People keep saying regional equations are complicated. People who solve issues are those who discover simple patterns among a complicated and dispersed set of data. Seeing complexity among dispersed, irregular data is easy. Finding simple patterns in that is not. The job of problem-solvers is not to say how complicated things are, but rather to find simple patterns that can organise them.
Iran has the opportunity to be the bridge between the east and west. The thing is that it has built its entire policy on top of a war with the free world (however the “free world” has not always been the free world as well, consider G W Bush for example). Iran’s solution has always been to disrupt the opponents’ game. This has led to a predictable pattern in Iran. The scale of social tension exponentially increases (compare the violence in demonstrations of the 2009 disputed election with recent social battles) and they become more and more frequent. Economic situations make things much worse. So Iran knows things should change. However, there is an opportunity which is Iran to discard its disruptive policies and turn toward constructive policies and becomes the bridge between China and the free world. It is in Iran’s interests. Iran cannot expect the world to provide the environment to ease social and economic tensions while it continues its disruptive policies. Because the solution the world will be seeking is to construct. Iran cannot destroy the solution and expects that the very solution it tries to destroy solves its problems.
Then Iran’s model can be an incentive for Russia too.