Iran: Lessons for Global South Nations

Introduction

The Islamic Republic’s military defeat of USA imperialism in West Asia holds lessons on sovereignty and statecraft for the Global South nations.

The 47 years of USA aggression against Iran, crystallized through the 40-Day War, proved that a principled ‘middle power’ nation can defeat the mightiest imperial army. Iran established its military credentials.

The War took place in the context of rapidly changing geopolitics, geo-economics, and military theory and praxis. China and Russia anchored their powers in the Global South and strategically collaborated with Iran. They implicitly acknowledged that the Iranian government and its people had the primary task of freeing Iran and its region from USA imperialism/Zionism. China and Russia played vital secondary roles.

The Islamic Republic refused for 47 years to be coerced into becoming a neo-colony of USA imperialism, IMF, and World Bank (WB).

The changing reality

1. The previously ‘fixed’ rules of the global economy are now being ‘unfixed’.
2. IMF loan orthodoxies, in the face of alternative financing, are collapsing.
3. From the 1990s to the present (30 years) African countries complied with IMF and WB loan orthodoxies but found themselves in debt cycles through compound interests on overdue interests.
4. Capitalist economists created theories on false assumptions to justify why African countries could not pay their loans.
5. IMF and WB trapped them in a transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism, which compromised their sovereignty and independent statecraft.
6. The blame was attributed to landlocked geography, ethnonationalism, tribalism, and lack of industrial policy.
7. The slowness in applying AI technology to maximise the production of real worldly goods except in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and lately Vietnam.
8. These countries are transitioning from low-wage manufacturing to high-wage, high-volume, technology-driven industrial production that is integrated in a global value supply chain of SMEs.
9. The low-wage jobs that China is shedding is being leveraged by countries that need to catch up with industrial growth and development.
10. China has already opened its market, tariff-free to African countries.
11. The need to avoid AI technology as bubble wealth sitting in computers or in the cloud.
12. The need for the developed countries to open up their capital accounts, which the IMF and WB have already abandoned.
13. In 1950 USA produced 60% of world manufacturing; today it is reduced to 16%. China’s current share is 30%.
14. Europe has lost its preeminent position in the shipbuilding industry to South Korea as a latecomer.
15. AI is an extension to intellectual labour that helps increase productivity and wealth.
16. Wealth creation is both for domestic and foreign consumption – a shift away from the Keynesian model of post-WWII that had focused on domestic consumption.
17. China set the new trend under Premier Deng Xiaoping who was a skilful tactician.
18. Governments that cannot control cost of living, inflation, and energy are getting voted out irrespective of their liberation or anti-colonial credentials.
19. Political power is demonstrably fragile, vulnerable, and ephemeral. Voters demand performance in defence of their family interests.
20. Governments are at high risk when they try to buy themselves out of financial troubles by selling treasury bonds, which future governments will have to pay as a burden of the past.
21. Governments are doomed that fear taxing the wealthy in order to redistribute wealth as social wage in the forms of education, health, job-creation, infrastructure and more.
22. There is now a socio-economic basis for the clear definition of the ‘developmental state’ that widens the circulation of wealth and social wage, sustainably, from economic growth.
23. The poor are questioning the ownership of the means of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.
24. Although the USA produces about 25% of world GDP its share of international trade is only about 12%. It is still strong on the sale of financial services that come with bubbles.
25. Warren Buffet, the multi-billionaire has famously said, ‘Please tax me more, because I pay less than my cleaner.’
26. The Singapore state owns 90% of the land and 85% of housing though it is not a socialist state.

The role of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei in a new history

History has called upon Ayatollah Khamenei to play a strategic role in guiding Iranians to leverage benefits for the Iranian nation from this complex, dynamic, and confusing reality. The 40-Day War induced the advent of this new epochal revolution.

He tackles the dynamics in a twofold way: firstly, to reconfigure domestic statecraft. Secondly, to set renewed international relations on the basis of the philosophical principle from The Holy Qur’an, which says turn neither to the East nor West. The principle was enunciated by Imam Khomeini.

He has taken his mandate from the feet-on-street that demonstrated their visible resistance during the 40-Day War on Ramadan nights and long after. The mandate is: NO SURRENDER.

Reconfiguring statecraft

The Ayatollah places the Iranian masses at the centre of the reconfiguration. He deepens the interpenetration of the multiple statecraft that harmonises further the singular interrelationship between the people and the religious, political, and military leaderships. The people had demonstrated their capacity for the recruitment of 30-million volunteers, which frightened the USA Army and IDF from putting boots-on-the-ground. Analogically, the statecraft is as complex and interpenetrated as protein folding in the human body to attain optimum functionality.

The legitimate leaderships hold themselves accountable to the people. In this accountability, diplomatic negotiations and military engagements are considered as strategic extensions of one another. It allows for diversity of thoughts and robust debates that enhance strategic unity of the nation. There is no space for elitism or male chauvinism or egotism or mimicry of western secular bourgeois ideas and ideology.

The USA/IDF aggression was accompanied by the threat to return Persian civilization to barbarism. It was intended as a facile replication of the Gaza Genocide/Urbanicide.

The Leader detached himself from his own personal views on the tentative Islamabad MOU of June 14-15, 2026 and allowed himself to be influenced by the majority of the SNSC who held themselves committed to the principle of accountability to the nation and the Resistance Front. The whole chain of command from the Leader down to the masses-on-the-ground – in terms of the two-way communication process of democratic centralism – has evolved as the wider process of optimising the institutionalisation of the unique statecraft and harmonious balance between centralised and decentralised structures.

The wider process establishes the objective political criteria for the evaluation of the ongoing diplomacy without any subjective deviation. The people retain the power to stop deviation.

Imperialism cannot understand the pivotal role of Khatam al-Anbiya (Seal of Prophethood) organization in the societal coordination of the Iranian nation because imperialism lacks a specific Islamic mindset. It chokes on its own spew of propaganda.

Shift from geopolitics to geo-economics

The 40-Day War has speeded the shift from confrontational geopolitics to cooperative geo-economics, in which peace is a condition for trade. There is the establishment of trade-transport-infrastructure-cultural-development corridors that are regional, continental, and transcontinental in nature. They encompass roads, rivers, seas, and air. They are making colonial-era railways confined to straight-lined colonial borders obsolete.

The new corridors stimulate the construction of roads, railways, bridges, riparian and ocean navigation, powerlines, pipelines, telecoms, hydroelectric power dams, electric power grids, deep-harbour ports for super-tankers, irrigation systems, and security arrangements. They make possible large-scale agricultural, industrial, mining, fishing, urban centres, and STEM centres. They shrink the globe further. There is wider distribution of wealth; greater circulation of money; and diverse availability of capital loans. There is greater commuting of knowledge, skills, expertise, technology transfer, ideas, culture, and tolerance. There is the development of value supply chains, development of SME and the integration of small- and large-scale businesses. There is narrowing of the rural-urban divide.

The corridors retain the local population as participants in the local economy and prevent large-scale migration of the rural population to urban centres as economic migrants. They improve the quality of life with minimum social alienation and disruption. The corridors become mega and micro civilizational projects on a sustainable economic basis. They prevent ghost towns arising in the future.

Background preparation for the changing reality

At the initiative of China there is the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), which enjoys the support of 160 countries and international organizations, of which more than 60 countries have joined the Group of Friends of Global Governance. GGI puts people at its centre.

China together with 53 countries and nine international organizations launched the Global Partnership for Poverty Alleviation and Development. China turned its own historic poverty reduction experience into global public goods and given momentum to global poverty reduction.

China established the Global Development and South-South Cooperation Fund with a present capital of $4-billion. It emphasises the pivotal role of the Global South in international governance. It needs international solidarity. It leverages support from BRICS, SCO, G-77, New Development Bank, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Such an initiative compels joint efforts of all countries in interdependent relationships. It prevents dependency on major powers. The development of one is the development of all.

China launched the Building on 2030 SDGs (of UN) for Stronger, Greener, and Healthier Global Development Initiative (GDI). It is informed by China’s own achievement of the SDGs well ahead of the time limit. GDI treats peace and development as the underlying needs of the post-COVID-19 era with its new opportunities for a new industrial revolution and closing the digital divide, increasing vaccine distribution, and reducing food insecurity. GDI is people-centred, development-oriented, innovation-driven, partnership-seeking, action-oriented, and synergy-seeking. It prioritizes poverty alleviation, food security, vaccine availability, developmental finance, climate change and green development, industrialization, digital economy, and connectivity.

China held the 2026 Forum on Global Human Rights Governance (GHRG), which attracted 400 participants from 100 international organization that included the UN. The theme was ‘Joint Development, Shared Human Rights: The 40^th Anniversary of the Adoption of the Declaration on the Human Right to Development and a New Vision for Global Human Rights Governance’.

China in 2023 launched the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI): A Vision for Peace in a Turbulent World. GCI advocates respect for the diversity of civilizations, the common shared values of humanity, the importance of inheritance and innovation of civilisations, and the international people-to-people exchanges and cooperation.

Interpenetrated into these six creative Initiatives is the Global Security Initiative for the elimination of international conflicts and the improvement of security governance, stability and certainty, and peace and development.

The future that humanity is heading into

Humanity requires depth of knowledge, expertise, and technology-savvy skills to develop modern society and harmonise it with traditional society. It is time to leave behind background noise and become fluent in the development of human capital, business, wealth creation, strategic leadership development, development of the ability to take risks, development of systems-thinkers, and formulation and implementation of policy-in-practice. The purpose is to optimise statecraft in order to improve the quality of human life. The future-in-the-present is demanding. While AI takes care of administrative work human beings should be left free to create, innovate, discover, and invent.

The reward of strategic patience

The Islamic Republic held its strategic patience for 47 years and suddenly through the 40-Day War it reaped its rewards in manifold ways through the blood of martyrs and cries of children.

Its military and diplomatic engagements are authoritative, performative, and demonstrative, which earned the respect not only of friends but also of enemies. It established itself as a  worthy regional power to act as the multipolar equal of China and Russia, with who Iran has strategic partnerships.

The large mind of The Leader

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as the sole commander-in-chief showed the way to writing new jurisprudence on sovereignty and statecraft and a new historiography, encapsulated in Islamic philosophy and Persian civilization, in order to harmonise the modern and traditional.

The final product of the jurisprudence will be made international law by way of a UNSC Resolution.

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