Iran

The eight Gulf countries: Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. In Saudi Arabia and Oman, non-citizen residents are about 40% of the population, compared to an average of more than 70% across the other four kingdoms

Table of contents

Basic information
Birth year trends in Israel’s targeted leaders since 2023
Birth year trends in Iran in general
Fertility rate discrepancy in Iran vs neighbouring countries
Deportation of Afghan migrants
Terror attacks in Iran
Oil
Inland and upland, Iranian cities vs neighbouring countries’
Turkey
Many additional notes

1.

Less than two years after 9-11, the US occupied Baghdad and disbanded Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Ba’ath party. This empowered Iraq’s Shia Arab majority and Kurdish minority groups, swinging the Gulf region’s balance of power towards Shia Iran.

Now, less than two years after the Oct. 7th attacks, this balance has been swung back, away from Iran. But it has not been swung back just to Sunni Arab governments. Iran’s allies in Syria have been overthrown and Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah badly weakened, but Iraq, where the majority of Gulf Arabs live, is still mostly Shia-led, as it has been since 2003. Iraq remains internally fractious, but it is also producing more oil now than at any prior time in its history.

Turkey, meanwhile, is seeing two of its historical rivals, Russia and Iran, weakened in wars. This has allowed it to spread its influence and military activity into countries like Syria and Iraq. Presumably, Turkey might become Israel or the Saudis’ next great concern.

This chart should be taken with a large grain of salt, for a number of reasons. First, because the available statistics for sub-national groups often range widely and may be inaccurate. Estimates for Iraq’s Shia population range from 50-70% of Iraq’s total population, and it’s not certain that even this range is correct. Second, because there aren’t always sharp dividing lines between groups. In Iran, for example, the large Azeri Turkic minority is well-integrated into the Persian mainstream, and intermarriage between the two groups is common. (Supreme Leader Khamenei has mixed Azeri-Persian parentage). The significance of the region’s Sunni-Shia divide, similarly, although very real, is often overstated. Third, there are often important differences existing within groups. For example, Iraqi Kurds are usually listed as a single group, but they speak at least two main Kurdish languages that are not generally thought to be mutually intelligible with one another.*

To partially sum up the charts above: within the eight Gulf countries, Arabs are a plurality of the total population, but they do not greatly outnumber Persians, and they are divided somewhat equally between Iraq and the Gulf kingdoms, and between Shia Arabs (mainly in Iraq) and Sunnis (in Iraq as well as the Gulf kingdoms). Both the Azeris and Kurds are large minorities in and around the Gulf countries. Azeris in Iran for instance likely outnumber Arab citizens in Saudi Arabia. In national terms, Iran has a plurality of the Gulf countries’ population and a majority of its citizens. Iran also has a large majority of the Gulf’s Shia population:

Shia Muslims outnumber Sunnis more than 2-to-1 within the Gulf region (not including the Gulf Arab monarchies’ foreign resident population, though many migrant workers in those countries are Sunni), but in the Middle East as a whole the reverse may be true. Shia are only an estimated 10-13% of the world’s Muslims. Only Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India are home to 10+ million Shia; only Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, and Bahrain have majority or plurality Shia populations. Iran, which only started becoming Shia on a large scale in the 1500s, is home to between ½ and ⅓ of all Shia. In Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Eastern Province bordering the Gulf had a Shia majority until fairly recently.

Iran and Turkey have more mature populations than countries like Egypt or Iraq, where large segments of the population are children. An estimated 69.8% of Iran’s population is between 15-65 years old. That is the highest in the world among major countries: the 22 countries that rank ahead of Iran in this regard have a combined population that is smaller than Iran’s own. Iran has the 16th largest working-age population in the world, but because it has extremely low female employment, it has only the 24th largest workforce.

In most countries, fertility rates and female labour force participation are negatively correlated. In Afghanistan for example women tend to have lots of children but do not usually participate in the labour force, whereas in the European Union most women are in the labour force but do not have many children. There are two main exceptions to this pattern: the Islamic Republic of Iran, where women neither participate in the labour force (at least, not officially) nor have many children, and certain countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, where most women participate in the labour force and yet still have large numbers of children. (In Israel, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women also have high labour force participation and large numbers of children). This might suggest that Iran could experience a rapid increase in its female labour force participation.

Currently, with fewer than one-sixth of Iran’s working-age women in the labour force (13% according to the World Bank), Iran’s female labour force participation rate is higher only than those of countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq. It is far behind Saudi Arabia*, Pakistan, or Turkey, where rates are around 35%.

*In Saudi Arabia, although female participation has risen from an estimated 20% in 2015 to 35% today, working-age men outnumber working-age women by about 1.8-to-1, due to the country’s millions of foreign workers, most of whom are male. So in spite of Saudi Arabia’s newly much higher female labour force participation rate relative to Iran’s, its total workforce remains not so much less male-skewed than Iran’s.

This chart shows estimated reserves, not current production. In terms of current production, Saudi Arabia produces more than 2.5 times as much oil as Iran. Iran, Iraq, and the UAE all produce roughly the same amount of oil as one another. Iran produces more than twice as much natural gas as Saudi Arabia, but both are dwarfed by the gas production of the US and Russia. Qatar is the second largest gas producer in the Gulf. Other Arab states, even Algeria and Libya, produce far less energy than those in the Gulf. Only Bahrain and Oman are not major energy producers (though even then, they are per capita).

Nearly all of the leaders in Iran who were targeted and killed by Israel during its recent 12-day-war were born in the early 1960s. Partly this is because they were in their early sixties when they were killed, and had therefore reached the age where they were in charge of the country’s military and intelligence organizations*. But it is also because Iranians born in the early 1960s first reached military age when the Iran-Iraq War began in 1980, and rose through the ranks during those eight years of fighting. This was the case for a large majority of the recently killed Iranian leaders listed in the chart below.

A similar dynamic likely existed within Hezbollah, which was influenced by the Iranian Revolution and was founded in 1982, the year of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990):

This chart includes seventeen Iranians (all killed since 2024, except for Qasem Soleimani, who the US assassinated in 2020), ten Hezbollah leaders, and three Hamas leaders (Yahya Sinwar, Mohammad Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh). There are an additional 20 Iranians listed below whose birth years I could not find. Of the 30 on this chart whose birth years were available, more than half were born in 1960, 1961, or 1962, and more than three-quarters were born between 1958-1964. These are only the prominent targeted figures in Iran I was able to find from news reports (and I included all the names I could find, regardless of their birth year). There might be many more that I missed, which could either negate or further emphasize this pattern. Iran claims there were approximately 1000 deaths of Iranians from Israeli strikes; Lebanon claims approximately 4000 deaths of civilians or Hezbollah members since Oct. 7th, 2023.

Even the youngest leaders on this list came of age during the Iran-Iraq War. Abbas Nilfofourshan, for example, an Iranian officer who died in Lebanon in 2024 in the same Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, was born in 1966, making him the second youngest listed below. Yet he still joined Iran’s paramilitary Basij at 14 years old when the Iran-Iraq war began, and was an officer by its end. Similarly, Khamenei’s eldest sons, born in 1965 and 1969, both served in the war.

*Source for ‘other officers killed in 2025 war’, whose birth years I could not find: https://southfront.press/iranian-media-names-30-generals-killed-by-israel/

*Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Mahabadi, a nuclear physicist born in 1961 and thought to have been the chief of Iran’s nuclear program, was assassinated in November 2020 by way of a remote-controlled or autonomous satellite-operated roadside gun and bomb, presumably by Israel’s Mossad

*Imad Mughniyeh, the number two man in Hezbollah, was killed less recently than the others on this list: in 2008. Mughniyeh, Sinwar, and Haniyeh were all born in 1962. So too were four or five of the six Hezbollah leaders killed during the same week as Hassan Nasrallah (who was born in 1960). Mughniyeh was 21 years old in 1983 when he planned the Beirut marine barracks and US embassy bombings, for which the CIA or Mossad later assassinated him. Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in 2024, on the day Iran’s new president was being sworn in.

Not every recent Iranian leader fought in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, even if they were of age. Ebrahim Raisi, for example, Iran’s president who died in a helicopter crash last year, was born in 1960, but served as a young provincial prosecutor and then deputy prosecutor in Tehran during the war, rather than on the frontlines. During the last year of the war, according to Wikipedia, “Raisi was part of the Tehran branch of what has been called the “1988 Iran death commission“. Under the direction of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, thousands of Iranian political prisoners were executed by these commissions”, many of whom were members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran”.

Khamenei, by contrast, was already in his forties during the Iran-Iraq War (as was Saddam Hussein), during which time he served as Iran’s president. He is now, at 86 years old, the same age as his predecessor Khomeini when Khomeini died in 1989, soon after the war ended. Khamenei has been Supreme Leader for 36 years, the longest in power of any current leader of a major country. But he is still a year short of the Shah’s 37 year rule prior to the Shah’s abdication in 1979.

While most of the Iranians targeted by Israel were born around the early 1960s, coming of age during the Iranian Revolution and war with Iraq, much of Iran’s population today was born between the late 1970s and early 1990s, with no direct experience fighting in any wars. These Iranians now represent the bulk of the country’s adult population, as a result of the drop in Iran’s fertility rate a generation ago, from approximately 6.5 children per woman in 1982 (higher than in any country in the world today) to 1.9 children per woman by 2002.

Source: the World Bank; Iran’s fall in fertility in the 1980s and 1990s was roughly as fast as China’s in the 1960s and 1970s (before the one-child policy began in 1979). Iran’s population structure today has similarities to that of China during the late 2000s, with its largest cohort in early middle age.

The graph below, from the World Bank, is of the ‘age dependency ratio‘, the ratio between a country’s working age population (defined as 15-65 years old) and its dependents (defined as anyone under 15 or over 65 years old). As recently as 1990 Iran had a dependency ratio as high as the average among “low-income” countries. Because of Iran’s rapidly falling birth rate, its dependency ratio has since dropped below the average among low-, medium-, and high-income countries.

Many Iranians, currently between 30-45 or 30-50 years old, may be entering the most productive economic periods of their lives – if politics allow them to realize their potential. This generation is also well-educated: according to an article by Stefan Trines, “In just a few decades, Iran has transformed from a society with low participation in tertiary education into an exceptionally highly educated one. Between 1999 and 2015 alone, Iran’s tertiary gross enrollment more than tripled from 19.13 percent to 71.9 percent.

Iran’s smaller echo boom generation, born in the 2010s (and peaking around 2017, before declining sharply again), will also come of age during the next decade. As a result Iran will likely have more college-age young adults by the 2030s than it has today, or than it has had at any time since the early 2010s.

At the risk of putting far too much stock into this sort of demographic determinism: a rebound in the size of the student population could perhaps become politically significant. It might not be entirely coincidental for example that the eldest of Iran’s largest generation reached college-age around the time of the 1999 student protests, or that this generation was between about 15-35 years old during the Green Movement a decade later. Even in 2019*, when rising food and gasoline prices following cuts to government subsidies triggered a protest movement, or in 2022-2023 during the Mahsa Amini protests, this largest generation was still relatively young, with the youngest of them in their late twenties.

For now, though, Iran has few 15-30 year olds, as the millennials and GenXers are 30+ and their kids are still kids. Iran’s youth unemployment has been falling from its peak of 29% in 2016 (after the 2000s oil price boom ended in 2015, and as many Iranian millennials were competing with one another upon entering the workforce), but it is still high, at 22.8% according to the World Bank. By comparison, it is 15% in Turkey, in spite of the fact that Turkish women participate in the workforce at more than double the rate of Iranian women.

*According to Wikipedia, “the 2019 uprising, as well as the wider Iranian Democracy Movement in general, differed from earlier protests in 2009 in not being limited to students and large cities, and in the speed, severity and higher death toll of the government crackdown, which crushed the uprising in three days, although protests flared up periodically in the months after.” The number of deaths that occurred as a result of the government’s crackdown against the protesters is contested, but it is commonly estimated to be between 300-1500. If true, this would be a vastly higher figure than even that of the Green Movement protests in 2009, when an estimated 72 people were killed over the course of seven months.

The drop in Iran’s fertility rate stands out even more when viewed alongside some of its next-door neighbours, where, apart from Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, fertility rates remain higher than almost anywhere outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan especially have high fertility rates; the discrepancy between these countries and Iran is among the highest that exists between any neighbouring states in the world:

In Afghanistan, women have approximately three more children than Iranian women have on average. The only higher discrepancies that exist between neighbouring countries are in Africa (where Mediterranean states like Algeria directly border Saharan states like Niger) or between China and Afghanistan (which share only a narrow, Himalayan border with one another). But whereas China’s population mostly lives far away from its higher-fertility neighbours in Central Asia and South Asia, many Iranians live close to those regions, making the discrepancy in fertility between Iran and its neighbours even starker. Pakistan for example already has a vastly larger population than Iran, even as its fertility rate remains more than twice as high as Iran’s.

Total fertility rate, Wikipedia. The closest comparison to Iran in this regard is Saudi Arabia, which has a significantly lower fertility rate than its more populous neighbours Yemen, Iraq, and (across the Red Sea) Sudan.

Iran and Afghanistan last had the same fertility rate in 1963, according to the World Bank, when both were still monarchies (the Shah’s White Revolution had just begun) and both had an estimated 7.3 children per woman on average. If current fertility patterns don’t change too much, a generation from now there might be more people who can speak Persian in Afghanistan and Tajikistan than in Iran itself. This could, perhaps, lead to further migration pressures:

The other news in Iran this year has been the deportation of nearly one million Afghan refugees and migrant workers, which had been taking place in the months before Israel and America’s airstrikes and has reportedly intensified since. A similar process has been occurring in Pakistan.

According to Hessam Habibi Doroh, a researcher at Khayrion, “The Afghan migrant community in Iran is estimated at 5-8 million individuals, which amounts to roughly 5.5-8.7% of the total population of c. 92 million. About 2.7 million of these 5-8 million individuals are registered, a bit less than half. Factors such as shared cultural ties, language and the Shi’a identity of the Hazara community, coupled with a relatively open 900-km border, have historically facilitated Afghan migration, while Iran has also tended to function as a transit hub for Afghan migration to Turkey and Europe…Iranian authorities intensified their rhetoric against undocumented Afghan migrants with calls for tougher migration policies and facilitation of forced returns. This sentiment also resonated in political discourse with high-ranking officials such as Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf advocating for the construction of a border wall and the closure of Iran’s eastern border, a stance that became a central issue in the 2024 presidential campaign.”

According to the New York Times: “Since March, when Iranian authorities ordered undocumented residents to leave the country, about 800,000 Afghans have poured across the border, Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations’ refugee agency, said on Monday. Almost 600,000 of them have been forced out since June 1.

During and since the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June, Iranian officials have repeatedly cast suspicion on Afghans as possible spies for Israel, amplifying longstanding rumors and tensions…Iran has ranked as the world’s biggest host country for refugees, with nearly 3.5 million according to the United Nations, primarily people who fled decades of war and violence in Afghanistan. Aid groups estimate that in reality, the Afghan population in Iran is much larger — including about two million refugees who are undocumented — and Iran’s patience with them appears to have run out.”

According to the Diplomat, “Iran is not acting alone. Since late 2023, Pakistan has intensified its deportation campaign against Afghan nationals. In April alone, more than 135,000 Afghans left Pakistan, followed by approximately 67,000 in May. Pakistan’s “Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan” targets undocumented migrants, including long-term resident Afghans and those awaiting resettlement…Turkiye [too] has continued to operate removal centers and conduct charter deportation flights to Kabul throughout 2024. In parallel, it has continued pushbacks along its eastern border with Iran, where Afghan migrants attempting to enter Turkish territory are being systematically forced back.”

The Afghan refugee issue has also been tied to terrorism concerns within Iran, and perhaps has cynically been used by Iran’s government to deflect from domestic political opposition.

Last year the deadliest terror attack in the Islamic Republic’s history occurred. According to Wikipedia, “On 3 January 2024, a commemorative ceremony marking the assassination of Qasem Soleimani at his grave in Kerman, a city in south-eastern Iran, was attacked by two bomb explosions. The attacks killed at least 95 people. The Iranian government declared the bombings a terrorist attack, the deadliest such incident in the country since the Cinema Rex attack of 1978. On the following day, the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group, claimed responsibility….According to Reuters, the United States Intelligence Community concluded that the attack was perpetrated by the Afghanistan branch of the Islamic State, Islamic State – Khorasan Province.”

Another terror attack – a shooting at the Shah Geragh shrine in Shiraz, in which 13-15 people were killed – occurred on the same day that protests were taking place across the country to commemorate 40 days since the death of Mahsa Amini, in 2022.

According to Kyle Orton, “It’s unclear if the attack was related to the protests. Protests swept through the Islamic Republic following the death of [Amini], the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in police custody after being taken to a “re-education center” for apparently not wearing her hijab properly. It was not that much of a stretch to believe the regime was complicit in such a cynical action. The regime then put out blatant disinformation, blaming the protesters for the attack and trying to implicate Azerbaijan, among other things. This attempt to use the attack to depict peaceful protesters as terrorists directed from outside—exactly as Bashar Asad had—to justify a violent crackdown only furthered the suspicions that the regime had some role in bringing about the attack.”

Earlier in 2022, “a stabbing attack took place at the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad, killing two Shia clerics and wounding a third. The perpetrator, identified as foreign national Abdullatif Moradi, a 21-year-old ethnic Uzbek illegal immigrant from Afghanistan, was immediately arrested along with six others accused of assisting him.”

Now of course there has also been the concern that the Israelis, Americans, or Gulf monarchies might have recruited spies or collaborators from minority populations, including Afghans. According to Amwaj media, “Since Israel’s June 13 surprise attack, and continuing after the ceasefire declared on June 24, Iranian authorities have launched a campaign to shore up domestic security. Iran has detained over 700 individuals accused of links to Israel’s Mossad spy agency or collaborating with other hostile states. The crackdown has entailed arrests in border provinces with large minority populations… In the southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan Province [on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan], mainly home to the Baluch minority, security forces have killed two suspects and arrested over 50 individuals accused of “terrorist” activities linked to foreign adversaries…Afghan migrants, Iran’s largest immigrant group numbering in the millions, have been swept up in the crackdown with alarming speed. State media have aired confessions of Afghans allegedly involved in espionage and sabotage, prompting the expedited expulsion of members of the community.”

Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq are currently three of the top six oil producers (with the US, Russia, and Canada), the first time they have all been in the top six since the late 1980s (before the First Gulf War) and 1970s (before the Iranian Revolution). The Saudi-Emirati-Kuwaiti alliance continues to lead Gulf production. The wider US alliance, including Canada and the Gulf Arab monarchies, dominates current production.

Oil production, US and Mideast countries (ex. North Africa) in twh, select years; Our World in Data

In 1933, Iran dominated Mideast oil production, but was far smaller than US oil production
By 1946, Iran still produced a majority of Mideast oil, but not by much; US production continued to dominate
In 1953, the year of the coup against Mossadegh following the nationalization of Iranian oil, Kuwait was the leading oil producer in the Mideast
In 1965, the US remained far ahead, but the Sunni-led states (which included both the Gulf Arab monarchies and Ba’athist Iraq), if taken as a whole, were catching up to it
In 1978, just before Iran’s revolution, Saudi Arabia was the leading oil producer in the region, and the Sunni-led Gulf states as a whole were well ahead of US production
In 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war and at the end of the first long oil boom (1973-1985), the Saudis cut back their oil production (by nearly two-thirds from 1980, when prices were at their peak), but Saudi production nevertheless remained higher than Iran’s
In 1991, oil production crashed in Iraq and Kuwait during the First Gulf War, while prices and Saudi oil production rose
In 2002, just before the US invaded Iraq and the second long oil boom (2003-2015) began, Saudi Arabia was leading the world in oil production, and the Sunni-led Gulf states as a whole were producing far more oil than anywhere else
In 2011, the start of the Syrian Civil War, the Saudis remained the leaders in oil production, but the Shia-led states, which now (since 2003) included Iraq, overtook the US
In 2023, as a result of a massive boom in US shale oil production, the US produced more oil than any other country. The Saudis remain the next largest producers, but the Shia-led countries – Iran and, to a large extent, Iraq – have continued to close the gap with the Sunni states, producing about half as much as them as a result of Iraq’s rising production.

(This graph does not include the US, Russia, or Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil producers)

Source: Wikipedia, from the year 2020 (1399 in Iran’s calendar). Apart from Tehran, the capital and largest province by far (approximately 13.5 million inhabitants in 2020), the largest GDP contributor is the Gulf province, Khuzestan (with 4-5 million people, perhaps 30-50 percent of whom are Arabs, the rest split between other minorities and Persians). The next largest, Bushehr (pop. 1-2 million) is also on the Gulf.

Iraq has (roughly speaking) more than 4/5ths of the Mesopotamian region’s population, but less than half of its oil reserves, and only a sliver of its coastline on the Gulf. It has therefore sometimes been an Iraqi aspiration to expand its current territory—not just for Saddam Hussein, who began the Iran-Iraq War by invading and laying claim to Khuzestan, then annexed Kuwait two years after the war’s end–but also for several previous Iraqi governments, going back to the Hashemite kingdom of Iraq upon its creation in 1932.

In 1980, a few months before the Iran-Iraq war began, a six-day siege of Iran’s embassy in London was carried out by Iranian Arabs – trained and organized, allegedly, by Iraq – to publicize their demand of sovereignty for Khuzestan. (This occurred during the same time that American hostages were being held in the US embassy in Iran. The famous, failed Delta Force-CIA rescue attempt in Iran ordered by Jimmy Carter had taken place only ten days before the successful SAS raid to end the standoff at Iran’s London embassy).

Also in 1980, the father of Iraq’s current Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, was executed by the Iraqi government along with several other members of his family, for being a member of the Shia Dawa party. Mohammed was nine or ten years old at the time. He later participated in the 1991 Shia and Kurdish uprisings against Saddam Hussein’s government, following Iraq’s loss in the First Gulf War in Kuwait.

Cities in Iran, the Middle East, and nearby regions; circle size indicates population size. Most of Tehran is between approximately 1100-1600 metres above sea level, as are Iran’s other largest cities. No other cities of Tehran’s size are similar to it in both distance above sea level and distance inland. (There are however a few major cities, like Addis Ababa, that are even higher up and further inland). The elevation mitigates summer heat and increases precipitation. For example, whereas Baghdad–which compared to Tehran is a similar distance inland, but is only 35 metres above sea level–suffers average daily highs of 45 degrees C in its hottest month, and has nightly lows of 4 C in its coldest month, Tehran has average highs of 33-36 C in its hottest month, but nightly lows of -1 in its coldest. And whereas Baghdad gets ~6 inches of rain on average during the year, Tehran gets ~9-17 inches of precipitation (including snow) on average. The ring of mountains surrounding Tehran has however contributed to its having extreme air pollution.

With Russia fighting in Ukraine and Iran and its allies weakened by Israel, Turkey has been able to increase its influence in the region. Turkey’s main rival, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), began disarming itself this summer after forty years of guerilla warfare. In 2023, Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan invaded the contested territory of Nagorno Karabakh, causing nearly the entire population of the territory to flee to Armenia. Turkey also mended ties with Egypt in 2023, which had been strained for a decade after the overthrow of President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had been supported by Erdogan’s AKP. Now Turkey and Egypt are on the same sides in Sudan’s civil war (which began in 2023; the UAE has been backing the other side), and, after having taken opposite sides in Libya’s, have been working together to broker a Libyan unity government. And of course, Syria’s Assad government was finally defeated in December 2024, by Turkish-backed forces, who are currently fighting Syrian Kurdish groups.

*These figures include non-citizen residents in the Gulf countries, but do not include the non-citizen Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza – approximately 5.3 million people – as part of Israel’s population. The UAE’s label on this chart is obscured by Israel’s, as they have about the same GDP and population size as one another. Turkey has the highest GDP of all Muslim-majority countries, ranking just ahead of Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

If Russia or Iran continue to weaken, Turkey’s relationships with Israel or Saudi Arabia might worsen. There have been some signs of this already, including this month’s Israeli strikes in the capital of Qatar, Turkey’s primary ally in the Gulf. (When the Saudis and Emiratis blockaded Qatar in 2017, Turkey supported the Qataris). One day before the airstrike in Qatar, Israel attacked multiple sites in Syria, allegedly targeting Turkish missiles and air defense systems in Homs. And in July, in response to fighting between Bedouin and Druze groups in Syria (the latter supported by Israeli Druze, who serve in the Israeli military) Israel carried out strikes in Damascus, hitting the Syrian Presidential Palace and General Staff headquarters, offices of the new government supported by Turkey.

There has been a lot of speculation that Israel will attempt to assassinate Hamas officials in Turkey, if not with airstrikes then by other means, whether covert or – like the Saudis, when they killed Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018 – blatant. According to Israel’s Shin Bet, Hamas operatives based in Turkey organized a plot to assassinate Israel’s extremist cabinet minister Itamar Ben Gvir, which was foiled several weeks ago.

“‘After Lebanon, Israel’s next target will be our homeland,’ Erdoğan stated at the opening session of parliament on 1 October 2024”. In March 2025, during the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan, Erdogan said “‘We see and we know what’s happening in Palestine. May Allah damn Zionist Israel.” (That was two weeks after the start of massacres in Syria by Sunnis of Allawites, in which allegedly 1000-2000 Allawites were killed, the first such event for the new Syrian government which was unable or unwilling to stop them. According to an article in New Lines, “The Alawis in Jableh, a Sunni-majority town, were set upon by HTS’s Unit 400 and the Othman Brigade, another elite HTS outfit, the SNA’s Sultan Suleiman Shah and Hamza Division, and the Uyghur jihadists of the Turkistan Islamic Party —all units publicly loyal to the Syrian Ministry of Defense. At least seventy-seven Alawis were killed”. Othman and Suleiman Shah are named for the Ottoman Empire’s founder and and his grandfather, respectively). Later, during the war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, Erdogan announced plans to build out Turkey’s supply of ballistic missiles to “deterrent level”.

When the US removed Saddam Hussein’s government after 9-11, it intensified Iran’s conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Now, similarly, if the US and its allies are able to continue weakening Iran and Russia, or perhaps even succeed in flipping Iran back into an ally against Russia (as it was pre-1979), it might lead to future conflicts with Turkey.

10. Many Additional Notes

*Azerbaijanis, by contrast, do share a mutually intelligible language with most of Turkey’s population and with the large Turkic minorities in both Iran and Iraq, but have their own country and so are usually considered to be their own separate group. Similarly, Persian in Iran is thought to be basically mutually intelligible with Tajik in Tajikistan and with Dari, one of Afghanistan’s main languages. Finally, some groups are more similar to one another than others even when their languages aren’t mutually intelligible. Persian and Kurdish for instance are considered part of the same family of languages, unlike Arabic or Turkish. Arguably, Persian is significantly more similar to Kurdish than, for example, French is to Spanish.

Khamenei was the Islamic Republic’s third president, before becoming Supreme Leader after Khomeini’s death. His predecessor as president, Mohammad-Ali Rajai, was assassinated in 1981, allegedly by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). Rajai’s assasination took place two weeks after a bombing that killed over seventy Iranian officials, including the Chief Justice, Mohammad Beheshti, thought to be the regime’s second highest ranking leader behind Khomeini. The day before the bombing, Khamenei had been badly injured in an assassination attempt. And five days before that, the Islamic Republic’s first president, Abdolhassan Banisadr, was impeached, charged with treason, and fled the country. He died of old age in France in 2021.
Iran’s prime minister was also killed in the same assassination that killed Iran’s president in 1981, eleven months into the Iran-Iraq war. He was succeeded by Mir-Houssein Mousavi, who served as prime minister for the remainder of the war, during the same years that Khamenei was president. Mousavi was Khamenei’s first cousin once removed, but they were often rivals. When Khamenei took over Khomeini’s role as Supreme Leader in 1989, Mousavi was pushed out of politics for several years and there has been no Iranian prime minister since. (The first prime minister appointed during the Iranian Revolution, Shapour Bakhtiar, was assassinated in exile near Paris soon afterwards, in 1991). Mousavi has been under house arrest since 2011.
The other leader from Khamenei’s generation is former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (who died in his swimming pool in 2017 at 82 years old; then-president Rouhani ordered an investigation into the death, while Rafsanjani’s family claims he was poisoned). Mousavi, after serving as prime minister from 1981-1989, ran against Ahmadinejad for president in 2009. He is now considered a leader of the Green Movement, which was prompted by protests following that election. Mousavi’s nephew was shot and killed during those protests. Rafsanjani was president from 1989-1997, succeeding Khamenei in that role; he later lost the 2005 presidential election to Ahmadinejad. (So did Mehdi Karroubi, under house arrest since 2011, who finished third behind Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani in 2005, and fourth in 2009). A year before his death, Rafsanjani attempted to run again for president, but was banned from doing so on the pretense that he was too old.

For what it’s worth, both Khamenei (in part) and Mousavi are Azeri Turks, as is Iran’s new president (following Ebrahim Raisi’s death), Masoud Pezeshkian. (According to Alex Vatanka,at least one CIA report during the war wrongly overemphasized Iran’s ethnic divisions by assuming the existence of a Soviet-leaning “Azeri faction”, led by Khamenei and including Mousavi and others).
*In the US military, for example, all eight members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were born in the 1960s. (Secretary of Defense Hegseth by contrast was born in 1980). Most however are at least a few years younger than Iran’s military leaders. And the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, is the second youngest of the joint chiefs, born in 1968. (The youngest is head of the Space Force, Chance Saltzman, born in 1969 a month before the moon landing).
Because it repelled the initial Iraqi invasion, most Iranian casualties during the war were soldiers (including child soldiers) rather than civilians. One exception to this was the “war of the cities”, when “10,000–11,000 civilians died as a result of the aerial bombardment of Iranian cities with the majority of those deaths occurring in the final year of the war”, according to Wikipedia. Another exception, also in 1988 around the end of the war, was the mass execution of Iranian political prisoners, mainly members of the People’s Mujahadedin, who were fighting on Iraq’s side at that point in the war, or of the Soviet-aligned Tudeh party. The executions were ordered by Khomeini, and are thought to have killed somewhere between 2800 and 30,000 people that year.
1988 was also the start of the “chain murders” in Iran, in which more than 80 intellectuals and dissidents were covertly murdered between 1988-1998, “by a variety of means such as car crashes, stabbings, shootings in staged robberies, and injections with potassium to simulate a heart attack”, which only came to light in 1998.
In Iraq too, 1988 was a year in which the state is thought to have killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, in Iraqi Kurdistan with the Anfal campaign and the use of chemical weapons. Iraq also used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians in the final years of the war.
In July 1987, an estimated 400 people died during a riot at the Haj in Mecca between Shia Iranian and Sunni pilgrims, one of the low points for Iran-Saudi relations.
After being invaded at the start of the Iran-Iraq War, by the middle of 1982 Iran regained nearly all the territory it had lost. (In the spring of 1982, Khamenei stated that Khomeini should be the Supreme Leader of Iran and Iraq). Soon after, in Lebanon, a number of key events occurred that pertain to the ongoing conflicts involving Iran and other countries in the region. These include the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the assassination of incoming Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel and Sabra-Shatila massacres in the fall of 1982, the Beirut barracks bombings in 1983 and US embassy bombings in 1983 and 1984, and the 1983-1988 pro-Iran terror attacks on Kuwait.
While Israel and Iran were increasingly becoming enemies in Lebanon at this time, their pre-1979 alliance remained partially intact in spite of Iran’s anti-Zionist rhetoric, support for the emergence of Hezbollah, affinity with Palestinian militants, and exodus of tens of thousands of Iranian Jews. In 1980 during the second week of the Iran-Iraq war, Israel helped Iran’s air force attack Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. In 1981 Israel carried out its own attack on Iraq, destroying the reactor. And during the mid-1980s Israel participated in the Iran-Contra affair, selling Iran weapons.
After Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a common enemy of Iran and Israel, was weakened in the First Gulf War, relations between Israel and Iran worsened. In July 1994, a suicide truck bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires killed 85 people, the attack carried out by Hezbollah operatives. One day later a Hezbollah-suspected suicide bombing on a Panamanian airplane killed all 21 passengers, 12 of whom were Jews. A week after that – and one day after Israel and Jordan signed the Washington Declaration, in anticipation of their peace treaty in October 1994, which made Jordan the second Arab country to officially recognize Israel, after Egypt – the Israeli embassy in London was car-bombed, followed hours later by a similar car bomb exploded outside a Jewish community centre in London. Nobody was killed in the London bombings.Natalio Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor in charge of the 1994 Buenos Aires Jewish community centre bombing investigation, was murdered in 2015, when the investigation was (even after two decades) still ongoing.“The 2013 signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran to facilitate the investigation led to a breach between Nisman and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner”, according to Wikipedia. “Nisman’s death was initially ruled a suicide by a group of forensic experts appointed by Argentina’s Supreme Court in 2015…In December 2017, Cristina Kirchner was indicted for treason by judge Claudio Bonadio. In March 2018, it was announced that she would be put on trial for an alleged cover-up of Iran’s role in the bombing… After analyzing the claims of the defendants in the case for the never-ratified Memorandum with Iran, on October 7, 2021, the Federal Oral Court 8 declared the case null and void”. On the 30th anniversary of the terror attack in 2024, new president Milei announced investigations would be reopened.
In February 1994, the deadliest attack carried out by a Jewish terrorist since 1946 occurred, when Baruch Goldstein shot 29 Palestinians to death at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, during the Jewish holiday of Purim. Iran responded, a few hours later, by executing Feyzollah Mekhubad, a Jewish resident of Tehran, who had been in prison since 1992 on charges of being a spy for Israel. (Purim, fittingly, is the holiday which retells a story of threatened Jews living in the Persian empire). Itamar Ben Gvir, an open admirer of Goldstein, has been Israel’s Minister of National Security since 2022.
Goldstein’s attack was followed the next year by the assassination of prime minister Yitzchak Rabin, by another Jewish extremist who was against the Oslo Accords. Months after the assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister for the first time, narrowly defeating Shimon Peres who was running as Rabin’s successor. Peres had been set to defeat Netanyahu, but a series of Hamas attacks in March and April 1996, just before the election in May, helped lead to a slight victory for Netanyahu’s coalition over Peres’. This November will be 30 years since Rabin was assassinated. 2026, when Israel is set to have another election, will be 30 years since Netanyahu was first elected (though he will only have been in office for about 19 of those years).
On March 4, 1996, on the eve of the first Purim after Goldstein’s massacre, a Hamas bomber blew himself up outside the Dizengoff shopping centre in Tel Aviv. “The attack was the fourth suicide bombing in Israel in nine days, bringing the death toll during that span to over 60….These operations were, in their scale, scope and sophistication, different and larger than any attacks of the past, and it has been alleged that both Syria and Iran had helped in their planning and financing.” Hamas carried them out in response to Israel’s assassination of chief bombmaker and commander Yahya Ayyash in January 1996”. They were led by Mohammed Deif, who was killed last year in an airstrike which, at least according to the Gaza ministry of health, killed 90+ Palestinians.
The month before the 1996 elections, Israel also carried out a two-week military operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Operation Grapes of Wrath, in which an estimated 150-250 Lebanese were killed. Over 100 of those deaths occurred when Israel attacked a UN compound that was sheltering hundreds of Lebanese civilians, which Hezbollah fighters had retreated to during a fight with a commando unit led by Naftali Bennett. (Bennett was prime minister in 2021-2022, and may well become so again in 2026, representing religious Jews who are supportive of West Bank Jewish settlement and who resent ultra-Orthodox not serving in the military while their own kids serve in large numbers). Many similar incidents to the 1996 UN attack occurred during the current war in Gaza.
In June 1996, the Khobar Towers truck bombing on the Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia, near the headquarters of oil giant Saudi Aramco, killed 19 US air force personnel and wounded hundreds of people from many countries. Iran was thought to be behind the attack, although it is not known for certain.
In the late 1990s, a partial realignment of Iranian and American interests took place, as Sunni forces such as the Taliban and al Qaeda were on the rise, while Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was moving sharply away from its secularist Ba’athist roots towards its own brand of Sunni-led religious extremism. The Taliban conquered Herat in 1995 and Kabul in 1996, and then, after conquering Mazar-i-Sharif (Afghanistan’s fifth largest city) on August 8, 1998, killed 11 Iranians in an attack on Iran’s consulate, as well as thousands of Shia and Tajik (Persian)-speakers, nearly leading to a war between Iran and the Taliban. Coincidentally, one day earlier, al Qaeda carried out its first major attack, the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding over 4000. (This was also only a few weeks after the foiled 1998 World Cup Plot would have occurred). Two days before the embassy attacks – again, coincidentally – Iraq suspended cooperation with UN weapons inspectors. The US responded by passing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and then by bombing Iraq at the end of the year. The US also, on August 20, tried to retaliate against al Qaeda, bombing the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a camp in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, in the Iraqi Kurdish civil war (1994-1998), Iran switched sides in 1995, going from supporting the KDP, which was backed by Baghdad, to the PUK, which was favoured by the US. More generally, there was a thaw in relations, and quiet cooperation, between Iran and the US, until they became direct rivals of one another in post-Saddam Iraq and the Middle East at large after 2003. (The twin events of Aug 7-8, 1998 would have an echo three years later, when al Qaeda assassinated Afghanistan’s leading Tajik figure, Iran and India’s ally Ahmad Shah Massoud, two days before 9-11). US-Iranian interests might be realigning again now, with Iran and its allies weakened by Israel, the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan (though so far cooperating with Iran, for the most part), and the US and Europeans looking for allies against Russia.
From Alex Vatanka’s excellent book The Battle of the Ayatollah’s in Iran (which covers Iranian politics since 1979 through the lens of the relationship between Khamenei and Rafsanjani):

In August 1988 the Iran-Iraq war finally ended. In February 1989, the day before the last Soviet troops left neighbouring Afghanistan in defeat, Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (In 1990, The Satanic Verses’ Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death as a result. In 1993 its Norwegian publisher survived being shot. In 2022 Rushdie survived being stabbed). In June 1989, Khomeini died. Khamenei took over as Supreme Leader the next day. The same day that Khamenei took over, Attollah Byahmadi, an ex-colonel in the Shah’s intelligence service, was killed in Dubai, according to Radio Free Europe. Eleven days later, “Abdolrahman Qassemlou, leader of the largest of the Kurdish opposition groups, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), and two associates are assassinated in Vienna”.

The day of Khomeini’s death, June 3, 1989, was an eventful one at the end of the Cold War: “On June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese government violently suppressed protests in and around Tiananmen Square, Beijing, with military forces using live ammunition and tanks to clear the area. This event resulted in a death toll estimated to be in the hundreds or thousands, though the exact number is disputed and officially suppressed by China…On June 4, 1989, Poles had their first free elections [since 1938]. The Polish Solidarity opposition won a landslide, capturing all but one contested seats in both the upper and lower houses of the parliament. This victory led to the appointment of the first non-communist prime minister and a unity government where former political dissidents sat together with their former oppressors. In this powersharing pact the government moved forward to dismantle the Polish communist system and initiate a peaceful democratic transition well before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union collapsed.”
While the Iran-Iraq war was extremely deadly, it is possible it was much less deadly than has been thought. According to demographic analysis from Charles Kurzman, “the death toll from the Iran-Iraq war was far less than the scholarly estimates of 600,000 or 1,250,000. It may even have been lower than the government figures of 250,000 Iraqi fatalities and 155,000 Iranian fatalities”.

By comparison, poor governance in Iran has also contributed to an enormously high death rate from traffic accidents, which have killed well over a million Iranians since the revolution. Iran has had one of the worst road death rates in the world, as a result of factors such as its rugged terrain, young population, cheap fuel, and use of motorbikes. Even this year, during just the 21-day holiday period around Nowruz (Persian New Year), over 800 Iranians were killed in over a million road accidents. That is an improvement – most years it has been over 1000. “Citing data from the ILMO, Etemad newspaper reported that around 20 years ago, the annual death toll from road accidents approached 28,000. Due to various interventions, this number was reduced to approximately 16,000 by 2020. However, the report noted that since 2021, traffic fatalities have been rising once more, now surpassing 20,000, a figure not seen since 2011, breaking a 12-year record.”
Iran now has roughly the same number of road crash deaths per year as the entire European Union – though still only about half as many as the US. A large majority of the victims and perpetrators are men. Like Joe Biden, Iran’s new president lost his wife and child in a crash, in 1994.
The large-scale deportations of Afghans from Iran have likely contributed to road deaths as well, on both sides of the border. In August 2025, “a passenger bus carrying deported migrants from Iran caught fire after it collided with a motorcycle and a fuel truck and veered off a road in Guzara District, Herat Province, Afghanistan, killing at least 79 people, including 19 children. It was one of the country’s deadliest road crashes of the decade”.
The combination of poor governance, mountains, densely populated cities, and automobiles has also contributed to high death rates from air pollution, roughly estimated to be causing 10,000-50,000 Iranian deaths per year.
In June 1990, “a devastating earthquake struck Iran, causing widespread destruction and claiming approximately 40,000 lives”. Cities like Tehran continue to face major earthquake risks.
In August 1990, “Shapour Bakhtiar, the last Iranian prime minister before the 1979 revolution, was stabbed to death in his home in a suburb of Paris, France”. In 1992, “The attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was a suicide bombing attack on the building of the Israeli embassy of Argentina, located in Buenos Aires. 29 civilians were killed in the attack and 242 additional civilians were injured. A group called Islamic Jihad Organization, which has been linked to Iran and possibly Hezbollah, claimed responsibility; their stated motive for the attack was Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayed Abbas al-Musawi in February 1992.”
Also in 1992, “Iranian dissident and singer Fereydoun Farokhzad-Araghi was stabbed to death in his home in Bonn, Germany”, and, soon after, Iranian Kurdish leaders in Berlin were assassinated, allegedly on Khamenei’s orders. “Four people, three of whom are members of the KDPI, are assassinated in a restaurant in Berlin, Germany, where they were to attend a meeting of the Socialist International. Among the dead was Dr. Sadeq Sharafkandi, the man who succeeded Abdolrahman Qassemlou as the secretary general of the KDPI after the latter’s assassination three years earlier”.
Attacks also took place within Iran in 1992, notably a series of bombings in Tehran that included an explosion near Khomeini’s enormous mausoleum (then still under construction), which killed five people. The People’s Mujahideen (MEK) were alleged to be behind the bombings. The mausoleum complex has been the site of several attacks since then, the largest of which was in 2017.
Iran was involved in the wars in the Balkans from 1992-1995, supporting Muslim Bosniak forces. Iran did not, however, support the Muslim Chechens against Russia during the Chechen Wars (1994-1996 and 1999-2000), as Turkey and the Gulf Arab monarchies arguably did, to a certain extent.
The partial thaw in Iranian relations with the West (and its Arab allies) in the late 1990s overlapped with the coming of age of Iran’s largest generation, those who were born just before or just after the Iranian revolution. This coincided with the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), and the student protests in 1999. Khatami is now 82 years old; in Jan 2025, “President Masoud Pezeshkian voiced his opposition to restrictions placed on the public appearances of former President Mohammad Khatami, the unofficial leader of the Reform Front”.
From Alex Vatanka’s book:

Khamenei first became president on October 9, 1981, coincidentally three days after Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat was assassinated on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, for having made peace with Israel. Sadat had been a good friend of the Shah, who had died in Egypt the year before. The Oct 7th, 2023 attacks occurred one day after the Yom Kippur War’s 50th anniversary. And Israel did try to kill Khamenei in response, at least according to Israel’s defense minister.
Because the Jewish calendar is lunisolar while the Islamic is lunar, most people don’t realize that Yom Kippur and Ashura, the foremost Shia holiday, are historically the same holiday, both taking place on the 10th day (Ashura means ten) of the 1st month of their calendars. (Shia mourn the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali, at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, while for Sunni Muslims Ashura marks the parting of the Red Sea by Moses). And both share a history of violent attacks in modern times. The last time the two holidays synced up, in 2016, bombings of Shia shrines in Afghanistan killed 30+ people, while in Iraq the Battle of Mosul, against the Shia-hating Islamic State, was just beginning, and Iraq’s (Shia) prime minister was feuding with Turkey over Turkey’s insistence that Turkish forces be included in retaking the city, Iraq’s second largest.
Before 2016, the two holidays last synced up in 2005, during Iraq’s constitutional referendum following its first elections, a week before Saddam Hussein’s trial began. That was one year after a major attack on Ashua occurred, near the start of the Iraqi civil war, when bombings led to 171 deaths of Shia worshipers in Karbala and Baghdad. This repeated in 2007, when 60+ Shia were killed. The Arba’een (Forty) pilgrimage to Karbala, at the end of Ashura’s 40-day mourning period, was banned during Saddam’s rule, but has since become the world’s largest annual pilgrimage.
A constitutional referendum in Iran following the Iranian revolution was also held during Ashura, in 1979. On Ashura in 1994, a bombing carried out by MEK and/or al Qaeda members including Ramzi Yousef, at Iran’s shrine to the eighth Imam of Shia Islam, killed 25+ people in Mashhad in northeast Iran, the country’s second largest city and hometown of Supreme Leader Khamenei, among others. In 2010, on Tasua (Nine), the day before Ashura, suicide bombings at the Imam Husain mosque in southeastern Iran, carried out by Sunni Balochis, killed at least 38 people.
Balochistan:

Iran’s political leaders have lately been discussing a grand, unlikely plan to move the country’s capital away from Tehran, to the opposite end of the country along southeast Iran’s desert sea coast. This plan is made only slightly plausible as a result of rapidly falling desalination costs, but it remains far-fetched all the same. One reason (of many) it is unlikely is the threat from Balochi militants:

Balochis, the primarily Sunni inhabitants of the mountainous region spanning the borders between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, have been involved in significant attacks of late. According to Chatham House, in Pakistan, in March 2025, “Baloch separatists hijacked a passenger train carrying more than 400 people travelling from Quetta to Peshawar…Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the militant Baloch Liberation Army (BLA). The subsequent siege, near the Bolan Pass in a remote part of Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan ended – apparently without mass casualties – after a 36-hour stand-off between the hijackers and army special forces. But some lives were lost. According to Pakistani military sources, at least 31 people, including civilians and security personnel, as well as 33 militants, were killed in the action. However, the BLA has disputed these figures claiming that it took 214 hostages and killed them all.”

In southeast Iran, when a Balochi suicide bombing in 2019 killed at least 27 soliders, Khamenei and other leaders publicly blamed the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE as being behind the attack. In 2018 , according to Wikipedia, “eleven Iranian border Guards were kidnapped by the group, with only five of them later released”. Insurgencies in this region go back decades, and include the cross-border smuggling of diesel fuel from Iran and opium from Afghanistan.

On the Pakistani side of the border, attacks by Baloch militants and suicide bombers, have often targeted Chinese nationals. According to the Australia Broadcasting Corporation, “Nearly 100 Chinese nationals have been killed in Pakistan in recent years amid local discontent over the failure of China-backed infrastructure projects”. Attacks have also targeted Shia, who are an estimated 10-15% of the population in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

^{Iran, fertility rate by province. In Sistan-Baluchistan in the southeast (population 3-4 million),fertility rates are closer to those in Pakistan and Afghanistan than to the rest of Iran. An estimated 15 million Balochis live across Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, with most living in Pakistan and perhaps one-third living in Iran}

^{“In 2024, Iran carried out a series of missile and drone strikes within Pakistan’s Balochistan province, claiming that it had targeted the Iranian Baloch Sunni militant group}^{Jaysh al-Adl}^{. The incident occurred one day after Iran carried out a similar series of}^{aerial and drone strikes within Iraq and Syria}^{, claiming that it had targeted the regional headquarters of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad within Iraqi semi-autonomous Kurdish region and several strongholds of terrorist groups, in}^Taltita^{, Syria, in response to the}^{Kerman bombings}^{on 3 January, for which the Islamic State took responsibility and December 2023 killing of IRGC general}^{Seyed Razi Mousavi}^.”

^From^{an article}^{by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker in 2008, when US was believed to be funding groups like the Baloch: “The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”….The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties. Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists….The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K (aka The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran)., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK” .}

^{It is not clear whether or not Hersh’s statements about a US relationship with Balochi groups in Iran are actually true.}But Balochi attacks were common during this period. According to a US state department report:

^{“In March 2006,}^Jundallah^{attacked a motorcade in eastern Iran, which included the deputy head of the Iranian Red Crescent Security Department, who was taken hostage. More than 20 people were killed in the attack. The governor of Zahedan, his deputy, and five other officials were wounded, and seven others were kidnapped in the attack. In May 2006, Jundallah barricaded a road in Kerman province and killed 11 civilians and burned four vehicles. The assailants then killed another civilian and wounded a child by firing at a passing vehicle. In 2007, Jundallah killed 18 border guards on the Iranian-Afghan border. Jundallah seized 16 Iranian police officers near the border with Pakistan in 2008. When the Iranian government refused to release 200 Jundallah prisoners in exchange for the hostages, Jundallah killed them. In May 2009, Jundallah attacked the crowded Shiite Amir al-Mo’menin mosque in Zahedan, destroying the mosque and killing and wounding numerous worshipers. An October 2009 suicide bomb attack in a marketplace in the city of Pishin in the Sistan va Balochistan province, which killed more than 40 people, was reportedly the deadliest terrorist attack in Iran since the 1980s. In a statement on its website, Jundallah claimed responsibility for the December 15, 2010 suicide bomb attack inside the Iman Hussein Mosque in Chabahar, which killed an estimated 35 to 40 civilians with 60-100 wounded. In July 2010, Jundallah attacked the Grand Mosque in Zahedan, killing approximately 30 and injuring an estimated 300”.}

Around the same time, there were reports claiming that Mossad agents posed as American intelligence in order to work with Baloch groups in Pakistan.

^{In 2018,}^{Iranians were accused of being behind an attempt}^{to blow up a MEK meeting outside Paris, at which Rudy Giuliani was attending. In 2017 and 2018, according to Alex Vatanka, figures like Giuliani, John McCain, and several other US senators visited the MEK leadership “at their displaced persons camp in Albania. McCain told Maryam Rajavi, the MEK leader, that ‘Someday, Iran will be free’”. This relationship was not surprising, given their mutual enemy in Iran, but it is interesting, considering MEK’s Marxist origin, its attacks on Americans in Iran throughout the 1970s prior to the revolution, and its close alliance with Saddam Hussein.}

From the Middle East Forum, in 2025: “It is a mistake, however, to interpret ethnicity in Iran the same way as in the United States or Europe. In Iran, ethnicity is fluid, especially among larger ethnic groups like the Azeris who assimilate and inter-marry more…Relatedly, the Azeris who performatively call themselves pan-Turkic reveal their actual allegiances at national [football] games when they support Iran during matches with Azerbaijan or Turkey….While some analysts in Washington—mostly those who rely on Azerbaijani patronage—exaggerate Azeri nationalism in Iran, they ignore an inconvenient truth: Not only is Khamenei part Azeri, but the most brutal unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is overwhelmingly staffed by ethnic Azeri officers and rank-and-file. The Iranian regime regularly uses their Azeri Revolutionary Guardsmen to crush Kurdish dissent in northwestern Iran, because Khamenei knows that the Azeris will be more brutal in their attacks on Kurds (and other minorities) than the predominantly Persian units would be”.
Alireza Farshi, whose father was killed in the Iran-Iraq War, is in prison currently, for protesting in favour of teaching schoolchildren in Azeri Turkish in northwest Iran’s Azeri provinces.

The IRGC commander in chief from 1981-1997, Mohsen Rezaee (who was removed from the job by president Khatami, and who more recently was runner up in the 2021 presidential elections, losing to Raisi), and his successor from 1997-2007, Yahya Safavi (who put down 1999 student protests, which had been supportive of Khatami’s reform movement), and his successor from 2007-2019, Mohammad Ali, are all alive today. But Ali’s successor, Hossein Salami, was killed by Israel this year. Rezaee is from Iran’s ethnic Lur minority, as was IRGC Quds force commander Qassem Soleimani. Safavi is Azeri.
The 1979 Kurdish rebellion in Iran “was one of the largest nationwide uprisings in the country against the new state following the Iranian Revolution. The Kurdish rebellion began in mid-March, just two months after the Revolution ended, and was one of the most intense Kurdish rebellions in modern Iran”, according to Wikipedia.
Notes from A Few Years Back: 1979

Others believed Shia revolutionaries in Iran were behind the siege [of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, in 1979]. This may have led to an uprising in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where the country’s Shia minority population lives and most Saudi oil is located. People there had been attempting to celebrate Ashura on November 25, the major holiday for Shia that had been mostly prohibited in Saudi Arabia. A week later, during that same Ashura, Iran held a referendum to ratify the constitution of its new Islamic Republic, which Khomeini had declared following his success in an earlier referendum held in March

1979 was also the year in which Israel first attempted to prevent a rival country, Iraq, from developing nuclear power. In April, in southern France, Israeli agents used explosives to sabotage a reactor that was about to be shipped to Iraq. A little over a year later, in Paris, they assassinated an Egyptian scientist who was leading Iraq’s nuclear programme…Finally, Israel attacked the Iraqi reactor directly in 1981.

Iran too carried out a significant assassination in Paris in December 1979, killing Shahriar Shafiq, a son of the Shah’s twin sister. Shafiq had been the highest-ranking royal in the Iran military, and the last to leave Iran during the revolution. In Paris in 1980, the Iranians also attempted to kill Shapour Bakhtiar, the last pre-revolutionary prime minister of Iran. He had been an opponent both of the Shah’s regime and of Khomeini. That attempt was a failure, but they later did assassinate him in Paris in 1991.

…Less than a year after the Shia-inhabited oil-rich Eastern Province uprising in Saudi Arabia, a kind of mirror-image event occurred in Iran’s Arab-inhabited oil-rich Khuzestan province, during the Iranian revolution.

According to Wikipedia, “On 22 September 2018, a military parade was attacked by armed gunmen in the southwestern Iranian city of Ahvaz [Khuzestan’s capital]. The shooters killed 25 people, including soldiers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and civilian bystanders It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Iran since the [Balochi] Chabahar suicide bombing in December 2010 [and the deadliest unrest in Khuzestan since 2005]. The parade was part of an annual commemoration known as the Sacred Defence Week commemorating the start of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980. It included the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps marching along Quds [Jerusalem] Boulevard in Ahvaz. Five gunmen began shooting at the parade from a nearby park on 22 September 2018 at 09:00 local time wearing military uniforms and disguised as Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Basiji…The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack and released purported photos of the attackers.Fars News Agency, described by news media to be a “semi-official” news agency of the Government of Iran, published a video threatening the capitals of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with missile attacks by showing a graphic video of rifle scope closing in into the two cities. The video was published as Khamenei blamed Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for the attack”. Iran and the Houthis in Yemen (who have been fighting the Saudis since 2015) carried out a significant attack on Saudi oil facilities ^{one year later}^.

According to Kyle Orton, “the aftermath of the 2018 Ahvaz attack was quite similar to what happened after the Shah Cheragh attack in 2022, in terms of the doubt that the Islamic State was really responsible, and the waters were muddied further when the separatist Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz initially took responsibility, only to repudiate the claim soon after…The only other Islamic State attack there has been in Iran was on 7 June 2017, when two Islamic State suicide bombers blew themselves up at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini [in Tehran], and gunmen shot up the nearby Majles (parliament). The twin attacks killed at least twelve people and wounded forty-two.” (Those 2017 terror attacks occurred a day after the beginning of the crisis between the Saudis and Qataris–the latter backed by Turkey and Iran–and two days before the destruction of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, where, among other things, the Islamic State declared their caliphate in 2014, during Iraq’s Battle of Mosul).

Protests also occurred in Khuzestan in April 2011, during the Arab Spring and on the anniversary of the province’s 2005 unrest. The Arab Spring in general impacted Iran in a number of ways: First, it risked spreading into Iran, not just via Arabs in Khuzestan but also through unrest in the country at large, which was already in the middle of its Green Movement protests. Second, it led to the Syrian civil war, in which Bashar al Assad was forced to rely on support from Iran, Hezbollah, and Russian. It also caused the ouster of President Saleh in Yemen, which became an Iranian-Saudi proxy war, eventually leading to Saudi and Emirati military intervention in 2015. Finally, it led Saudi Arabia and the UAE to send forces to Bahrain – an island claimed by Iran until 1971 – in order to assist Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy against protestors from its Shia majority.

According to the Washington Institute, this may have contributed to the failed 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington and then bomb both the Saudi and Israeli embassies: “The deployment of Bahraini Defense Force tanks, backed by Saudi Arabian and UAE forces, caused shock and anger among Bahraini Shi`a and among the Shi`a leadership and people of Iran and of Iraq. There is some indication that the Iranian leaders regretted not being in a position to support the Bahraini Shi`a in what might have been a decisive political action against the Sunni monarchy. It was reportedly right after the 2011 protests that Arbabsiar [one of the two Iranian nationals charged in the plot] presented himself to his cousin, a senior Quds Force official, and that the Quds Force began planning the assassination of the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir. Gholam Shakuri, the IRGC-Quds Force officer identified by one of the plotters as being in charge of the operation, is believed by Saudi intelligence to have met with a radical Bahraini Shi`a cleric in Beirut in early 2011 before the operation began.”

Tensions with Saudi Arabia continued, even after the emergence of ISIS and its conquest of Mosul in Iraq in June 2014, and after the Iran nuclear deal pushed by Obama was signed in 2015:

In 2017, according to this same book, “the Saudis financed the birth of Iran International, a first-class television channel with a multi-billion dollar budget, headquartered in London and operated by Iranian exiles”.

^{From 2005-2013, during almost the entirety of the second oil price boom, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iran’s president, the first non-cleric to hold the position since 1981. (Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon, is the second). Ahmadinejad took on the Reformer camp–backed by Khamenei in doing so–but afterwards clashed intensely with Khamenei. Ahmadinejad’s close ally and son’s-wife’s-father Esfandiar Rahim Mashei tried to succeed him in the next election, but was prevented by Khamenei (via the Guardianship Council) and arrested in 2018 . Mashei, born in 1960, is yet another story of his generation rising through the Iran-Iraq war:}^“Mashei started his career at the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit where he joined in 1981 at 21 years old. In 1984, during the Iran–Iraq War, Mashaei joined the intelligence ministry in Kurdistan province and founded the Guards’s intelligence branch in the province. There he met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then governor (at the age of 37) of the northwestern city of Khoy…Mashaei married a former member of the People’s Mujahedin in the 1980s. Mashaei’s daughter married the former President Ahmadinejad’s oldest son in 2008.” These sorts of connections via marriage are common: Ahmadinejad’s predecessor Khatami, for example, was married to Musa al Sadr’s niece, while Khatami’s brother was married to Khomeini’s granddaughter.
This may be oversimplistic but, according to Wikipedia, Iran ranks second in proven gas reserves and fourth or fifth in proven oil reserves. Iran ranks sixteenth in the size of its working age population and eighth in primary energy production. Only China, US, Russia, and India rank ahead of Iran in both energy production and working-age population size. As of 2016 Iran had the fifth highest number of STEM graduates, behind these same four countries. A significant majority of new STEM graduates in Iran are women.
Iran’s tertiary school enrollment rates are “higher than in countries like Italy, Japan, or the United Kingdom, and twice as high as the global average. (Tertiary gross enrollment rates as reported by UNESCO.)… Reflective of the tremendous growth [in college enrollment], Iran has become home to two of the largest mega universities in the world. Iran’s massive Islamic Azad University system enrolls more than 1.7 million students. The country’s second-largest university, Payam-e-Nour University, enrolls an additional 940,000 students. Together, these two institutions alone enroll more students than the entire 2014 tertiary level student population of the country of France.” STEM subjects, especially engineering, are the most commonly studied by Iranian students.
by Ariane Bonzon in Le Monde: “The following year (2019), Israel, Cyprus, Egypt and Greece launched the East Mediterranean Gas Forum, a shared platform for the region’s suppliers, transporters and buyers of gas. The move was greeted with shock in the presidential palace in Ankara: Turkey’s prospects of becoming an energy hub were receding. ‘It was at this point that the Turkish government realised how isolated it was. In order to prevent Libya from joining the group, it signed a military cooperation agreement and a maritime boundary treaty with Tripoli,’ explains Evren Balta, international relations professor at Özyeğin University, Istanbul.
At the Negev summit in March 2022, the flags of Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, US, Morocco and Israel flew side by side. Saudi Arabia and the UAE had reestablished relations with Qatar, an ally of Turkey. A new Middle East seemed to be taking shape – one from which Turkey might find itself excluded. ‘Erdoğan took the initiative in the move towards normalisation,’ Liel explains. ‘The Abraham accords [2020] changed his way of seeing things: he understood that they significantly improved Israel’s position in the Middle East.’ In September 2023 Erdoğan and Netanyahu met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, and a visit to Ankara by the Israeli prime minister was planned. The Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 therefore came just as Turkey was preparing to normalise relations with Israel.

…By demanding sanctions against Tel Aviv at the same time as the closing of an American radar station at Kürecik used by the Israelis and even for Turkish troops to be sent to Gaza, the New Welfare Party (YRP) led by Fatih Erbakan (the son of Erdoğan’s former mentor) is gaining a growing following – including within AKP ranks. Refusing to ally with the YRP, Erdoğan is critical of the popularity of his Islamist rival, which obtained nearly 7% of the vote in elections in March 2024, depriving the AKP of two cities it had previously held”.
This year will be the 80th anniversary of the 1946 Iran crisis, often regarded as the first conflict in the Cold War. Later, the Korean War, the first major war fought directly between the US and its Cold War rivals, ended in a stalemate in July 1953 – only a few weeks before the infamous coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosadegh on August 19, orchestrated by the US and Britain. A week before the coup, the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon (boosted fission) was detonated. One day after the coup, on the eve of Eid al-Adha at the end of Ramadan, France forced the sultan of Morocco, Mohammed V, into exile in Corsica, replacing him with his first cousin once removed. (In a somewhat similar manner, Britain and the Soviet Union put the Shah on the throne, when only 22 years old, in place of his father, after their joint invasion of Iran in 1941). Moroccan nationalists and terror attacks led France to recall the sultan a year later, who then negotiated with France and Spain to gain Morocco’s independence. Around the same time, an Algerian protest in July 1953 in Paris was violently put down by the police, in the leadup to the Algerian war of independence against France, which began the following year. France also lost its war in Vietnam in 1954; Eisenhower’s domino theory speech and the start of US aid to anti-Communist forces in Vietnam was in August 1953 – again, the same month as the coup in Iran.
August 1953 also saw Ariel Sharon lead a raid into Egyptian-controlled Gaza, in which 20-30 Palestinians were killed, before the Qibya massacre in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank in October. Egypt’s monarchy had been abolished two months earlier, a year after the Egyptian revolution, led by officers Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdul Nasser. (“In late 1953, Nasser accused Naguib of supporting the recently outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and of harboring dictatorial ambitions”, then forced him out of office).This led to the 1956 Suez Crisis, when, unlike in the Iranian coup, the US backed Nasser, restraining the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt.
In Jordan, Hussein began his 46-year rule as king in 1953, following his father’s abdication and his grandfather’s assassination by a Palestinian gunman at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque in 1951. In Syria, military strongman Adib Shishkali was overthrown in February 1954, by Hashim al Attassi, who was backed in large part by Druze officers. (Shishkali was killed a decade later by a Druze assassin in Brazil). In Israel, diplomatic relations with its former ally the Soviet Union were severed after a Jewish terror group bombed the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv, one month before Stalin’s death in March 1953, in response to Stalin’s anti-Jewish Doctors’ Plot. In Saudi Arabia, the kingdom’s founder and long-time ruler Abdulaziz Ibn Saud died in November 1953. He died a month after oil workers in the Eastern Province, at US-owned Saudi Aramco, began the country’s first significant labour strike.
A larger labour dispute, in East Germany in June 1953, turned into a mass uprising against the regime, the first to occur in Europe’s Communist bloc, leading to a violent crackdown by Soviet forces.
Finally, two last excerpts from Alex Vatanka’s book The Battle of the Ayatollah’s in Iran:

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9 Nov 202428 May 2025

USA

8 Nov 202426 Nov 2024

Guest Post: Political Turnover Rate in the United States

Here’s another excellent guest post from the Vacuous Wastrel:

Political Turnover Rate in the United States

America is, like a lot of democracies, a two-party country, more or less. There’s one party, and then there’s the other party, and people tend to consistently vote for one or for the other and that’s just how it is and always has been. Nothing special there. As I say, it’s common. It reflects in part the simple plurality (or ‘first past the post’) electoral system, which privileges the two largest parties, but also to a large extent the social cleavages within the nation.

That’s why most countries (not all, but most) with multi-party systems in practice tend most of the time have those parties line up in two blocs – one of the left, and one of the right, although in individual countries local issues may also play a role in defining how the blocs see themselves, and how they compete. [Long-term additional parties or blocs likewise tend to reflect additional cleavages – regional parties that reflect differences in national or ethnic identity, for example]

As a result of parties being based on underlying cleavages, parties tend to be static: the same people, and the same places, keep on voting for the same parties, or their successor parties. There are parts of the UK that have voted Conservative (or, before that, Tory) every election since the 1830s.

But parties aren’t fixed in stone, and the biggest example of that is the US (perhaps in part because historically both major parties were broadly ‘liberal’ middle-class parties, more flexible than the labour parties, agrarian parties or religious parties, or even conservative parties, found in most other democracies). It’s well known that the US has gone through several different ‘party systems’, in which its parties had different names, or drew from different bases of support, or competed on very different issues. What that means on the ground is that areas have gone from supporting one party to supporting another.

And that, excuse the longwindedness, is what I’ve just been intrigued by. How far do you have to go back before all the states in the US voted differently from how they do now? How often has such a complete turnover occurred? How quickly does it occur?

This isn’t an academic study, it’s just me looking at some historical election results. There are ambiguities around the edges, mostly around how you define which parties are the successors to which earlier parties – I’ve taken an inclusive, common sense line on succession, because I’m interested in real changes in voting, not just party rebrandings. And for my purposes here, I’m defining a “turnover” or “transition” as a period of time from Year X to Year Y, inclusive, when every state had been admitted to the union by Year X had voted for two different parties by Year Y – which means that during that time, no states (other than those that entered the union during that period) remained loyal to a single party. And the turnovers that have occurred are:

1: 1789 – 1820: the Connecticut / Delaware Transition

This one is nice and clear cut: in 1789, every single state voted for Washington’s Federalists; in 1820, every single state voted for Monroe’s Democratic-Republicans. I’ve called this the Connecticut/Delaware Transition, because those are the only two states that didn’t vote D-R in 1804 – the country was, as it were, kept waiting for those two states to switch allegiance. Because these transition periods are about both change and continuity: change in that across the period all states changed their votes, but continuity because they are defined by the end of a state’s loyalty – in this case, Connecticut and Delaware voted Federalist every election up to, but not including, 1820. This example turns out to be commonplace: often transitions revolve around a big wave election like 1804, with just a few loyal states that are then picked off more slowly later on.

2: 1796 – 1860: the Virginia Transition

The one-party state established during the C/D Transition eventually broke down. And by ‘eventually’, I mean the very next election, in 1824, when four different candidates ran, all nominally as Democratic-Republicans – the two new parties, the Democrats and the National Republicans, were only formalised for the 1828 cycle. I’ve chosen to consider the Democrats as the successor party to the D-Rs – the Democrat Jackson was the candidate with the most votes in 1828 (though he lost the election when the House settled on his rival, John Quincy Adams, instead), and the self-declared ‘Old Republicans’, who wanted to restore the perceived traditional values of the party, eventually sided with the Democrats, rather than with the National Republicans.

This transition therefore represents the loss of dominance by the D-R/Democratic Party and the rise of a sequence of new parties – National Republicans, Whigs, and finally Republicans. Virginia was the final hold-out, voting the same way for 64 years, before finally voting for the Constitutional Union Party on the eve of the civil war – it would take until 1872 before they finally went the whole way and voted Republican.

3: 1820-1868: the Alabama Transition

This transition can be seen as an extension of the second: it exists because several states entered the union after 1796, including a couple that would prove faithfully Democratic for decades: Missouri and Alabama. Missouri finally voted Republican in 1864, when Alabama was in secession; Alabama joined it the next cycle. The period represents the transition to a Republican-dominant system after the civil war.

4: 1828 – 1912: the Massachusetts Transition

The third transition may have left the Republicans dominant, but the Democrats were able to recover, and even to pick off traditionally Republican states. The transition ended with the unusual election of 1912: with the Republicans split into two parties, the Democrats under Wilson were able to make sweeping gains, including finally grabbing the Republican stronghold of Massachusetts, which had voted Republican (and before that Whig, and before that National Republican, and before that for the Adams faction) since 1828.

5: 1836 – 1964: the Vermont Transition

In the middle of the 20th century, power swung dramatically backward and forward, with the Democrats scoring crushing victories in 1932 and 1936, and Republicans doing likewise in 1928, 1952, and 1956. But each wave broke against the shores of the same enemy strongholds: the Democrat south and the Republican northeast. The final breakthrough didn’t come until LBJ’s sweeping victory in 1964, which finally knocked out the Republicans everywhere except, ironically, the south, and Arizona.

In the short term, the shift of the southern states to the Republicans looked more striking – but the southern states had already all voted Republican before, mostly in the aftermath of the civil war. The real hold-out was Vermont, which had been loyal to the Republicans (etc) since 1836. Remarkably, the only reason which this transition was so ‘short’ was that Vermont in 1832 had voted for the Anti-Masonic Party – the state had never actually voted Democrat before.

6: 1876 – 1968: the Arkansas Transition

Here’s the one that symbolises the loss of the Democrat south. After the initial post-civil-war confusion, the south went back to being soundly Democrat until the time of LBJ. Many southern states flipped in 1964, but Arkansas lasted until 1968, when it voted for Wallace’s American Independents. It went the whole way and voted Republican in 1972, not quite making it to the century mark…

7: 1952 – 1996: the Arizona Transition

While all that business with the south and the northeast was going on, something else had changed: Arizona, which had swung to the Democrats with FDR, swung back in the high-water Republican election of 1952. It wasn’t pried out of their hands again until Clinton’s re-election in 1996 (and that was a one-off). It’s actually a slightly bigger deal than it might seem: the most loyal of Eisenhower’s states in the far west (that is, the only one not to vote for Johnson in ’64), even its temporary loss is emblematic of the gradual transition of those Eisenhower states from Republican to Democrat: Washington and Oregon switched in ’88, California in ’92, and Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico have all become active states again. Montana and Arizona have both toyed with the Democrats, leaving only Utah and Idaho as loyal Eisenhower states (since ’64). And I guess Wyoming.

8: 1968 – ? : the Western Transition

We don’t know how long this transition will last, but I’m guessing it may take a while. The interesting thing is that the Republican stronghold this time (and this transition will be a matter of eroding Republican support – the current Democratic strongholds weren’t established until later) isn’t, in historical terms at least, the South at all, despite popular perception. The Southern states have already betrayed the Republicans: en masse to vote for Carter, and then piecemeal to vote for Clinton.

Instead, the historical core of Republican support in this transition has been in the west: the Wilkie states (that emerged as a bloc voting for Wilkie and then Dewey against Roosevelt and Truman) of Kansas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota, plus the remaining Eisenhower states of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Plus Oklahoma, which also swung with Eisenhower but doesn’t really fit. Plus Alaska, which didn’t vote until 1960, but can probably be considered an Eisenhower state. All nine states went Democrat for Johnson in ’64, but switched back in ’68 and have never looked back. Not until all nine have voted Democrat at least once will the current transition be complete.

These nine states, with a combined population of 17.7 million in 2024, have voted the same way (Republican) in 15 consecutive elections, starting in 1968 and including 2024

Note: due to the way these transitions are calculated, for each starting year after one of the years listed above, there is a complete turnover by the end-point of the last-listed transition. Put plainly: the 1789 and 1792 situations were both completely turned over by 1820; the 1796, 1800, 1804, 1808, 1812 and 1816 situations were all turned over by 1860; 1820 and 1824 were both turned over by 1868; the elections from 1828 to 1836 were all turned over by 1912, and so on. And conversely, because the current unfinished cycle began in 1968, that means that 1964 is the most recent election outside this cycle – that is, since 1964 every state has voted both ways, but that is not the case since 1968.

From this we can calculate the slowest and quickest turnovers. The electoral map in 1836 was not completely overturned until 1964, a record 128 years of relative stability [other strongholds during this time included Alabama and Mississippi (minus some Reconstruction-era elections) and Georgia (minus a flirtation with the Whigs in the 1840s) for the Democrats, and Maine (again, minus some confusion in the 1840s) for the Whigs/Republicans]. At the other end of the spectrum, the quickest total turnover was between 1948 and 1968 – specifically, only 5 states didn’t vote the opposite way in 1956 and 1964, and two of those (West Virginia and Kentucky) flipped twice those eight years (the only three that stayed loyal through that crisis were North Carolina and Arkansas for the Democrats and Arizona for the Republicans). Three turnovers of less than 20 years were only narrowly avoided: only one state (Arizona) voted the same way for every election from 1956 to 1968, and only two states (Arizona and Massachusetts) voted the same way in 1964-1972.

Anyway, cut out some smaller overlapping transitions and this method gives you three grand cycles: 1789-1820; 1824-1872; 1872-1964; 1968-now. This takes us back to the beginning of this post, because those line up fairly decently with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd/4th/5th and 6th party systems (though this model has the 3rd starting a little later, once the system really gets fixed in place, rather than when the Republican Party is officially founded). Interestingly, the normal debate is about whether the 5th and 6th are really separate (and if so when the break occurred), whereas under these definitions that distinction is unavoidable, and the questions are really about the 3rd, 4th and 5th systems…

Those nine Republican-voting states, plus Minnesota, have voted the same way since 1976. (In 1972 Minnesota voted for Nixon, its only Republican vote for president since 1956. In 1984, Minnesota was the only state in the country *not* to vote for Reagan. Reagan’s 1984 opponent Mondale had been a Senator representing Minnesota (and later was Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President), and he still only got 4000 or so more votes there than Reagan did)

14 states have voted the same way since 1980, still all Republican except for Minnesota

20 states have voted the same way since 1988, when Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, having voted for Reagan in 1984 (and in 1980, except for Hawaii and Rhode Island), did not vote for George Bush Sr.

5 Jun 20241 Dec 2025

Fertility Rates in Utopia

If constraints of wealth and health ever become dramatically reduced, would fertility rates still remain below replacement levels?

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In a short period of time (relative to the length of human history), a tiny difference in fertility rates can lead to an enormous difference in population. If for example there were to be a sustained average fertility rate of 2.15 children per mother, the world’s population could reach about 70 billion by the year 3000*. Yet a slightly lower average fertility rate, of 2.05 children per mother, could bring the world population down below one billion – back to mid-19th century levels – over that same span of time. Keep extrapolating to the year 4000 and this minuscule difference in fertility rates would determine whether our population falls back into the millions or rises improbably (or impossibly) to the trillions.

Blue: human population size over the last 100,000 years, very roughly speaking (showing the Agricultural Revolution approximately 10,000 years ago); Red: human population size going forward* with a fertility rate of 2.15 children per mother on average; Orange: human population size in the future with a slightly lower average fertility rate of 2.05 children per mother

Put another way: if you were to extrapolate the current total fertility rates of the Dominican Republic (approximately 2.15) and Jamaica (2.05), then about two thousand years from now the world could have billions of Dominicans but only hundreds of Jamaicans

(*Hypothetically. And depending on a few other factors as well, such as infant mortality rates, average lifespans, and the ratio between male and female children. And assuming I didn’t bungle that math).

Obviously, fertility rates in the future won’t be the same in all places and all times. But considering the decisive effect that even a 0.1 difference in fertility rates could have over the course of a single millennium, it seems interesting to consider what fertility rates might become in the future, if the recent relationship between rising levels of wealth and falling numbers of children were to break down.

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During the past fifty years, the world’s fertility rate has fallen from an average of approximately 4.6 children per woman in 1972 to an average of 2.3 children per woman today. In the next few years the world’s average may reach replacement levels (~2.1, in countries with low infant mortality rates and a relatively balanced ratio between boy and girl children) outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are currently estimated to be 4.7. Even some of the most conservative of wealthy societies, such as American Mormons or Gulf-monarchy Arabs or religious (but not Orthodox) Israeli Jews, are approaching or have already reached replacement levels.

Many countries now have fertility rates as low as 0.8 (South Korea, the world’s lowest) – 1.8 (France, Europe’s highest). Fertility rates in the US and Brazil are both around 1.7. In Japan and much of Europe they are around 1.4. China’s fertility rate is somewhere between 1 and 1.7 (but probably closer to 1), down from 2.7 when it began its one-child policy in 1979, and down from 6 a decade before that, during the middle of the Cultural Revolution. India’s fertility rate is roughly 2.2, down from 5.2 when its own mass sterilization program began in 1975. Northeast China, China’s rust belt, a region of 110 million people, may have a fertility rate as low as 0.55!

To a certain extent, the relationship between high income and low fertility has already begun to break down. Northeast China, a relatively poor part of what is still a relatively poor country, is only the most extreme example of this. Many of the world’s medium-income and low-income countries now have fertility rates that are nearly as low as, or lower than, those in rich countries. With the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa and a few small Pacific island states like Samoa, only two countries, Afghanistan and Yemen, remain above a 3.5 fertility rate.

Even in Africa, 16 countries’ fertility rates are thought to have fallen below 3.5. Ethiopia, the second most populous African country, is estimated to have a fertility rate of 3.9. The world’s biggest outliers by far are Nigeria at 5.2 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo at 5.8; they rank third and eighth in the world in fertility rates, respectively. Yet even they are now down to where the world’s average fertility rate was in the 1950s. (Nigeria’s official population size, of about 235 million, may also be overstating its actual population size by many tens of millions of people. It’s not actually known how many people live in Nigeria; the country’s censuses have been politicized). Niger, a country with a much smaller population than Nigeria or the D.R. Congo, may now be the world’s lone holdout above 6.

That is still much higher than any rich country, of course. Apart from Israel, where the fertility rate is 3, no high-income country now has a fertility rate that is above 2.2. And even Israel’s is mainly due to Arab-Israeli and especially Ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations. The secular Israeli Jewish fertility rate is only 2.2, and it was below 2 for most of the 1990s and 2000s.

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All this is remarkable, but it does not necessarily tell us what the future may hold; certainly not the long-term future. Just as fertility may be falling in part because of how expensive kids are – in terms of time, money, real estate, food, physical exertion, etc. – it could perhaps become higher again if humanity eventually becomes richer in all these things. If we are lucky and the future is one of abundance, in health and in wealth and in the time to spend both, it could plausibly result in an abundance of children as well, at least in comparison to today’s levels.

To put it somewhat simplistically: if we were all multi-millionaires, what would our average fertility rate be?

The obvious place to look for clues here is at the current fertility rates of the world’s richest people. But there are a few snags. I wasn’t able to find any estimates for the current fertility rates of millionaires or billionaires. (There is some good information on the topic of income and fertility here though, in an article by the demographer Lyman Stone). But even if those numbers were easily searchable, they still would not be proof of what might happen if everyone in society were rich. Today’s rich often became so by being workaholics. Even the heirs and heiresses with inherited wealth probably feel pressure to emulate their fortune-building parents or grandparents and the rest of society around them. Whereas if almost everyone in society was rich, societal values could perhaps shift to a certain extent away from work, and towards family-building.

At the moment however, there are no such societies. The richest economies in the world today, like Norway or Switzerland or Alberta or the Gulf Arab mini-monarchies, are nowhere near being ultra-rich. All of their average incomes are well under 100,000 dollars, and that money is of course not evenly distributed throughout their populations. The two major Gulf monarchies, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have fertility rates of roughly 1.4 and 2.2, respectively. (The minority of the Gulf states’ population who are actually citizens, rather than migrant workers, have higher fertility rates, between 2 and 3). Norway and Switzerland both have fertility rates around 1.5. Alberta and Saskatchewan, where after-tax incomes have been very high and housing has been cheap (by Canadian standards), have fertility rates between 1.5 and 2, which is high for Canada but still below replacement levels. Nearby South Dakota, a high-income, low-cost-of-living state, has the highest fertility rate in the US, at 2. Texas has the highest of any large state in the country, about 1.8.

Still, it may be worth keeping in mind that most parents who have only one child would usually prefer to have at least two, but hold back only because of major constraints having to do with wealth or health. If you were to lift those constraints, it is not hard to imagine that a 2-child family would become the norm, or that families with 3 or more children would become very common again as well.

Even today, among people who are parents in their forties in the US, nearly twice as many have 2 children as have only 1 child. (In Europe, by contrast, roughly half of all families with children are 1-child families). 41 percent say they see 3 or more children as ideal, though admittedly that is just a poll. Considering these preferences, it is not impossible to imagine a rich country getting back to above the replacement rate*. Especially if there continue to be significant advancements in birth science, or if there are economic changes that make it easier for most people to afford fertility treatments, childcare, or housing.

The Israeli example might be somewhat instructive here. Not only is the 6.5 fertility rate of Ultra-Orthodox Israelis arguably made viable (as many secular Israelis will tell you) by the fact that the rest of Israeli society is wealthy enough to subsidize it, but even the secular Israeli Jewish fertility is slightly above replacement levels. This might be partly a result of nationalism, given recent Jewish history and Israel’s sense of embattlement. Nevertheless, if Israel today can have a fertility rate of 3, and secular Jewish Israelis 2.2, then we cannot rule out that future countries far richer and more technologically advanced than Israel could have above-replacement fertility rates too.

—

A century from now, things are going incredibly well, as you can see by the nice picture above. Our population has fallen back below 6 billion for the first time since the 1990s. People have healthy and delicious food and drink, childcare and medical care, supportive communities and loving families, good health well into their senior years, effective fertility treatments, cities where children and adults no longer risk getting crushed to death by automobiles, maybe even (if we’re really lucky) cheap high-quality lab-grown meat and long-range electric aircraft. Each person has at least 1000 square feet of housing for themselves. China has become liberal, America economical. The whole world has become rich and peaceful, and we have stopped massively polluting and harming natural environments.

Life is good; surprisingly good, considering all the dangers and damages we faced and caused in the preceding centuries. But the fertility rate has recently reached above replacement as a result of this success, for the first time in several generations. It’s reached above 2.1; it might even be inching up towards 3, back to where countries like the US and Canada were in the 1960s, or Israel and Saudi Arabia were in the 2010s. People really love having kids, it turns out. Lots of people are having lots of them. Even in this magnificent future, Malthus’ question remains: will population growth eventually outpace our ability to provide ourselves with that growth’s necessities? And how rapidly might it do so?

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Maybe these aren’t actually such dismal questions. There are worse things to worry about than what to do about overpopulating utopia: we’ll be lucky if we get there in the first place. But it is interesting to consider that even in this best-case scenario — assuming that more outlandish outcomes such as outer space expansion are either impracticable or undesirable — our economic success might lead relatively quickly to a point where it becomes self-limiting. Hopefully, at some point before this scenario occurs, whether in this century or later ones, we will manage to live very well with one another, and with animals and other living things, while having fertility rates at or below replacement levels.

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Additional Notes:

_{Replacement-level fertility rates are higher in countries with high infant mortality, or which practice sex-selective abortion in favour of boy babies. In rich countries the replacement-rate is estimated to be 2.1, with about 0.3 of that 2.1 being the result of infant mortality and 0.7 being the result of there naturally being more boys born than girls. Currently, for the world as a whole, the replacement rate is estimated to be 2.25 children per mother.}
_{*Imagine a country where 55% of women have 2 children, 15% have no children, 20% have 3 children, 9% have 4 children and 1% has more than 4 children. This imaginary country would have a fertility rate just above 2.1. Or imagine that 40% of women have 2 children, 30% have 3 children, 20% have no children (which is roughly the rate in the US and Canada today, which are among the countries where childlessness is most common), 9% have 4 children and 1% have more than 4 children. Again, that’s a fertility rate just above 2.1. Does anything like these breakdowns seem likely to happen in the real world? Maybe not. (And obviously there will not actually be any countries where 0% of mothers have only one child). But I think this thought experiment might help show that getting back above replacement levels is not so far-fetched that it can be ruled out.}

_{You could of course also look for the real breakdowns from countries that are above replacement rate today, or were above it in the past, to get a sense of what a plausible above-replacement distribution might look like. Indonesia, for example, is estimated to have a 2.1 replacement rate today. The US last had above-replacement fertility levels in 2006-2007, and before that in 1971. I looked for, but couldn’t find, the family size data for these cases.}

_{This chart above, from the demographer Lyman Stone, shows age-specific fertility rates in the US over time. Not surprisingly, it shows that the big drops have been for young people: 25 year olds started having a lot fewer children in the 1960s, 20 year olds had drops in the 1960s and again in the 2010s, and 15 year olds had a drop in the 1990s and 2000s. 30, 35, and 40 year olds meanwhile have been rising. And because people in their thirties and forties tend to have higher incomes than people in their teens and twenties, this is another specific case where people with higher incomes have higher fertility than people with lower incomes, in spite of the fact that the total fertility rate of the US has fallen while the country’s average income has risen.}
_{A few more charts from Lyman’s article, with his quotes:}

_{US total fertility rates and income percentile, by group}
_{Maybe a greater trouble arising in this sort of futuristic prosperity would be from a rising inequality of family size. A couple who has, say, 5 children, and then the 5 children average 2 children of their own, and then the grandchildren all average 2 children as well, could end up as an old man and wife in a clan with over 70 members. And this is not counting the dozens or even hundreds of great-great-grandchildren who they might live to see if they started having their children at a young age, or if they live to a very old age.} _{Meanwhile, people who have no children, or just one child, might instead be part of the same small types of families that have become the norm in recent years and decades. It could therefore become very common for there to be huge differences in the numbers of living descendants that people have. Whether or not this would be a problem is interesting to imagine.}

_{This type of inequality could also take place at the level of nations, if some places achieve very great prosperity earlier than others. This has already happened to a degree in recent decades, where countries like the United States now enjoy much higher levels of wealth and much higher fertility than countries like China. China’s fertility rates went from above those of the US in the 1990s to well below those of the US in the 2020s, even as China’s rapidly rising per capita wealth still greatly lags that of the rich world. This is also true for other countries in East Asia, such as Thailand, which today has a similarly low fertility rate (1.3) and per capita income as China (about $20,000, adjusted for purchasing power parity). In the future, something like this could perhaps happen to other countries in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa, if fertility rates fall even more than they are expected to in the poorest countries, or if they surprise everybody by reversing direction and rising again in the richest ones.}

_{Where nationalistic fertility efforts are concerned, it is the Hungarian government that has of late put forward the largest financial incentives to mothers in an attempt to push up its fertility rates. So far these efforts have been fairly unsuccessful – Hungary’s fertility rate is 1.5, and has not changed very much in recent years. But it is early days yet, and there has been a pandemic, and Hungary is not a very wealthy country. (Hungary’s wealthier neighbour the Czech Republic, which has had the fastest-rising fertility rate in recent years, has also been growing economically at a faster rate than Hungary or most other countries in Europe). If a richer country, or perhaps a more autocratic country, tried a similar trick, maybe the results would be different.}

_{What might China do, for example, regarding its low fertility rates? China scrapped its urban one-child policy in 2015 in favour of a two-child policy, and then in 2021 raised that to a three-child policy. A month after that it did away with limits on childbirth altogether. But, as in Hungary, it is not clear that these policy changes have been having much of an effect thus far. Whether or not they or other future policies do work to increase the country’s fertility rate will be significant over the course of the next decade, as the younger of China’s two major population cohorts is currently in its thirties (roughly speaking). They still have at least a few years left in which to have kids.}

_{Considering the even lower fertility rates of its richer neighbours like South Korea and Taiwan, it seems unlikely that China’s fertility is going to bounce back much any time soon. Still, we should not be too surprised if it does end up rising, especially if the Chinese government tries hard to make it do so. China still has a far larger share of its population living in rural areas than other countries in Northeast Asia do. China’s new parents today also very often have no siblings themselves, which means that even if they have two kids instead of just one, most of those kids will have four grandparents to help the new parents with childcare. These grandparents are also still relatively young. Most are in their fifties or early sixties rather than in their late sixties or seventies.}

_{On the other hand, if the only children who are now contemplating becoming parents in China and other countries worry that they will be left having to financially provide for their own parents as they get older, they may decide to have fewer kids in order to save more money} _{and have more time and energy available to do so.}

_{In China, and in India too, it might matter not just how many kids parents have, but also how many girls. In both China and India today there are more than 11 boys born for every 10 girls born. That is the highest gender discrepancy at birth in the world (apart from Liechtenstein, a village-sized country), in the two largest countries in the world. Yet obviously it is girls, not boys, who grow up to bear children themselves. Women also tend to live much longer than men. Even in China and India, despite the early prevalence of boys, there are only about 9 male seniors (65 years and older) for every 10 female seniors. In many countries} _{there are twice as many elderly women (85 years and older) as men.}

_{Will these gender discrepancies that exist in China and (northern) India change in the years ahead? It seems plausible that they will, whether because of economic development in India, policy shifts in China (during much of the one-child policy era that recently came to an end, for example, rural Han families were allowed to have two kids only if the first child was a girl; in other words, the policy straightforwardly promoted having an imbalanced gender ratio in favour of boys), or because population aging in China could increase the perceived value of girls, given that it will be daughters and nurses who will tend disproportionately to care for the growing number of elderly people. The government too might decide to work hard towards rebalancing the gender discrepancy, perhaps out of a concern that it will lead to social instability borne of wifelessness.}

_{Wth modern fertility treatments, it is becoming easier and cheaper for parents to select the gender of the child they want; and to do so without resorting to sex-selective abortion. It is not inconceivable that a country could put in place incentives meant to reverse the gender ratio of babies from, say, 55% male (where China and India have been in recent years or decades) to 55% female. But with a population that is 55% female, you would only need a fertility rate of 1.8-1.9 children per mother in order to achieve replacement levels, rather than the normal replacement rate of 2-2.1. If you had a population that is 60% female (the reverse of what some regions of China and India had in recent decades),} _{then the replacement rate would fall to as low as 1.6-1.7. (Going full sci-fi, an 100% female society with no infant mortality could have a replacement level as low as 1). Of course, having such an imbalanced gender ratio might also contribute to reducing the fertility rate – there would be fewer potential dads around – partially offsetting the population-growth impact of there being more women.}

_{(In most countries, by the way, an average of about 52.5% of babies born are male, due to natural causes; boys however also have higher child mortality rates than females do, especially in the poorest countries.} _{In Nigeria for example, an estimated 53% of newborns are male, but only about 51.5% of 15-24-year-olds are male).}

_{Relatedly, average lifespans and health in general also matter to the population growth question. Though they have no direct exponential growth impact, as fertility rates do, they can have a linear impact: more old people can mean more people alive at one time. Perhaps more importantly, they could indirectly influence fertility rates. If you expect to live a long, relatively healthy life, you might become likelier to have more kids than you otherwise would.}
_{True, this has not happened in countries like Japan or South Korea, which have among the highest average lifespans in the world, but low fertility rates. But Japan and South Korea are also extremely urbanized and densely populated, their populations tend to work long hours, and they are not close to being among the very highest income countries, in nominal or purchasing power-adjusted terms. Nor, perhaps, are their lifespans yet as long or as healthy as they will become in the future.}

_{Today, the average lifespan in China, India, and Africa is 77, 70, and 64, respectively, whereas many high and medium-income countries have average lifespans of 80. (Japan is #1 at 84.3, the US is #40 at 78.4). If the world average lifespan were to rise from 72.7 today to 88 (which is the current average lifespan of women in Japan), that could lead to a significant increase in the world’s population over time, if fertility rates do not continue falling.}

_{As for the worry that the most extreme religious groups will keep up their extremely high fertility rates – sorry to bring up Ultra-Orthodox Israelis again, but their fertility rates are higher than even any country in Sub-Saharan Africa – I don’t know how likely it is that these high fertility rates will actually manage to be sustained over the course of the coming generations. It would take a number of generations of extrapolating current demographic trends for a religious population like the Ultra-Orthodox to become a majority of the population in a country like Israel, and before that happens it is perhaps more likely that economic developments will help make ultra-religious people have lower fertility rates than they do today.}

_{Fertility rates among the most religious groups could fall because of increased exposure to secular society, or because of economic scarcity within the rapidly growing ultra-religious population. (Not for nothing was Malthus a clergyman). This scarcity could occur in absolute terms because of rapid population growth within the religious group, but it could also grow in relative terms, when compared to increasingly wealthy secular societies.}

_{Invoking the Israeli example one final time, one can see that all of this has probably already been happening in recent years. Religious fertility rates have been falling, the amount of exposure to secular society within religious society has been rising, and economic scarcity within religious society has in many cases been rising both in absolute terms and relative to the increasingly wealthy secular or religious (rather than ultra-religious) populations.}

_{Perhaps the extreme scenarios that are likelier to occur in the future are ones that take place on the smaller scale of the religious cult, rather than the larger scale of an entire religious movement. A cult, whether of the new-age or old-school variety, could decide to try to use the (hypothetical) wealth and technology of the future to try and have as many children as possible, for as many generations as possible.}

_{I don’t know how likely this actually is, but if for example a new fertility cult of, say, 1000 couples each were to have ten children over the course of three generations, it would grow to more than 120,000 members (assuming nobody were to leave the group or die during this time, and that new spouses could be brought into the group in each generation). Add an unlikely fourth generation into the mix and those 1000 original couples would have grown themselves a city-sized cult, with over a million members, to preside over in their elderhood. A hyper-natalist cult of this sort could also purposefully select for female children, in an attempt to rapidly reproduce. Again, I don’t think anything like these scenarios are likely either. But then, I would have also found unlikely many of the 19th and 20th century cults or new religions that really did come to pass.}

30 Apr 202323 Oct 2025

Dynasties and their Discontents, part 1

North America

Imagine if Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton had become president in 2016, then won re-election in 2020. There would have been a Bush or a Clinton as president for 28 out of 36 consecutive years, from George H W Bush’s election in 1988 all the way through to 2024. Only Obama would have served as a break in between. Add in the Vice-Presidency and Secretary of State and there would have been a Bush or a Clinton within the presidential cabinet for 40 out of 44 consecutive years, from 1982 until 2024.

To put into context how unique that would have been in American history, the only other presidents from the same immediate family were John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, and they served only a total of 8 years as president, with a 24-year gap separating Sr’s leaving office in 1801 from Jr’s being selected president (by Congress) in 1825. The two Roosevelts later racked up a total of 20 years as president – eight for Teddy and twelve for FDR – but they were only fifth cousins (though FDR’s wife Eleanor Roosevelt was Teddy’s niece), and they too were separated by a 24-year gap of non-Roosevelt governance, from 1909 to 1933. William Henry Harrison and his grandson Benjamin Harrison were president for 4 years (WHH died a month into his own presidency), 48 years apart.

The Bush and Clinton families by comparison really did have 20 uninterrupted years alternating as president, from 1988 to 2008. During this time they also had governorships in Texas (George W.), Florida (Jeb), and Arkansas (Bill), and a senatorship in New York (Hillary). (Bush Sr.’s father, Prescott Bush, had also been a senator, from 1952-1963, representing Connecticut). And then, of course, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton were thought to be the front-runners for the presidency a year before the 2016 elections.

It is difficult to know to what extent Americans’ wariness or resentment of the Bush and Clinton families helped the anti-establishment politicians who ran that year. In the Republican primaries in particular, about 45 percent of the votes went to Donald Trump. Another 25 percent went to Ted Cruz. In the Democratic primaries 43 percent of votes went to an independent candidate, Bernie Sanders. It is easy to imagine the Bush-Clinton dynamic played at least a small role in influencing the outcome of the 2016 elections.

I’ve had political dynasties on my mind in recent years not only because of American politics, but also because in my home country Canada, and home province Ontario, both of the politicians in charge, Justin Trudeau (since 2015) and Doug Ford (since 2018), have been in office mainly because of who their relatives were. Justin Trudeau is the son of the charismatic Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who was prime minister of Canada for 15 years between 1968 and 1984. Doug Ford is the older brother of Toronto’s infamous former mayor Rob Ford, who passed away in 2016, and the son of a provincial parliamentarian and businessman, Doug Ford Sr.

Both Trudeau and Ford were elected by their parties in times of political desperation. The Liberals picked Trudeau to become party leader following an election loss in 2011, in which the party had fallen to third place in a Canadian election for the first time in its history. He is the first child of a prime minister in Canada to ever become prime minister himself. The Ontario Progressive Conservatives meanwhile chose Doug Ford after being 15 years out of power, and after their previous party leader had been forced out in response to allegations of sexual misconduct several months before the 2018 provincial election was scheduled to take place.

In Mexico, political dynasts held the country’s presidency from 2006 until 2018, at which point the country’s current populist president, Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador, was elected. From 2013 to 2018 Mexico’s president was Enrique Pena Nieto, both of whose uncles were former governors of the State of Mexico, the state in which Mexico City is located. From 2006 to 2012 the president was Felipe Calderon, whose father founded the political party that the younger Calderon went on to lead, the National Action Party. (In 2000, when Vincente Fox became president, the National Action Party ended a 71-year streak by the autocratic Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had governed since 1929). To become president in 2006, Calderon narrowly beat Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador in one of the closest and most controversial elections in Mexican history. Obrador, who does not come from a political or upper class family, became a national figure as Mexico City’s mayor from 2000-2005.

Northeast Asia

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping

In China, the current General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, is the first to come from the “princeling” class. He is the son of a high-ranking political figure, Xi Zhongxun, who was part of the first generation of the Communist Party leadership. After being jailed for years during the Cultural Revolution, Xi’s father went on to preside over China’s Guangdong province when it led the way in China’s economic re-opening. Other prominent princelings include China’s current vice president Wang Qishan (though only by marriage), who arguably was China’s second most influential politician during the past decade, and Bo Xilai, who famously fell from power around the time Xi was promoted to General Secretary in 2012.

In Japan, former prime minister Shinzo Abe also came from a top political dynasty. His father was Foreign Minister during the 1980s, his paternal grandfather was an anti-militarist politician who died of a heart attack just before Japan’s post-WWII elections in 1946, and his maternal grandfather was one of Japan’s infamous 20th century leaders, Nobusuke Kishi. Kishi was a member of cabinet during WWII, was one of the major managers of Japan’s industrial puppet-state slave economy in Manchuria in the 1930s, and became prime minister of Japan from 1957-1960.

Like Xi Jinping, Shinzo Abe was probably the most important politician his country has had in recent decades. He retired from being prime minister in 2020 due to health reasons, and was assassinated earlier this year. The current prime minister, Fumio Kishida (who faced an assassination attempt earlier this week), is the son and grandson of former members of Japan’s House of Representatives.

Many of Japan’s lawmakers are from political families. Taro Aso, for example, who was Japan’s prime minister from 2008-2009 and deputy prime minister from 2012-2021, is the grandson of a former prime minister, the son-in-law of another prime minister, and a relative of Japan’s emperor Akihito by marriage. Aso is now the vice president of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (ranking just behind prime minister Kishida), even though he previously led the party to its worst electoral defeat – one of only two losses since WWII – in 2008.

Akihito, meanwhile, traces his own imperial family’s roots back at least 1483 years. He was emperor for 30 years before abdicating in favour of his son in 2019. His father, Hirohito, reigned for 63 years, the longest of any of the nearly 100 historically verifiable Japanese emperors.

The president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, was born to North Korean refugees and grew up in poverty. The previous president however was Park Geun-hye, the daughter of South Korea’s longest-serving president, Park Chung-hee. The elder Park came to power in a military coup in 1961, and served as president from 1963 until he was assassinated in 1979. (His wife – Park Geun-hye’s mother – was also assassinated, in 1974, a casualty of an earlier failed attempt on her husband’s life). Park Geun-hye was South Korea’s first female president from 2013 to 2017, but was then impeached on corruption charges, and spent several years in prison.

In North Korea, the Kim family’s rule is now roughly 74 years old, and 12 years into its third generation. But the Kim regime will have to survive for another quarter century, all the way to 2058, if its current leader Jong Un is to surpass his grandfather Kim Il Sung’s 46-year reign (from 1948-1994).

South Asia

Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, poses for a picture with Indian Congress Party leaders Sonia and Rahul Gandhi

In India in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party became the first party in over three decades to win a majority government in a national election. Modi is not from a political dynasty himself, rather he is (among other things) a reaction against the modern world’s most prominent political family of all: the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty – which is not related to the Gandhi – began with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-British prime minister from 1947 until 1964. Nehru was himself the son and nephew of political figures in pre-independence India. Nehru’s dynasty continued with his daughter Indira Gandhi (née Nehru), who was India’s prime minister from 1966-1977 and 1980-1984. Indira was assassinated in 1984, two months before a general election; her son Rajiv Gandhi took over and received a record number of votes in that conflict-ridden election, but was then voted out of office in 1989. Rajiv ran again in 1991, but was assassinated a month before the election. His wife, Sonia Gandhi, has presided over India’s Congress Party ever since then. (The Congress Party held the office of prime minister in 55 out of India’s 67 years of independence prior to Modi’s being elected). Their son Rahul Gandhi was Modi’s main opponent in both of Modi’s electoral wins, in 2014 and 2019.

In Pakistan, current prime minister Shehbaz Sharif is the brother of Nawaz Sharif, who previously served as prime minister from 1990-1993, 1997-1999, and more recently 2013-2017. Shehbaz Sharif took over from the previous prime minister, former cricket star Imran Khan, as part of a constitutional crisis earlier this year. The third Sharif brother, Abbas, was also a member of parliament in the 1990s. Nawaz’ daughter Maryam has recently entered politics as well, becoming a high-ranking member of their current governing party (which her father founded in 1993), the Pakistan Muslim League.

Pakistan’s new foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto Zardar, is the son of two former leaders: former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and former president Asif Ali Zardari. (Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007 soon after her return to the country following eight years in exile, two months after an earlier failed assassination attempt at her return parade killed an estimated 180 bystanders). He is also the grandson of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father, who had served as prime minister and as president of Pakistan before being executed in 1979 following a coup.

The Bhutto family mausoleum, in southern Pakistan. It was built between 1993-2011, inspired in part by the mausoleums of Khomeini in Iran and Ataturk in Turkey. Other members of the family buried there include Benazir’s brothers Murtaza Bhutto (a political figure/terrorist leader who many believe was assassinated by Benazir’s husband, president Zardari, in 1996) and Shahnawaz Bhutto (who died under mysterious circumstances in France in 1985 at the age of 26). Zulfikar’s wife Nusrat Bhutto, who was First Lady for most of the 1970s and then a high-ranking government minister at the end of the 1980s (after Zulfikar’s overthrower Zia ul Haq died in a plane crash) is buried there as well.

In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina has been prime minister for 18 years, from 1996-2001 and again since 2009. Her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the founding president of Bangladesh after it became independent of Pakistan in 1971, and served as prime minister from 1972 until 1975, when he, his wife, and his three sons were assassinated during a military coup. After the coup Ziaur Rahman (unrelated to Mujibar) rose to power, but was assassinated in another coup in 1981. (In between these two coups there was another, unusual coup attempt, which was sparked when Japanese Red Army airplane hijackers landed a flight from India in Bangladesh in 1977. More than 1100 military personnel were hanged in two months following the coup’s failure). Before he was overthrown in 1981, Ziaur allowed Sheik Hasina to return to the country.

Ziaur’s widow Khaleda Zia became prime minister in the early 1990s and again in the early 2000s, and remains the leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Uniquely, Bangladesh’s politics have therefore been dominated by two women in the past generation. Meanwhile in West Bengal – India’s populous Bengali state, just across the border from Bangladesh – the chief minister since 2011 has been a self-made woman, Mamata Banerjee. She is currently the only woman among the 30 chief ministers of India’s states.

Southeast Asia

Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and vice president Sara Duterte-Carpio

The Philippines may be the best example of a democracy dominated by political dynasties. Earlier this year, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos was elected president, along with Sara Duterte-Carpio as his vice president. Bongbong’s father Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was president for 21 years, from 1965-1986, mostly ruling as a dictator with the country under martial law. Bongbong’s mother, famous First Lady Imelda Marcos, was governor of Manila for 11 years, a member of parliament for 18 years (most recently from 2010-2019), and twice ran for president in the 1990s. Bongbong’s wife, son, daughter, and nephew also ran for various political offices in 2022. His vice president, Sara Duterte-Carpio, is the child of a notorious political leader too: Rodrigo Duterte, who was president until his term ended earlier this year. Sara Duterte’s grandfather and great uncle were also fairly prominent politicians.

In the election that brought Rodrigo Duterte to power in 2016, roughly two-thirds of the Philippines’ outgoing Congress had been heirs of political families. Before Duterte, the country’s president was Benigno Aquino III, whose mother Corazon Aquino (president from 1986-1992) had led the uprising against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos after her husband Ninoy Aquino, a senator and leading political opponent of the Marcos regime, had been assassinated in 1983. Before Benigno Aquino, the president was Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001-2010), the daughter of Diosdado Macapagal (president from 1961-1965).

In other words, three of the four presidents since 2001 have been children of earlier presidents, and the only exception, Rodrigo Duterte, is the father of the new vice president.

[2024 Update, from Semafor: “Filipino politics has taken a turn for the macabre, as the vice president threatened to exhume the corpse of the president’s father, and admitted to imagining ‘chopping off‘ the president’s head. Relations between the families of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio hit an all-time low with the remarks, against the backdrop of the two dynasties’ ongoing feud. Duterte-Carpio said she would throw the body of the president’s father, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., into the sea. The vice president also luridly described thoughts of murdering the president that were spurred by refusing a request to give his watch as a graduation gift.”]

In Indonesia, the president since 2014, Joko Widodo (Jokowi), was the first of his generation not to have come from an established political or religious family or from the military. Megawati Sukarnoputri, by contrast, who was previously Indonesia’s president from 2001-2004 and now serves in Jokowi’s cabinet, is the daughter of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first post-independence president from 1945-1967. And Jokowi’s son Gibran was elected mayor of Surakarta, a major city in central Java, in 2021, where Jokowi had previously been mayor from 2005-2012.

Update: Jokowi’s son Gibran became Indonesia’s vice-president in February 2024, at the age of 36, running with former general Prabowo Subianto, the newly elected president.

Prabowo’s ex-wife was the daughter of Indonesia’s former military dictator Suharto, who ruled from the fall of Sukarno in 1967 until the East Asia financial crisis in 1998. 1998 was also the year of Prabowo’s divorce from Titiek Suharto, and his dishonourable discharge from the military, on the accusation of having incited anti-Chinese pogroms during that year’s riots. (Suharto’s son, Tommy, ran for president in 2019 – as did Prabawo, who was defence minister at the time – despite having been accused of carrying out several bombings and the attempted assassination of a judge when members his family began being prosecuted in 1999. Tommy Suharto’s party received only about 2% of the vote in 2019).

In addition to Jokowi’s son becoming Probowi’s VP this year, Jokowi’s son-in-law Bobby Nasution has been the mayor of Medan, the largest city on Sumatra, since 2021. According to the East Asia Forum, “Dynastic politics in modern democratic Indonesia is well and truly entrenched, forming the bedrock of several leading political parties…Former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno, is the matriarch of a dynasty now three generations old which controls Indonesia’s largest political party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle….Jokowi’s youngest child Kaesang Pangarep, an entrepreneur, YouTuber and soccer club owner, indicated that he is also preparing to enter politics.”

In Malaysia, the leading political figure has been Mahathir bin Muhammad, prime minister from 1981-2003 and again from 2018-2020. He was the first one of Malaysia’s prime ministers not born into a well-known political, business, or religious family. Before Muhammad’s return to power (at 93 years old), the prime minister from 2009-2018 was Najib Razak, who was the son of Malaysia’s second prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein and the nephew of Malaysia’s third prime minister Hussein Onn. (Malaysia’s first prime minister, from 1957-1970, was the seventh son of a sultan). The current prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, like Mahathir bin Muhammad, does not come from an influential family. He had been one of Muhammad’s deputy prime ministers in the 1990s, but was then was imprisoned on charges of sodomy until Muhammad left office in 2004. He received a royal pardon in 2018.

In Singapore, the prime minister since 2004 has been Lee Hsien Loong, the son of modern Singapore’s founding leader, Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister of Singapore from 1959-1990, a cabinet minister until 2011, and a member of parliament for 60 years, from 1955-2015.

In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi became prime minister in 2016. She had spent 15 years under house arrest in the aftermath of an election victory in 1990, the election result having been annulled by the military. She was elected again in 2020, but was then overthrown by another military coup and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Her father, Aung San, was modern Burma’s founding leader, who was assassinated along with most of his cabinet just before the country became independent in 1948. Her uncle, Thaksin Than Tun, later led the Communist Party of Burma, and was assassinated in 1968.

In Vietnam, the leading General Secretary of the Communist Party since 2011, Nguyễn Phú Trọng, lists “average peasant” as his background in his official biography. The previous General Secretary, Nông Đức Mạnh (2001-2011), was however rumoured to have been the illegitimate son of Hồ Chí Minh. (According to Wikipedia, “In April 2001, shortly after Nông Đức Mạnh was named as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam , a reporter at a news conference asked him to confirm or deny the rumor. He responded, “All Vietnamese people are the children of Uncle Hồ.)” In 2016, “the sons of Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung were newly elected… The older son, Nguyen Thanh Nghi, is one of the youngest provincial party chiefs in Vietnam. He is 39 years old. The younger son, Nguyen Minh Triet, 25, was also selected to be a member of the party committee of Binh Dinh province”.

In Cambodia, King Norodom Sihamoni has reigned since 2004. His father, the filmmaking king Norodom Sihanouk, reigned from 1941-1955 and 1993-2004. Sihanouk’s first kingship began at 19 years old, during WWII when Cambodia was governed by a mix of Vichy France, imperial Japan, and Japan’s regional ally Thailand. Uniquely, he abdicated the throne in favour of both his own father (in 1955) and son (in 2004). His 1955 abdication was carried out so that he could participate directly in Cambodian politics. His father took over his role as king until dying in 1960, and his mother reigned as queen from 1960 to 1970, when a coup swept both her and her son from power. She died in exile in Beijing in 1975, only ten days after the Khmer Rouge conquered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.

Sihanouk came back from his own exile in China and North Korea in 1975, to serve briefly as a figurehead president during the Khmer Rouge regime. After the Khmer Rouge were ousted by Vietnamese forces in 1979, he went into exile again in 1981. He became king for the second time in 1993, following elections that brought to power a coalition government composed of his son Norodom Ranaridd (a half-brother of Cambodia’s current king) and Hun Sen, Cambodia’s dominant politician.

Hun Sen has led Cambodia since 1984. He has held the post of prime minister for nearly three decades, and is now 71 years old. In 2018 Hun appointed one of his sons, Hun Manet, to high-ranking military and political positions. Manet was promoted again several months ago. It is now thought that he might succeed his father as Cambodian prime minister as soon as this summer.

The nearby Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, has similarly been prime minister since 1984. But he has also been the sultan since 1967, making him (since Queen Elizabeth’s passing) the longest-lasting state leader in the world today.

Finally, in Thailand, there are two dynasties of note: the monarchy and the Shinawatras. The monarchy, which is one of the wealthiest in the world, is currently helmed by King Vajiralongkorn, who had previously spent 50 years as the crown prince. His father, Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX), was king from 1946-2016, a 70-year reign that is tied with Queen Elizabeth’s for history’s longest as an adult sovereign. He was widely revered and respected, whereas the new king Vajiralongkorn is for many reasons a problematical figure (far more so than, for example, King Charles). But it is difficult for people in Thailand to criticize him, as the royal family is covered by extremely strict lèse-majesté laws.

_{According to Wikipedia}, _{“Vajiralongkorn’s reign has been plagued by controversies unheard of during the reign of his predecessor. His image is affected by his reputation as a philanderer. In 2020, widespread unprecedented protests against his reign were popping up all over Thailand….In January 2021, reports surfaced that Princess Sirindhorn, the King’s younger sister, had been taken to the hospital for serious injuries to both her ankles. These injuries appear to be the result of a direct physical attack on the Princess by the King. Reports suggested that the Princess had become angry upon being informed that the King would be formally making a concubine his second wife, making her his second queen. During the heated exchange, sources from the palace say that the King’s dogs jumped on the Princess, knocking her over. While on the ground, the king appears to have broken her ankles either by jumping on them or using his cane. More specifics of the encounter remain unclear due to lèse majesté laws, which endanger anybody who divulges information regarding the incident….For most of 2020, Vajiralongkorn reportedly rented out the alpine Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in Garmisch-Partenkirchen [in the Bavarian Alps] for himself and his entourage during the COVID-19 pandemic.. He remained there during the nationwide protests and amidst a wave of anti-monarchy sentiments in Thailand, sparking controversy in both Thailand and Germany”.}

The Thai military, often allied with the monarchy, has played a leading role in the country’s politics. The prime minister from 2001-2006, Thaksin Shinawatra – the son of a former member of parliament and a minor member of the royal family of the old kingdom of Chiang Mai – was overthrown by a military coup, following a political crisis in which Shinawatra was alleged to be an anti-monarchical leader. His younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra later became prime minister from 2011-2014, before being removed during the Thai political crisis in 2013-2014, which ended in another coup, endorsed by the former king. The military-monarchy alliance has remained in power since.

During elections in 2019, King Vajiralongkorn’s elder sister, Princess Ubol Ratana, tried to become prime minister as the candidate of a political party supported by the exiled Shinawatras. The king immediately denounced the move as unconstitutional and the party was banned from politics for a decade.

Now, however, Thaksin Shinawatra’s 36-year-old daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra (Yingluck’s niece) appears likely to become Thailand’s next prime minister. Elections will be held on May 14th.

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Additional Notes for Part 1:

_{The Ford family’s list of scandals is long, in addition to the crack-smoking video which made Rob famous while mayor of Toronto. Doug and his brother Randy were medium-sized drug dealers when they were younger, and in the 1990s were accused of kidnapping a fellow drug dealer who owed them $5000 dollars. (This did not stop their father and Rob from attempting to carve out war-on-drug reputations in municipal politics. Rob’s attempt to do so was derailed by an early arrest for impaired driving in Florida, one of the family’s numerous DUIs). The Fords’ ex-brother-in-law meanwhile was convicted of murdering their sister’s new lover, a white supremacist, in 1998. That same sister (who is the mother of Ontario’s new minister of citizenship and multiculturalism, Michael Douglas Ford, elected in 2022) had another boyfriend taken into custody for allegedly trying to kill Rob Ford in 2012, and was shot in the face, maybe accidentally, by that boyfriend and another man in 2005.}
_{The saddest and strangest dynastic episode in recent history took place in Nepal, in 2001. There, in the middle of civil war (1996-2006), the heir to the throne, crown prince Dipendra, is alleged to have carried out a mass shooting inside the royal palace, killing his father the king, his mother the queen, seven other siblings or cousins, and then shooting himself as well. He survived the suicide attempt for three days, in a coma, and despite his murders he was officially declared the new king, while comatose. After his death the kingship passed to his uncle, Gyanendra. There are many conspiracy theories about this royal massacre, including suggestions that it was really Gyanendra who was behind the attack, since it resulted in his becoming king and since his own immediate family members, who had been present during the attack, were said to have been relatively unscathed. Gyanendra had actually been king previously as well, from 1950-1951 when he was three or four years old, during a period when most of the rest of the royal family fled to India. His second kingship lasted only from 2001-2008, when Nepal abolished its monarchy altogether. But he is still involved in Nepalese politics today.}
_{In Cuba, Fidel’s death in 2016 and Raul’s retirement and death in 2021 have left the island without a Castro in charge for the first time in 62 years.}
_{The most successful American dynasty of all, the Kennedy family, recently lost its long hold on high office. Ted Kennedy’s death in 2009 ended his nearly 47-year tenure in the Senate, the fourth-longest such tenure in American history, which he had begun when he took over his brother JFK’s seat in Massachusetts at the start of the Kennedy presidency in 1962. Then in 2011 Ted’s son Patrick Kennedy retired from Congress, ending a streak of 68 consecutive years with a Kennedy in high office, going all the way back to 1947 when JFK was elected to Congress. By 2013, however, RFK’s grandson (and son of former Congressman Joseph Patrick Kennedy II}) _{Joe Kennedy III was elected to the House, where he remained until losing a Democratic primary in an attempt to become a senator in 2020. That made him the first Kennedy to ever lose an election in Massachusetts, leaving Congress without a Kennedy again. But his uncle RFK Jr. just announced he is running against Biden to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2024.}
_{Multiple members of the Bush family were involved, directly or indirectly, in the events in Florida that decided the 2000 presidential election. Jeb was Florida’s governor} _{at the time. George H W Bush had appointed Clarence Thomas and David Souter to the Supreme Court, which then in effect narrowly ruled (5 to 4, though admittedly Souter was among the 4) to stop the statewide election recount that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered. Even George and Jeb’s first cousin, John Ellis, was involved in the election over at Fox News, as head of its election night decision desk. Fox was the first news network to call Florida for Bush on the night of the election, leading the other major networks to temporarily follow suit, before all of them, including Fox, retracted their calls. Cousin John’s role is perhaps somewhat reminiscent of a more recent electoral event: the Dominion lawsuit payout, a story which similarly began with Fox News being the first to call the 2020 election (via Arizona) for Biden. And of course, John was not the last Bush cousin to be involved in the late stages of an election. The cousin Billy Bush-Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape was aired one month before the 2016 election.}
_{Gore too came from a political family: he and his father served in the House of Representatives, Senate, or as vice president for all but six years from 1939-2001}
_{Hillary Clinton meanwhile was also elected in 2000, as a senator representing New York, immediately following the end of her husband’s presidential term. She beat Republican Rick Lazio after the presumptive nominee, mayor Rudy Giuliani, was diagnosed with cancer and faced a series of setbacks and scandals earlier in the year. During this same time, Giuliani also inserted himself into the Elian Gonzales affair,} _{repeatedly calling the US agents who forcibly retrieved Gonzales “storm troopers”. The Gonzales affair, in turn, might also have helped swing the 2000 presidential election. (Gonzales, by the way, was elected to Cuba’s parliament this past week, at the age of 29.} _{By coincidence, this occurred the day before the Dominion lawsuit was settled, a week after a new Giuliani audio tape, recorded secretly by a Fox employee, emerged in that suit).}
_{Pierce Bush, a nephew of Jeb and George W., ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020}
_{Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt came somewhat close to facing one another in the 1920 presidential election. Teddy had already been president previously, and had afterward founded his own Progressive party, becoming in the 1912 election “the only third party presidential nominee to finish with a higher share of the popular vote than a major party’s presidential nominee. [He got more votes than William Howard Taft, who had been the incumbent president and yet finished a distant third behind Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt]”. But Teddy became the Republican front-runner again ahead of the 1920 election, after rejoining the party. He died however in 1919, and Warren Harding became the Republican nominee and president instead. (Harding then appointed Taft, an ex-president, to the Supreme Court – a unique situation) . Meanwhile FDR, then only 38 years old, was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in the 1920 election, facing Harding’s running mate Calvin Coolidge. Both Coolidge and FDR later became presidents themselves.}
_{The Adams family came fairly close to spending three generations at the top of American politics. John Adams was the country’s second president, taking over from George Washington in 1797. His son John Quincy Adams won the 1825 election without receiving a majority of the electoral college seats – he only got 38% – but was chosen to become president by the House, the only president this ever happened to. 24 years later, John Quincy’s son ran for vice-president as part of Martin Van Buren’s Free Soil Party ticket in 1848, but lost.}
_{According to Wikipedia, Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was referred to as the “Monster of the Shōwa era“…. “when he was locked up in Sugamo prison in 1946 [a decade before becoming Prime Minister], awaiting trial, he reminisced about his Manchukuo [Japanese-ruled Manchuria] years: “I came so much, it was hard to clean it all up”.}
_{In the Dominican Republic, the president since 2000 has been Luis Abinader, whose father José Rafael Abinader Wasaf was a senator and wealthy businessman, who founded the political party that the younger Abinader now leads.}
_{In Sri Lanka, mass protests this summer forced the resignation of president Nandasena Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a week after protestors broke into and partied in the presidential mansion. In addition to being president, Rajapaksa is the brother of the former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, who previously also served as president from 2005-2015. Their other brother, Chamal, was speaker of the parliament. The Rajapaksas have long been a political dynasty, with many past and present members in Sri Lankan politics. The country’s new president similarly comes from a major political family.}
_{Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s elder son, died while piloting an airplane}_{in 1980, not long before Indira’s assassination in 1984 and Rajiv’s in 1991. (This is one reason the Gandhis are often compared with the Kennedies). He had been made secretary general of the Congress Party only a month before his death, not long after playing a controversial role during the Emergency. For example (according to Wikipedia) “In September 1976, Sanjay Gandhi initiated a widespread compulsory sterilization program to limit population growth. The exact extent of Sanjay Gandhi’s role in the implementation of the program is disputed, with some writers holding Gandhi directly responsible for his authoritarianism, and other writers blaming the officials who implemented the programme rather than Gandhi himself”. Sanjay too survived an assassination attempt during the following election campaign, his first, in 1977. (A year later, two men hijacked a passenger airplane for several hours and demanded that Indira be released from prison – she was arrested after the Emergency – and various charges against Sanjay be dropped. The two hijackers were rewarded by the Congress party for doing this, by being made parliamentary candidates in Uttar Pradesh in 1980. Both won and served multiple terms).}
_{Sanjay’s wife, Maneka Gandhi, has however since jumped ship from the Gandhi-dominated Congress Party and joined the rival BJP. She is currently a cabinet minister in the BJP-led government. Maneka’s son Varun has also gone over to the BJP, serving as the youngest National Secretary in the history of the party and a member of the country’s parliament. But Maneka and Varun both remain less prominent than the Congress side of the family, which is led by Maneka’s sister-in-law Sonia and Varun’s first cousins Rahul} _{and Priyanka Gandhi.}
_{The BJP is arguably just as dynastic as the Congress party is, or at least not so far off. According to the Economist “nearly a third of lawmakers in India’s lower house come from political families”. Family politics are also extremely common within India’s diverse, influential state governments.} _{In Tamil Nadu for example the chief minister, M.K. Stalin (born four days after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953) is the son of Tamil Nadu’s longtime Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi. In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, the Yadavs’ Socialist Party has been influential, while in the second most populous state, Maharashtra, the Thackeries’ Army of Shiva Party has been even more influential. The longest incumbent among current chief ministers, Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik (in power since 2000) is the son of a previous chief minister too. These are just a few examples of prevalent dynasticism in India.}
_{In Bhutan, the current dragon king is the fifth in a dynasty that has reigned since 1907. He became king in 2006, when his father (still living today) abdicated the throne at the age of 54. His father had become king in 1972, at the age of 17. In 1975, Bhutan’s fellow Himalayan kingdom, Sikkim (it is wedged right between Bhutan and Nepal) joined India; Bhutan is now the last of these kingdoms, since Nepal abolished its own monarchy in 2008.}
_{The royal family of Sikkim comes originally from Tibet. Tibet, of course, has its own hereditary leadership, of a sort, with figures like the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.} _{The current 14th Dalai Lama was given political power following the battle of Chamdo} _{in 1950, at the age of 15, a decade after his enthronement as a child. According to Wikipedia: “The current 11th Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was recognized by the 14th Dalai Lama on 14 May 1995. Three days later, the six-year-old Panchen Lama was kidnapped by the Chinese government and his family was taken into custody. The Chinese government instead named Gyaincain Norbu as the 11th Panchen Lama. Their nomination has been widely rejected by Buddhists in Tibet and abroad, while governments have called for information about and the release of the Panchen Lama. Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has never been publicly seen since 1995″.}
_{India too had royal-run regions – the princely states – until its post-independence period. “At the time of the British withdrawal, 565 princely states were officially recognised in the Indian subcontinent…In 1947, princely states covered 40% of the area of pre-independence India and constituted 23% of its population”. Hyderabad, by far the most significant of these princely states, was home to about 16 million people, with a territory nearly the size of Britain, when its princely status was ended in 1948 after it was briefly invaded by India.} _{(The last Nizam of Hyderabad had 34 children; his second son married a daughter of the last Ottoman crown prince and caliph in 1930, several years after the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate ended). The other large princely state was Jammu and Kashmir, which was religiously the opposite of Hyderabad: its rulers were Hindu but its population was mostly Muslim, whereas Hyderabad’s rulers were Muslim but its population was mostly Hindu.}
_{Many of the heirs of the numerous princely states are still rich or influential today, to varying extents. Perhaps the most intriguing one is Balthazar Napoleon IV de Bourbon, who lives in Bhopal. “It is claimed that this family is legitimate descendant of the House of Bourbon, descended from Jean Philippe de Bourbon, an exiled French noble who served in Mughal Emperor Akbar’s court. In his book, Prince Michael of Greece and Denmark says that he believes Jean de Bourbon was a nephew of the first Bourbon French king, Henry IV. While this hasn’t been proved fully yet, it is notable to mention that if true, Balthazar Bourbon would be first in line for the French throne.”}
_{In Pakistan, according to Wikipedia, “The son of a wealthy industrialist, Mr Sharif worked in the family business before entering politics. While his brother had three terms as prime minister, Shehbaz, now 70, had three terms as chief minister of the country’s most populous province, Punjab. His first stint was cut short by a military coup in 1999, when the army ousted the elder Sharif as prime minister and both brothers temporarily went into exile. Like Nawaz, he has also been accused of corruption.”}
_{In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo was president from 1978-1988, and Chiang Hsiao-yen – thought to be an illegitimate son of Chiang Ching-kuo – was Vice Chairman of their Nationalist party (Kuomintang) from 2009–2014. Chiang Kai-shek’s adopted son Chiang Wei-kuo was also a significant political and military figure. (Chiang Kai-shek was China’s Nationalist leader from 1928-1975, ruling as autocrat in Taiwan after fleeing the mainland at the end of the Chinese Civil War. His son Chiang-kuo “was sent as a teenager to study in the Soviet Union during the First United Front in 1925, when his father’s Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party were in alliance…but when the Chinese Nationalists violently broke with the Communists, Stalin sent him to work in a steel factory in the Ural Mountains. [He was kept there as a political prisoner and potential bargaining chip]. There, Chiang met and married Faina Vakhreva. With war between China and Japan imminent in 1937, Stalin sent the couple to China.” Ching-kuo later governed Taiwan for a decade until his own death, but also ended its long era of martial law in 1987.}
_{Taiwan is also home to an heir (at least symbolically) of Confucius, a 79th-generation descendant who has had an advisory role in politics. The supposed or ceremonial heirs of the other of the Four Sages have also had roles of this kind. Meanwhile in the mainland, a descendant of the Qing dynasty played a small part in Beijing politics, before retiring in 2008. So too have the heirs of the Ming, the preceding dynasty which lost the emperorship around 1644. China’s premier from 1998-2003, Zhu Rongji, may have been descended from the first Ming emperor who ruled in the 14th century. [When the Ming’s successors, the Qing, were overthrown just before WWI, the idea of either the 76th-generation Duke Yansheng (thought to be a descendant of Confucius) or the heir of the dormant Ming dynasty becoming China’s new emperor was considered. But neither happened. Instead, general Yuan Shikai declared himself emperor in 1915 – a move that lasted only four months. Later, the final Qing emperor Puyi became emperor of Japanese-controlled Manchuria from 1934 until the end of WWII. Puyi had previously been China’s emperor when he was a child. In 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, “The Cemetery of Confucius was attacked by a team of Red Guards from Beijing Normal University….The corpse of the 76th-generation Duke Yansheng was removed from its grave and hung naked from a tree in front of the palace during the desecration of the cemetery.” That same year Red Guards also damaged the tomb of the Wanli emperor, who had the longest reign of any Ming emperor]. More recently, Mao’s grandson became the youngest general in China’s military, in 2009. But he is not a significant figure.}
_{Kim Jong Il’s eldest son Kim Jong-nam, who was Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, was assassinated in 2017 at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Kim Jong Il’s sister’s husband, Jang Song-thaek, was executed by firing squad in 2013}.

Part 2 – The Middle East