How a Pack of Real‑Estate Swindlers Became Henchmen of "Civilization"

(With apologies to Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw).

Let us begin with a confession, as all proper satirists must, preferably while adjusting a starched collar and affecting the pained expression of a man who has just stepped in something unspeakable in the street. The confession is this: we in the West have been guilty of a rather breathtaking failure of observation. We have stared directly at a truth for forty years, blinked, and called it an optical illusion. The truth, now laid bare for any soul brave enough to whisper it, is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is governed by a cadre of philosopher‑kings of such staggering erudition that Plato would weep with the pure, uncomplicated joy of a schoolboy finding his lost marble. And the United States of America? It is governed by a traveling circus of real‑estate swindlers, hereditary placemen, and teleprompter‑addicted narcissists whose moral compasses—if they possess such instruments at all—point only to the nearest television camera, cell phone or offshore tax shelter.

Yet it is these very American lowlifes, these moral pygmies in expensive suits, who have the unmitigated gall to point a finger across the ocean and pronounce the Persians “barbarians.” One is reminded of the village drunkard accusing his neighbor of an unsteady gait. The situation is not merely ironic. It is a cosmic joke of such elaborate construction that one suspects the universe of having a satirical bent all its own.

I. The Regiment of the Doctorate

Consider, if you will, the matter of education. In Iran, a man does not simply wake up one morning, announce that he feels a “call to serve,” and proceed to spend his family’s fortune on billboards depicting himself shaking hands with a firefighter. No. The ascent to power in Tehran is a grinding, ascetic pilgrimage through the cloisters of theology, the labyrinths of jurisprudence, and the cold, unyielding corridors of revolutionary philosophy. Let us take a tour of the Iranian political class’s curricula vitae—a document that, if dropped on the floor of the United States Congress, would cause a stampede of bewildered legislators searching for the nearest community college.

The Supreme Leader. Ali Khamenei pursued advanced religious studies at seminaries in Mashhad and Qom, achieving the clerical rank of Ayatollah after studying Islamic jurisprudence, philosophy, and logic under prominent scholars. He has written more books than most American congressmen have read. When he lectures on the nature of justice, he does so from a foundation of four decades of scholarly disputation.

The President. Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s current president, earned diplomas in food industry and natural sciences before completing a medical degree at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in 1985, where he also taught physiology. A physician in the presidential palace—not a former game‑show host or a failed car salesman, but an actual doctor. One imagines him diagnosing the body politic with a stethoscope while his American counterpart is busy diagnosing his own hairline with a mirror.

The Former Presidents and Negotiators. Hassan Rouhani obtained a PhD in Islamic law from Glasgow Caledonian University in 1999. A Scottish doctorate! The very phrase conjures images of rain‑soaked seminars and meticulous footnotes. Mohammad Javad Zarif, former foreign minister and key nuclear architect of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, holds a BA and MA from San Francisco State University, plus an MA and PhD in international law and politics from the University of Denver. An Iranian who studied in California and Colorado, who then returned home to lecture American diplomats on the fine points of treaty law—the humiliation was so exquisite that Washington still hasn’t recovered.

The Nuclear Negotiators and Security Figures. Saeed Jalili earned a PhD in political science from Imam Sadiq University, focusing on Islamic political thought. Abbas Araghchi, the current foreign minister, has a PhD in political science from the University of Kent (1996). Ali Larijani, that towering figure of Iranian politics, held a PhD in Western philosophy from the University of Tehran, with a thesis on Kant. Kant! Can you imagine? An Iranian mullah writing a dissertation on the Critique of Pure Reason while his American counterpart is busy tweeting about celebrity feuds. Hossein Dehghan possesses a master’s in metallurgy and a PhD in public administration from the University of Tehran. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr earned a bachelor’s in economics and master’s in public administration from the University of Tehran, plus a PhD in strategic management from the National Defense University. And Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, holds a bachelor’s in human geography from the University of Tehran, a master’s in human geography from Islamic Azad University, and a PhD in political geography from Tarbiat Modares University.

Let us pause here to catch our breath. These are not the credentials of barbarians. These are the credentials of a university faculty meeting. These are men who have spent more years in libraries than most American politicians have spent sober. They have written theses on Kant and Islamic jurisprudence; they have mastered metallurgy and strategic management; they can negotiate a nuclear treaty and then go home to grade papers on physiology. They are, in short, terrifyingly overeducated.

And what of their American counterparts? Ah. Now we enter the funfair.

II. The Parade of the Placemen

Look at the American politician. Look closely. What do you see? You see a creature who majored in “Communications” or, if he is feeling particularly adventurous, “Political Science” with a minor in Fraternity Leadership. His intellectual formation consists of having once skimmed a thirty‑page summary of Robert’s Rules of Order. His moral formation consists of learning which donor wants which tax loophole and how to appear outraged about the opposing party’s scandal while committing an identical one in the cloakroom. The American politician does not read Plato; he reads polling data. He does not wrestle with Aquinas; he wrestles with his own ego on a hotel room floor at three in the morning, wondering why the cable news segment only gave him seven minutes instead of nine. To call this man a “philosopher‑king” would be an insult to kings, to philosophers, and to the very concept of governance. He is, at best, a philosopher‑clown, and at worst, a philosopher‑mugger.

But we must be specific, for the species has its particularly noxious sub‑genera. Let us examine the cohort of American power‑holders who genuinely believe themselves to be the betters of the Persian philosopher‑kings—a collection of real‑estate refugees and performative populists who have mistaken a B‑minus in leveraged buyouts for a doctorate in statecraft. I speak, of course, of Jared Kushner, Steven Witkoff, Donald Trump, and that special bouquet of synthetic authenticity, J. D. Vance.

Jared Kushner possesses a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, which he obtained under circumstances that polite society calls “legacy admission” and the uncharitable call “Dad bought a building.” He then acquired a law degree and an MBA from New York University—simultaneously, because why waste time?—but has he ever practiced law with distinction? Has he published a thesis on international relations? He has not. He has, instead, distinguished himself by shepherding the “Peace to Prosperity” plan in the Middle East, a document so devoid of geographic and political literacy that it proposed a $50 billion investment fund for Palestine while simultaneously endorsing Israeli annexation of the West Bank. This is not statecraft; this is a rich kid’s PowerPoint presentation. His greatest diplomatic achievement was negotiating a normalisation agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates—a deal that had been quietly cooking for years before he showed up, and for which he took full credit with the shamelessness of a magician claiming to have invented the rabbit. When Iranian negotiators with PhDs from Glasgow and Kent sat across from Mr. Kushner, they must have felt like concert violinists being asked to jam with a man who owns a ukulele and knows three chords.

Steven Witkoff is a real‑estate developer from New York, whose primary qualification for international diplomacy appears to be that he was once Donald Trump’s golf partner. Mr. Witkoff has no advanced degree in international relations, no PhD in political science, no thesis on Kant. He has, instead, a talent for building luxury condominiums and a résumé that includes a notorious bankruptcy involving the Witkoff Group’s 2009 restructuring. In 2024, he was dispatched to the Middle East on “peace missions,” presumably because the administration had run out of people who could spell “Hamas.” His approach to negotiation is said to resemble his approach to real estate: identify a distressed asset, offer a lowball price, and threaten to walk away. This works beautifully when you’re buying an office building in Miami. It works rather less well when you’re dealing with people who have been perfecting the art of vendetta since the Crusades. But Mr. Witkoff imagines himself a master negotiator, and the American media, ever eager for a narrative of the amateur genius, plays along.

Donald Trump is the sun around which these lesser luminaries orbit. The man has no degree beyond a bachelor’s from the Wharton School—an institution he has described as “the hardest school to get into” and “super genius stuff.” In truth, he transferred from Fordham, and his academic record is a state secret for the same reason that the recipe for Coca‑Cola is a state secret: because the reality would be devastating to the brand. He has built his career on a series of real‑estate ventures that include multiple bankruptcies (Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza, Trump Entertainment Resorts), a fraudulent university (Trump University, settled for $25 million), and a collection of branded buildings whose actual ownership often boils down to “licenses his name while others assume the risk.” He has written books—or, rather, he has had ghosts write books with titles like The Art of the Deal, which should more accurately be titled The Art of Having Other People Do the Work While You Take a Bow. His foreign policy “accomplishments” include withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal (negotiated by those PhD‑wielding Persians), assassinating an Iranian general (an act of state‑sponsored murder that any graduate of a correspondence‑school law program could tell you is dicey), and publicly musing about buying Greenland. Greenland! As if the Danes were a distressed real‑estate asset and he could offer them a lowball price and threaten to walk away. The man’s worldview is not merely adolescent; it is a cartoon of adolescence, a thirty‑year‑old living in his parents’ basement who thinks he’s a tycoon because he once flipped a Funko Pop on eBay.

And then there is J. D. Vance, the most tragicomic figure of the lot. Here is a man who, on paper, should know better. He graduated from Ohio State University summa cum laude. He attended Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He wrote a memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that was celebrated by the coastal elite as a Rosetta Stone for understanding the white working class. By any reasonable measure, J. D. Vance possesses the raw intellectual material to be a serious statesman. He could have studied Persian foreign policy. He could have earned a PhD in political science. He could have written a thesis on Kant. Instead, he chose the path of the performative populist, transforming himself from a Never‑Trump critic into a Trump‑loving sycophant with the spiritual alacrity of a man who has discovered that flattery pays better than principle. He now sits in the United States Senate, where his chief legislative “accomplishments” include introducing bills that go nowhere and delivering speeches that sound like they were written by a chatbot trained on Fox News chyrons. He calls the Iranians “barbarians” while holding a law degree from Yale—a degree that qualifies him to understand exactly how impoverished his own rhetoric is. That is the tragedy of J. D. Vance: he is a man who climbed the mountain of elite education only to throw rocks down at the people still climbing. He knows what a real education looks like. He knows that the Iranian negotiators across the table have credentials as good as or better than his own. And yet he chooses to sneer, because sneering is cheap and authenticity is a brand, and in American politics, the brand always wins.

III. The Chessboard and the Checkerboard

Let us examine the actual conduct of statecraft, that art which Shaw defined as the ability to lie convincingly on a national scale. Here, again, the Iranian demonstrates a mastery that leaves his American counterpart looking like a chimpanzee trying to perform surgery. Iranian statecraft is slow, patient, and woven from the deep threads of history. They are playing chess while America plays Hungry Hungry Hippos. Consider the nuclear negotiations. For years, Iranian diplomats—men with law degrees from Tehran University and doctorates from Glasgow and Kent—sat across the table from American secretaries of state who, in previous lives, had been senators from states that produce corn or oil, or, in one memorable case, a woman whose primary qualification was that her husband had been a president. The Iranians quoted the Vienna Convention. They discussed the finer points of the Non‑Proliferation Treaty. They referenced the diplomatic traditions of the Safavid dynasty, for heaven’s sake. The Americans? They demanded “transparency” and “good faith” and then, the moment an agreement was signed, promptly abandoned it because a new man with a bad haircut and a hotel in Manhattan decided it would be good for his real‑estate portfolio to do so.

That, gentle reader, is not statecraft. That is a tantrum in a $5,000 suit. That is a child knocking over the checkerboard because he doesn’t like the rules. And yet, when the Iranian regime—with exquisite, infuriating patience—simply waits out the American electoral cycle and continues its enrichment program, the American politician sputters on cable news that “the Iranians cannot be trusted.” Trust? Between a chess grandmaster and a toddler, the trust issue is not the grandmaster’s unpredictability. It is the toddler’s tendency to eat the pieces.

IV. Who Is the Barbarian?

But the most delicious irony, the crème de la crème of this absurdist banquet, is the charge of “barbarism.” The American politician, with a perfectly straight face, calls the Iranian a barbarian. Let us define our terms. A barbarian, in the classical sense, is one who is outside the bounds of civilized order, one who rejects law, reason, and restraint. One who is governed by base appetites rather than elevated reason. One who resorts to violence when persuasion fails. One who, in short, behaves like a thug.

Now. Which country has a legislative body that routinely devolves into shouting matches, physical altercations, and the hurling of procedural hand grenades designed to grind governance to a halt? Which country’s political discourse features grown men calling each other “liars,” “traitors,” and “losers” on the floor of its national legislature? Which country’s chief executive has used the official social media account of the presidency to insult athletes, attack judges, and promote wrestling matches? The answer is not Tehran. The Majlis of Iran, for all its hardline posturing, conducts its business with a degree of decorum that would make a Victorian butler nod in approval. They argue. They disagree, violently and sincerely. But they do not call each other names on Twitter. They do not storm the chambers of their own parliament. They do not, in short, behave like barbarians.

What of the rule of law? The American politician loves to lecture Iran on its “kangaroo courts” and “show trials.” But let us be honest. America’s legal system has become a grotesque carnival of plea bargains, mass incarceration, and outright bribery masquerading as campaign finance. A rich man in America does not go to prison; he goes to a resort with a fence around it. A poor man goes to a cage. And the politicians who make these laws? They are exempt from most of them. They have their own health care, their own pension system, their own insider‑trading rules. They have constructed a legal architecture designed to protect themselves and their donors, with the rest of humanity left to scramble through the cracks. If that is not a form of barbarism—the strong making rules for the weak while ignoring them for themselves—then the word has lost all meaning. The Iranian system, for all its manifold and horrifying cruelties, at least has the honesty to apply its Sharia with a brutal, consistent hand. The cleric who steals loses his hand, just as the peasant who steals does. In America, the executive who steals a billion dollars gets a “golden parachute” and a book deal. Which society is truly lawless?

And what of that endless, insatiable American hunger for adulation? This is perhaps the most barbaric trait of all, for it reveals a soul that cannot stand its own company. The American politician lives in a state of frantic, desperate neediness that would embarrass a stray dog. He requires the crowd’s roar. He basks in the flash of cameras the way a reptile basks on a warm rock. He measures his worth not by the wisdom of his policies but by the size of his rallies, the volume of the applause, the number of retweets. He is a hollow man, shouting into a void, hoping the echo comes back loud enough to convince him he exists. Donald Trump, the apotheosis of the type, once claimed that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing voters. He may be right—not because of his policies, but because his followers are addicted to the spectacle of a man who has never read a book but believes himself a genius. That is not leadership. That is a narcotic.

Contrast this with the Iranian politician. Whether you admire him or despise him, you cannot accuse him of being an attention‑seeker. He does not smile for the cameras. He does not tell jokes. He does not try to be your friend. He is a grim, ascetic figure, often bearded, often dressed in the simple robes of a cleric, or—in the case of President Pezeshkian—a white medical coat under his suit jacket, radiating the uncomfortable certainty of a man who believes he is answerable to God and not to you. He does not need your approval. He cares nothing for your likes or shares. He is, in the truest sense, an adult. A terrifying, inflexible, occasionally murderous adult, to be sure—but an adult nonetheless. His worldview is not adolescent; it is medieval, which is to say, it is coherent. It has been tested by centuries of philosophical and theological argument. It has answers for everything, even if those answers are wrong. The American politician’s worldview, by contrast, is a collection of bumper stickers held together with hope and donor money.

V. The Mirror Speaks

And so we arrive at the final, magnificent irony. When the American politician calls the Iranian a barbarian, he is projecting. He is looking into a mirror, seeing his own greed, his own lawlessness, his own emotional neediness, his own intellectual vacancy, and he is refusing to recognize the reflection. He points a finger across the ocean and shouts “barbarian!” because the alternative—looking in the mirror and shouting “barbarian!” at himself—would require a moment of self‑awareness that his fragile ego cannot sustain.

The Iranian, meanwhile, goes about his business. He studies his Kant. He finishes his thesis on political geography. He teaches physiology to medical students. He enforces his harsh, coherent laws. He waits. He plays chess. He knows that the American will be replaced by another American in four or eight years, and that the new one will be just as loud, just as needy, just as profoundly, hopelessly adolescent. He knows this because he has been watching for forty years. He has read our history. He has studied our philosophy. He has, in many cases, earned advanced degrees from our own universities before returning home to call us the Great Satan. He has looked at the West with clear eyes and found it wanting—not because it is evil, but because it is silly. Because it has confused freedom with frenzy, individualism with selfishness, and democracy with a reality television show.

When the Iranian diplomat hears that Jared Kushner has been appointed to “bring peace to the Middle East,” he does not laugh. He is too sophisticated for laughter. Instead, he furrows his brow, reaches for a volume of Machiavelli, and murmurs, “Si vedrà.” We shall see. And what he sees is a parade of American mediocrity—men who have never written a thesis, never defended a dissertation, never spent a sleepless night wrestling with the problem of evil or the categorical imperative—strutting across the world stage in $5,000 suits, convinced that their real‑estate deals qualify them to redraw borders and topple governments.

It would be funny if it were not so expensive. It would be tragic if it were not so predictable. The Persian philosopher‑king, with his PhD in Kant and his thesis on Islamic jurisprudence, waits. He knows that the American will tire of the game eventually. He knows that the American will be replaced by another American, just as loud, just as needy, just as profoundly, hilariously underqualified. And in the meantime, he reads. He studies. He plans. He does not call the American a barbarian. That would be too easy, too imprecise. He calls the American something far worse: a tourist. A tourist in the serious business of power, snapping pictures, buying souvenirs, and leaving before the real work begins.

Coda: The Serious Work

So let us stop using the word “barbarian.” It is an insult to the Persians, who built one of the great civilizations of antiquity while our ancestors were painting themselves blue. And it is an insult to the true barbarians of our age—the men in expensive suits who cannot govern, cannot think, and cannot stand five minutes of silence without checking their polling numbers. The barbarians are not in Tehran. They are in Washington, smiling into cameras, shaking hands with donors, and calling everyone else savages to hide the savage in the mirror.

And the saddest part? The Iranian knows this. He has known it all along. He is, after all, a philosopher‑king—a man with a PhD in Western philosophy from Tehran and a dissertation on Kant tucked under his arm. He has read his Plato. He knows that the worst form of injustice is for the ignorant to rule over the wise. He looks at the American politician—at Kushner and Witkoff and Trump and Vance—and he does not see a rival. He sees a cautionary tale. He sees the Republic, Book VIII, come to life. He sees democracy rotting into tyranny before his very eyes. And while the rest of us cheer for our preferred team of clowns, he waits. He studies. He plans. And every now and then, he smiles—a small, grim, knowing smile—and he whispers to himself: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. But blessed also are we, the patient, for we shall inherit the ashes of the fools.