Ask the Iranians, and they will entirely endorse the claim. A growing number of international analysts call it Iran's nuclear option. Iran's real nuclear journey now seems relegated to this newfound pleasure of choking the world at will. Ask the Pakistanis, and most will gloat over how Iran, the brave, has taken Trump, America, and the West in a chokehold. Crediting Iran for standing up to the bully is one thing, even if it has cost Iran an arm and a leg, and a lot of blood and treasure, which we will perhaps never get the true estimate of, but to reinforce what is stifling and suffocating for the rest is blatant. Even more importantly, Trump and the US may never asphyxiate, or if so, perhaps slowly, but the rest would surely have life squeezed out of them much faster and much earlier.

Celebrating Trump's predicament as a loser and America getting its face blackened by Islamic Iran are all happy tidings that most Muslims may smile about and chuckle in corners, but it truly takes us closer to what Samuel Huntington had prophesied a couple of decades back. History must find its new direction when one phase is over, Francis Fukuyama would now agree. When Huntington came out with his theory of the clash of civilisations, these were the same Muslims who huffed at another white man sighting his guns on Islam as a civilisation, now that the Soviet Union seemed to have closed its chapter as the West's favourite whipping boy. One turn of the geopolitical play, and one strategic error down, and the same champions of Islam are happily pitting the Iranian Islamic brothers against Trump, America, and the West. How is that for a requital?

This........

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