A nightmare scenario for Iran

A nightmare scenario for Iran

Opinion Washington Post-Jan 23rd 2026

By Michael Doran

Michael Doran is director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute.

With a U.S. carrier strike group slated to arrive in the Middle East this weekend, President Donald Trump will soon decide what to do next with Iran. But first, he must grapple with an unanswerable question: Is Iran a multiethnic nation or a Persian-dominated empire? Even Iranians cannot answer authoritatively.

History offers a warning. Yugoslavia long presented itself as — and was widely understood to be — a pluralistic, multiethnic state. Many Yugoslavs embraced that identity sincerely. Yet when the regime collapsed in the early 1990s, the identity dissolved almost overnight. People called themselves Yugoslavs one day only to wake up the next as Serbs, Croats or Bosnians. Such arrangements can persist for decades — until, suddenly, they do not. Long-suppressed ethnic identities surfaced, and politics turned violent.

In Yugoslavia, the hegemonic Serbs made up roughly 36 percent of the population. In Iran, Persians account for a larger share but are almost certainly still a minority. A 2010 Iranian government study put them at 47 percent.

Iran’s ethnic geography sharpens the stakes. Persians dominate the central plateau around Tehran and Isfahan. Minority populations concentrate along the borders — more accurately, astride them — bound by language, culture and history to communities just across the frontier. Azerbaijanis cluster in the northwest along Azerbaijan and Turkey; Kurds in the west face Kurdish regions of Iraq and Turkey; Arabs in the oil-rich southwest look toward Iraq; Baluch in the southeast connect to kin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Turkmen in the north border Turkmenistan.

Neighboring states therefore have a direct interest in how Iran manages — or fails to manage — its diversity. And one neighbor matters more than any other: Azerbaijan.

There are more ethnic Azerbaijanis in Iran than there are in Azerbaijan proper. According to that same Iranian government study, Azerbaijanis account for roughly 23 percent of Iran’s population (the true figure may be higher) and are concentrated in a geographically contiguous enclave. While Azerbaijanis have been better integrated into the Iranian state than any other minority group, signs of restlessness are growing. They increasingly consume Turkish and Azerbaijani media, show greater interest in their Turkic-Azerbaijani roots and demand schooling in their own language. It’s not hard to see why. Turkey and Azerbaijan enjoy European-level development. The Islamic Republic presides over economic failure and isolation.