This essay responds to a Washington Post argument that treats the fragmentation of Iran as a plausible, or even tolerable, endpoint of regional strategy. The premise is familiar. Iran is not a coherent nation state in the classical Westphalian sense. Its borders are historically contingent. External pressure may accelerate internal fissures. A smaller or splintered Iran could be less threatening to Israel and easier for the region to manage. Presented as realism, this is in fact a simplified geometry. It mistakes Iran for an administrative container rather than a civilisational field.

Yes, Iran is not a nation state in the textbook European mould. It is multiethnic, multilayered, and historically thick. But the conclusion that fragmentation is the natural sequel to complexity is a logical leap disguised as sobriety. Complexity does not automatically yield collapse. In some political systems, complexity is precisely what enables resilience, because the state does not rely on a single homogenous identity. Instead, it draws on a broader civilisational grammar that can absorb shocks, reinterpret pain, and convert external threat into internal cohesion.

The civilisational engine of power

A durable state in Iran has rarely been built only on bureaucratic competence or economic performance. Those matter, but they are not the final glue. The deeper engine is civilisational legitimacy: the ability to speak in a language that makes disparate groups feel they share a fate, a memory, and a dignity. In Iran, any government that cannot claim some version of this civilisational story struggles to become a national centre of gravity. It may rule a province. It may survive as a faction. But it rarely stabilises as a sovereign order.

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This is where many external analyses misread the Islamic Republic. They describe it as a regime imposed upon a reluctant geography, sustained only by coercion. Coercion exists, undeniably. Yet the Islamic Republic also draws from an older reservoir that precedes it and will likely outlive it: the fusion of homeland and moral meaning. In the Iranian imagination, political life is not only about administration. It is also about honour, injustice, sacrifice, and endurance. This is not merely propaganda. It is cultural infrastructure. The state does not invent it from nothing. It channels it.

Civilisational statehood in Iran is not in tension with ethnic diversity. It is built upon it. Persian, Azeri, Kurd, Arab, Baluch, Lur, Turkmen, and others have never been........

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