What If Iran Dominated the Middle East? World-System (1960-2100)

 

Iran has currently reentered talks with the US over the Iranian nuclear program (here) after the US Bombed Iran's nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025. Iran and the US have had a long history of troubled and turbulent relations. Both the US and Israel seem to fear that one day a nuclear powered Iran could dominate the Middle East. 

The best model for the Middle East is to stabilize growth rates with no Geopolitical Alignments. 

Since I have models of the Iranian (IRLM), the Middle-Eastern Regional (MEA _BAU), the US (USL20) and the World (WL20) economies, I can predict different paths of overall growth under different Geopolitical Alignments.

• The Best Model (in terms of growth) is the MEA BAU (Business as Usual) model, essentially the Middle East without a dominant regional hegemon.
• The Next-Best Model is MEA driven by the Iranian Economy (IRL20)
• The Also-Ran Models are MEA driven by the US Economy (USL20) and the World System (WL20) when compared to a Random Walk (RW, the Middle East struggling to find some Geopolitical Alignments that work).

The only one of these models that is stable (see the AIC Statistics below) is MEA linked to the World System (WL20), but that  model peaks after 2020 and then declines. In other words, stability for the Middle East would involve growth-and-collapse rather than a steady state (growth rates of the BAU model could easily be modified to produce a steady state, see the MEA_L20 code).

Notice in the MEA_L20 code, stabilizing the system is not enough to prevent collapse. Growth rate of the Malthusian Factor, MEA2= (N-CO2-EG-Q), must be reduced beyond simply stabilizing the system. 

A simple summary of the MEA Measurement Model above is that growth is controlled by a Malthusian factor, MEA2 = (N-CO2-EG-Q), and Energy Use, MEA3 = (Q-E). The interactions between the Control Components and Growth (in the System Matrix):

are small. You could also experiment with strengthening feedback effects by modifying the off-diagonal elements of F.

For the future, ChatGPT reports:

 

Notes

For more of my posts on Iran, see the Blog Roll. For more information about data sources and about how the State Space Dynamic Component Models were constructed, see the Boiler Plate.

IR Measurement Model

The IR Measurement Model has three components: IR1 = (Growth), IR2 = (0.9091 LU - 0.335 KOF) and IR3 = (0.827 KOF - 0.3878 LU - 0.258 EF - 0.217 EG) where LU = Unemployment, KOF = Globalization, EF = Ecological Footprint. Notice the low weightings on HDI, the Human Development Index.

MEA Measurement Model

The MEA Measurement Model has three components that explain 99% of the variation in the indicators: MEA1 = (Overall Growth), MEA2 = (0.8746 LU - 0.361 EG - 0.2320 CO2), MEA3 = (0.708 Q - 0.604 EG) where LU = Unemployment, EG = Energy use, CO2 = Emissions and Q = GDP. Briefly, Growth is controlled by an Unemployment-Energy use controller and a GDP-Energy use controller.

IR_MEA Model

The MEA1 model is unstable.

MEA BAU Model

The MEA L20 System Matrix has three unstable diagonal coefficients (greater than 1.0).

IR_MEA AIC Statistics

The IR_MEA models (RW, BAU, World, US and IRL20) are all very close together with the RW actually being best.