“Iran is not a country defined under NATO’s security umbrella, not an economy absorbed into a single bloc, and not a state whose path in a moment of crisis can be determined by the order of one foreign power. But at the same time…Iran does not have the economic power of China or the United States, their global alliance networks, or their institutional power to shape the rules of the world order.” It is “a regional power in an in-between place, trying to preserve a degree of independence without being able to become a global hegemon. “The US-Israeli attack and Iran’s response revealed this in-between position more clearly than anything else.”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51