AS Iran braces to change the global landscape of war and peace, of imperial conquest and its nemesis in a people who refuse to be afraid of dying for their nation’s self-respect, for their abiding pride in a mesmeric culture of poetry, inclusion and reflection, where do its friends and foes go from here? An all but signed agreement for permanent peace with the US promises to leave Israel out in the cold, and with it its sympathisers. That leaves room for future trouble, of course. But Iran has shown it has the wherewithal to figure out the cure.

For now, the peace deal would be a shot in the arm for BRICS whose summit, contrarily, a rightward-bound Israel-hugging India is to hold in September. But what is in store for Pakistan and its Saudi allies whose endeavours for the peace deal, overtly and covertly, may fall short of Iran’s larger vision of a multicultural Palestinian state in lieu of Zionist Israel, in which its Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities live as equal partners as they had done for centuries, not as superiors and inferiors as proposed by colonialism? Isn’t that the equation each one of the communities strives for in its abode in Europe and America? What will become of India’s Hindutva project of majoritarianism in a world in which its sheet anchors in racist Israel, and to an extent the MAGA-bound US, struggle to fend off Iran’s two remaining deadly vows?

Of the four clenched-fisted promises that Iranians learnt to state collectively during Ayatollah Khomeini’s early consolidation of........

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