One of the consolations of an ancient society is that it provides long memories. For authoritarian leaders, that means the ability to patiently nurse old grudges and mete out revenge when the time is right.

After declaring victory in the 12 Day War with Iran, it would be wise for the US not to make the mistakes it made in dealing with China and post-Soviet Russia. That means working with Israel and other allies to do whatever can be done to help the Iranian people topple the Ayatollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-led regime from within.

Until very recently, American policymakers badly misread the intentions of China’s leaders. The American side assumed that a prosperous China would become a kind of Belgium at scale — a good global citizen, reliable ally, and trading partner. For the Americans, that idea seemed reasonable. After all, that’s what happened with post-Imperial Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.

But the Chinese had learned different lessons from their much-longer history.

China boasted a massive navy in the early 15th century, and then inexplicably dismantled it. European powers filled the vacuum by taking much smaller ships across the Atlantic, colonizing the Americas, and prospering. For China, what came next was a series of humiliations that reduced them from accounting for one-third of the global economy in 1820, to the Opium Wars, to the poverty that plagued the country throughout the 20th century.

The lesson the Chinese learned from all this? Become an outward-looking superpower, dominate other countries that are resource-rich and institution-poor, and the bad times will be a minor blip in a long story of global hegemony.

Having spent decades helping China’s authoritarian leaders pursue their dream, the US is now scrambling to contain it.

Similarly, when Vladimir Putin emerged from the wreckage of Russia’s debt default in 1998, Western leaders assumed he wanted to make Russia a normal country and bring back foreign investment. As it turned out, what Putin really wanted was to be a Tsar.

History may not be destiny, but it certainly informs an adversary’s perception of itself.

There’s no question that Israel and the United States achieved impressive results in their brief war with Iran. The IRGC knows that it has been infiltrated by the Mossad, and the costs of the regime’s bad behavior have been personalized rather than imposed on the wider Iranian public.

No number of hasty executions of alleged Israeli spies will change the reality that the Israelis have freedom to operate, not just in Iranian skies, but in the highest reaches of Iranian society.

The physical infrastructure and human resources associated with Iran’s nuclear program have also been badly degraded, with promises for more of the same if there are signs that the program is starting up again. Top nuclear scientists have options, including emigration, and tend to prefer to stay alive. They are not like the suicidal membership of the terror proxies that Iran has nurtured in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen.

As long as the Americans and Israelis maintain credible deterrence, pursuing nuclear weapons will remain dangerous work.

But Iran’s leadership has signaled that their ambitions remain what they were before the defeats of the past year, and it would be a mistake not to take them at their word.

To convince themselves that they’re merely down but not out, they will likely look back to the first time their country warred with a stubborn democracy – 2,500 years ago.

In 490 BCE, Darius I hoped to subjugate the burgeoning democracies of Greece to Persian rule and punish the Athenians for supporting the Ionians in their revolt against him. Darius had superior numbers, but the Greeks had a better strategy and managed to encircle the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. The Persians suffered more than 6,400 casualties against just over 200 Greek dead, and promptly retreated back to Asia.

Marathon may have been a decisive Persian defeat, but the loss of blood and treasure was relatively small, and as a result, the loss did little to undermine Persia’s ability to wage war in the future.

War came soon enough.

In 480 BCE, Xerxes I, Darius’ son, brought an obscenely large army — estimated to be between 70,000 and 300,000 troops — to ensure that he could overwhelm the Greek defenses. A heroic army, led by King Leonidas and 300 Spartans, held off the invading Persians at Thermopylae in order to give the Greeks time to plan their next move.

After much debate, it was agreed that Themistocles would lead the Athenian fleet to a decisive battle off the island of Salamis. It was a risky move, and the future of what subsequently came to be known as Western civilization hung in the balance.

The outnumbered Greeks prevailed once again, largely due to superior tactics and an ability to swim. Salamis was the beginning of the end for the Persian campaign in Greece, and the following year, they were pushed out entirely.

The lessons of prior millennia have their limits. But there’s no question that the leaders of today’s Iran have broad regional ambitions, and they intend to pursue them with the unyielding resolve of the emperors who came before them.

We are now very likely in something akin to the period between Marathon and Salamis, in which a dented but not broken Iran will decide when, where, and how to attack next.

Fortunately, the regime is despised by its people, and that remains its Achilles’ heel. If Israel and the US don’t wish to be at war with Iran again, they shouldn’t proclaim victory too soon and ought to do everything they can to help the Iranian people topple the regime.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.

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