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Several recent articles have called on President Donald Trump to change the Iran policy of the United States based on ‘past lessons’ and Persian history. If we follow these writers to a logical conclusion, then they appear to accept that Iran must be appeased and accommodated, not confronted or contained, in its drive for regional hegemony, support for terrorism and pursuit of non-conventional weapons.

In The Diplomat, Arwin Rahi reviews the history of Persian kingdoms from ancient to modern times, and concludes that Iran ‘wants respect and a recognition of its role as a regional player and has earned the right to such’. Rahi calls on Trump to ‘understand that Iran is not going to curb its drive for regional supremacy’.

Ian Dudgeon’s analysis in The Strategist similarly used supposed history to demand that Washington not persist in seeking to improve the nuclear deal or in confronting Iran’s destabilising regional activities. He warns of the danger of a US policy that ‘rides roughshod over the Europeans on the JCPOA and foreign investment, seeks to wind back Iranian regional security interests to the direct advantage of US/Israeli/Saudi interests and unacceptably insults Iran’. His key evidence is former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami’s alleged ‘attempt to reach out to Washington and the West’ that was supposedly ‘misread and ignored’ by the West.

An insight by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel comes to mind here: ‘We learn from history that we do not learn from history.’

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