A note before you read: This is not about banking. It is not about AI, data, or digital transformation. If you follow me for those topics, I completely understand if you stop here. But if you’ve ever wondered what I think about the world beyond balance sheets and LLMs — this is it. These are hard-learned life lessons, written in the shadow of a war that, I believe, is reshaping the next century. I hope it’s worth your time.
In this article:
- Part One: The Anatomy of a Dictator
- Part Two: Ideology Is Poison
- Part Three: The Iran Strike Is All About China
- Part Four: Lessons for CEOs and Founders
- My View: This Is the Opening Act
- The Through Line
Part One: The Anatomy of a Dictator
History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme, with terrifying precision.
I was born in Iran. I grew up under the shadow of a man who was not elected, not loved, and not legitimate — yet held absolute power for over four decades. Watching the fall of Khamenei’s regime from a distance, I find myself doing what I always do when the world shifts: going back to first principles. Why does this keep happening? How does a human being become a dictator? And why do entire societies — educated, intelligent, civilized societies — allow it?
A dictator is not born. A dictator is assembled — piece by piece, from fear, from vacuum, and from our own desperate need for certainty.
The blueprint is older than history books. It starts not with cruelty, but with a crisis. Real or manufactured, the crisis is essential. Hitler rose from the ashes of Weimar Germany’s humiliation and hyperinflation. Stalin climbed to power on the rubble of World War I and the chaos of revolution. Mao consolidated control through a nation shattered by foreign invasion and decades of civil war. Khomeini — and then Khamenei — exploited the legitimate anger of a people oppressed by a Shah who himself was propped up by foreign powers.
People in crisis don’t want freedom. They want relief. They want someone to tell them: I know what went wrong. I know who is to blame. And I will fix it.
That is Stage One: The Savior Narrative.
Stage Two is the Silencing of Alternatives. This is always dressed as necessity. Courts are packed. Media is captured. Elections become theater. The judiciary becomes a weapon. It never happens in one dramatic leap — it happens in a hundred small steps, each justified by emergency, each defended as temporary. By the time the population realizes the cage has been built, the door is already locked.
Stage Three is the most insidious: the Ideological Moat. The dictator wraps himself in something untouchable — God, the Revolution, the Nation, the Race, the Party. Criticism is no longer merely political disagreement; it becomes blasphemy, treason, terrorism. This is not accidental. It is the deliberate weaponization of identity.
When you make your authority sacred, you make dissent a sin.
Khamenei called it Islam. Hitler called it the Volk. Stalin called it the Proletariat. The wrapper changes. The mechanism is identical.
And Stage Four — the one we always underestimate — is the Economy of Loyalty. Dictators are not stupid. They are, in fact, magnificent systems designers. They build an economy within the economy: a class of generals, clerics, oligarchs, and bureaucrats whose entire wealth, status, and survival is tied to the regime’s survival. The Revolutionary Guards in Iran did not support the Islamic Republic out of faith. They supported it because the Islamic Republic made them billionaires.
Khamenei survived for 35 years not because Iranians loved him. He survived because he had engineered a system where enough powerful people had enough to lose from his fall (a bit like a good ESOP).
What brought him down, in the end, was not a foreign army or a popular revolution. It was the compound weight of a war that destroyed the proxies he had spent decades building, a generation of Iranians who had nothing left to lose, and the demolition of the economic infrastructure that kept his inner circle loyal. When the Revolutionary Guards stopped believing they could win — when their investments in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen became liabilities rather than assets — the foundation cracked.
Every dictator has an expiration date. The tragedy is how many lives are consumed before it arrives.
We often ask: how did people let this happen? But that is the wrong question. The right question is: what were the conditions that made it rational for ordinary people to comply, collaborate, or simply look away?
The answer is always the same. Fear. Economic dependency. The normalization of small cruelties. And — most importantly — the absence of a credible alternative.
This is why the lesson of Khamenei, of every dictator, is not merely historical. It is architectural. The only long-term protection against dictatorship is not a strong opposition — it is institutional redundancy. Courts that no single actor controls. Press that no single actor owns. Economies that no single actor can hold hostage. Education systems that teach people how to think, not what to think.
When those institutions erode — slowly, quietly, one emergency at a time — the conditions for the next dictator are already being laid.
Part Two: Ideology Is Poison
I want to say something that I know will make many people uncomfortable.
Ideology — any ideology — is an intellectual shortcut that eventually becomes an intellectual prison.
I am not talking about values. Values are things you arrive at through experience, reflection, and reason. I am talking about ideology: the pre-packaged worldview that tells you what to think before you’ve thought. The operating system that processes every new input and routes it toward a predetermined conclusion.
The danger of ideology is not that it’s wrong. The danger is that it makes you certain — and certainty is the death of learning.
Look around. The examples are everywhere.
In government: The Soviet Union had an ideology. So did the Third Reich. So did Maoist China. They each had comprehensive, internally consistent frameworks that explained everything — history, economics, morality, the future. Their catastrophic failures were not failures of execution. They were failures of ideology itself: a belief system so rigid that it could not update when reality contradicted it. Millions died not because their leaders were stupid, but because their leaders were ideologically certain.
In cults: Every cult in history — from Heaven’s Gate to NXIVM to Jonestown — operated on the same principle. A charismatic founder provides a complete explanatory framework. Questioning the framework is redefined as a personal failing, a spiritual weakness, or a sign of corruption. The member learns to distrust their own instincts and defer to the doctrine. This is not brainwashing in the Hollywood sense. It is the systematic replacement of individual reasoning with collective certainty.
In religions: I want to be precise here, because I am not attacking faith. I am attacking weaponized faith — the version that says God has told us, and therefore there is nothing to discuss. Every atrocity committed in the name of religion — every inquisition, every jihad, every pogrom — was committed by people who were absolutely certain they were right. Faith, at its best, is humble. Ideology, at its worst, is totalizing.
In corporate culture and so-called “core values”: This one hits closest to home for those of us in the business world, and I want to spend a moment here because it is profoundly underappreciated.
I have sat in hundreds of leadership offsites where smart, well-meaning executives craft beautiful statements about their company’s values. Integrity. Innovation. Customer-centricity. Inclusion. They are printed on walls. They are embedded in performance reviews. They become the invisible grammar of organizational life.
And here is the thing: when it works, it works. Shared values can create alignment, build trust, and signal what a company stands for. But there is a razor-thin line between a value and an ideology — and most companies cross it without noticing.
The moment your “values” become something you enforce rather than something you embody, you have built a cult, not a culture.
I have watched companies destroy honest dissent because it violated the culture. I have watched “psychological safety” become a ritual performance rather than a reality. I have watched “innovation” become a word that decorates PowerPoints while the actual organizational immune system attacks every genuinely new idea. The ideology of the company — its founding myths, its heroes and villains, its sacred narratives — calcifies over time into something that prevents the very adaptation that made the company successful in the first place.
The great companies I have admired are not the ones with the best values statements. They are the ones where the people are given the tools and the permission to reason their way to the right answer.
This brings me to the most important point of this section.
We do not need people to do the right thing because they have been told it is the right thing. We do not need compliance; we need cognition.
The goal should never be: make people follow the right ideology. The goal should be: give people the reasoning tools to arrive at right conclusions independently.
This is not an idealistic statement (or maybe it is). It is, increasingly, a practical one. Because we now have AI.
Think about what AI — genuinely good AI — can do for individual reasoning. Not AI as a propaganda tool, not AI as an ideology-reinforcing echo chamber, but AI as a Socratic interlocutor: a system that helps each person examine their assumptions, stress-test their beliefs, understand the strongest version of the opposing argument, and arrive at their own considered conclusions.
The antidote to ideology is not a better ideology. It is better thinking. And for the first time in human history, we have a tool that can help every person on earth think better.
A teenager in Tehran, a farmer in the Midwest, a factory worker in Shenzhen — each of them, with access to a genuinely intelligent AI system, can now interrogate the narratives they have been handed. Can ask: Who benefits from this story? What evidence would change my mind? What am I not being told?
This is not guaranteed. AI can just as easily be weaponized to reinforce ideology as to dissolve it. The architecture of the system — who controls it, who can access it, what it is trained to do — will determine everything.
But the potential is real. And it is, I believe, one of the most important battles of the coming generation: whether AI becomes a tool of individual liberation or a tool of ideological control.
The dictators of the next century will not look like Khamenei or Stalin. They will look like algorithms.
Part Three: The Iran Strike Is All About China
Now we get to the thing that made me sit down and write this.
The United States launched Operation Epic Fury — a coordinated series of strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile infrastructure, and command and control networks. Israel had spent the previous 12 days systematically dismantling Iran’s air defenses and ballistic missile stockpile. The strikes were surgical. The damage was comprehensive. The Islamic Republic — already on its knees after years of economic strangulation, the destruction of its proxy network, and a population that had been in open revolt — was now, militarily, broken.
The world covered this as a story about Iran. A story about nuclear proliferation. A story about the Middle East. A story about Trump.
I believe it is none of those things.
And I am not the only one.
Standing on the Shoulders of a Sharp Mind
A few days ago, a piece by Zineb Riboua in The Free Press stopped me cold. The title alone: “The Iran Strike Is All About China.” I read it three times.
I want to be clear: Riboua deserves full credit for the analytical framework I am about to build on. She made the argument first, she made it well, and I think it is the most important geopolitical lens through which to understand this moment. What I will do here is share her core thesis as I understood it, add my own perspective as an Iranian who has lived inside the story she is analyzing, and then extend the argument to where I think it leads.
When someone says something true that most people are missing, the right response is not to paraphrase them into invisibility. It is to amplify them, credit them, and add your own voice.
So: read Riboua. Then come back here.
Her Argument, In Her Honor
Riboua’s central claim is this: Beijing has spent years and billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset — a pillar of China’s regional architecture. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration dismantled that pillar, whether by design or by consequence.
The foundation of that architecture is oil. China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports at steep discounts, transported on a ghost fleet of tankers that switch off their transponders and relabel their cargo to circumvent American sanctions. Since 2021, the cumulative value of these purchases has exceeded $140 billion. As Riboua puts it, this makes China the main reason the Islamic Republic has not gone bankrupt.
On top of the oil relationship sits the 2021 25-Year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership — a commitment of an estimated $400 billion across Iran’s energy, banking, telecommunications, and infrastructure sectors. The deeper that integration runs, she argues, the less leverage anyone else has over Tehran, and the more leverage Beijing accumulates.
But China’s investment in Iran goes beyond economics. Iran’s proxies — Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias — function, in Riboua’s framing, as a mechanism of American strategic attrition. Every dollar the U.S. spends defending Red Sea shipping lanes is unavailable for submarine production or Pacific bases. Every carrier group in the Gulf of Aden is absent from the Western Pacific. The costs fall entirely on Washington while Beijing accumulates gains without firing a shot.
She also identifies a less obvious benefit: China uses the anxiety that Iran generates among Gulf Arab states to deepen its own relationships with those states — which happen to be America’s most important regional partners. It funds Iran and sells security to Iran’s rivals simultaneously. It plays both sides.
Riboua’s conclusion is simple and devastating: the Islamic Republic was at its weakest point in history — and China was moving to put it back together. Reports emerged of Tehran finalizing a deal for Chinese supersonic anti-ship missiles capable of threatening American carriers. Chinese suppliers had already shipped over 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate — a key missile propellant — to an Iranian port, enough to begin rebuilding the ballistic missile stockpile Israel had just spent 12 days destroying.
The window was closing. Not because Iran was recovering on its own. But because China was reloading the gun.
The choice was not strike now or negotiate later. It was strike now or watch China rebuild the threat from scratch.
This is Riboua’s argument. I think she is right. And I think the implications go further than even she has traced.
My View: This Is the Opening Act
What I want to add to her framework is this: the destruction of the Islamic Republic’s military capacity is not just a setback for Iran’s rulers. It is a structural rupture in China’s entire Middle East strategy.
For two decades, Beijing’s approach to the region has been elegant in its simplicity: let America manage the chaos, profit from the energy, and gradually position China as the indispensable alternative to American hegemony. Iran was the engine of that chaos. A weakened, rearmed, perpetually threatening Iran kept Washington reactive, kept Gulf states anxious, and kept China’s dealmaking relevant.
That engine has now been destroyed. Not damaged — destroyed.
Operation Epic Fury is, in my view, the opening act of what I will call the Indo-Pacific Century — the long contest between a U.S.-led order and a China-led counter-order for the architecture of the 21st century.
The Middle East was never the main theater. It was the warm-up act — a place to drain American attention, resources, and strategic bandwidth while China built islands, expanded its navy, deepened its grip on Southeast Asian supply chains, and made the defense of Taiwan progressively more expensive and less certain.
Every year Washington spent managing Tehran was another year Beijing spent building in the Pacific.
By striking Iran — decisively, in coordination with Israel, with a speed that caught both Tehran and Beijing off guard — the United States has signaled something that matters far beyond the Persian Gulf: that it is capable of strategic clarity. That it can recognize a distraction and eliminate it. That it understands, finally, where the real game is being played.
The most dangerous opponent is not the one who is stronger than you. It is the one who has correctly identified what game you are actually playing.
China correctly identified the game years ago. Washington, I believe, has just caught up.
What Comes Next
I want to be honest about what I don’t know.
I don’t know whether the Islamic Republic will survive in its current form. I don’t know whether a successor government will be meaningfully different, or whether it will be captured by the same networks of power that have dominated Iran for 46 years. I was born there. I have family there. I hope, genuinely and deeply, that what comes next is something better — not just strategically convenient for Washington, but actually better for Iranians and other people in region.
I also don’t know how Beijing responds. The loss of Iran (after Venezuela) as a structural asset will register in Chinese strategic calculations. The question is whether China recalibrates — shifting toward economic and diplomatic competition in the Pacific — or whether it accelerates on Taiwan, reasoning that the window of American distraction has now closed and the window of action is narrowing.
The next five years will answer that question. And the answer will matter more than almost anything else happening in the world today.
We are not watching the end of a war. We are watching the end of a prologue.
The real story — the struggle for the architecture of the 21st century — will be decided not in Tehran or Gaza, but in the waters between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, in the semiconductor fabs of TSMC, in the satellite networks of low Earth orbit, and in the AI labs of California and Beijing.
Riboua helped me see the Iran chapter clearly. Now I am watching for what comes next.
Part Four: Lessons for CEOs and Founders
I have spent my career advising and working alongside leaders building companies. And the longer I sit with what I’ve written in this essay, the more I realize that every pattern I have described — dictatorship, ideology, strategic miscalculation — has a direct and uncomfortable parallel in the boardroom.
This is not a metaphor for the sake of elegance. It is a genuine structural observation. The failure modes that destroy nations are the same failure modes that destroy companies. They are just smaller, faster, and usually less bloody.
Here is what I would tell every CEO or founder who has read this far.
You Are One Bad Quarter Away from Becoming a Dictator
Not literally. But structurally.
Every dictator I described in Part One started with a genuine mandate. Real authority, earned or granted. The problem was not the power — it was what happened to the feedback loops as the power grew. The people around them stopped telling the truth. Not because they were cowardly, but because the incentive system punished honesty and rewarded agreement.
Ask yourself: when did someone last tell you something you genuinely did not want to hear? Not a softened version. Not “here’s a concern, but I’m sure you’ve thought of it.” A real, uncomfortable, you-might-be-wrong challenge?
If you are struggling to remember, you have a problem.
The most dangerous moment in a leader’s career is not when things are going badly. It is when things are going well for long enough that dissent starts to feel disloyal.
This is how cults of personality form inside companies. Not through malice — through success. The founder is right often enough that people stop stress-testing their instincts. The company hires in the founder’s image. The board stops pushing back. The executive team learns to pre-align before meetings rather than actually disagree in them.
And then the market shifts, the technology changes, or a competitor makes a move no one saw coming — and the organization has lost the institutional muscle to respond honestly, because it spent years optimizing for agreement.
Build adversarial feedback into your architecture. Not as a value on a wall — as a structural feature of how decisions get made. Red teams. Pre-mortems. Promotion criteria that explicitly reward people who changed your mind, not just people who executed your vision.
The goal is not to manufacture conflict. It is to ensure that truth has a path to the top that does not depend on someone’s personal courage.
Your Culture Is Either a Tool for Thinking or a Substitute for It
I said it in Part Two and I will say it again, more directly: most company cultures I have encountered are ideologies in disguise.
The tells are always the same. Newcomers who ask obvious questions are told “that’s not how we do things here.” Strategies that worked in Year 2 are still being defended in Year 8 because they are associated with the founding mythology. Failures are processed through the lens of execution — we believed the right things, we just didn’t do them well enough — rather than through genuine strategic re-examination.
The founding story of your company is your most dangerous asset. It gives you identity, cohesion, and a sense of shared purpose. It also, if you are not careful, becomes the lens through which every new piece of evidence gets filtered, bent, and made to fit.
Every company that has ever failed while being absolutely convinced it was doing the right things was operating on ideology, not reason not data.
The antidote is not to abandon your values. It is to hold them with enough intellectual humility that reality can update them.
Practically: separate your principles — which should be durable — from your strategies — which should be ruthlessly revisable. A principle might be “we will always put the customer’s long-term interest above the short-term transaction.” A strategy is “we will do that through a mobile-first experience.” If the evidence changes about what the customer needs, the strategy must change. The principle should hold. But conflating the two is how companies become incapable of pivoting while sincerely believing they are being consistent.
And on AI: I genuinely believe that giving your people access to good AI tools — tools that challenge assumptions, surface counterarguments, and help individuals reason rather than comply — is one of the most powerful organizational investments you can make right now. Not because the AI is smarter than your team. But because it is structurally indifferent to your company’s mythology. It has no career to protect. It does not know which opinion the CEO prefers. It will just engage with the argument.
That indifference is underrated.
Play the Game You Are Actually In, Not the Game You Started
This is the China lesson, translated.
Beijing’s extraordinary strategic success over the past two decades has come from one discipline above all others: the consistent ability to identify the real game being played — not the surface game, not the declared game, but the underlying structural competition — and optimize for it, quietly, over decades.
Most companies I have worked with are playing the wrong game. Not because they are stupid. Because the game changed and they did not notice, or they noticed but the organizational cost of acknowledging it was too high.
I have seen banks spend five years optimizing their mobile app experience while the real competition moved to invisible, embedded finance that required no app at all. I have seen fintech companies build extraordinary technology for a regulatory environment that was already shifting beneath them. I have seen enterprise software companies win every feature comparison while losing the architecture war.
The question to ask — regularly, honestly, with people who are not invested in your current answer — is not “are we executing well?” but “are we playing the right game?”
Flawless execution of the wrong strategy is just a faster way to lose.
Specifically for founders: the game almost always shifts at scale. The skills that got you to ten million in revenue are not the same skills that get you to a hundred million. The culture that worked with twenty people starts to calcify at two hundred. The founder who refuses to acknowledge that the game has changed — who insists that what worked before will work again if only the team executes harder — is making the same mistake as the general who prepares brilliantly for the last war.
Be honest about which chapter you are in. The companies I have admired most are the ones where the leadership was able to say, clearly and without defensiveness: we are a different company now, operating in a different environment, and we need to think differently. Not as a confession of failure. As a sign of maturity.
The Long Game Is the Only Game
Khamenei played a long game. China plays a long game. And it is worth noting — without endorsing anything about their methods — that they were effective precisely because of that time horizon.
Most of the pressure on founders and CEOs runs in the opposite direction. Quarterly results. Investor updates. Annual planning cycles. Competitive pressure that feels urgent even when it is not. The entire structural environment of modern business is designed to compress your time horizon and reward short-term legibility over long-term positioning.
The founders I have seen build the most durable things are almost universally the ones who found a way to resist that compression. Who were willing to make decisions that looked wrong for two years in order to be right in year five. Who protected the long-game bets from the organizational pressure to show near-term returns on everything.
This requires institutional architecture, not just personal conviction. It requires a board that understands and has genuinely bought into the long horizon. It requires communication to your team that contextualizes near-term pain against long-term direction. And it requires, frankly, the self-awareness to distinguish between a bet that looks bad because it is bad, and a bet that looks bad because it is early.
The most expensive strategic mistake is not making the wrong bet. It is abandoning the right bet too soon because it looked wrong.
Build the institutions that protect your long game. Because the market, the investors, and the quarterly calendar will not do it for you.
The Through Line
I started this essay with dictators. I moved to ideology. I ended with China and Iran.
These are not three separate topics. They are three expressions of the same underlying truth.
Dictators thrive when institutions fail. Ideology thrives when reasoning fails. And strategic miscalculation thrives when we see the world as we wish it to be rather than as it is.
Khamenei lasted 35 years because the institutional checks on his power were dismantled, one emergency at a time. The ideologies that sustain authoritarian systems — religious, nationalist, revolutionary — persist because they are never subjected to honest critical scrutiny. And China’s strategy in the Middle East worked for as long as it did because Washington kept analyzing the region through the lens of the region itself, rather than understanding it as a theater in a much larger competition.
The world is not, at its core, a complicated place. It is a place where power accumulates in the absence of accountability, where certainty calcifies into ideology, and where the long game is almost always won by the player who correctly identifies the real game being played.
The most dangerous illusion is not that you don’t know enough. It is that you already do.
These are my lessons. Hard-earned, imperfectly held, and constantly being revised.
Thank you for reading something different.
