Perhaps all we are left with is to imagine that Donald Trump, at this stage of his life, sees himself as a kind of new Alexander the Great. The idea of bending Tehran by force, of forcing Iran into a solution imposed from the outside, has an ancient ring to it: it is the recurring temptation to believe that military superiority alone is enough to rewrite the political order of a civilization.
The point is that today’s Iran has changed its name and its form of government compared with the Persian Empire, but it occupies the same historical and mental space: that of a civilizational power which, for centuries, stood as the principal eastern counterweight to Western empires. And, above all, it has never been an easy ground for those who enter convinced they can “solve everything” with a show of force.
There is one fact which, even as an image alone, weighs more than many analyses: Persia was conquered militarily by a Westerner only once, when Alexander the Great overwhelmed the Achaemenid Empire. It was a colossal and unrepeatable event under those same conditions, because it combined military genius, internal contingencies, and a geopolitical world that no longer exists. After that, history was far less generous: it more often showed the opposite, namely Persia’s capacity to absorb the blow, endure, reorganize itself, and return.
The Romans learned this through a defeat so total that it became proverbial. In 53 BC, Marcus Licinius Crassus — the immensely wealthy man who wanted a glory worthy of his stature — led the Roman army against the Parthians, heirs and continuators, in different forms, of that Persian imperial tradition which Rome never truly managed to subdue. Crassus entered Mesopotamia with the idea of a “Roman-style” campaign, based on discipline, mass, and frontal confrontation, and instead found himself trapped in a different kind of war, one tailored to the characteristics of both the enemy and the terrain.
At Carrhae, on the plain of western Mesopotamia, the legions discovered the limits of their own power when power can no longer impose its own rhythm. The Parthians, with mobile cavalry and horse archers, wore the Romans down, struck them from afar, and forced them into a defensive posture without ever allowing them to determine the decisive point of the battle. Tradition also tells of the personal tragedy of Crassus’s son, Publius Licinius Crassus, who, after a failed attack, preferred to take his own life, and of the macabre display of his severed head as an instrument of psychological shock. It then tells of the general’s own end, killed and transformed, in the moralizing memory of the ancients, into a symbol of punished greed: the legend of molten gold poured into his mouth, as the ultimate mockery of “the richest man in the world.”
There is no need to take every detail handed down by the sources literally. The political point is simpler and harsher: Carrhae is a verdict against strategic arrogance. It is proof that the East is not a theater one enters under Rome’s rules and exits carrying a trophy. It is a system which, when underestimated, turns strength into a handicap and initiative into a trap.
That is why, if we really must choose a historical figure to place alongside Trump, perhaps it is not Alexander the Great. It is Crassus. Because the illusion lies not only in believing that Iran is “conquerable.” It lies in believing that striking the head is enough to make the body vanish. It is a deeply Roman temptation: kill the leader, and the regime collapses. But contemporary political systems — especially those built upon layered ideological, military, and security apparatuses — often react to trauma with the opposite reflex: they harden, close ranks, turn the death of their leaders into martyrdom, and convert external pressure into internal legitimacy.
If there truly were an intelligent way to bring down a regime like the Iranian one, it would hardly pass through the theatrical shortcut of eliminating leaders, as though politics were a duel between sovereigns. It would instead require a long, silent, thankless effort: intelligence, diplomacy, targeted isolation, management of internal fractures, the construction of credible alternatives, and above all a strategy capable of not handing the enemy the perfect narrative of resistance.
History, when speaking of Persia, is not an academic exercise. It is a practical warning. Those who enter convinced they are Alexander the Great risk discovering, at the worst possible moment, that they have in fact chosen the road of Crassus. And that, as we know, was not a glorious end.
M.S.
