Bow before the throne of the Great Persian Shahanshah.

The history of Iran, commonly known as Persia, historically was comprised of the area from Greece and Egypt in the west to Ancient India and China in the east, and from the Russia and Kazakhstan in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in the south.
Any nation with -stan was named by the Persians and was historically under the control of the Persian satrapies.
Throughout the ages, the Persian's have had many, many empires such as the Medians, Achaemenids, Parthians, Sassanids... (it keeps going) ... the Safavids, Qajars, and so on. It has had the most empires of any country. Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to 4000 BCE.
To this day, modern Iran is still able to exert a large amount of influence in the middle-east regardless of Western intervention. Especially over the nations which are ethnically Iranian such as Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, etc.