The New Yorker:

The Islamic Republic is weaker—on multiple fronts—than it’s been in nearly half a century.

By Robin Wright

For forty-five years, Tehran’s Shiite theocracy has heralded its political system as a model for all predominantly Muslim countries—and even beyond. “We should try hard to export our revolution,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared, in 1980, after ousting the last of several Iranian monarchies that had endured for two millennia. “We shall confront the world with our ideology.” It was the core of his government’s strategy to overtly and covertly build a network of allies—dubbed the Axis of Resistance—to serve as frontline buffers against Israel, its regional rival.

In 2004, I interviewed King Abdullah II, the Sunni leader of Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty, who warned about an emerging “crescent” of Shiite powers that began in Iran and extended through Iraq, into Syria, and ended in Lebanon. The Middle East—dominated for centuries by Sunni monarchies, tribal sheikdoms, and autocracies—was being transformed by this Shiite arc, he told me. The rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites, who are a minority in the Muslim world, dates back to a dispute over political leadership after the Prophet Muhammad died, in the seventh century. It intensified after Iran’s Revolution.

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