Washington’s foreign policy establishment has a dangerous tendency to dismantle nations it deems adversarial. Now, neoconservative think tanks like the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and their fellow travelers in the European Parliament are openly promoting the balkanization of Iran — a reckless strategy that would further destabilize the Middle East, trigger catastrophic humanitarian crises, and provoke fierce resistance from both Iranians and U.S. partners.
As Israel and Iran exchanged blows in mid-June, FDD’s Brenda Shaffer argued that Iran’s multi-ethnic makeup was a vulnerability to be exploited. Shaffer has been a vocal advocate for Azerbaijan in mainstream U.S. media, even as she has consistently failed to disclose her ties to Azerbaijan’s state oil company, SOCAR. For years, she has pushed for Iran’s fragmentation along ethnic lines, akin to the former Yugoslavia’s collapse. She has focused much of that effort on promoting the secession of Iranian Azerbaijan, where Azeris form Iran’s largest non-Persian group.
Shaffer’s views align with a recent Jerusalem Post editorial which, amid the euphoria of Israel’s initial strikes in this month’s war against Iran, called on President Trump to openly embrace Iran’s dismemberment. Specifically, it urged a “Middle East coalition for Iran’s partition” and “security guarantees to Sunni, Kurdish and Balochi minority regions willing to break away.” The same outlet is on the record calling for Israel and the U.S. to support the secession from Iran of what it calls “‘South Azerbaijan,” (meaning the Azeri-majority regions in northwestern Iran).
Meanwhile, the foreign affairs spokeswoman for a centrist liberal group in the European Parliament convened a meeting on the “future of Iran,” ostensibly to discuss the prospects for a “successful” revolt against the Islamic Republic. The fact that the only two Iranian speakers were ethnic separatists from Iran’s Azerbaijan and Ahwaz regions made clear her agenda. Since the European Parliament unilaterally cut all relations with Iran’s official bodies in 2022, it has become a playground for assorted radical exiled opposition groups, such as monarchists, the cultish MEK (Mojaheddeen-e Khalk), and ethnic separatists.
Yet Iran is not some fragile patchwork state on the verge of collapse. It is a 90-million-strong nation with a deep sense of historical and cultural identity. While proponents of balkanization love to fixate on Iran’s ethnic diversity — Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs — they consistently underestimate the unifying force of Iranian nationalism. As the scholar Shervin Malekzadeh noted recently in the Los Angeles Times, “There is a robust consensus among scholars that politics in Iran begins with the idea of Iran as a people with a continuous and unbroken history, a nation that ‘looms out of an immemorial past.’ Nationalism provides the broad political arena in which different groups and ideologies in Iran compete for power and authority, whether monarchist, Islamist or leftist.”
Decades of foreign pressure, from sanctions to covert operations to war, have only reinforced this cohesion. The idea that stirring separatist sentiment will fracture Iran is a dangerous fantasy — one that deliberately overlooks how schemes hatched, in major part, by pro-Israel neoconservatives, have backfired in Iraq and Syria leaving chaos in their wake.
Such a strategy also exposes its proponents’ deep ignorance of the realities on the ground. Shaffer, the champion of Azerbaijani irredentism, has gone so far as to cheer Israeli airstrikes on Tabriz, the cultural and economic heart of Iranian Azerbaijan.
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