The good side of a nuclear Iran. Seriously.

If you believe the self-serving leaks from the Israeli government, or the cries of professional anti-war campaigners fearing redundancy, the West is preparing to take out as many of Iran’s nuclear facilities as it can find. Forces are massing in the Gulf, to demonstrate America’s iron will and irresistible power. Statesmen and commentators, meanwhile, are sitting back home, wondering just how thick the Iranians will have to be if they’re ever going to fall for this transparent bluff.

The West has no casus belli for a strike, and no appetite for one. It has little confidence that it could actually find all of Iran's nuclear sites. Or fully destroy the sites that it does know about. Neither does it know how long this would delay Iran’s nuclear programme. All it knows is that it would do is cause diplomatic carnage and turn the Islamic Republic’s hardliners into heroes. No one seriously thinks this is a good plan, so instead we’re going to vaguely threaten and annoy Tehran, with both sides fully aware that there isn’t much more we can do.

This is the easy and lazy option, and therefore the one that we seem to be going ahead with. But it is not the only option. Instead of harassing Iran to no particular gain, it may be both wise and possible to acknowledge its growing status as a major power, and extend it a civil hand. It is quite true that a nuclear Iran may be a threat, a high-stakes challenge, and would turn Middle East strategies upside down. But its development also offers a potential route out of Islamic extremism.

The growth of Islamic radicalism has never been a straightforward response to grievance, as the usual theory goes. Many peoples are poorer than the Islamic world is, many more oppressed, and none as angry or as sensitive. The usual scapegoat for terrorism - the Israel-Palestine impasse - would barely cause a ripple if it were in a different part of the world. Neither would any other people riot and murder hundreds - of fellow-believers, mostly - over a handful of cartoons. Yet our grievance-mongers and unthinking appeasers just cannot accept that there is something unique about Islam today. They fail to ask the vital, and knuckle-draggingly obvious question of why the Islamic world is so much tetchier than the rest of humanity.

The ‘root cause’ of terrorism is to be found in the psychology by which a minor territorial squabble became the violent, mad obsession of an entire civilisation. It is not plain injustice that does this. It is weakness - or, more specifically, the gap between its weakness and its pride. The Islamic world believes that it is by rights a great civilisation, and it is infuriated by its inability to project itself onto the world stage.

As Germany showed in the years following the Treaty of Versailles, a frustrated, proud, and humiliated civilisation is a particularly dangerous one. And Islam is sensitive, inevitably, where its wounds are. The conflicts that get Islamists seething are not those that cause the most suffering to Muslims, as the grievance-theory would dictate, but those that show the Islamic world to be powerless. Israel treats the Palestinians with indifference and contempt, and feels free to ignore them in pursing its own interests. This is deemed much worse than the massacres of hundreds of thousands in Darfur - where there is horrific suffering, but as it is largely Muslim-on-Muslim slaughter, no insult. It is insult, not pain, that the weak and angry cannot stand.

This psychology is the product of a unique piece of geopolitics. Mainly because of the need for oil supplies, the superpowers have long tried to prevent a local, Islamic hegemon developing in the Middle East. In the normal course of history, the fall of the Ottoman Empire would have left a vacuum for a new regional hegemon to develop. For understandable pragmatic reasons, various Western powers have, for the best part of a century, sought to keep the Middle East controllable and weak.

And for most of the last century, the emasculated Islamic civilisation, stripped of any symbol of power, has been clutching at anything that might be able to wield influence in its name. None did. Nasser, Saddam, and the others were all brought to heel, and once the last and most formidable was humiliatingly ejected from Kuwait, international jihadism became Islam’s new icon.

Terrorism is the worst possible way of giving a people new confidence, quite aside from its unpleasantries. All it can do is lash out again and again, or lose its power. Only states can provide a people with the benign power, the security that is so closely linked with confidence.

Cultural security is what the Islamic world needs more than anything - more than democracy, more than economic regeneration, more than death-to-infidel-pig-dogs. A culture secure in itself - in its identity and its independence - can brush off insults and cope with the imperfections of the world. A brittle civilisation, with superficial arrogance covering a soft, bewildered core of weakness, has the same attitude to ‘disrespect’ as a tooled-up South London thug. Under all the posturing, both are rather pathetic and insecure. They have to prove themselves to be tough, while those who know their own power don’t.

It is necessary for the West that the Islamic world regains the self-respect lost with the fall of the Ottomans, if we don’t fancy fighting an everlasting war against a fanatical enemy. Islam can only return to being a more normal civilisation once it the US that sense of cultural security. It needs a strong and influential state on its home turf, one that can play the role that America plays for the West, that China does for the Orient, South Africa for its continent, Brazil for Latin America, and so on.

Iran is already Islam’s natural hegemon. It is the only Islamic state in the Middle East to be largely independent and able to defend itself, and it is a real, old nation, rather than some cobbling together of oilfield and squabbling peoples. What it wants more than anything is power and recognition, and not to be treated as a tin-pot dictatorship. Which is an ambition not helped by kidnapping sailors, but then no one is suggesting that Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards are touched by strategic genius.

As things look, and regardless of what the West or anyone else does, Iran will probably become the Islamic hegemon. It may come soon, or perhaps in a decade or two. But even the most hardline anti-Iranians talk only of delaying Iran's rise, not stopping it. The strategic question for the West is whether it is worth trying to keep it contained for as long as possible, or whether it might be smarter instead to ease its rise.

If Iran is extended a civil hand and can develop at its natural rate, the worst-case threat would ultimately be no greater than if we insisted on containment. In exchange for facing this risk sooner rather than later, the West’s prize is the chance to be on civilised terms with a significant new power, and to prevent it forming links with China and Russia alone. But if Iran rises in the teeth of Western military opposition, it will create the sort of legend that keeps revolutionaries in power for decades. See Cuba for more details.

A powerful, potentially nuclear Iran is a difficult prospect, and those who say otherwise are fools. Yet for all Ahmadinejad’s vicious rhetoric, Israel is quite able to defend itself, being an advanced nuclear power by air, land and submarine. Ahmadinejad promises to wipe Israel from the face of the map. Our PM promises to wipe out African poverty. Politicians do occasionally say things for effect, as the shrewder observers ought to have noticed.

More worrying is the potential for a local arms race with one or more of the major Arab states, and a destabilising battle to split the Middle East around competing hegemons. But an internal struggle in the Middle East is approaching regardless of what we do. Protecting our interests in the region will require that we are on reasonable terms with the major players, and yet we seem to inexplicably keen on playing Ahmadinejad’s game. The creatures of the Enlightenment are supposed to be capable of rationality over foreign policy, rather than letting a little peasant thug dictate the relationship. What we flatteringly call a strategy is now more about saving face than promoting our own interests.