What Persia taught Alexander

By Dennis T. Cosgrove
Real Clear Wire

When "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling was published in 1901, it described a shadow contest between the British and Russian empires across Central Asia. The geography of that struggle has shifted, but its logic has not. Today, the Great Game runs through Iran and the Strait of Hormuz — and the risk is not that the United States misunderstands Iran’s capabilities, but that it misunderstands the game itself.

Years ago, while working in Central Asia as an advisor on border security, I traveled to Takht-i-Sangin along the Pyanj River, known in antiquity as the Oxus. Near the modern borders of Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, history there feels startlingly immediate. Alexander the Great crossed that river during his eastern campaign against Persia and helped establish the settlement whose ruins still lie scattered across the arid expanse. Centuries later, imperial powers maneuvered across the same terrain during the original Great Game chronicled by Peter Hopkirk. Standing nearly alone among the remnants of the ancient Temple of the Oxus, I found myself thinking not only about armies and empires, but about the ordinary lives that once existed there. Archaeologists working at the site have uncovered small votive offerings left at the temple centuries ago, including delicate Greek earrings shaped like amphorae and dolphins — designs still recognizable in Greece today. Soldiers, traders, settlers and conquerors all passed through this frontier. The landscape outlasted them all.

I had encountered other parts of that world earlier in my career: working near the Iran-Iraq border in Kurdistan documenting the aftermath of chemical attacks, and decades before that, transiting the Strait of Hormuz aboard a supertanker as a young merchant marine officer. Across these environments, one lesson remained constant: in this region, history is not background. It is living infrastructure.

In Washington, Iran is typically framed as a contemporary problem — its nuclear ambitions, proxy networks and role in regional instability. All of that is real. But it is incomplete. Iran is not simply a Middle Eastern state. It sits at the intersection of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Gulf, shaped by historical ties and strategic traditions that extend well beyond its borders.

Iran is also heir to a civilizational legacy that once stretched from Anatolia to the borders of India — a history that still shapes how Iran sees itself and interprets pressure from abroad.

History does not provide a blueprint, but it does offer warnings. Consider Alexander and his campaign against the Persian Empire. His early victories were swift and overwhelming. But conquest proved easier than control.

As Alexander pushed east into Central Asia, the campaign changed. Resistance hardened. Terrain and distance imposed new constraints. It was there — on the far edges of the Persian world — that he adapted. He incorporated local forces, adopted elements of Persian custom and married into regional power structures. Domination alone was not enough. To sustain his position, he had to adjust to the realities of the board.

Subsequent powers learned similar lessons, often at significant cost. The British struggled to impose durable control in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion became a costly quagmire. The United States, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, found itself engaged in a conflict that lasted two decades with no clean resolution.

Each of these episodes reflects a common pattern: overwhelming force at the outset, followed by a prolonged encounter with geographic, cultural and political limits.

The current U.S. posture toward Iran — military pressure, economic sanctions and deterrence — is often presented as a contained strategy. Its aims are clear: prevent nuclear proliferation and counter destabilizing activity. But the broader strategic context is often given insufficient weight.

For Iranians, foreign intervention is not an abstraction. The 1953 coup, in which the United States helped install a government aligned with Western interests, remains central to Iran’s political memory. It informs the regime’s worldview and its deep suspicion of external pressure. Whether Washington accepts that narrative is irrelevant. Tehran does.

Layer onto this the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through this narrow corridor. It is one of the few places where a regional actor can exert immediate global leverage. The ability to threaten disruption — even without executing it — is itself a powerful strategic tool.

In earlier centuries, the Great Game centered on access to India or influence in Central Asia. Today, it is equally about energy flows, trade routes and strategic positioning. The pieces have changed. The stakes have evolved. But the structure of the contest remains.

The enduring mistake is to assume that such a contest can be resolved through a decisive outcome. It cannot.

The Great Game does not reward final victories. It rewards endurance. The objective is not triumph in a single decisive moment, but the ability to sustain position over time — to absorb pressure, adapt to changing conditions and avoid irreversible missteps.

History here is not analogy. It is warning.

Military action can achieve tactical success, and sanctions can impose real costs. But neither resolves the deeper dynamics of a region shaped by centuries of external intervention and internal complexity. Actions taken today — however justified — will be interpreted through a long historical lens.

Strategy in this environment is about managing consequences, not controlling outcomes. Every action — military, economic or diplomatic — carries consequences that extend well beyond its initial intent. In Iran’s case, those consequences are filtered through geography, history and a deeply ingrained sense of external threat.

That reality imposes a different standard of thinking: not what achieves immediate effect, but what preserves long-term position. Not what signals strength in the moment, but what sustains it over time.

If there is a lesson to draw from the long arc of the Great Game, it is this: understanding the board matters as much as moving the pieces.

The temptation, particularly in moments of tension, is to focus narrowly on immediate objectives: deterrence, retaliation and signaling. Those are necessary components of statecraft. But without a broader framework grounded in history and regional understanding, they risk becoming moves made without full awareness of the game being played.

The Great Game never truly ended. It evolved.

And in that game, survival — not victory — has often been the more durable measure of success.

Dennis T. Cosgrove is a former FBI Special Agent, legal attaché, and former Head of the Border Security and Management Unit at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna. He worked extensively in Central Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans in a variety of law enforcement, diplomatic, and international security roles, including numerous assignments with U.S. Embassies overseas. He writes on geopolitics, transnational threats, and strategic affairs, and is the author of two published books with a third currently in progress.

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