Iran Is the Enemy the West Created

War with the West needs a theocracy

This post was originally published by the Institute of Art and Ideas and is republished here with permission as part of the Blog of APA’s partnership with the Institute.

The Middle East is ablaze with conflict. From Israel and Palestine, to Yemen and the recent collapse of the Syrian government, when there is crisis in the region fingers usually point in one direction. Towards Iran. But what is Iran’s grand strategy? Vali Nasr, professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins and described as “a leading world authority on Shia Islam” by The Economist, argues Iran is best not thought of as a theocracy, but instead a security state. If the West is to pursue peace in the region, outside intervention is merely fuel for the revolutionary fire and true change can only come from within. 

For over four decades, Iran’s policies have posed serious challenges to its neighbors and the West. The threat of Iran’s nuclear program and its far reach across the Middle East through a chain link of well-armed allies has grown in magnitude as the Islamic Revolution of 1979 has receded in the rear view mirror. Still, despite the gravity of this threat, there is scant understanding of Iran’s intentions, the assumptions, calculations and goals that drive its international statecraft. But what does Iran want and how does it seek to attain it?

Iran is a revisionary international actor. This is perhaps expected insofar as the Islamic Republic was born of a revolution and revolutions by nature challenge the established order. Iran’s international posture is also routinely blamed on the religious nature of its revolution and the theocracy that it has borne. This line of reasoning, however, obfuscates the true motivations that drive Iran today.

It is important to reiterate that Iran’s antagonism towards the West has increased as the memory of the revolution has receded. As the influence of ideology on state and society diminished, Iran has become more determined to resist the West, even as it has faced growing economic and strategic costs. In fact, it seems that the Iranian regime is using religious ideology to maintain its confrontational stance in the interests of statecraft, rather than being driven primarily by religious ideology. It is not that theocracy needs war with the West, but that the war with the West needs theocracy. Without ideology binding state and society, such a confrontation would not be possible. As such, behind the veneer of religious ideology, the Islamic Republic is today a national security state.

Close examination of ongoing debates in Iran suggests that the Islamic Republic’s conception of national security—how to defend Iran, the Islamic Republic and the revolution, understood as one totality—is deeply ingrained in the understanding of the country’s history as well as lessons learned in contending with external threats in more recent years. The language of statecraft is Islamic, but it is a deep sense of insecurity and rage at imperialism that shapes its agenda.

Iran’s revolutionary elite were inspired by Islamic ideology expounded by the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That ideology drew deeply from Iran’s history of foreign interference and the Third-Worldist anti-colonial movements that were popular in developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s. The current Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is well-read in that literature, and his view of the West is reflective more of the discourse of the anticolonial theorist Franz Fanon than of Islamic theology.

The revolution has focused on Iran’s history as a struggle for survival against imperialism. In the nineteenth century, Iran was humiliated and brutalized by European powers who took Iranian territory, intermittently occupied the country and deeply penetrated its economy. Iran barely survived intact and in the process nursed a deep distrust of the West has which became entrenched as an article of faith for the revolution.

In the twentieth century, the Allied powers invaded Iran and occupied it during WWII. At the conclusion of the war, the Soviet Union tried to hold on to Iran’s northwest, only to be thwarted by the Truman Doctrine, a U.S. foreign policy that pledged military and economic aid to countries resisting Soviet expansionism. But the more crucial experience would come a short time later, when Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, would dismiss the Soviet threat to focus instead on anti-imperialism, demanding that Britain relinquish rights to Iran’s oil. That gambit failed. The United States, although at first sympathetic to Iran’s position, saw it as naïve and dangerous—opening the door to communism and Soviet influence—and so threw its support behind the monarchy and the Iranian military, who saw Soviet communism as a greater threat than British imperialism.

Iranians would attribute the fall of Mossadegh to Western machinations and would lionize him as a political martyr on the altar of anti-imperialism. Mossadegh’s shadow looms large over Iran’s current resistance to the West. The lesson that Iran’s revolutionary elite have accentuated is that the country’s independence and prosperity must be won in fighting the West. This is the bedrock on which the Islamic Republic’s statecraft has been built. And its opening act was the Hostage Crisis of 1979 that drove the United States from Iran and cast their relations in enmity.

One may have expected that over time this sour view of the West would have receded as the embers of revolutionary zeal died out and the Islamic Republic matured. The opposite has happened. That owes to learned experience in confronting external threats after the revolution, and no lesson has been more salient than the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88. That brutal war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced large number of Iranians, and demanded of state and society total commitment of all national resources to free Iranian territory from Iraqi occupation and then to wage a harrowing and costly campaign to continue the war in the hope of toppling the Baathist regime that had invaded Iran. In the end, Iran fell short of its war aims. It won back its territory in 1982, but it had little to show for the enormous expenditure in blood and treasure over the following six years.

What revolutionary Iran learned during the course of that war shaped its national security thinking. It learned that Iran was alone. The international community condemned neither Iraq’s invasion nor its use of chemical weapons. And when Iran got the upper hand, the West and its regional allies threw their full support behind Iraq.

Iranians came to see surviving the war and winning back their territory in the face of Western support for Iraq as victory. That had been possible only because the Islamic Republic then enjoyed the support of its population. They were bound together by the force of revolutionary ideology in the defense of the homeland. The political and military elite who have since led Iran received their education in statecraft during the Iran-Iraq war, and important social and economic institutions and the all-powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are the product of that war. They came to see ongoing conflicts with the West in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, along with America’s apparently endless containment policy, as clear arguments for ongoing ideological vigilance in the interests of national security. The influence of revolutionary ideology on Iran would have waned had it not been for the verdict of the war.

America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was another formative experience. Iran viewed American resolve leading to the invasion with alarm. The U.S. had crossed a Rubicon in its thinking; it was now prepared to go to war to pacify the Middle East. After Iraq, it would be Iran’s turn. Tehran thus resolved to defeat U.S. plans in Iraq before it sets its eyes on Iran. Intervening in Iraq to mobilize Shia resistance to the U.S., and likely colluding with Syria to boost the Sunni insurgency there as well, was a strategy of survival.

As Iraq sank into chaos and civil war, Washington set aside any plans for a war on Iran. That was what Tehran wanted. It learned that sustained asymmetric warfare –waged by local militias trained and led by Iran—can exhaust and deter the U.S. Success in Iraq led Iran’s rulers to turn it into a regional strategy, the so-called Forward Defense strategy – to contain American ambitions, and even force it to relax its containment of Iran. To America and the Arab world, this was not deterrence or defense, but nefarious Iranian expansionism.

Forward Defense could only go so far. It dampened America’s appetite for military intervention in the Middle East, but also generated resentment and resistance in the Arab world—especially when Iran intervened in Syria in 2014 to save the regime of Bashar Assad. The strategy would unravel altogether in the wake of the Gaza war as Israel dealt a deadly blow to Hezbollah in 2024, and then the Assad regime collapsed as a result of a successful insurgency led by a coalition of opposition forces hostile to Iran. Forward Defense’s folly lay in the assumption that Iran could sustain its strategy in unwelcoming Arab lands when success invited a military reaction that Iran would be unable to contend with. It bit off more than it could militarily chew, so to speak.

Setbacks for Forward Defense have not changed Iran’s strategic calculus. The Islamic Republic’s statecraft is still built on the foundation of anti-imperialism and resistance, one that sees realization of Iran’s national goals as possible only in defiance of the West. Iran still sees U.S. as the principal threat to its national security, and Iran’s aim is still to exhaust the U.S. and end its containment of Iran. It is in this context that Iran’s investment in nuclear capability, advanced drones and missile technology must be understood. Iran needs these levers of power because it sees its national interest in independence from the West, and believes that it must fight to achieve it.

More important than setbacks in Lebanon and Syria in charting Iran’s future is the domestic challenge facing its foreign policy. The popular support that the Islamic Republic enjoyed during the Iran–Iraq war, and that was visible for decades afterwards, has all but dissipated. Iranian society is exhausted by the cost of resistance, with economic hardships and international isolation, and no longer subscribes to the underlying logic of the country’s prevailing statecraft. Iranians want a normal state instead of the one forged by the national security mindset that has dominated since the revolution. Can Iran continue to pursue a grand strategy that was built on the assumption of unwavering popular support? There lies the Achilles’ heel to the statecraft that has dominated Iran since 1979, and the potential catalyst for change.

Vali Nasr

Vali Nasr is the Majid Khaddouri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Iran's Grand Strategy published by Princeton Press.