple but, I believe, necessary: Iran is not a country waiting to discover the idea of freedom. It is a civilization that has been fighting for it — seriously, persistently, at great cost — for nearly two hundred years. That history is not incidental to this moment. It is the point.

I am posting it here in the hope that it finds readers who believe the Iranian people deserve more than a negotiated silence — and that their future belongs in this conversation.

The Arc of Freedom: Iran’s Two-Hundred-Year Struggle for Modernity

Today is Nowruz — the Persian New Year — a celebration of renewal that has endured for more than three thousand years. It is the day when Iranians mark the arrival of spring, the triumph of light over darkness, and the eternal promise of a new beginning. Yet this Nowruz arrives under the shadow of war, as American and Israeli bombs rain on Iranian cities and the regime that has held the Iranian people hostage for forty-seven years teeters on the edge of collapse. In this moment — as tragic as it is potentially transformative — it is worth understanding how we arrived here. The story does not begin in 1979, nor in 1953. It begins two hundred years ago, at the dawn of a century that would set Iran on a long, tortuous, and still-unfinished journey toward freedom.

I.   The Darkness Before Dawn

In the early nineteenth century, Iran was a civilization in ruins. The once-mighty Persian empire — heir to the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, the dazzling courts of Isfahan — had been reduced to a state of extraordinary poverty, illiteracy, and decay. The Qajar dynasty, which had consolidated power around the turn of the 19th century after decades of brutal civil war, presided over a nation that bore little resemblance to its glorious past.

The numbers, such as they were, tell a devastating story. Illiteracy approached ninety-nine percent of the population. The vast majority of Iranians lived in grinding rural poverty, subject to the whims of feudal landowners, tribal chieftains, and a parasitic clerical class that had embedded itself in every facet of society. The infrastructure of the country — its roads, its waterways, its institutions — had decayed to a state of near collapse. While Europe was undergoing its Industrial Revolution and the ideas of the Enlightenment were reshaping the Western world, Iran remained mired in a medieval existence.

The early Qajar kings — Agha Mohammad Khan, the dynasty’s founder, and his successor Fath-Ali Shah — were preoccupied not with reform but with consolidation and survival. The devastating wars with Russia, culminating in the humiliating Treaties of Golestan (1813) and

Turkmenchay (1828), stripped Iran of its Caucasian territories and imposed crippling indemnities. The Anglo-Persian war (1856-57) ended with the Treaty of Paris (1857), in which Iran was forced to formally renounce all claims to Herat and Afghan territory. These defeats did more than redraw the map — over the course of a few decades, Iran lost nearly half of its territory to Russian conquest and British coercion. They shattered the already fragile sense of national confidence and exposed the yawning chasm between Iran and the modernizing powers of Europe and Russia.

It was into this darkness that a profound question began to stir — the question that would define two centuries of Iranian thought, and that remains unanswered today: How can Iran reconcile its own civilizational identity with modern science, politics, and institutions?

The responses to this question did not come from a single source. They emerged from multiple directions — spiritual movements, secular intellectuals, diaspora reformists, feminist pioneers, statesmen, poets — each offering a different answer, each contributing a thread to a tapestry that is still being woven. The modernity movement in Iran was never a single unified school. It evolved in waves, and understanding those waves is essential to understanding where Iran stands today.

II.   The First Stirrings: Spiritual Rupture and Secular Reform

Before Iran could think about modernity in any sustained way, something more fundamental had to shift. The entire edifice of Iranian society rested on a foundation of fixed religious tradition. The Shia clergy held a monopoly not merely over spiritual life but over the interpretation of reality itself. Law, morality, education, social relations — all were governed by a clerical class that claimed exclusive authority to mediate between the human and the divine. In a society structured around the premise that truth was fixed and that only the clergy could interpret it, the very concept of change — progressive, institutional, systemic change — was difficult to think about, let alone enact.

A religious renewal was also brewing.  The Shaykhi school, a reformist current within Shia Islam, had cultivated messianic expectations — a sense that the old religious order had exhausted itself and that a new dispensation was at hand.  It is in this context that the Bábí movement of the 1840s must be understood. In 1844, a young merchant from Shiraz declared himself to be the Báb —the Gate — challenging the clerical establishment at its root. Whatever one makes of its theological claims, the movement’s intellectual consequences were enormous: it introduced the concept of progressive revelation — the idea that history unfolds, that truth is not frozen in the seventh century, that the structures of the past can and must give way to the requirements of a new era. It created a mobilized, literate, idea-driven community in a society where independent thought was dangerous. And it broke the conceptual monopoly of traditional religious authority in a way that opened space for everything that followed — secular and religious alike.  

Perhaps the most brilliant fruit of the early Bábí movement was the appearance of a young, erudite and courageous woman: the peerless Tahirih – Qurratu’l-Ayn.  Her penetrating poetry and prose established her as one of the most formidable intellects of her age.  But it was her courageous act of casting away her veil in public — an unimaginable act at the time — that set in motion the chain of events reaching far beyond her own life.  In that single gesture, she planted the seed of women’s emancipation that would define the struggle for the next two centuries and pave the way for some of the most remarkable women in the history of modern Middle East.  Her brutal killing by the state, far from silencing the cause, unleashed a movement that gradually gathered momentum and has become a driving force for change in Iran to this day.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the Qajar state and the Shia clergy responded to the Bábí movement with overwhelming violence. Tens of thousands of Bábís were killed. The Báb himself was executed in Tabriz in 1850. But the movement’s legacy — widening beyond the confines of Iran even as it deepened into a humanism not yet conceived even in the seemingly enlightened West — broke through its chrysalis into the Bahá’í Faith.  This radical new religion which emerged from it, spread rapidly, and found adherents in diverse corners of the world, propagated  modern and progressive teachings that stood in sharp contrast to the fundamentalist practices of the Shia clergy.  It persisted as one current among many that fed the broader stream of Iranian renewal.

At the same time, a different kind of reformist energy was stirring among Iranians who had encountered the modern world through travel, diplomacy, and education. These early secular modernists looked outward — to Europe, to Russia, to the Ottoman Empire — and began to articulate what Iran lacked and what it needed. Their approach was fundamentally one of importation: bringing modern concepts into Persian discourse and arguing for their adoption.

Among the earliest and most influential was Mirza Malkam Khan, an Armenian-Iranian diplomat whose newspaper Qanun — “Law” — published from London in the 1890s, introduced Western political concepts into Persian with extraordinary skill: constitutionalism, the rule of law, administrative reform, the separation of powers. His central insight — that Iran’s backwardness was a matter of institutional failure, not fate — was revolutionary in its time.

Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh went further, mounting a radical critique of religion and tradition from Tiflis. He promoted secularism, nationalism, and even script reform, and was among the first to frame Iran as a modern nation-state. Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani emphasized pre-Islamic Iranian identity as the foundation for renewal. Mirza Abdul Rahim Talibov wrote accessible texts introducing modern science and political ideas to a broader readership. And Bibi Khanoom Astarabadi, an early feminist intellectual, broke new ground by advocating for women’s education and social equality — anticipating by more than a century the women who would lead Iran’s most consequential modern movement.

Not all modernization was purely intellectual. Amir Kabir, the remarkable chief minister of Naser al-Din Shah in the mid-nineteenth century, represented the tradition of practical reform from above. His founding of the Dar al-Fonun — Iran’s first modern polytechnic school — in 1851 was an act of institutional creation that planted the seeds of a modern educated class. His reward was assassination at the hands of the very court he had tried to reform.

Among the most sophisticated reform texts of this era was The Secret of Divine Civilization, written in 1875 by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Addressed to the rulers and people of Iran, it argued that the country’s renewal required not merely the adoption of Western technology but a fundamental transformation in the moral and intellectual foundations of society — universal education, administrative reform, the rule of law, consultative governance, and the accountability of rulers. What distinguished the text from the work of the secular modernizers was that it grounded these prescriptions not in European models but in an indigenous framework, one that was not only pragmatic but also ethical and philosophical. It advocated for the harmony of science and religion, for rational inquiry over dogmatic authority, and for the education of women as central to national progress. Many of these arguments paralleled European liberal thought but they arose independently, from an entirely different premise — one grounded in a fundamental distinction that is of significant importance for a full understanding of the range of Iranian reformist thinking.

The influence of these spiritual movements, secular reformists, practical modernizers and early feminists, all working together, introduced a new vocabulary into the Persian language and the Iranian imagination: qanun (rule of law), mellat (nation), azadi (liberty), education, progress, reform. They expressed their ideas through essays, newspapers, satire, and poetry, reaching a public that was, for the first time, beginning to imagine a different future. They did not agree on everything — some were radical secularists, others grounded in religious reform, still others pragmatic institution-builders. But they shared the conviction that Iran could not remain as it was.

III.   The Constitutional Revolution: Hope and Compromise

In 1905–1906, the accumulated pressure of decades of reform agitation, combined with popular outrage at Qajar misrule and foreign exploitation, erupted in the Constitutional Revolution — Iran’s first serious attempt at democratic self-governance. A broad coalition of merchants, intellectuals, clerics, and ordinary citizens demanded and obtained a constitution and a national parliament, the Majlis.

The Constitutional Revolution was a watershed — the first such movement in the entire Middle East and one of the earliest in Asia. Figures like Hassan Taqizadeh, who famously argued that Iran must become “European in every way” (a position he later moderated), embodied the fervent modernizing spirit of the moment. The initial constitutional draft was remarkably progressive, drawing heavily on Belgian and French models. It enshrined principles of popular sovereignty, the separation of powers, and individual rights.

But here, the fundamental tension that would haunt Iran for the next century asserted itself with full force. The clerical establishment, which had initially supported the revolution — primarily out of opposition to the Qajar court and foreign influence — moved quickly to ensure that any new order that was to be introduced would remain within the Islamic framework. The Supplementary Fundamental Laws of 1907 required all legislation to be compatible with Sharia and established a committee of senior clerics with effective veto power over parliament.

This compromise — between the aspirations of the modernizers and the entrenched power of the religious establishment — would prove pivotal. The constitution that emerged was neither fish nor fowl, an uneasy hybrid: modern in form and aspiration but constrained by clerical authority in substance and practice. The tension was never resolved; it was merely deferred, waiting to reassert itself at every subsequent turning point in Iranian history.

IV.   Oil, the Pahlavis, and the Institutionalization of Modernity

Iran’s constitutional experiment was already faltering by the time oil was discovered in 1908 at Masjed Soleyman.  Almost overnight, Iran became a strategic prize in the great game of imperial rivalry, and the country’s internal politics became inseparable from the interests of foreign powers — first Britain, then the United States.

The Qajar dynasty, weakened and discredited, fell in 1925 to Reza Khan, a military officer of humble origins who crowned himself Reza Shah Pahlavi. The country he took charge of was in a state of near-total ruin.  What followed was a period of rapid, top-down transformation. Roads were built, railways laid, universities founded, the legal system reformed, and the apparatus of a modern state constructed from almost nothing. Reza Shah forced the secularization of public life, banned the veil, curtailed clerical authority, and attempted to forge a national identity rooted in Iran’s pre-Islamic past.  Historians and the public are increasingly crediting him with laying the groundwork for Iran’s modernization on virtually every level.

His son, Mohammad Reza Shah, continued this project with the White Revolution of the 1960s — a sweeping program of land reform, women’s suffrage, literacy campaigns, and industrial development that transformed the material conditions of Iranian life within a single generation.

The Pahlavi era represented the institutionalization of modernity — the second phase in the evolution of Iranian modernist thought. Where the first generation had introduced modern ideas, the Pahlavis attempted to build them into the structures of the state. And in material terms and measures, they succeeded: by the 1970s, Iran had a modern army, a growing industrial base, expanding universities, and a rising middle class.

Yet throughout both Pahlavi reigns, the fundamental paradox of Iranian modernization persisted. Modernity was being imposed from above — some would argue out of necessity — but democratic participation and genuine consent of the governed were developing at a much slower pace. The Pahlavis modernized Iran’s infrastructure and economy but not its politics. Dissent was crushed, political parties suppressed, civil society hollowed out. The SAVAK secret police became a byword for repression. Modernization without freedom was, in the end, a contradiction that could not hold.  Samuel Huntington had identified the mechanism a decade earlier:  when social mobilization outpaces political institutionalization, the gap between them doesn’t close peacefully — it explodes.

Meanwhile, the clerical establishment, though pushed to the margins of public life, had never been dismantled. The first Reza Shah had confronted the clergy directly; his son chose a more accommodating path and that forbearance proved fateful.  The clerical class retained its networks, its seminaries, its moral authority among the rural and traditional populations, and — critically — its deep institutional patience and instinct of revenge. The clerics remembered every slight, every forced unveiling, every restriction. And they waited.

V.   The Second Wave: Questioning Modernity (1920s–1960s)

As the Pahlavi state built its modern institutions, a second generation of Iranian intellectuals emerged — less concerned with importing modernity than with questioning its cultural consequences. If the first generation asked “How do we become modern?”, the second asked “What does modernity cost us? And who are we, if we are no longer what we were?”

Sadegh Hedayat, the pioneer of modern Persian fiction, gave this crisis of identity its most haunting literary expression. His masterwork The Blind Owl — with its fractured narrative, hallucinatory imagery, and existential despair — became a mirror for a society caught between worlds. Hedayat was critical of both tradition and the shallow imitation of the West; he found home in neither, and his work resonated with a generation that shared his sense of dislocation. His death by suicide in 1951, shortly after the assassination of Prime Minister Ali Razmara by Islamist militants, was a loss from which Iran’s literary culture has never fully recovered.

Ahmad Kasravi — historian, jurist, and fearless critic — occupied an pivotal position in this generation. His advocacy of rationalism, his effort to purify Persian culture of what he saw as layers of superstition, and his insistence that Iran could not modernize without directly confronting the shibboleths and sacred cows of Shia tradition earned him the undying hatred of the clergy.

Kasravi was assassinated in 1946 by Islamic extremists.  Ayatollah Khomeini and other prominent clerics praised the killing. The response from the broader intellectual class was near silence — a chilling harbinger of the isolation that would befall secular voices in Iran for decades to come.

Yet even as political violence closed some doors, a remarkable wave of poets and intellectuals — both men and women — was emerging.  Other doors were opening.  Parvin Etesami brought modern social consciousness to classical Persian verse, writing with fierce clarity about justice, women’s rights, and the failures of Iranian society.  Nima Yoshij went further, breaking the classical forms themselves and founding modern Persian poetry.  And Forough Farrokhzad shattered every remaining convention — poetic, social, gendered — with a voice of such raw honesty and power that it still reverberates today.   Together, with others of their generation, they demonstrated that Iranian culture could be remade from within, that modernity could find expression in indigenous terms. 

And then there was Jalal Al-e Ahmad, whose 1962 essay Gharbzadegi — “Westoxification” — became one of the most influential texts of twentieth-century Iran. Al-e Ahmad’s argument was not that modernity was wrong but that Iran’s version of it was a fraud — a superficial imitation of Western forms that left Iranians alienated from their own identity without absorbing the substance of modern thought. He sought an authentic Iranian path to modernity, rooted in the country’s own traditions. His critique resonated deeply, but it also — in ways he may not have fully anticipated — opened intellectual space for those who would later claim that Islam itself was the authentic alternative to Western modernity.

The core themes of this second wave — the identity crisis between East and West, the tension between authenticity and imitation, the lived experience of cultural alienation — were not merely academic. They were the daily reality of millions of Iranians caught between the traditional world of their parents and the modernizing ambitions of the state. And they set the stage for a third wave that would turn the modernity debate into a revolutionary one.

VI.    1953: The Wound That Would Not Heal

Before we reach the revolution, we must reckon with 1953 — the hinge event that bent the arc of Iranian history toward tragedy.

In that year, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister — elected, that is, within the narrow definition of democratic elections that the constitution allowed — who had dared to nationalize the country’s oil industry. The coup restored the Shah to power and set in motion a chain of consequences that reverberates to this day.

Mohammad Mossadegh — popular, controversial and consequential Prime Minister who was deposed in the 1953 coup

The 1953 coup was more than a political event; it was a psychological trauma that shaped the Iranian consciousness in ways that outsiders have never fully grasped. It demonstrated to Iranians that their aspirations for democratic self-governance could be crushed at will by foreign powers. It discredited the secular nationalists who had been Mossadegh’s base of support. And it left the clerical establishment as the only organized force in Iranian society not directly compromised by association with the Shah’s regime.

The mosque became the only space where dissent could be expressed, opposition organized, and an alternative vision of society articulated. This was not because most Iranians wanted a theocratic state. It was because it was the only significant remaining avenue for political expression.

VII.    The Third Wave: Politicizing Modernity (1950s–1979)

The third generation of Iran’s modernist thinkers did not merely debate ideas; they forged ideologies — and those ideologies would light the fuse of revolution.

No figure looms larger than Ali Shariati, perhaps the most influential pre-revolutionary intellectual in modern Iranian history. A sociologist trained at the Sorbonne, Shariati accomplished something no Iranian thinker before him had managed: he fused Islam with existentialism, Marxism, and anti-colonial thought into a revolutionary ideology that electrified a generation. His Islam was not the quietist, ritualistic faith of the traditional clergy; it was a radical call to action, a theology of liberation that cast Shia Islam as an ideology of social justice and resistance to oppression. His lectures at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran drew thousands and were reproduced in the millions.

Shariati’s brilliance was also, in retrospect, his tragedy. By clothing revolutionary politics in religious language, he made the mosque the natural locus of political opposition — and inadvertently helped create the conditions for the clerical takeover that he himself would almost certainly have opposed.  Although in some way he was the midwife of the revolution, he died before it took place, in 1977, under mysterious circumstances, and never had to confront the regime his ideas had helped to bring into the the world.

On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum stood Ehsan Tabari, the chief theorist of the Tudeh Party, who promoted a Marxist interpretation of modernization. For the Iranian left, the path to modernity ran through class struggle and socialist revolution. Their influence among students and intellectuals was considerable, but they were ultimately outmaneuvered by the Islamists and the Tudeh was crushed by the very regime it had briefly supported.

This third wave politicized modernity in ways that proved fateful. The contest was Islam versus Marxism, theocracy versus liberalism, a cultural revolution played out against the backdrop of anti-imperialism and Cold War geopolitics. The question was no longer whether Iran should be modern, but whose version of modernity would triumph. The answer, when it came in 1979, was not one that any of the modernizers had intended.

VIII.    1979: The Theocratic Turn

When the revolution came, it was a genuine popular uprising — millions of Iranians from every stratum of society took to the streets to demand the end of the Pahlavi dynasty. Although the role of the foreign powers in enabling the revolution is undeniable, there was clear local support for the movement.  The

revolution was not, in its origins, an Islamic revolution. It was a revolution against authoritarianism, against foreign domination, against a political system that had delivered modernization without freedom.

But the clerics, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were the best organized, the most disciplined, and the most ruthless of the revolutionary factions. Their grassroots efforts allowed them to outmaneuver and eliminate the liberals, the nationalists, the leftists, and every other group that had contributed to the revolution’s success. The Islamic Republic was established, and Iran embarked on an experiment in theocratic governance unprecedented in the modern world.

What followed was not merely political consolidation — it was systematic extermination.  The left had been indispensable to the revolution: the Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq had organized, agitated, and bled for it.  Shariati’s Islamic socialism had given the uprising much of its intellectual energy.  They believed, with the characteristic optimism of revolutionaries, that they were partners in a shared project.  They were not.  Within three years, Khomeini had turned the apparatus of the new state against every left-wing faction that had helped bring it into existence.  The Tudeh was crushed, its leaders forced to televised confessions before being executed or imprisoned.  The Mojahedin were hunted across the country.  In the summer of 1988, in one of the twentieth century’s least-examined mass atrocities, thousands of political prisoners — the majority from the left — were executed in a matter of weeks on Khomeini’s direct order.  The betrayal was not incidental.  It was doctrinal.  In a system that claimed divine sanction, no competing ideology could be tolerated — and those who had been useful were, by that logic, the most dangerous of all.

There is a powerful argument — articulated by various Iranian thinkers across generations, including Kasravi who paid for his secular convictions with his life — that Iran needed to pass through this experience. That after centuries of clerical influence and the intertwining of religious and political authority, the Iranian people needed to see, firsthand and at full scale, what rule by the clergy actually meant. That they owed the theocrats one government, and that the theocrats would deliver a lesson more powerful than any intellectual argument ever could.

If that was the wager, it has been paid in full — and the price has been staggering.

IX.           The Fourth Wave: Reinterpreting Modernity After the Revolution

The revolution did not end the modernity debate; it transformed it. A fourth wave of Iranian intellectuals, writing in the shadow of theocratic rule, turned to philosophy — attempting, with a new urgency, to reconcile tradition and modern thought.  There were arguments for pluralism, for the separation of religious authority from political power, and for the legitimacy of democratic governance — made in religious language that the regime found deeply threatening.  There were also traditionalist philosophers who rejected secular modernity wholesale, arguing that the Western project was spiritually bankrupt and that Iran’s salvation lay in a return to the perennial truths of sacred tradition.

Other thinkers explored the hybrid identity of societies caught between civilizations — neither fully traditional nor fully modern — arguing that this in-between space was not a pathology but a creative condition.

These post-revolutionary thinkers mapped the four competing visions that had been present in Iranian modernity from the beginning — now sharpened by the lived experience of theocratic rule. The westernizing modernists, the nationalist modernists, the critical anti-Western thinkers, and the religious reformers were all still present, but the terms of the debate had shifted decisively. The question was no longer abstract. Forty-seven years of Islamic governance had turned it into a matter of life and death.

X.    Forty-Seven Years: The Education of a Nation

For nearly half a century, the people of Iran have lived under clerical rule. They have seen what happens when religion is fused with political power. They have experienced the corruption, the incompetence, the brutality, the hypocrisy, and the suffocating repression that follow when a self-appointed religious elite claims divine authority to govern.

They have watched as the clerics enriched themselves while the economy collapsed. They have seen their daughters dragged off the streets and beaten — and sometimes killed — for the crime of showing their hair. They have buried their sons in prisons and unmarked graves. They have endured sanctions, isolation, and the systematic destruction of their country’s potential — all in the name of a revolutionary ideology that has delivered nothing but misery.

And through it all, the Iranian people — educated, sophisticated, proud heirs to one of the world’s great civilizations — have never stopped demanding their freedom.

The Green Movement of 2009. The protests of 2017–2018. The massive nationwide protests of late 2019. And then, in September 2022, the murder of Mahsa Amini — a twenty-two-year-old woman from Kurdistan, killed by the morality police for the sin of allowing too much of her hair to be seen — ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Mahsa represented something that transcended her own story: the anger, the frustration, and the accumulated yearning of an entire nation. The movement she unwittingly catalyzed was different from everything that came before. It was led by women. It was explicitly secular. It did not seek reform within the system; it rejected the system itself.

And then, in late December 2025, the largest protests since the revolution erupted across all thirty-one provinces, driven by economic despair and an unmistakable demand: the end of the Islamic Republic.  The regime’s response, in early January 2026, was a massive and brutal crackdown that claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians in a matter of days — a watershed moment not only for Iran but for the conscience of the watching world.

XI.    The Paradox of Secular Iran

Here lies one of the great ironies of modern history. Iran, governed by the most rigid theocratic regime in the world, has produced one of the most secular societies in the Middle East — perhaps the most secular.

Polls by organizations such as GAMAAN have consistently shown that the overwhelming majority of Iranians — upward of eighty percent — favor a secular state. Religious observance has plummeted. Mosque attendance has collapsed. Naming practices have shifted dramatically from Arabic-Islamic names toward pre-Islamic Persian ones. Young Iranians, who make up the majority of the population, have rejected not merely the Islamic Republic but the very premise that religion should have a role in governance.

Recent research, including studies from Stanford’s Iranian Studies program, documents what amounts to a paradigm shift. Earlier protest movements used reformist and religious rhetoric within the Islamic Republic’s framework. Recent protests are openly anti-clerical and secular. The shift is visible not just in slogans but in everyday life — in how people name their children, how they speak about religion in private, how they imagine their future. For centuries, the clerical establishment controlled the most intimate moments of Iranian life: birth, naming, marriage, death. That hold has been broken, not by intellectuals or armies, but by the lived experience of an entire generation. 

This is the lesson that forty-seven years of theocracy has taught. The regime itself — through its corruption, its incompetence, its cruelty — has done more to advance the cause of secularism in Iran than any intellectual or reformist movement ever could. The mullahs have proven, more conclusively than any of them could have imagined, what generations of modernist thinkers had argued.

Looking back across two centuries, a simple but powerful pattern emerges in how Iran engaged with modernity: the nineteenth century was about importing it; the early twentieth about institutionalizing it; the mid-twentieth about questioning it; and the late twentieth about reinterpreting it. What the Iranian people are doing now is something different. They are not importing, institutionalizing, questioning, or reinterpreting modernity. They are claiming it — on their own terms, forged in their own suffering, with a clarity of purpose that no amount of repression has been able to extinguish.

XII.     Nowruz 2026: The Inflection Point

Today, as I write these words, Iran is at war. The Supreme Leader is dead, killed in the American and Israeli strikes that began on February 28. The regime’s military infrastructure has been devastated. The economy, already crippled by decades of sanctions and mismanagement, is in freefall. More than fourteen hundred people have been killed. Over two hundred of them are children. The war has spread across the region — to Lebanon, to Iraq, to the Gulf states. Oil prices have spiked. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a halt. The world is watching, and much of it is looking away.

It is too early to know how this chapter ends. War brings suffering, chaos, and consequences that no one can predict. The Iranian people — who did not start this war and did not choose it — are paying an unconscionable price, as they have paid for two centuries of great power interference in their affairs.

But here is what two hundred years of history tells us, and what I believe with the conviction of someone who has spent a lifetime studying this civilization and its people: the arc of Iranian history bends, however slowly and painfully, toward freedom.

The yearning that stirred in the 1840s — for justice, for equality, for the dignity of every human being — has never been extinguished. These ideas have only grown stronger with each generation, with each setback, with each betrayal.

The Iranian people have now learned, through the most painful possible education, what the mixing of religion and politics produces. They have paid the price that some said had to be paid. And they have arrived at a clarity of purpose that no amount of bombing, no amount of repression, and no amount of external manipulation can shake.

What they want is what they have always wanted, from the very first stirrings of modern Iranian consciousness two hundred years ago: to be free. To govern themselves. To build a society worthy of their civilization’s magnificent past and their children’s limitless future. To take their rightful place among the nations of the world — not as a theocratic pariah, not as a playground for foreign powers, but as a sovereign, democratic, secular nation, at peace with itself and with the world.

Iranian Nowruz New Year spread symbolizes life, hope and freedom

This Nowruz, amid the rubble and the grief, that dream endures. Spring returns. Light triumphs over darkness. And Iran’s two-hundred-year journey toward freedom continues.

Shane Tedjarati is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of the Tribridge Group. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and co-founder of its Middle East Leadership Initiative and China Fellowship Program. He writes on geopolitics, leadership, and civilization at stedjarati.medium.com.

And yet.

At the center of this happiness is a child locked in a dark room. Neglected. Starved. Alone. The citizens of Omelas know this. They are told, often as children themselves. They recoil at first. They are sickened. Some weep. But they are also told a second truth: if the child were ever freed, if the injustice were ever corrected, the entire structure of Omelas would collapse. The joy would fade. The peace would fracture. The city itself would cease to exist as it is.

Most citizens accept this bargain. Not happily, not casually, but resignedly. They return to their lives carrying the knowledge like a dull ache. A few cannot. They walk away from Omelas, into an unknown beyond the city walls. Le Guin never tells us where they go. Only that they leave.

That silence is the point.

The False Stability of Sacrifice

Omelas is not a story about cruelty. It is a story about moral outsourcing. About systems that depend on suffering placed deliberately out of sight. About the lie that prosperity must rest on someone else’s permanent immiseration.

For the Fellows of the Aspen Institute leadership programs, Omelas is essential reading in the pursuit of a “good society” grounded in enlightened leadership.  It provides a powerful lens through which to examine the world as it is, not merely as we wish it to be.  Omelas is assigned not to provoke agreement, but to provoke discomfort.  That is why when I was speaking with an Aspen Fellow this morning about the agony of what is happening to the people of Iran today, she said, almost instinctively: “Iran is the child in the dungeon at Omelas!”

The remark struck a deep chord.

Iran today occupies a disturbingly similar place in the global imagination.

In the Middle East, and increasingly in global geopolitics, Iran has become the child in the dungeon. Its suffering is known. It is not hidden. Sanctions, isolation, internal repression, economic strangulation, intellectual suffocation. An ancient civilization reduced to a pressure valve for regional equilibrium and great-power bargaining.

Everyone knows the conditions are unjust. Everyone also knows the argument used to justify them.

If Iran were allowed to breathe, we are told, the region would destabilize. If Iran were treated as a normal nation rather than a permanent problem, alliances would wobble. Energy markets might shift. Strategic balances would need recalibration. It is safer, the logic goes, to keep the door locked.

This is the Omelas bargain.

The Comfort of Distance

What makes Le Guin’s story so unsettling is that Omelas is not sustained by hatred. It is sustained by rationalization. By complexity. By fear of unintended consequences. By the quiet belief that suffering, if sufficiently contained, can be morally tolerated.

That is precisely how the world relates to Iran.

Whether the posture is pragmatic, transactional, or tactical; whether it is driven by regional rivalries, hedging by neighboring states, or a convenient narrative that change would unleash chaos at home and instability abroad; everyone claims to oppose injustice. Yet no one wants to be responsible for altering the structure that depends on it.

Meanwhile, the Iranian people live the consequences. Not as abstractions, but as daily reality. Lost opportunities. Brain drain. Cultural suffocation. A generation raised in a room without windows, told that the darkness is necessary for global order.

They no longer are buying the dystopian narrative.  Neither should we.

Walking Away Is Not Neutral

Le Guin’s walkers are often misunderstood as moral heroes. But the story is more ambiguous than that. Walking away from Omelas is a refusal to participate in injustice, yes. But it is also an abdication. The child remains in the dungeon.

The world today is full of walkers.

Those who say, “Iran is tragic, but too complicated.”

Those who say, “We can’t interfere.”

Those who say, “The alternatives might be worse.”

Walking away feels clean. It preserves one’s moral self-image. But it does nothing for the child.

The child in the dungeon is not voiceless; it has been deliberately unheard.

The harder question Le Guin leaves us with is the one she never answers: what would it mean to stay, and yet refuse the bargain?

Beyond the False Dichotomy

The deepest lie of Omelas is the claim that there are only two options: universal happiness built on one child’s misery, or total collapse.

This is the same lie told about Iran.

That regional stability requires Iranian stagnation.

That prosperity elsewhere depends on Iranian paralysis.

That dignity for Iranians must wait for a safer time that never arrives.

History offers little support for this logic. Systems built on enforced humiliation do not produce stability. They produce resentment, distortion, and eventual rupture. The child in the dungeon does not remain quiet forever. The cost of the bargain compounds.

The moral imperative, then, is not to “save” Iran in a paternal sense, nor to impose external visions, nor to romanticize suffering. It is to reject the premise that injustice is a legitimate tool of order.

The Moral Test of Our Time

Omelas endures because it asks each generation the same question: what are you willing to live with?

Iran is not merely a policy problem. It is a moral mirror. It forces the world to confront whether it truly believes that human dignity is universal, or merely conditional on convenience.

Will we continue to enjoy the music of Omelas while telling ourselves the child’s suffering is unfortunate but necessary? Will we walk away, congratulating ourselves on our clarity, while leaving the door locked?

Or will we do the more difficult thing: refuse the false dichotomy, stay engaged, and insist that no lasting peace, no real prosperity, no credible moral order can be built on a child in a dungeon?

Le Guin does not give us an answer because answers are not transferable. They must be lived.

What she gives us instead is responsibility.

And Iran, today, is asking the world whether it is willing to accept it.

—-

Shane Tedjarati

17-January-2026

Chinese companies are coming to Europe and the United States. In many sectors, they have already arrived. The debate consuming boardrooms and legislatures — can they be stopped? — is the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. Two better questions deserve to be asked simultaneously, and they point in different directions.

The first is addressed to the West: How did we arrive here, what is actually coming, and what should Western companies and governments do about it?

The second is addressed to the Chinese companies now arriving at the gate: What will it actually take to win?

Both questions are harder than they appear. And the answers to each illuminate the other. This essay addresses them in turn.

— MOVEMENT I —

Chinese Companies Are Coming: How Should the West Respond?

How the West Built Its Own Challenger

The uncomfortable truth that rarely surfaces in Western boardrooms is this: the competitive threat from Chinese companies is not something that happened to the West. It is, in significant part, something the West built.

For three decades, Western corporations pursued a strategy that was rational quarter by quarter and cumulatively self-defeating: the systematic transfer of manufacturing capacity, operational know-how, engineering discipline, and indirect market access into China, in exchange for lower costs, higher margins, and short-term shareholder returns. The logic at each decision point was sound. The strategic consequence, accumulated across hundreds of companies and thousands of supply chain decisions, was the construction of the very competitors now arriving at the door.

This is not a story of naïvety alone. Capital behaves as capital does: it moves toward the highest return. In China, for more than two decades, the returns were extraordinary. Lower labor costs, disciplined workforces, government incentives for foreign direct investment, and an enormous untapped consumer market created conditions that Western CFOs could not responsibly ignore. “Capital is a coward” — it does not ask civilizational questions. It asks return questions. For decades, the answers pointed consistently east.

What made this capital migration different from normal globalization dynamics was what traveled with it. Not just manufacturing contracts, but quality systems. Not just product specifications, but engineering discipline. Not just market access, but a structured education in how Western supply chains function, what Western customers require, and how global commercial relationships are built and maintained. Entire generations of Chinese engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs received their most consequential business education inside the factories, joint ventures, and supplier networks of Western multinationals. The textbook was written in the West. The students were Chinese. The exam results are arriving now.

China understood something that many Western executives did not, or chose not to: globalization was not just about trade flows. It was about capability accumulation. Western firms optimized for quarterly financial extraction. Chinese firms — often with patient government backing, long institutional time horizons, and a strategic culture that measures success in decades rather than quarters — optimized for industrial learning. The asymmetry compounded with each passing year.

In many cases, Western CEOs were handsomely rewarded for “winning China” — for establishing the joint venture, signing the supply agreement, opening the factory. In doing so, they were often unintentionally training the future competitors that would eventually challenge their own global businesses. The assumption underwriting all of this — that economic liberalization would converge with democratic liberalism, making China more Western over time — now looks not merely wrong but historically naïve.

The point is not moral recrimination. Capital pursuing returns is not a failure of judgment but a structural consequence of the incentive systems Western corporations operate within. The point is clarity of diagnosis: the competitive pressure now bearing down on Western industries is partly an artifact of decisions that made complete sense at the time. Understanding that history matters because it reframes the response. This is not an external aggression to be repelled by legislation alone. It is, in part, a consequence of structural incentives that need to be redesigned.

What Is Actually Arriving

There is a phenomenon in Chinese commercial culture that has no direct Western equivalent, and that has produced some of the most distinctive and misunderstood features of the competitive landscape now going global.

When a business succeeds visibly in China, others follow — not gradually, not cautiously, but in concentrated waves. One entrepreneur opens a pearl store and thrives. Within months, an entire street, then an entire district, becomes pearl stores. The same pattern repeats across turbochargers, switchgear, socks, optical equipment, control systems, furniture, construction materials, and consumer electronics. Chinese entrepreneurs rally around proven commercial winners with a speed and density that can look, from the outside, like irrational imitation. What it actually produces is something more consequential: concentrated industrial ecosystems of extraordinary depth, scale, and competitive refinement.

The mechanism works through attrition. Intense localized competition destroys individual margins and eliminates the weakest entrants, but simultaneously creates something that no distributed market logic generates as efficiently — entire supply chains, manufacturing communities, specialist knowledge networks, and logistics systems optimized to a single product category through years of brutal selection. The winners that emerge from this process are not merely competent. They are the survivors of the most rigorous competitive selection mechanism in modern industrial history. Western observers who see only the chaos of imitation miss the infrastructure it creates. What looks like a street of pearl stores is also the development of the world’s most efficient pearl supply chain. That efficiency eventually becomes an export.

Before assessing the scale of what is arriving, precision about definitions matters. “Global” is a term applied to Chinese companies loosely and inconsistently. Selling products internationally is not the same as becoming a genuinely global company. A more useful taxonomy distinguishes three categories:

Tier 1 Global Chinese Companies generate more than 50 percent of their revenue outside China. This group remains relatively small but produces the most visible competitive disruption — BYD’s export operations, DJI’s domination of the commercial drone market, SHEIN’s compression of fast fashion economics, Temu’s entry into Western e-commerce.

Tier 2 Emerging Globalizers generate between 30 and 50 percent of revenue offshore. This category is analytically underappreciated. The companies in it have genuine international traction but organizational models still transitioning from domestic to global. Over the next twenty years, this middle tier may represent the more significant wave of competitive pressure — not because any single company within it is as formidable as a Tier 1 player, but because of its collective scale and forward momentum.

Export-National Champions have substantial export volumes but operating models, leadership structures, and strategic dependencies that remain overwhelmingly China-centric. They sell globally but are not yet organized globally. They are candidates for the tier above, not members of it.  They usually lack global branding power but produce for many famous brands.  Furniture and construction materials are good examples.

The Tier 1 companies already visible are formidable. BYD has surpassed Tesla in quarterly global EV sales, controls its own chip design, manufactures its own batteries, and has a cost structure that European automakers are struggling to comprehend, let alone match. CATL holds roughly 37 percent of global EV battery supply and counts Volkswagen, BMW, Ford, and Tesla among its customers. The global transition to electric mobility runs, in significant part, through one company’s factories in Fujian. DJI owns the commercial drone market so thoroughly that American attempts to legislate it out of US airspace keep colliding with the inconvenient reality that there is no competitive alternative. SHEIN has compressed the design-to-shelf cycle from months to days, rewriting fast fashion economics in ways that Zara and H&M cannot replicate. Temu’s entry into Western e-commerce produced user acquisition numbers that forced legacy platforms to reconsider their assumptions about price sensitivity.

The supply chain dimension extends deeper than the visible products. Data centers — the physical backbone of AI, cloud computing, and digital services — depend heavily on servers, networking equipment, cooling systems, and power management infrastructure, much of which is manufactured in China or by Chinese companies. Western governments and hyperscalers are grappling with a paradox they have not resolved: building AI infrastructure intended to reduce dependence on Chinese technology while relying on Chinese supply chains to build it. This tension will not resolve cleanly or quickly.

These are not state instruments. They are companies that earned their position in the most unforgiving commercial environment on earth. The question is whether that excellence translates, and what it will take for it to do so.

Why They’re Coming Now: The Push Behind the Push

The conventional narrative frames Chinese globalization as a strategic offensive — an expansionist push engineered in Beijing. The reality is more complex, and more instructive. Many of the Chinese companies now entering Western markets are not expanding purely from a position of domestic strength. They are also responding to domestic conditions that make international expansion a commercial necessity.

China’s domestic market is ferociously competitive and, in many sectors, structurally margin-destructive. The same crucible that forged these companies’ capabilities also compressed their profitability. The EV market is the most visible example: China now hosts over a hundred electric vehicle manufacturers competing for domestic market share, and the resulting price wars have driven margins to levels that make domestic-only profitability nearly unsustainable. BYD’s globalization is not merely a story of ambition. It is also a response to brutal domestic economics. The same pattern appears in solar panels, where successive rounds of capacity expansion have made export-or-die a structural imperative for the sector’s survivors. In consumer electronics, margins have been competed away by the pearl-store dynamics described above. In batteries, in industrial equipment, in control systems, the pattern repeats: companies achieve world-class capability, face domestic price destruction, and discover that Western markets offer something the home market cannot — pricing power, less saturated competitive fields, and the foreign currency earnings that transform a company’s financial profile. For many, going global is not optional. It is the route to profitability.

The overcapacity dynamic intensifies this pressure. Chinese industrial systems are oriented toward scale. Scale generates supply that routinely exceeds domestic demand. That surplus must find exits, and Western markets — with their higher price ceilings and less saturated competitive landscapes — are the logical destination. This is not strategic conspiracy. It is the near-gravitational consequence of an industrial model built for volume, and of the perpetual-motion logic of the pearl store applied at national scale.

The geopolitical dimension adds a third force. Chinese government policy has moved from tolerating outbound investment to actively encouraging it. Companies that build genuine international market positions reduce China’s dependence on any single geopolitical relationship and diversify the country’s economic exposure. The alignment of commercial incentive and state interest is a powerful accelerant.

Western incumbents who frame all of this as purely strategic aggression misread the underlying economics — and calibrate their response accordingly wrong. Understanding the commercial logic driving the other side is not a concession. It is the precondition for a response that actually works.

The External Barriers Are Real. They Are Not the Main Story.

Geopolitics, tariffs, regulatory complexity, forced labor legislation, the closure of the acquisition route: these are genuine headwinds and deserve to be named clearly.

CFIUS and its European equivalents have effectively closed the acquisition path that was once the fastest route to Western market entry, local talent, and brand credibility. Organic build is now the primary available route. It is slower, more expensive, and requires exactly the organizational capabilities Chinese companies are still developing. The US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act’s rebuttable presumption structure means goods with Xinjiang inputs are detained at ports unless proven otherwise — a real market access problem for companies in textiles, electronics, solar, and polysilicon. The Huawei and TikTok precedents have established that product quality provides no protection once geopolitical momentum reaches critical mass.

These barriers will shape which sectors are accessible and which entry paths are viable. They require serious geopolitical risk management as a core strategic discipline — not a government affairs function, but something that shapes product decisions, data architecture, and partnership choices from day one.

But they do not answer the fundamental question. Plenty of Chinese companies will navigate the external environment competently and still fail to build genuine market presence. The chief reason will be internal more than it will be external.

The Role of Government: Industrial Policy, Not Just Walls

The corporate strategy conversation in this article has a necessary counterpart that is largely missing from the policy debate: what should Western governments actually do? The answer is not primarily about walls. Tariffs, CFIUS screening, forced labor legislation, and technology export controls are legitimate instruments. But they are intervals, not strategies. They buy time. The critical question — the one that determines whether that time is used productively — is what industrial policy fills the space they create.

China’s own development trajectory offers the most instructive model, and Western governments would do well to study it honestly rather than simply react to its outputs. China’s successive five-year plans were not primarily about keeping foreign competitors out. They were about using the interval of protection to build genuine domestic capability — directing government support into specific industries, incentivizing local innovation, and progressively raising the sophistication level required of domestic companies. The walls were temporary scaffolding. The building was the point.  State Capitalism was working at full speed.

The nuance on incentives is important and almost entirely absent from Western policy debates. Western multinationals operating inside China — including companies like Honeywell — regularly received substantial government incentives for genuine research and development activity. Tax credits worth millions of dollars annually were available to foreign companies that invested in real R&D, produced genuine IP, and created local innovation capacity. The incentives were not exclusionary. They were conditional — on genuine investment, genuine innovation, genuine capability-building. The difference was not that China subsidized its companies while Western multinationals competed without support. The difference was that China’s policy architecture was designed to produce capability accumulation, while Western policy frameworks optimized, in practice, for short-term consumer welfare. Public policy shapes behavior. That cuts both ways, and the lesson is available to Western governments willing to draw it.

The productive Western policy agenda is not defensive. It is constructive. Incentivize advanced manufacturing that cannot easily be replicated by lower-cost competitors. Fund R&D at the frontier — in AI, advanced materials, next-generation energy systems — with the urgency that strategic importance demands. Accelerate automation and robotics in domestic industry, which is the only durable structural response to labor cost differentials. Create the conditions for private capital to move into strategic sectors rather than ceding them by default to patient state-backed competitors.

The critical discipline is sequencing. Protection without capability-building simply delays the reckoning. The walls will come down — through negotiation, WTO mechanisms, the political limits of consumer tolerance for higher prices. When they do, industries that used the interval to genuinely strengthen will emerge more competitive. Industries that used it to avoid the uncomfortable internal changes that competition demands will face a worse version of the same problem at a later date. Government policy can create the conditions for the first outcome or inadvertently enable the second. The design choices made now will determine which.

What Western Companies Must Do

The competitive arrival of this generation of Chinese companies is not a problem that tariffs will solve, legislation will prevent, or time will dissolve. It is a structural shift in the global competitive landscape, and Western companies that treat it as a temporary political situation rather than a permanent commercial reality are making a strategic error that will be expensive to correct.

Start with honest assessment. The instinct to dismiss Chinese competitors as cheap, state-subsidized, or IP-dependent is both outdated and dangerous. Some of that description was accurate twenty years ago. In the sectors leading the current wave — EVs, batteries, consumer electronics, fast fashion, industrial equipment — it is simply wrong. BYD is not winning on price alone. CATL is not dominant because of subsidies. DJI does not own the drone market because of dumping. These companies are winning because they are genuinely better at certain things. Western incumbents who cannot say clearly what those things are, and why, are not ready to compete.

Do not wait for the wall to protect you. Tariffs and investment screening are buying time, not building competitiveness. The companies that use this window to genuinely improve — on cost discipline, on product iteration speed, on supply chain efficiency — will emerge stronger when the political environment shifts. The companies that use it to avoid the uncomfortable internal changes that competition requires will find themselves in a worse position when protection erodes. The wall is not a strategy. It is an interval.

Recognize your real moats and invest in them aggressively. Western incumbents have genuine competitive advantages that need to be named clearly rather than assumed. The most durable and underappreciated is the channel and partner ecosystem built over decades — distributor networks, dealer relationships, value-added resellers, systems integrators, retailer partnerships, healthcare GPOs, enterprise implementation partners. These are deeply embedded commercial architectures built on personal trust, shared history, and mutual dependency, constructed over decades and impossible to replicate quickly regardless of product quality or price. A Chinese EV manufacturer can build a compelling vehicle. It cannot build, in five years, the dealer network, service infrastructure, and customer relationship architecture that gives an incumbent access to every market in a country.

If you have already globalized through China, you have a structural head start. Western multinationals that built genuine operations in China — with local leadership, local R&D, locally adapted cost structures, and the organizational discipline to compete in the world’s most demanding market — have already done this hard work once. They understand from the inside what it costs to build in a hyper-competitive, fast-moving environment where margins are thin and the pace of change is relentless. That China DNA is a competitive asset most peers do not possess. Companies that recognize it and deploy it deliberately — rather than treating their China experience as a regional sideshow — will find themselves better equipped than incumbents who built only for home markets.

Compete on what Chinese companies cannot easily replicate, yet. Regulatory relationships built over decades in heavily governed sectors — financial services, healthcare, defense-adjacent industries — represent real barriers to entry that Chinese competitors will take years to build. Brand trust in categories where data sovereignty and privacy are purchasing criteria is a genuine competitive advantage that Chinese companies will struggle to establish until they resolve their data architecture credibility problem. These moats are real. They are also not permanent.

Learn from the competition rather than only defending against it. Chinese companies bring capabilities that Western incumbents need to honestly study. The velocity of product iteration that BYD brings to vehicle software, that Chinese consumer electronics companies bring to hardware development cycles, is a disciplined operational capability, not a cultural accident. Western companies that study how their Chinese competitors move as fast as they do, and honestly assess where their own processes are slower than necessary, will extract more competitive intelligence than any market research report provides.

The honest conclusion is uncomfortable: some Western incumbents in some sectors will not survive this wave regardless of what they do. The economics of certain industries have shifted in ways that management effort alone cannot reverse. The productive response is not denial but adaptation — finding the segments, customer relationships, and value propositions where a Western competitor can genuinely win, and concentrating resources there with discipline.

The Bigger Prize: The Next Two Billion

The competitive stakes in this story extend far beyond the defense of Western home markets. The same forces reshaping competition in Europe and the United States are also determining who will win the largest commercial opportunity of the next two decades: the emerging middle class across Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America.

Over the next ten to fifteen years, one to two billion people will rise into a consuming middle class. China itself lived this transformation over three decades — the fastest and largest expansion of middle-class purchasing power in human history. The next wave is now underway: urban India, coastal West Africa, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico. These markets will need to be serviced with goods and services. The companies that reach them first, at the right cost structure, with the right product adaptations, will define entire industry categories for a generation.

Chinese companies have prepared themselves well for exactly this. They operate at cost structures Western multinationals cannot easily replicate. They have experience adapting products for price-sensitive, infrastructure-constrained markets. They have been building relationships and operational footholds across Africa and Southeast Asia for two decades — initially through state-backed infrastructure projects, increasingly through commercial market-building. They are ahead.

Here is where the argument closes its loop. Western multinationals that genuinely learn to compete with Chinese companies — on cost structure, on speed of iteration, on organizational adaptability, on the willingness to build locally rather than headquarters-out — will not only defend their home markets. They will also build the capabilities required to compete for the next two billion consumers. Welcoming the Chinese competitor, studying it seriously, and allowing it to force genuine organizational transformation is not comfortable. It is also not intuitive.  But it may be the most strategically important choice a Western company can make right now — not because it is easy, but because the alternative is to remain unprepared for a world that is arriving regardless.

— MOVEMENT II —

Chinese Companies Are Coming: Will They Win? And How?

The Workarounds That Won’t Work

Faced with external pressure, Chinese companies have developed strategies designed to soften their landing in Western markets. Each is rational. None is a substitute for the harder organizational transformation that winning actually requires.

The Singapore gambit. Restructure through a Singapore or Dubai holding company and enter Western markets as a regionally-headquartered company rather than a Chinese one. This has genuine value when it reflects real organizational change: actual relocation of decision-making authority, genuine separation of governance, non-Chinese boards with real power. It is theater when it is a mailing address on top of an organization that still makes every meaningful decision in Mandarin through networks rooted in Beijing. Regulators, business partners, and the press are sophisticated enough to ask where decisions are actually made, in which language, and by whom. The DNA of an organization is not a legal structure.

Joint ventures, licensing, co-branding, and alliances. The appeal is obvious: borrowed credibility, shared regulatory risk, faster access to distribution. This will be the dominant entry mode for many Chinese companies initially. But three decades of MNC joint ventures in China have produced consistent cautionary lessons: misaligned time horizons, disputes about customer ownership, technology transfer anxieties, governance ambiguities that create paralysis at critical moments. The reverse will not be simpler. Western partners will carry anxiety about IP, data flows, and what partnership actually means when strategic interests diverge. Most JVs in this direction will underperform. Some will fail instructively.

The token foreigner. The Western name in the org chart. The non-Chinese face in the press release. Given no real authority, no genuine decision-making power, no seat in the rooms where things actually get decided. Chinese social media mocks this practice openly. Sophisticated Western markets recognize it immediately. It produces neither organizational benefit nor reputational credibility.

The Data Trap — And Its Mirror

The thorniest issue, and the one most capable of ending a Western market position regardless of everything else, is data.

Any Chinese company operating software platforms, connected devices, cloud services, or AI applications in Western markets faces an unavoidable question: where does data live, who can access it, and under what legal obligations? China’s National Intelligence Law requires organizations to cooperate with state intelligence work upon request. That legal structure creates a concern for Western governments and enterprises that cannot be waived by contract or resolved by reassurance. It requires technical architecture: genuinely firewalled data systems, verifiable local residency, third-party auditing with real independence.

The irony is exact and worth stating. Western companies operating in China face nearly identical requirements. American cloud providers cannot offer certain services in China without local data localization structures that effectively provide Chinese authorities access. Both systems have produced conditions in which foreign companies face legal obligations to host governments that their home governments find intolerable. This symmetry should temper the moral framing of the debate. It does not reduce the practical requirement for Chinese companies entering Western markets: build verifiable data sovereignty into Western operations from the beginning, as a non-negotiable design requirement. Not as a retrofit. Not as a concession. As table stakes. Companies that do not will face their TikTok moment.

The Real Barrier: Leadership and the Deeper Organizational DNA

Here is the argument that deserves to be at the center of this conversation, and largely is not.

The companies that will win in Western markets are not the ones with the best technology or the lowest costs, though they will need both. They are the ones that solve the organizational problem: building genuinely local leadership and actually trusting it with consequential authority.

The default playbook is clear, familiar, and insufficient. Send home-country leaders abroad — trusted, linguistically comfortable, embedded in the networks through which real decisions flow. But they arrive with a headquarters-out worldview that cannot build authentic local market roots. Supplement with overseas Chinese professionals who bridge some cultural gaps but rarely the decisive ones. And add, for optics, the token Western face that signals global ambition to no one paying attention.

The deeper problem is structural. China is one of the world’s most homogeneous large societies. Its business culture is profoundly relationship-centered. Guanxi — the architecture of trust built through shared language, shared cultural references, educational ties, and years of accumulated personal familiarity — is not a buzzword. It is a real operating system.

But reducing the organizational challenge to guanxi alone understates it, and risks falling into the trap many Western analysts make of collapsing all Chinese organizational behavior into a single concept. Guanxi does not explain Chinese execution intensity. It does not explain Chinese strategic adaptability. The full organizational operating system that high-performing Chinese companies have built is more sophisticated than any single term captures, and two of its most consequential — and least replicable — elements are rarely named in Western discussions.

The first is Jiāzhǎngshì Lǐngdǎo (家长式领导) — a form of paternalistic authority in which senior leaders assume responsibility not merely for performance outcomes but for the broader welfare architecture of employees’ lives. Housing, family health, personal milestones: all fall within the orbit of the effective Chinese leader’s attention. The resulting exchange — comprehensive protection and personal investment in return for organizational loyalty that can be total — creates cohesion and execution intensity during periods of rapid growth or crisis that Western organizations, operating on professionally distanced management norms, rarely match. The loyalty is not purchased. It is earned through demonstrated care. The performance it generates is not compliance. It is commitment.

The second is Shěnshí Duóshì (审时度势) — a form of anticipatory execution: the ability to read the direction of political, regulatory, and market change before it is formally articulated, and to mobilize organizational action at exceptional speed. Western firms often experience this as recklessness — the Chinese competitor building the high-rise before the architectural drawings are complete. Inside China’s competitive and regulatory system, it frequently functions as decisive adaptive advantage. The organizational bias is toward momentum first, optimization second. By the time a Western competitor has completed its due diligence process, the Chinese firm has already broken ground.

These are not personality traits. They are embedded organizational capacities, shaped by the specific competitive and institutional environment in which these companies were formed. Chinese competitive strength is not just guanxi. It is a deeper organizational operating system combining relational authority, strategic sensing, adaptive execution, and embedded trust architectures. Extending genuine decision-making authority to someone who exists outside this system runs against a coherent operating logic that works extraordinarily well inside China and becomes a structural liability when applied unchanged to markets it was not built for. This is a diagnosis, not a criticism.

The Other Side of the Hiring Problem

The challenge runs in both directions, and this half is almost never discussed.

Will excellent Western talent actually join Chinese companies? The career calculus for a senior German automotive executive or a respected American enterprise software leader considering a Chinese employer is real and not easily dismissed. The geopolitical stigma is portable — it follows a career across subsequent moves. And beneath the compensation and the title is the question every capable candidate is actually asking: is the authority real?

The most talented candidates for these roles have usually seen the dynamic before: a senior local hire who discovers that meaningful decisions are made in a language they don’t speak, through networks they cannot access, by people who were never in the job description. They are not going to take the career risk for a role that turns out to be advisory in practice.

What these candidates often do not fully anticipate — and what makes the challenge more intractable than it first appears — is the existence of informal decision architectures operating in parallel to the formal organizational chart. Real influence in many Chinese firms flows through relationship networks, founder proximity, political trust, historical loyalties, and internal alliances that are largely invisible to outsiders. Decisions appear agreed in formal settings, then shift or stall elsewhere — in conversations the Western executive was not part of, mediated by relationships they do not have. Even highly capable Mandarin-speaking Western executives often struggle to fully access these structures. The result is not merely frustration but operational ineffectiveness: a leader who is formally empowered but practically peripheral. Understanding the visible organization is often insufficient. The real organization sits partially underneath it.

This creates a compounding problem. The companies most in need of excellent Western leadership are often the ones least organizationally ready to provide the conditions that would attract it. Breaking this cycle requires something specific: a CEO who makes the commitment visibly and personally, and early hires who are demonstrably given real authority in ways the market for talent can observe. The first two or three hires of this kind are the hardest to make and the most important. They are the signal.

The Mirror: What Western Companies Learned in China

This is not a new problem. It is the same problem, reversed. And I watched it unfold from the inside.

In 2005, I presented to Honeywell’s global leadership what I called the “March of the Red Army”: a systematic mapping of Chinese competitors rising from the bottom of the market pyramid. These were companies born in back-street workshops and industrial parks, producing what looked, on the surface, like cheap copies of ours. Shanzhai, the Chinese vernacular for this phenomenon, carried a dismissive connotation at headquarters, and that dismissiveness was nearly universal. The prevailing view was confident and wrong: these were corrupt, cash-burning copycats who would collapse under their own poor quality and IP exposure. Not worth serious strategic attention.

We pushed back with data. We had done the work on the ground, tracking the handful of companies in each product category that were not merely copying but genuinely learning, iterating, improving, and beginning to compete on dimensions that mattered to Chinese customers: price, local features, serviceability, local relationships, and speed of response. Swimming in a sea of thousands of imitators were a smaller number of companies that were quietly becoming real. We made headquarters see them — not as a generic threat but as specific competitors with specific strengths in specific markets.

That recognition led directly to what became Honeywell’s “East for East” strategy: building locally for local markets, with local leadership, local R&D, and local end-to-end decision-making authority. Ultimately we articulated our ambition internally as “Becoming the Chinese Competitor.” Not competing against Chinese companies as a foreign multinational defending its position, but competing as a genuine local player who happened to have global technology behind it. We learned to respect these companies, study them, and beat them on their own terms — with local pricing logic, local service architectures, locally adapted features, and local relationships that headquarters-driven strategies could never build.

The results were not abstract. China became not just Honeywell’s fastest-growing and largest business outside the United States, but one of its most profitable, genuinely accretive to global margins. That outcome was inseparable from the decision, made years earlier, to take the competition seriously before anyone at the center thought it necessary.

The lesson is directly transferable, and the direction of travel has reversed. The companies we were tracking in 2005 are the companies now arriving in Europe and the United States. The Western executives who dismiss them today as cost-competitive but technologically shallow, or as state-backed rather than genuinely innovative, are making precisely the mistake that multinational headquarters were making twenty years ago. The data on the ground tells a different story. The question is whether Western incumbents will read it in time.

KFC became one of the most successful restaurant brands in Chinese history not by replicating its American model but by letting Chinese leaders genuinely reinvent it: local menu innovation, local management, local supply chains, driven by people with the authority and mandate to act on what the market required. The result looked more like a Chinese company with an American parent than an American company operating in China. The lesson from both cases, and from every genuine success story in Western companies’ China expansion, is consistent: localization of leadership is not a cultural accommodation. It is the commercial strategy. Everything else is implementation.

American and European companies had a structural advantage in making this leap. They come from immigrant societies where the definition of “one of us” is broad, porous, and at their best, genuinely meritocratic across cultural lines. For Chinese companies, this is a harder ask. Not impossible, but harder. Chinese society is largely homogeneous and has had little historical need to develop the organizational reflex for integrating outsiders into genuine positions of trust. Building it across real cultural distance requires conscious design, CEO sponsorship, and patience measured in years rather than quarters.

What the Winners Will Actually Look Like

The profile of Chinese companies that will genuinely win in Western markets is becoming discernible, and it is not what most people expect.

Their CEOs will have spent real time in Western markets — not on roadshows, but the kind of sustained engagement that builds genuine intuition and genuine relationships. They will have made the localization of leadership a personal agenda item with personal accountability attached. Their senior Western hires will be in the rooms where consequential decisions are made, with real P&L ownership, real authority over market strategy, and career trajectories that do not require relocating to China.

The data question will be resolved technically and verifiably, not rhetorically. Geopolitical risk will be managed as a strategic discipline from day one, not a crisis response after the fact. Over time, they will have built something harder to replicate than any product advantage: a reputation as employers where excellent Western professionals can build real careers with real authority.

When this combination comes together, these companies will be formidable in a way that existing Chinese market entrants are not. They will combine the cost efficiency and technological depth that Western incumbents cannot match with the market embeddedness and local credibility that previous Chinese entrants never achieved.

There is a strategic dimension to all of this that Western observers consistently misread — and a metaphor from Chinese intellectual tradition that clarifies it with unusual precision.

Western strategic thinking defaults to the logic of chess: decisive confrontation, territorial capture, and ultimately the removal of the opposing king. Victory is binary, achieved through direct dominance. China’s strategic tradition is closer to Wei Qi — known in the West as Go. Wei Qi does not seek the opponent’s destruction. It seeks positional advantage, patient encirclement, the gradual accumulation of influence across the board until outcomes become structurally inevitable — without a single decisive confrontation. The goal is not to kill the king. It is to make one’s own position so advantageous that the outcome is no longer in question.

This distinction matters practically. Many Western observers interpret Chinese commercial expansion as an attempt at outright dominance — at winning in the zero-sum sense they understand from chess. They are often mistaken. What they are observing more accurately is the patient construction of supply chain leverage, market optionality, customer dependency, and strategic positioning across multiple theaters simultaneously. The Chinese competitor is not necessarily trying to defeat you. It may be surrounding the board in ways you have not noticed yet. By the time the encirclement is visible, the question of who holds the structural advantage may already be settled.

Finally: at some point, the most globally successful Chinese companies will need to develop a class of leadership that does not yet widely exist. Not Western executives with Mandarin fluency alone — though language helps. Not Chinese executives with Western market experience alone — though that matters too. What the moment ultimately requires is something rarer: leaders who are genuinely credible inside Chinese trust architectures while remaining genuinely credible in Western commercial and cultural contexts. Leaders who can navigate the shadow hierarchy and the formal org chart simultaneously. Leaders who can translate not just language but the deeper operating systems of two different civilizational business models — in both directions, in real time.

This is the real scarcity. The executives who achieve it will be disproportionately valuable strategic assets to whoever they work for — whether that is a Chinese company trying to win in the West or a Western company competing in a genuinely global landscape.

One final asymmetry is worth naming. American and European systems remain substantially more open to integrating foreign executives into positions of real authority than Chinese systems currently are. That structural imbalance still tilts the playing field. Whether it remains permanent — whether the organizational evolution required to close that gap is achievable within the timeframe that competitive pressure demands — is one of the most important unanswered questions in global business.

The Chinese companies that figure this out will not merely enter Western markets.

They will shape them.

Shane Tedjarati spent more than two decades building and leading operations at the intersection of Chinese and global markets, including growing Honeywell’s China business into the company’s second-largest country operation.  He is Founder and CEO of Tribridge Group and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley.

China and Iran are the two great enigmas of the contemporary world — two ancient

civilizations that dominate headlines for very different reasons but are equally, and

profoundly, misunderstood.

China is at once feared and respected, vilified and demonized. Far from an ideal society, it

has nonetheless risen to an economic power that challenges the established Western order,

leaving the West uncertain whether to engage or contain it. Iran, by contrast, is reduced in

the Western imagination to a caricature of mullahs and missiles, cast as the epicenter of

fundamentalism. Both nations are treated as problems to be managed rather than

civilizations to be understood.

But beneath the geopolitical noise lies something the headlines never capture. These two

civilizations share functional similarities that run deep — bound by 2,500 years of

continuous contact and shaped by converging answers to the same fundamental questions

about divinity, family, moral cultivation, and the meaning of a good society. They are not

structurally equivalent — their cultural, religious, and political preconditions diverge in

ways that matter enormously. But the parallels are real, and ignoring them means missing

something urgent about Iran’s current dilemma and path forward.

There is a moment that anyone who has spent serious time in both countries will recognize.

You are sitting in a living room — it doesn’t matter which — and tea is being poured. The

host insists you take the best seat. You refuse. They insist again. You refuse again. On the

third round, you accept, and only then does the real conversation begin. In Tehran, this

ritual is called ta’arof. In Beijing, it operates through the interplay of renqing and mianzi. In

both cases, it is invisible to Western eyes. And in both cases, it is the surface expression of

something that flows far deeper — a shared civilizational grammar that connects two of the

oldest cultures on earth.

Understanding that grammar matters now more than ever. Because the most important

question facing Iran today — how to shed the weight of ideological dogma without

abandoning the ancient values that make a society worth building — has already been

answered, imperfectly but consequentially, by China. The question matters not because the

two countries are interchangeable, but because the answer did not come from Western

models but from China’s own civilizational depth. And so China’s experience is uniquely

instructive. For Iran, at this critical juncture, to look at that experience not as a blueprint

for change but as a challenge to its national conscience may illuminate possibilities that no

Western development manual ever could.

Delicious Details

The first direct diplomatic exchange between the Persian and Chinese civilizations dates to

around 200 BC, when the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian encountered the Parthian court. But ro

even frame this as “diplomatic relations” misses the point. What flowed between these

civilizations along the Silk Road was not merely silk and silver. It was consciousness.

Iran was the gatekeeper of this exchange, controlling much of the trade that moved goods

between East and West. Persian merchants carried their religions, music, and ideas into

China. Sassanid kings sent their finest musicians and dancers to Tang dynasty courts.

Persian communities thrived in Chinese cities — running wineshops, introducing polo,

cuisine, and Zoroastrian ritual. When the last Sassanid king fell to the Arab conquest, his

son took refuge at the Chinese imperial court. A Parthian prince, An Shigao, had centuries

earlier become the first person to translate Buddhist sutras into Chinese: an Iranian

transmitting Indian religion to China, the Silk Road at its most cosmopolitan.

The flow was genuinely bilateral. Chinese astronomical instruments, printing, and paper

money traveled west. Persian alchemy, mathematics, and pharmacology traveled east. The

cobalt blue pigment behind China’s famous blue-and-white porcelain came from Persia;

Persian potters then copied and adapted the Chinese designs. Under the Mongol Empire,

Iran and China were for a time politically unified — the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Yuan

dynasty in China — and the Timurid empire wrote its letters to the Ming court in Persian.

Their languages still carry traces of this shared consciousness. The Chinese word for grape

(pútáo) derives from Iranian; for lion (shīzi) from Old Persian. The Chinese called spinach

“the Persian vegetable.” In return, the Persian word for tea (chāy) comes from Chinese chá

— perhaps the most globally consequential loanword in history — and even the Persian

word for paper money (chāv) entered from Chinese during the Mongol era. These are the

fossilized footprints of two civilizations walking side by side.

The parallels extend far beyond trade. Both civilizations elevated poetry to a supreme art

form — not entertainment but the primary vehicle for philosophy, spirituality, and national

identity. Li Bai, universally regarded as China’s finest poet, was born not in China proper

but in Suyab — present-day Kyrgyzstan — deep in the Persianate cultural sphere. His

father was a Silk Road merchant. His mother was likely of Central Asian origin. The Tang

emperor employed him as a translator because he spoke a non-Chinese language. His wine

poetry — the moon as companion in solitude, intoxication as a portal to transcendence —

conforms to the Persian Sufi tradition of Hafez and Khayyam with uncanny precision. He

frequented Sogdian wineshops in Chang’an, establishments run by Iranian merchants, and

wrote poems about them. His self-presentation as a wandering mystic who rejects

institutional authority faithfully mirrors the Persian rind — the holy rogue celebrated by

Hafez. The musical substrate of China’s greatest poetry was Persianate.

And this fascination was mutual. In the classical Persian literary imagination, China

represented the pinnacle of beauty and artistic perfection. Nezami placed a Chinese

princess in his Haft Peykar. Rumi used China as a metaphor for artistic mastery. Persian

poets invoked “Chinese beauty” as the aesthetic ideal. China was not merely a trading

partner in the Persian poetic mind — it was an archetype.

Even today, poetry remains a living force in both societies, in a way that has no Western

equivalent. Ordinary people memorize vast swathes of verse, deploy classical lines in daily

conversation, and turn to Hafez or Du Fu for guidance the way an American might consult a

self-help book — except that the poetry is taken far more seriously.

Musical instruments are a physical proof of this cultural link. The Chinese erhu (“two-

stringed barbarian instrument”) and the Persian dotar (“two strings”) share identical

naming logic — same concept, different technique, each adapted to its own musical world.

The Persian santur, a hammered dulcimer traceable to Babylonian carvings from 669 BC,

traveled east and became the Chinese yangqin — originally written as “foreign zither,” later

renamed “acclaimed zither.” The pipa, considered the king of Chinese instruments, is

believed to descend from the Persian barbat. And again, the musical and artistic exchange

went both ways: the dotar’s original gut strings were replaced with silk imported from

China; Chinese porcelain design reshaped Safavid ceramics; the blue-and-white tradition

Westerners associate with China was itself a collaborative creation of Persian cobalt and

Chinese technique. These instruments and objets d’arts traveled not by treaty but because

someone heard something, saw something beautiful and wanted it too.

Both cultures also developed formalized systems of compressed proverbial wisdom —

Chinese chengyu and Persian zarb-ol-masal — that serve as daily moral navigation. The

Chinese “water drops pierce stone” (水滴石穿) and the Persian “drop by drop, the sea

forms convey the same conviction: patience and incremental effort transform the hardest realities.

The Chinese “plant melons, get melons” and the Persian (It comes from us, it affects us”) both

embed radical self-accountability into everyday speech.

These aren’t mere folk curiosities. In both societies, a well-deployed four-

word phrase can resolve a conflict or redirect a negotiation. They reflect a cognitive habit

invisible to outsiders but central to how both cultures reason, how both are governed.

These are all delicious details. The shared poetry, the wandering instruments, the

interlocking proverbs, the tea rituals and the civilizational grammar of deference — all this

stuff is rich, it is real, and it is seductive. But it merely arouses our appetite for something

more substantial. We are living in critical times and hunger for answers to urgent questions

today; we cannot take refuge in the beauty of civilizational parallels between Iran and

China while the world burns. Cultural affinities between these two civilizations are the

context. But they are not the argument. The real question facing us is what happens when

ancient civilizations confront modernity, how and why they need to break free from

ideological captivity — and whether one civilization’s evolution can illuminate another’s.

To pursue that argument, we must set the superficial details aside and examine what lies

deep beneath the bedrock of both these cultures. Because it is in the cognitive and spiritual

reservoirs — in how these civilizations think, not merely in what they have produced and

created — that the most consequential parallels and differences may be found.

Deeper Waters

The convergences between them flow directly from the spiritual reservoirs of Chinese and

Persian civilizations.

Both systems posit the same fundamental concept underlying reality:an ineffable source

that gives rise to a manifest world through intermediate emanations.

The Daodejing opens: “The Dao that can be explained is not the eternal Dao.” In

Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda is conceived as uncreated and beyond human

comprehension, approachable only through emanated attributes. Different vocabulary,

same deep waters.

On the ethical plane, we find similarities again. Zoroastrianism’s moral core — Humata

(Good Thoughts), Hukhta (Good Words), Hvarshta (Good Deeds) — describes a cultivated

person whose interior and exterior are aligned. Confucianism’s junzi is built on a strikingly

similar concept: ren (benevolence), li (propriety), yi (righteousness). Both insist that

morality is about character formation, not rule-following. Both place family at the center of

the moral universe. Both conceive of the individual not as autonomous but as relational —

defined by obligations to parents, elders, guests, and community.

These spiritual and ethical parallels ripple and flow beneath the very social rituals already

described above. Persian ta’arof — “fighting for the lower hand,” as one scholar describes it

— and the Chinese trinity of renqing, mianzi, and guanxi share the same operating logic:

indirectness as sophistication, reciprocal obligation as social glue, “face” as moral

architecture, and a hierarchy of deference rooted in age and relationship. When a Persian

enters a Chinese home, the grammar is immediately recognizable — the three-round

refusal, the deference to elders, the elaborate self-deprecation. A Westerner sees

inefficiency and obfuscation. These cultures see the refinement of civilization.

But these spiritual reservoirs also diverge into separate channels and these differences

prove to be of enormous consequence to everything that follows.

Zoroastrianism posits genuine moral dualism — good versus evil, light versus darkness,

with the ultimate triumph of the good. This is a system which demands that you choose.

Daoism, by contrast, advances complementary dualism: yin and yang are not adversaries

but interdependent poles of a single process. This is a system that asks you to harmonize.

Both agree that polarity is woven into the fabric of reality, and wisdom consists in

navigating it rightly. But their instincts about how to navigate it differ profoundly.

Chinese civilization, shaped by this yin-yang sensibility, developed an extraordinary

tolerance for ambiguity. The Chinese mind, at its deepest, is comfortable holding

contradictions in balance without resolving them. Confucian ethics coexisted with Legalist

statecraft for over two millennia — not as competitors but as complementary layers.

Indeed, some scholars describe this synthesis as the “iron scaffolding of the Chinese

empire”: Confucianism providing the moral language, Legalism providing the institutional

structure, and the whole system functioning precisely because no one insisted on resolving

the tension between them. Add to this Buddhist absorption and the Daoist undercurrent,

and you have a civilization that for over a thousand years operated without serious

challenge from organized religion, alternative political philosophies, or limits to state

power — a remarkably stable ecosystem of “both/and” thinking.

Persian civilization, by contrast, carried within it a more restless spiritual dialectic.

Zoroastrian dualism stimulated a habit of thinking in moral absolutes, in terms of either/or

— not always, not everywhere, but as a deep tendency.

When Islam arrived, it reinforcedthis tendency with its own sharp categories: believer and unbeliever, halal and haram, the

faithful and the kafir. And yet — and this is crucial — Persian civilization also developed

powerful counter-traditions that pulled against the binary impulse. The Sufi mystical

tradition, which flourished most richly in the Persian-speaking world, was precisely a

revolt against rigid legalism, an insistence that divine truth could not be captured in

narrow categories. Hafez’s poetry is a sustained act of subversion against the orthodoxies

of his time. The entire Persian literary tradition lives in paradox and ambiguity — wine as

both literal and metaphorical, the beloved as both human and divine, the tavern as both a

den of iniquity and a spiritual sanctuary. Persia’s genius, at its best, was to hold and contain

both the binary impulse and the counter-impulse of pluralism in creative tension.

A crucial distinction must be drawn here, because from a distance these two orientations

can appear deceptively similar. Chinese comfort with ambiguity is generative — it keeps

possibilities open, avoids premature closure, and maximizes the space for a better

outcome. It is not deception nor is it hypocrisy; it is patience cast in cognitive form. The

more open the field, the safer and more productive the engagement. This is yin-yang

thinking applied to daily life: hold the tension, don’t force the resolution, let the outcome

emerge.

The Shi’a doctrine of taqiyya is driven by an entirely different instinct: not openness but

protective closure. For the sake of self-preservation and in order to propel forward the

greater cause, taqiyya permits — indeed encourages — concealment of one’s true beliefs in

times of danger, persecution, or existential threat. Where Chinese ambiguity expands the

space of possibility to evade direct confrontation, taqiyya contracts inwardly, reinforcing

the self in order to endure. One civilization has developed the habit of keeping guard at the

open door; the other, born of centuries of minority persecution, stands ready to close it.

They may look alike to an outside observer — both cultures are comfortable with

indirection — but it would be a fundamental error to confuse them. Chinese ambiguity

builds trust slowly through open-endedness. Taqiyya, whatever its historical justifications

as a survival mechanism, habituates a culture to institutionalized hypocrisy — the

separation of interior conviction from exterior presentation — and when sanctioned by the

state itself, corrodes the very foundation of public trust on which a society depends.

This distinction — between one civilization watered by ambiguity and another flooded by

alternating and competing impulses of absolutism and pluralism — is not merely

philosophical. It is the key to understanding why China and Iran diverged so dramatically

in the twentieth century, and what it will take for Iran to emerge through its present crises.

But before turning to that divergence, another distinction should be made which again

highlights the connection between these two cultures. There is a vast difference between

flexible attitudes motivated by a desire to find common ground and the appearance of

open-endedness intent upon avoiding responsibility and accountability. While principles of

fluidity may guide private lives and social relations, a breakdown of trust will occur if clear

definitions are not applied to questions of international law and the maintenance of peace

in global relations. To exploit ambiguity in such circumstances can be proof of unreliability

and hypocrisy. So however important poetry is to both cultures, it cannot replace policy.

China and Iran both face this challenge, each in its own way, in their attempts to become an

integral part of the global world order.

Absorbers

One final parallel between China and Iran must also be addressed because it shapes

everything that follows: both civilizations are chameleon by nature. They are supreme

absorbers of foreign ideas. They take systems and beliefs from outside and remake them

into something unmistakably their own.

This capacity is not unique to Iran and China. Spain absorbed Arab culture; England

absorbed Norman French; the entire Mediterranean basin is a story of cultural osmosis.

What distinguishes Iran and China is not the fact of absorption but its scale, its continuity,

and the resilience of the underlying identity through millennia of successive absorptions.

China took Marxism — an entirely Western philosophy born of European industrial

conditions — and produced “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a hybrid the

originators would barely recognize. The phrase “with Chinese characteristics” is not a

slogan. It is a civilizational operating principle — the same instinct that turned a Persian

hammered dulcimer into a Chinese national instrument.

Iran did the same with Islam. A foreign religion, imposed on the culture by Arab

conquerors who dismantled the Sassanid Empire, was so thoroughly absorbed within two

centuries that Persian became the second language of the Islamic world, Persian scholars

dominated Islamic philosophy and science, and the distinctly Persian form of Shi’a Islam

became the spiritual foundation of a renewed Iranian identity. The Persianized Islam that

flourished in Isfahan was as different from Arabian Islam as the pipa is from the barbat.

Beneath all these layers lies something more fundamental: an identity that transcends any

political system. Everyday Chinese people, whether Han, Zhuang, Hui, or Manchu, consider

themselves Chinese first; their relationship to the Communist Party, to Marxism, to any

system of government, is tangential to who they are. They were Chinese long before Mao,

and they will be Chinese long after the current system evolves into whatever comes next.

In Iran, Persian cultural consciousness plays the same role — the common warp and woof

binding the nation’s diverse peoples into a single civilizational family. Azeris, Baluchis,

Kurds, Gilakis, Lors, Turkmens — each with their own language and traditions — are held

together by the poetry of Hafez and Ferdowsi, the rituals of Nowruz and ta’arof, the moral

architecture of good thoughts, good words, good deeds. This fabric survived the Arab

conquest, the Mongol devastation, the Qajar decline, the Pahlavi modernization, and the

Islamic Revolution. It has always outlasted the regimes that claimed to define it.

However much its color changes, the chameleon always remains a chameleon.

Divergence: A Pivotal Moment

It is against this backdrop — functional similarities, shared absorptive genius, watered

through fundamentally different cognitive channels — that the modern divergence must beunderstood.

Because when both civilizations confronted ideological revolution in the

twentieth century, the nature of these deep reservoirs determined everything.

China’s arc moved from pragmatism to dogma and back to pragmatism. The Opium Wars

shattered the Middle Kingdom’s self-confidence — an ontological crisis for a civilization

that had always assumed its own centrality. Russia, alongside the British and later the

Americans, played equally brutal roles in this humiliation. Mao’s Great Leap Forward

overrode reality with ideology, producing one of the deadliest famines in human history.

The Cultural Revolution went further: Red Guards smashed temples, burned classical texts,

humiliated scholars and teachers, and systematically attacked the Confucian family

structures that had held Chinese society together for millennia. Children were encouraged

to denounce their parents. The renqing networks, the elder-respect hierarchies, the poetic

traditions — all were targeted as “feudal remnants.”

And here is the critical point: the Cultural Revolution was so devastating precisely because

it was counterintuitive to the Chinese mind. It imposed a binary logic — you were either

revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, red or black, with us or against us — on a

civilization whose deepest instinct was to hold opposites in balance. To pit fathers against

sons, children against parents, brother against sister was not merely a political revolution.

It was cognitive violence, a forced overwriting of the yin-yang operating system with an

alien either/or code. That is why it could not last and was ultimately doomed. It demanded

that a people act against their own nature, that a civilization cut its own spiritual wrists.

Then came Deng Xiaoping — twice purged, branded a “capitalist roader,” forced to toil in a

tractor factory. His genius is often described as pragmatism, but it was something more

precise than that. Deng’s revolution was an act of restoration. When he said “it doesn’t

matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice, it is a good cat,” he was not

introducing a new philosophy. He was giving 1.4 billion people permission to stop debating

whether they were communist or capitalist, whether getting rich was moral or immoral,

whether the cat was black or white — and inviting them to return to the way Chinese

civilization had always thought. The cat theory is yin-yang philosophy compressed into a

single image. It is the refusal to resolve contradiction, elevated to national policy.

Deng’s approach was incremental: agriculture first, then light manufacturing, then Special

Economic Zones, then education, then technology. Each stage built capacities that justified

the next — water drops piercing stone, translated into national strategy. But the

precondition for all of it was cognitive: he freed the Chinese mind from the shackles of

revolutionary dogma and allowed it to return to its ancient comfort with ambiguity, with

“both/and,” with pragmatism over purity. The township and village enterprises that drove

early growth ran on precisely the guanxi networks that Mao had tried to destroy. The

Confucian respect for education, supposedly a “feudal remnant,” reasserted itself with

explosive force once the constraints were removed. Deng didn’t import Western values. He

reconnected China with its own civilizational depths. And the result was the most explosive

economic transformation in human history — hundreds of millions lifted from poverty in a

single generation.Even so, it cannot be denied that China’s path also came at an enormous cost. The

authoritarian bargain that enabled rapid development carried within it the suppression of

political dissent, the persecution of minorities, environmental devastation on a staggering

scale, and a surveillance apparatus that grows more pervasive with every passing year,

especially since it has now been fortified by a technology unprecedented in human history.

The Confucian-Legalist synthesis that scholars call the “iron scaffolding” of the Chinese

state is not merely a metaphor for cultural continuity — it is also a description of

authoritarian control sugar-coated in the language of imposed harmony. China’s success is

real, but it is not a fairy tale, and it would be dishonest to present it as such.

But what is genuinely instructive — not as a model to copy but as a phenomenon to study

— is the mechanism underlying China’s pivotal moment. A civilization traumatized by

ideological madness found its way back to its own roots, roots fed by deep underlying

waters that served as its source of transformation. It is this mechanism that matters for

Iran.

Iran’s arc followed a reverse trajectory — and the timing is bitterly ironic. During the

course of the very years that Deng was dismantling ideological rigidity in China, Iran was

embracing it. Two centuries of Western and Russian meddling — the Qajar humiliations,

the loss of vast territories to Tsarist Russia, the 1953 CIA coup against Mossadegh, the

Shah’s dependent modernization — all these factors had created the ideal conditions for a

civilizational backlash. In the 1970s, Iran had a booming economy; expectations for it

resembled today’s prospects for China. Yet the Shah’s modernization was top-down and

dependent on Western patronage rather than indigenous capacity. It masqueraded

historical grandeur while dismissing traditional sensibilities. It deployed authority without

sufficient capacity-building — the inverse of Deng’s sequencing. The Shah was deeply

suspicious of the dogmatic Marxist and Leninist movements, yet he allowed the religious

clergy considerable room to maneuver, oblivious to the powers of Islamic fundamentalism

that were slowly gathering force before his eyes.

Then came 1979. Whereas China’s Cultural Revolution was a secular dogma imposed on

society by a political leader, Iran’s Islamic Revolution was a religious dogma that claimed

divine authority over the people. The revolution drew on legitimate grievances — decades

of Western interference, autocracy, inequality, and the cultural dislocation of too-rapid

modernization. But the system it produced locked Iran into a structural trap that led to a

fundamentally different experience from China’s.

At first glance, it is the similarities that stand out most obviously. The Islamic Revolution,

like the Cultural Revolution, imposed a binary logic on a civilization with pluralist roots. It

led to absolutes: you are either for or against, within the revolution or outside it, a believer

or a kafir. The inclusive, ambiguity-embracing tradition of Persian Sufism, of Hafez’s

subversive irony, of the rind who refuses to submit to dogmatic authority — all of this was

suppressed in favor of a rigid orthodoxy that, due to its insistence on absolute categories,

was as alien to Persia’s deepest literary and spiritual instincts as Mao’s binaries were to

China’s yin-yang habits of mind.But here the analogy reaches its limit. Unlike the Chinese experience,

there has not, until now, been a pivotal moment for Iran.

Once the conflation of religious and political authority became the defining feature of the

new order in Iran, it proved to be at the cost of the people. The Supreme Leader was seen

as the leader of the revolution, not of the republic. The Revolutionary Guards were sworn

to defend ideological purity, not national prosperity. And because the system’s legitimacy

rested on divine mandate rather than empirical results, “seeking truth from facts” — the

very words that liberated China — became, in Iran, a form of heresy. Khomeini, the founder

of the revolution and its Supreme Leader, is famously recorded as saying that “the economy

is for donkeys,” effectively dismissing scientific inquiry as the basis of development.

The Islamic Republic thus became the structural inverse of Deng’s China. Deng said,

“socialism cannot endure if it remains poor” and subordinated ideology to material

outcomes. Iran’s revolutionaries embraced what Deng contemptuously called “poor

socialism” — outwardly promoting the idea that spiritual purity mattered more than

prosperity. Yet the regime’s own custodians never practiced the austerity they preached.

The Revolutionary Guards have gradually morphed into one of the largest economic

engines in the country, running nearly half of Iran’s economy, controlling every critical

state asset and infrastructure, and even profiting from the very sanctions imposed on the

nation by monopolizing all imports and exports — including contraband. The hypocrisy is

not incidental; it is structural — a theocracy that demands sacrifice from the people while

its guardians have built an empire of staggering wealth behind the wall of ideology. Deng’s

cat theory made method irrelevant so long as the outcome was progress. Iran’s theocratic

model made the method — Islamic governance — the entire point, regardless of outcomes.

In the same decade that Deng was opening Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, Iran was

sending its brightest young men to die in human-wave attacks during the eight-year war

with Iraq, their deaths sanctified by the same ideology that governed the economy, the

courts, and the schools. Young boys were given “keys to heaven” to wear around their

necks as they walked across minefields toward their martyrdom. That these keys were

likely “made in China” is as painful as it is bitterly ironic.

Deng could dismantle the revolutionary mindset because he was the state — he could keep

the party functioning while changing the operating software. Iran cannot replicate this

maneuver because the revolutionary mindset is the regime’s reason for existing. The

Islamic Republic does not merely use revolutionary ideology as a governing tool; it is

revolutionary ideology. Velayat-e faqih — the guardianship of the jurist — is not a policy

that can be reformed. It is the theological foundation on which the entire edifice rests.

Remove the dogma, and there is no justification for the system. This is a structural

difference, not merely a difference of degree, and no amount of cultural similarity can wish

it away.

Why the Analogy Matters — and Where It Breaks

A skeptic would be right to point out that cultural exchange does not equal structural

equivalence, because structural similarity — even functional similarity — does not

guarantee a transferable development path. Societies with civilizational depth havediverged

wildly in their development.

China and Russia shared revolutionary Marxism but produced fundamentally different outcomes.

Turkey and Iran share a deep Turco-Persian heritage, far more intimate than anything linking either to China, and yet their paths

towards modernity could hardly be more different. Analogy does not equal proof.

Moreover, China’s transformation was enabled by conditions that Iran does not share:

continental scale, massive state capacity inherited from millennia of centralized

bureaucratic governance, favorable positioning in the global economic cycle of the 1980s

and 1990s, and an authoritarian coordination that, whatever its moral costs, proved

effective at directing resources. Iran has significant human capital and natural resources,

but it lacks the scale, the institutional inheritance, and — critically — the geopolitical

alignment that made China’s pivotal shift possible.

These limits must be acknowledged. But they do not erase the value of the comparison. The

point is not that Iran can or should replicate China’s path. It is that China’s experience is

uniquely instructive for Iran — more instructive than any Western model — because it

demonstrates a specific truth: that an ancient civilization, locked into its own ideological

captivity, escapes not by importing foreign values but by releasing its own; that freedom

from political and religious dogma depends not on others but on one’s own cultural and

spiritual strength. That is the transferable insight we are analyzing here — not the Special

Economic Zones, not the state-led industrialization, not the authoritarian bargain — the

insight that civilization is itself a resource for renewal. China recognized that insight when

it reached that historical crossroads, and chose its path forward.

At the Crossroads

Iran today is facing this same dilemma. After forty-seven years under the Islamic Republic,

something remarkable has happened — something that the regime’s own policies

inadvertently created. The regime’s “leap forward” in modernization — expanded

education, healthcare, infrastructure — has produced precisely the constituency that now

rejects the dogmatic assumptions of the system. Iran has educated a generation that can

see the cost of ideological rigidity. And the surveys confirm what anyone who speaks with

young Iranians already knows: after nearly half a century of theocratic rule, Iranians are

among the most secular people in the Middle East. The lived experience under a religious

government has been the most powerful inoculation against religious governance.

Some of Iran’s most prescient thinkers anticipated this. They argued that the Iranian

people needed to experience direct theocratic rule at least once — to live under the very

system that centuries of clerical ambition had always aspired to — in order to finally move

beyond it. The argument was painful in its implications: that a nation sometimes has to

pass through a particular form of suffering before it can outgrow the conditions that made

that suffering possible. And this is precisely what has happened. The revolutionary

generation believed. Their grandchildren do not.

This is where the Chinese parallel becomes most powerful — and most painful. In China,

Deng Xiaoping reached beneath the revolutionary wreckage and reconnected the nation to

its ancient cognitive reservoirs — comfort with ambiguity and a pragmatic refusal tochoose between false binaries.

But Deng could do this because he held the levers of power.

The Chinese people’s readiness for the shift and the leader’s capacity to initiate it coincided.

In Iran, the sequence is inverted. The people have already done the cognitive work. They

have already, in their minds, crossed the threshold that Deng had to push China’s people

across and have moved beyond the binary thinking that the regime imposes. They are

ready to reach back to their own pluralist roots — the Sufi tradition, the poetic embrace of

paradox, the ancient Persian conviction that wisdom lies not in choosing between

opposites but in holding them together in creative tension and balance. The population is

thirsting for those waters. But a dam, intended for preservation, has blocked the flow.

And it won’t give way.

There is an even deeper irony. A great Persian modernist thinker of the early twentieth

century argued that when religion and politics are fused, contrary to what most people

assume, it is not politics that suffers the most damage — it is religion itself. How

devastatingly true this has proven to be in Iran. Nearly half a century of theocratic rule has

not elevated Islam in the eyes of Iranians; it has shattered it. The regime wielded religion as

an instrument of coercion, and in doing so accomplished what no external enemy could: it

turned a deeply spiritual people against the faith that had shaped their civilization for over

a millennium. One of the greatest casualties of the Islamic Republic has been Islam itself.

The other is the people of Iran. The Revolutionary Guards enforce the binary model with

brutality not because it reflects Iranian culture but because it justifies their power. The

Supreme Leader guards the dogma of absolutism not because the people believe it but

because the system will collapse without it. And so any candid reckoning with Iran’s path

forward must confront the reality that the current system is not merely dogmatic — it is

violent. Ideological purity is enforced through surveillance, imprisonment, and killing.

While there may be Chinese parallels here too, the current crisis in Iran demands a new

level of honesty that cannot be buried beneath civilizational similarities. The systematic

repression of dissent, the widespread persecution of religious minorities, the suppression

of the Green Movement, the crackdowns on the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, and the

brutal massacres that have led to the current crisis — these are not abstractions. They are

the lived experience of millions of Iranians and cry out to be addressed.

The people of Iran have arrived at the crossroads of choice.

Reform: A Mirage

At this point, we must take the proverbial bull by the horns and be blunt. The idea that the

current regime can reform itself — that somewhere within the Islamic Republic there

exists an Iranian Deng Xiaoping waiting for his moment — has been tested for decades and

found wanting. The regime has for years cultivated a carefully staged theater of internal

tension between so-called “reformers” and “hardliners,” a false dichotomy designed not to

produce change but to absorb and deflect the people’s desire for it. For several decades,

this manufactured drama has served a single purpose: to preoccupy the population with

the pipe dream of gradual reform and to forestall the conclusion that the system itself —

not merely its current leadership — is the obstacle.

Without leaving Islamic ideology behind entirely and moving to a fully secular system of

governance, this transition is simply not possible. The conflation of religious and political

authority is not a feature of the regime that can be adjusted; it is the regime’s reason for

being. Velayat-e faqih cannot be “reformed” any more than the divine right of kings could

be reformed into a constitutional republic. The theological claim must be relinquished, not

moderated. Leaders whose very identity depends on vilifying the West, on perpetuating the

siege mentality of revolutionary Islam, on maintaining the fiction that Iran’s struggles are

caused by external enemies rather than by internal suppression — such leaders are

structurally incapable of initiating the cognitive liberation that Deng achieved. They cannot

free the Iranian mind because their power depends on keeping it shackled.

This is the fundamental asymmetry between the Chinese and Iranian cases. Deng was a

product of the system who turned its tools against its own dogma. Iran’s equivalent cannot

come from within the current establishment, because the establishment is the dogma. The

transformation can only come once the country frees itself from these strictures.

There is a generation waiting in the wings — young men and young women — ready to

rebuild Iran. The country possesses one of the most educated, culturally sophisticated, and

internationally connected populations in the Middle East. The human capital is there. The

civilizational depth is there. The cognitive readiness is there. That this generation can

revive and rise again today, in spite of the surveillance and suppression, the brutality and

oppression, is the source of the regime’s worst nightmares and its greatest fear. This is why

its violence is directed not outward but inward — at its own people, at the very civilization

it claims to represent. This is why even a disastrous war can be an advantage for it — to

direct attention toward “the enemy,” to blame the “other” for the devastation it has itself

created in the country, environmentally and economically, and arouse notions of

nationalism based on victimhood. This is why the present moment is unique and must be

recognized.

Beyond Iran

Because the stakes extend far beyond Iran’s borders.

If Iran is able to face the dilemma waiting at this crossroads of its history — if it is able to

shed the theocratic yoke and release the pent up waters of its cultural reservoirs — it

could transform itself, the Middle East and even beyond. A free, flourishing, secular Iran —

grounded not in Western imitation but to its own civilizational depths — would be the

most powerful repudiation of fundamentalism the Islamic world has ever witnessed. It

would demonstrate that a Muslim-majority society can move beyond theocratic

governance not by abandoning its heritage but by reaching deeper into it, past the layers of

dogma to the inclusive, pluralist traditions that Islamic civilization itself once celebrated.

Some leaders in the region may see a prosperous, dogmatically free Iran as a threat —

economically and geopolitically. They would be right to feel unsettled, initially, because

such an Iran would expose the fragility of every regime in the region that depends on

religious orthodoxy or authoritarian control to maintain its grip. But to the ordinary people

of the region, men and women and children deserving of education, and to the enlightened

leaders among them that want to govern prosperous societies, a flourishing Iran should

bring hope. A nation of ninety million people, strategically positioned at the crossroads of

Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East, freed from the dead weight of

revolutionary ideology and reconnected with its ancient genius for absorption, adaptation,

and creative synthesis — such a nation would not destabilize the region. It would anchor it

in self-confidence and security that does not need to depend on military might. A

prosperous and free Iran would be the single greatest force against fundamentalism, and

the single most powerful catalyst for a period of stability, peace, and prosperity — not only

for the Middle East but for the world.

The resolution of this crisis will not come from more violence, more sanctions, or more

isolation, but through the patience of “drop by drop, the sea forms,” which cannot be

imposed by force, however righteous the rhetoric that clothes it. Nor will it come from

denial, deflection, or by sweeping the regime’s brutality under a Persian carpet while

falsely accepting that any element in the current regime is capable of real change and

reform. It will come from the moral clarity of good thoughts, good words, good deeds, on

the ancient Persian conviction that outcomes are earned — az māst ke bar māst. In other

words, it will come, if at all, from the Iranians themselves reconnecting with the deepest

consciousness of who they are — a depth that predates the current regime by millennia.

Two civilizations. 2,500 years of shared history — in poetry, music, instruments, proverbs,

spiritual grammar, and the way they pour tea for a guest. One found its way through the

darkness of ideological madness back to its own ancient light. It did so because a leader

understood that restoration, not revolution, was the path — and because the civilization’s

own hidden reservoirs of wisdom made that return possible.

The other has now arrived at a similar crossroads. Its people are ready. Its ancient

traditions are intact. Its future lies waiting for a generation thirsting for change. The

question is no longer whether Iranian society possesses the inner resources to choose

which way to go. It is whether those who hold it captive will step aside — or be swept

away.

Iran will not wait at the crossroads of choice forever.