Like Russia and China, Iran is directed by an authoritarian and seemingly bellicose regime with some strong anti-Western interests. For now, that regime shows no serious signs of losing power internally. This is despite a series of recent threats to its authority: Iranian women protesting the violence of the state-sanctioned Islamic morality police; the American assassination of Iran’s talented and nefarious expert in warfare on foreign soil, General Qasem Soleimani; the humiliating and avoidable death of the President during a helicopter crash; and the impending demise of the 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Iran has been brutalised and woefully governed in recent years. Faced with moral, political, economic as well as ecological issues, Iran might appear to be floundering. The question is now: will one of the great civilisations of world history fall victim to its deep-seated internal crises or will it remain immovable and intransigeant? As the state begins to crumble, will Iran resist collapse?

The nation has endured against the odds before. More than any other region which succumbed to the Islamic conquests of Late Antiquity, Persia preserved a strong sense of its civilisational identity under the banners of the Caliphate.

Dualism has always been the key to Iran’s identity. The Zoroastrian religion of ancient Iran is renowned for its supposed cosmic dualism, positing a battle between good and evil in which the former is eventually triumphant. Iranian self-understanding has also been shaped by how Persian poets of the early Islamic era blended pre-Islamic Iranian histories and mythologies into their masterpieces. The 10th-century Abolqasem Ferdowsi preserved legendary stories of old Persian kings, and voiced nostalgic dismay that the minbar (a mosque’s pulpit) should have become as exalted as the Persian throne. Islam and Persian civilisation ended up existing in a creative tension that is peculiarly Iranian.

Modern Iran is in some respects similarly dualistic, possessing both what Westerners would recognise as the ordinary instruments of secular republican government and an Islamist constitutional superstructure. A President, parliament, and more or less modern state apparatus coexists with a Supreme Leader, a clerical Guardian Council which “supervises” elections and can veto legislation, and a legal system incorporating sharia. This dualism is by design, realising the Islamic Republic’s legal-theological ideal of the velayat-e faqih or guardianship of the Islamic jurist. Described by Ayatollah Khomeini as “one of the most important obligations” of the Iranian people and “more necessary even than prayer and fasting”, this hyper-politicisation of Shia Islam was a hallmark of his rule. While this ideology guarantees the Islamic character of the state, it is less traditionally Islamic than one might expect. Rather, as one academic analyst of Iran’s constitutional order observes, it “reinvents the [Shi’ite] tradition in response to the postcolonial crisis of Muslim-majority contexts”. The Islamic Republic’s construction of a velayat-e faqih deep state is best understood, then, as a strange fusion of Shia Islam and 20th-century revolutionary politics.

Can Iran’s unique hybrid system survive? Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian History at the University of St Andrews, describes the socio-theological hold of radical Shi’ite Islam over the Iranian population as the Islamic Republic’s “moral problem”. He estimates that as many as five to six million Iranian women now refuse to wear the veil, and as many as two or three times that number tacitly support their rebellion. This is a significant challenge to the regime’s Islamic authority. Stories of elite corruption and the brutal and sexualised repression of female protestors are hardly an advert for the moral probity of the Islamic Republic’s guardians. There must be some in Tehran who worry that the theological and political ruling class is burning through its reserves of moral-religious capital.

Ansari nevertheless warns against Western liberals being too cynical about the regime’s commitment to a particular reading of Shia Islam. The people running Iran are, by and large, “true believers”. This makes for a tense, brittle situation, in which there is a real risk of religiously inflected protests boiling over into much more serious civil strife.

Meanwhile, a succession crisis also torments Iran. Despite lacking the more invigorating charisma of his predecessor Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei has been a stabilising influence on the Islamic Republic. His death will be a moment of trial for the regime. Ansari suspects that a viable succession plan will already have been worked out. For the Islamic Republic’s elites, the show must go on. Until his untimely death, some commentators considered the late President Raisi a likely choice. Now the preeminent candidate is the present Supreme Leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is thought to have commanded the Basij, the volunteer paramilitary wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Such political instability is not helped by the mixed economic situation. A consensus hasn’t yet been reached on the effectiveness of US sanctions. But as in Russia, sanctions don’t appear to have been particularly punishing, with possible benefits such as forcing pragmatic moves towards economic autarky. Ansari, however, questions whether the issue is instead that the West has only half-heartedly enforced economic measures against Iran. For him, sanctions against Iran seem designed to send signals to foreign and domestic audiences rather than to break the country’s productive capabilities and bleed the Islamic Republic’s wealth. 

Yet Iran’s economy isn’t as robust as the country’s defenders might have it. Despite Iran possessing a significant share of the Persian Gulf’s oil resources, Ansari argues that the Revolution’s leaders made a major error in adopting a flimsy version of the Shah’s planned energy policies at the end of the Seventies. These were drawn up when Iran had a population of some 30 million; now estimates hover at around 90 million. 

Some sectors of the Iranian economy are faring worse than others. Iran’s aviation industry, once an unparalleled success in the Gulf, has been hit hard by Western sanctions and chronic mismanagement. Sanctions have made it highly difficult to acquire key parts for maintenance of an ageing fleet of aircraft. There has been some suggestion that this may have been a factor in the helicopter crash which killed President Raisi. The Iranian automotive industry is in a similarly depressing shape. Cars produced in the Seventies, in the last years of the Shah’s rule, sell for higher prices than far more recent models. Iranian drivers don’t seem to have great faith in automobiles produced in the Islamic Republic.

On top of this, the Islamic Republic also currently faces a severe ecological crisis. Indeed, Ansari thinks this might be the most dangerous challenge to the Islamic Republic: it is currently stumbling blindly into a ruinous ecological catastrophe.

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Due to a combination of climate change, corrupt mismanagement of Iran’s water resources and infrastructure, and an unsustainable reliance on pistachio farming as a cash crop, Iran is drying up. The north of the country is, Ansari says, more or less holding up, but his prognosis for southern Iran is much grimmer. He thinks some Western analysts are underpricing the potential for a devastating — perhaps irreversible — collapse in Iran’s ability to provide water to its farmers.

Startling comparisons can be made to the destruction of the Aral Sea: the most infamous example of an authoritarian state doing irreversible environmental damage in Central Asia. From the Sixties, short-termist and overambitious irrigation programmes in the Soviet Central Asian republics steadily drained the sea, which has now all but disappeared. There too, poor government was exacerbated by a foolish overreliance on a cash crop, Uzbek cotton for the Soviets.  

These four issues don’t bode well for Iran’s future. But Westerners would be unwise to expect changes for the better. In the face of popular protest, the Revolutionary Guard Corps will most likely defend the regime and its own substantial political and economic interests. Iran’s ruling class would likely resort to using the Corps to rule by martial law if necessary.

But perhaps that won’t be necessary. For now, Iran seems socially resilient. Ansari wonders whether Iran in the second quarter of the 21st century will resemble the country as it was in the early 20th century: a weak state with unstable institutions, but a cohesive nation with a strong civilisational identity. Those traits of national stoicism and an uncanny ability to manage tensions suggest an Iranian ability to weather coming storms without collapse.

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There seems little immediate hope of a major liberalisation in Iran. The country’s middle class is somewhat politically significant but numerically small. Iranian critics of the Islamic Republic are often intensely patriotic, and suspicious of Western intentions towards their nation. Even the more liberal dissidents, who hope that Iran will enjoy a more Western and democratic future, are somewhat demoralised by the current state of the West: its internal divisions, its decadence, its indecision. 

I am told that those who might once have looked to America for inspiration have been horrified by the subversive zealotry on display in the radicalised student protests on American college campuses. Iranian moderates remember with grim apprehension where a toxic cocktail of revolutionary politics, student protest and Islamist fervour can lead an unsuspecting country.

To some extent, managing the Iran problem will require both a recovery of American backbone and a careful self-discipline to avoid needless escalation with a regime which isn’t afraid to choose violence. There is a danger of Western bluster being counterproductive: announcing sanctions and failing to enforce them can send extremely unhelpful signals. Targeted assassinations, such as that of Soleimani, are certainly risky; killing Soleimani in Iraq, however, was a wiser choice than striking Iranian soil.

America’s task is to forcefully contain Iran without being drawn into an unwinnable regional conflict. The enforcement of clear red lines is a necessity, though it seems unlikely that we will see this from the present White House. In fact, the radical politicisation of junior US civil servants and the personal unpredictability of both candidates in the 2024 election make it hard to see how Iran should be expected to reliably read the signals it receives from Washington. After all, deterrence requires the opposition to understand the cost of bad behaviour.

The more you learn about Iran, the more it feels like a perennial civilisation, stuck in endless cycles of violent tragedy, as permanent and immovable as the towering Zagros mountains. It is hard to avoid feeling cynical and pessimistic about the medium-term future of this civilisation-state. In the words of the 19th-century statesman Lord Salisbury, “whatever happens [in Iran] will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible”.

Unremovable, the ink fades from the skin in around 48 hours or so. It’s become something of a status symbol; the Iraqi democratic process given corporeal form, quite literally imprinted onto the bodies of those who subscribe to it. 

A fortnight on from the elections and, with no clear winner, the horse-trading to form a new government is only just beginning. It will be a fraught process — for many of the reasons that the wider Middle East is fraught, too: sectarianism, corruption, civil strife and, of course, foreign meddling. These are bad enough. But the problems that strafed Iraq and the wider region throughout the 20^th century are now galvanised by one of the 21^st century’s most powerful forces: digitally powered disinformation.

Understand the Iraqi elections and understand, in miniature, at least some of the wider forces driving instability across the Middle East. The electoral process is theoretically simple: the people elect 329 members of Parliament, who in turn elect the President of Iraq and confirm the Prime Minister. Whichever party or bloc gets 165 seats forms a government. Given Iraq’s fractured polity, this never really happens — and this time was no exception.

The largest party, with 72 seats, is the Sadrist Movement, led by the scowling and barking Shi’ite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr comes from a famous clerical family and his name carries huge weight among Iraq’s Shia, whom he led against US forces following 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a rare animal in Iraqi politics: a Shi’ite leader independent — at least rhetorically — of Iran.

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The other major Shia forces are former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s State of Law party, which got 35 seats, and then the Al-Fatah Alliance, which saw its vote drop to just 15 seats (from 48 in the 2018 election). Officially, its leaders have close ties to Iran, but most Iraqi Sunnis — and indeed many Shia (plus most of the region) — consider them to be a straight-out Iranian proxy. Other Shia parties include the militia (and designated terror group) Kata’ib Hezbollah, which recently formed the Huqooq party, and which got one vote; and the Victory Alliance of Haider al-Abadi (another former PM), which got four seats. As ever post-2003, the Iraq Shia, so long oppressed by former leader Saddam Hussein, remain politically dominant.

The Sunni Taqaddum (Progress) came second with 37, while Iraq’s third major ethnic bloc, the Kurds, saw its major party the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (KDP) take 16 seats. A variety of smaller parties and independents made up the remainder.

It is this patchwork of ethnic, sectarian, and religious groupings that seeks to rule Iraq — and it is this which is, of course, the problem. If Iraqi society is divided, its politics are sundered. The 2021 elections were born of crisis after swathes of Iraqi youth took to the streets in 2019, sick of the corruption that dominates their lives, of those who rule them, and of the sectarianism that courses through the veins of the body politic. It was the largest civil unrest in Iraq since 2003 and it was bloody. The Government, backed by many of the Pro-Iranian Shia militias that support it, struck back, often firing live ammo; more than 1,000 people were killed. In the end, though, it was too much. The Government faced a simple choice: massacre everyone or back down. It backed down. Then Prime Minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, resigned to be replaced by the incumbent, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. New elections were promised: they have just been delivered.

Campaigning was merciless. Every party and group and sect seemed to toss accusations at the other: Sunni versus Shia; Shia versus Shia and Sunni; Shia versus Kurds. But certain narratives and tropes reoccur. These are clearly identifiable as false or misleading, designed to achieve behavioural change, and as such are what we might usefully describe as disinformation. They are also instructive, because not only do they spread across legacy and social media, allowing us a glimpse of what experts call the Iraqi Information environment (IE), but they are geared toward exploiting psychological vulnerabilities in Iraqis (as with all nationalities), which are formed by a specific set of cultural, historical, and geographical experiences.

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The Iraqi IE, especially its online spaces, is toxic at the best of times, but things began to get worse about a month before the election. And while all sides engage in disinformation, it’s clear that pro-Iranian Shia groups and their associates — perhaps reflecting their dominant position and foreign backing — do it more often and better than anyone else.

Given Iraq has had foreign troops on its soil for almost twenty years, not to mention a history of colonialism still very much alive in the national consciousness, then narratives that speak to foreign interference are popular there — as they are across the Middle East. About three weeks before the vote, Kata’ib Hezbollah-owned Aleitjah TV posted a report on Telegram claiming that international election observers form the UN and EU were seeking to manipulate the elections for the benefit of Western interests. The story even included a fabricated quote from the UN special representative to Iraq, who was quoted as remarking that “if things don’t go the way they’re supposed to, we will have another say in this”.

These kinds of narratives never fail to appeal and spread rapidly across social media — and none more so than those that mention the “Zionists”. Three weeks before the election, pro-Iran outlet Sabereen News got in early and attacked UN representative Hilary Stauffer on Telegram, claiming that she had worked in Israel before Iraq and was, inevitably, a Mossad operative, a lie that was, naturally, repeated on mainstream channels.

Much of the online content here has unsurprisingly been sectarian in nature. A Kata’ib Hezbollah-linked group claimed it had hacked a database containing a list of Sunni politicians frequenting the Saudi Embassy in Baghdad, which was supposedly buying votes for them. It was all nonsense, but clever nonsense nonetheless. It was clearly designed to exploit Shia fears of Sunni meddling in the elections, as well as to rhetorically bolster Iran’s broader geopolitical battle with Saudi Arabia for influence in the region.

Then came the day itself. Sabereen News began reporting — totally falsely — that “forces” had entered a polling station to mess with the count. Another group of pro-Iran outlets, again led by the now relentless Sabereen News, reported that voting at polling stations across several provinces, including Anbar and Baghdad, had been disrupted because voting servers, located in the UAE (a close Saudi ally) were, with the help of an Iraqi National Intelligence officer, being used to tamper with votes.

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Now that the results are in, it’s clear that one theme unites all these narratives: what we might call “the big lie”; that the voted was rigged, altered, or otherwise tampered with, and is therefore invalid. Once this is understood it’s obvious why most of the disinformation came from Pro-Iran outlets and parties. Al-Fatah lost over 30 seats. Iraqis have once more shown that they don’t want Iran in their country, but Iran cannot let this stand.

Indeed, as soon as the results started to become clear, Iran’s footsoldiers started getting their people out. On 12 October, two days after the vote, an Al-Fatah linked group announced that they had filed complaints with the electoral commission, threatening “alternative measures” if these weren’t addressed. A week later, another pro-Iran group released a statement also rejecting the elections and urging Iraqis to “demand their rights” and take to the streets.

Al-Fatah knows they will not force a recount, but they don’t really want one. After all, they’d only lose again, and they know it. But get their people out on the street and they can exercise influence on the incoming administration. The new Iraqi government can ignore 15 seats in the parliament. It can’t ignore 50,000 people on the streets.

All of this is likely to go on for several more months. The infighting will get worse, and the disinformation will grow. And all the while Iran will benefit from the chaos, as it always does — and the Iraqi people will suffer, as they always do.

In his first address as PM to the Pakistani Senate, he said he intended to raise the blasphemy issue in the United Nations and would work to achieve a “common policy” within the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).[1. Imran Khan spoke after the Senate adopted a resolution condemning a plan by Geert Wilders, a militantly Islamophobic, far-right Dutch opposition leader, to hold a competition for cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims see visual depictions of the prophet as blasphemy. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte denounced Mr. Wilder’s plan as “not respectful” and “provocative” but provoked Pakistani ire by refusing to ban the competition on the grounds that he would not curtail freedom of speech.]

Likewise campaigning before his election, Khan said: “We are standing with Article 295c and will defend it,” referring to the blasphemy clause in the constitution that mandates the death penalty for any “imputation, insinuation or innuendo” against the Prophet Muhammad.

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This clause has been used to victimise minorities, including Shiites – who account for up to a quarter of the population – as well as the country’s small communities of Ahmadi Muslims, Christians and Hindus. It has acted as a means to whip crowds into a frenzy and at times turn them into lynch mobs; it has inspired vigilante killings. It is also used to intimidate journalists in the country, threatening freedom of the press and free speech.

The new prime minister’s backing for the clause came as no surprise to South Asia scholar Ahsan I. Butt, who noted shortly after the election that “Khan’s ideology and beliefs on a host of dimensions are indistinguishable from the religious hard-right”.

In fact, Khan’s move was a carefully calculated political gambit on two levels. It caters to the anti-blasphemy sentiment widely shared among Pakistanis, including the Islamist militants whose popularity in the election displaced Khan’s main rival, thereby playing a key role in his electoral victory.[2. Khan was once dubbed ‘Taliban Khan’ because of his support of the Afghan Taliban, and his advocacy for the opening in Pakistan of an official Taliban Pakistan office, for allowing government funds to go to militant madrassas, and for enabling Islamists to dictate the content of public school textbooks. His reluctance to confront the militancy problem has recently cost him $300 million of aid from America]

But it also sends a sign to Saudi Arabia, which has been quietly campaigning for more than decade for a global law that would punish blasphemy.

Pakistan doesn’t want to get caught in the cross-fire from the bitter rivalry between Saudi and Iran, with whom Pakistan, home to the world’s largest Shiite Muslim minority, shares a border. Nonetheless, Saudi is keen that Khan steps up support for the 41-nation, Saudi-led Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, which is widely seen as an anti-Iranian alliance.

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This is key. Saudi financial support for Pakistan – currently caught in a financial crisis that will probably force it to turn for the 13^th  time in three decades to the IMF – could depend on the degree to which Khan bends to the kingdom’s will. The Saudi-backed Islamic Development Bank reportedly would be willing to lend Pakistan US$4billion to alleviate the crisis.

Saudi efforts to exploit Pakistan’s precarious financial position so early in Khan’s prime ministership stem not only from Pakistan’s urgent need for assistance indicate a certain uncertainty on their part as to how warm Saudi-Pakistani relations will be.

Indeed, Shameem Akhtar, a veteran foreign policy analyst, columnist and former dean of International Relations at Karachi University, argues: “Imran Khan doesn’t feel personally obliged towards the Saudis, who have long bought Pakistan and considered it their satellite state. If there’s anything that could push his hand it’s the economic support provided by Riyadh, given Pakistan’s fiscal needs.”

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But while Saudi Arabia will surely feel reassured by Khan’s ‘blasphemy’ move. There may yet be a problem neither country has considered. China.

For if he is successful in his campaign for a global blasphemy law, Khan will soon find that his credibility and that of the Islamic countries that join him will be undermined if they remain silent about China’s current crackdown on Uyghur Muslims. This is arguably one of the most concerted attacks on Islam in recent history and yet, curiously, the Muslim world has remained largely silent on the subject.

“Many Middle Eastern states have a poor human-rights record themselves — including when it comes to the treatment of religious minorities. Many exhibit a similar understanding of human rights to China’s — that is, that social stability trumps individual rights. This is how the Chinese Government has framed the presence of re-education camps and other repressive measures,” said Chinese politics scholar Simone van Nieuwenhuizen.

Many Muslim nations are also targets of significant Chinese investment, beneficiaries of trade, and in some case heavily indebted to the Republic. This puts Khan in an unenviable position: seeking to bolster domestic and international positions by burnishing his religious credentials, he could be jeopardising the Muslim world’s economic ties with the People’s Republic. Khan may yet come to regret his hasty blasphemy move.

A look at the Shi’a-Sunni conflict within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s Sunni-Shi’a relations are a cycle of repression, rebellion and activism that dates back decades. The execution of Shi’a cleric and activist Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, along with three other Shi’a clerics, in January 2016, was the latest chapter in the long-running and unequal struggle between the Sunni Saudi government and the Shi’a minority. In the 1980s there was armed confrontation, which was brutally put down, and after which many leading Shi’a clerics came to an accord with the Saudi government in 1993 – one Al-Nimr refused to join.

It’s an unhappy arrangement, with Shi’a resentment at their treatment never too far from the surface. And oil plays a key role in maintaining it.

Saudi Arabia’s oil sector accounts for around 87% of its budget revenues, and that oil is concentrated where much of the Shi’a population is concentrated, with many working in the industry.[1. Dilip Hiro, ‘A Matter of Crude Politics’, The Guardian, 12 December 2006] Which helps explain why an uneasy co-existence is maintained by the Saudi rulers: oil is the Kingdom’s life-blood, any action which might damage the industry would be catastrophic. Shi’a populations in other Gulf states (notably Kuwait in 1986) have shown that they are capable of striking at the oil industry and causing enormous damage.

Yet because of the Saudi monarchy’s role as the Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques (Mecca and Medina), the holiest sites in Islam, any further compromise with their Shi’a minority would be seen by many Sunnis as a fundamental dereliction of religious duty.[2. It’s worth noting that, although Iran has some important Shi’a sites such as the Imam Reza Mosque in Mashhad, the holiest sites: Najaf and Karbala, are in Iraq. The Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf is the resting place of the Fourth Caliph. Karbala is where Hussayn was murdered in 680CE. An event which is commemorated by the Shi’a every year in the Festival of Ashura.] The Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam espoused by the Saudi royal family rose to prominence on its claim to unsullied religious piety and purity. This impacts on how the Kingdom engages not only with their own Shi’a population, but also with Shi’a communities across the Middle East and especially the (Shi’a) Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran and the Shi’a Awakening

The rising influence of Iran, another state with huge oil reserves, has emboldened Shi’a communities throughout the Middle East to be more pro-active in seeking concessions from their Sunni governments. This growing confidence has been labelled the ‘Shi’a Awakening’ or the ‘Shi’a Crescent’ (a reference to the broad shape of the geographical areas inhabited by Shi’a populations across the region). Shi’a Muslims are a sizeable minority in most countries across the Middle East, and a majority in Iran, Iraq and Bahrain (as well as forming the larger part of Lebanon’s Muslim population).

The Shi’a Awakening and the rise of Iran has given Saudi Arabia the opportunity to present itself as the defender of Sunni interests. For instance, it has funded Sunni militias in Syria (countered by Iranian funded Shi’a militias, most notably Hizbullah). More recently, Saudi Arabia, with the backing of Bahrain and the United States, intervened in Yemen after the Shi’a Houthi movement captured the capital and promptly offered a commercial flight route to Iran. Saudi Arabia, desperate not to allow Iran a toe-hold on the Arabian peninsula, took immediate military action. That war is ongoing.

Tensions are also rising in Lebanon, where, yet again, Iran and Saudi Arabia are backing rival factions.

To date, Iraq has been Iran’s biggest victory in this regional-sectarian struggle – with Iranian backed militias and political allies taking control in the wake of the US-led invasion. Which is where the religious ‘purity’ comes into play – the Sunni militias who would have been Saudi Arabia’s natural allies hated the Saudi government for not being the ‘pure Sunni Muslims’ they presented themselves to be. Particularly unforgivable in the eyes of ISIS and al-Qa’ida, was the fact that the Saudis had allowed non-Muslim soldiers on the Holy Arabian Peninsula during the Gulf War, although the ongoing presence of western businesses in Saudi Arabia was also a cause of upset. Therefore, Iran was able to extend its influence in Iraq because Saudi Arabia was unable to mount an effective counter-strategy.

If Saudi Arabia was not so dependent on the oil sourced from Shi’a-populated areas, they would have little reason to maintain that accord. A dramatic fall in the oil price could trigger an escalation in conflict.

What happens if the oil price falls

The price drop would, of course, be catastrophic for Iran as well as Saudi Arabia. Indeed, both countries have recognised the dangers posed by their over-reliance on oil and are seeking to diversify their economies. The recent purge of top officials orchestrated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia is part of the same dynamic: putting the ‘house’ in order to curb expenditure and attract alternative investment. The Iran nuclear deal can be seen in much the same way.

For the Saudis, however, the objective of maintaining their religious legitimacy by not allowing the Arabian Peninsula to be further ‘polluted’ with non-Islamic influences would remain. In this context a $10 oil scenario could be seen by the Saudi government as an opportunity to move more aggressively against the Shi’a minority. A heavily diminished oil industry may in fact prompt the Shi’a minority to leave of their own accord to look for work elsewhere (they are barred from working in government or the military).

That displacement might be a best-case scenario. More catastrophically, a dramatic fall in the oil price could lead the Saudis to forcibly expel or violently oppress their Shi’a population, which might provoke Iran to intervene. At that point, $10 oil could shift Saudi Arabia and Iran from proxy wars into all out war.