The query that has organized most critical evaluation of Iran for the previous half-century is: What does the Islamic Republic need? It’s a cheap query, however not the proper one. The Islamic Republic is 47 years previous. Iran, as a contemporary coherent political entity, is 5 centuries previous. Conflating the 2 has produced almost half a century of failed U.S. coverage, collapsed agreements, and a struggle that few noticed coming in its present type.
The extra helpful query is what Iran desires; not this authorities, not this supreme chief, however the state whose strategic instincts have been formed lengthy earlier than the revolution and have survived each change of system since. The Safavids, the Qajars, the Pahlavis, and the Islamic Republic have every operated from the identical geographical and historic inheritance. The governments modified. The logic didn’t.
The query that has organized most critical evaluation of Iran for the previous half-century is: What does the Islamic Republic need? It’s a cheap query, however not the proper one. The Islamic Republic is 47 years previous. Iran, as a contemporary coherent political entity, is 5 centuries previous. Conflating the 2 has produced almost half a century of failed U.S. coverage, collapsed agreements, and a struggle that few noticed coming in its present type.
The extra helpful query is what Iran desires; not this authorities, not this supreme chief, however the state whose strategic instincts have been formed lengthy earlier than the revolution and have survived each change of system since. The Safavids, the Qajars, the Pahlavis, and the Islamic Republic have every operated from the identical geographical and historic inheritance. The governments modified. The logic didn’t.
The Iranian plateau is ringed by the Zagros Mountains to the west and the Alborz to the north, bisected by among the world’s most inhospitable desert, and positioned on the junction of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Center East. Each main land empire has needed to interact with it. Each naval energy with Indian Ocean ambitions has needed to reckon with the strait at its southern finish.
That geography produced a constant lesson throughout dynasties: You can’t safe the inside by defending the inside. Rulers who confined their technique to the plateau finally misplaced items of it. Those that projected outward, who turned the plateau from a goal right into a hub, persevered essentially the most.
Hormuz is the place this logic turns into most legible within the current. Roughly a fifth of world oil provides move by that strait. When Iran moved to limit passage on the outset of the 2026 struggle, power markets reacted earlier than a single tanker was stopped. A rustic with out nuclear weapons and and not using a typical army able to matching america can nonetheless transfer world markets due to the place it sits. That could be a geographical inheritance. It doesn’t collapse with a change of presidency.
Three convictions run by Iranian strategic conduct no matter who holds energy.
The primary is that weak point invitations intervention. The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 stripped Iran of its Caucasian territories. The Anglo-Russian Conference of 1907 divided the nation into spheres of affect with out consulting Iranian officers. Each authorities since has learn these occasions as a structural warning: A state that can’t undertaking deterrence will discover its sovereignty administered from the surface. The nuclear program, the regional community, and the missile arsenal are, at one degree, every a response to that warning.
The second conviction is that sovereignty is just not negotiable. The tobacco revolt within the early Nineties, the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Firm in 1951—these weren’t remoted episodes. They have been the identical reflex throughout totally different eras. A 1976 U.S. diplomatic cable, Ambassador to Iran Richard Helms briefing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, captured it exactly: The nuclear pressure exists due to “Iran’s unwillingness to concede any exterior interference which can derogate from its sovereignty.” The sentence belonged equally in each dispatch from the nuclear negotiations of 2015, 2021, and 2026.
The third conviction, and the one most constantly underweighted: Iran doesn’t consider itself as a regional energy. The 1979 revolution is often framed in regional phrases—the empowerment of Shiite political actions, the reorganization of Gulf safety, the emergence of political Islam as a governing drive.
However the first-order impact was world. In a single yr, Iran moved from being certainly one of Washington’s most vital strategic companions to a state pursuing a 3rd path between the superpowers. The hostage disaster modified U.S. home politics for a technology. The Iran-Iraq Warfare drew within the intelligence companies and arms industries of each superpowers and most of Europe. Iranian Shahed drones ended up in a European struggle. The 2026 battle moved world power markets, disrupted delivery insurance coverage throughout a number of oceanic routes, and compelled recalculations in each financial system that is dependent upon Gulf oil—which is most of them. Former Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini mentioned he would export the revolution to the 4 corners of the world. He meant it.
Two remarks, separated by half a century, make the continuity plain. The primary got here from Col. Mojtaba Pashaie, head of the Iranian secret police’s Center East directorate, within the Sixties, explaining why the shah was backing events in Lebanon: “We should always fight and include the menace [of Nasserism] within the east coast of the Mediterranean to forestall shedding blood on Iranian soil.” The second got here from former Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in January 2016, talking to households of troopers killed in Syria and Iraq: “If they’d not gone to battle the enemy there, the enemy would have come contained in the nation. We’d have needed to battle them in Kermanshah and Hamedan.” The logic is equivalent. The governments weren’t.
The shah’s Western orientation seemed, from the surface, like a departure from this sample. It was not. He pursued nuclear functionality by the identical logic because the Islamic Republic. He sought the Israeli army partnership. When Washington pushed for nuclear safeguards implying exterior oversight, he resisted—not out of ideology, however as a result of accepting such oversight would have confirmed a subordinate standing that no Iranian ruler throughout any century has been capable of settle for.
The identical sample is seen now. Within the Pakistan talks, Supreme Chief Mojtaba Khamenei made clear to officers within the room that Iran wouldn’t negotiate on phrases set by others. Washington and Tel Aviv entered the 2026 struggle wanting one thing contained—stress on the nuclear program, the missiles, the regional community. Iran expanded the body. When army stress reached a threshold, Tehran closed Hormuz, changing the confrontation into a world financial disaster. Each time Washington units the principles of the sport, Tehran modifications the taking part in discipline.
Complete sanctions, focused sanctions, assassination campaigns, cyberwarfare, proxy help, direct army motion—all of those have been tried. None produced the strategic transformation they promised. With a consistency that ought to itself be handled as information, they produced acceleration: quicker nuclear improvement, a deeper regional community, a extra consolidated political system.
The 2002 “axis of evil” speech is the cleanest case research. Within the months after Sept. 11, Tehran cooperated on Afghanistan, participated within the Bonn Convention on the nation’s political future, and opened oblique channels to Washington. The reformist camp round President Mohammad Khatami absorbed actual home political danger in doing so. Iranian officers believed they’d prolonged a hand and that reciprocity was doable. My very own analysis on this era at Royal Holloway produced constant accounts describing former U.S. President George W. Bush’s speech in phrases much like former British international secretary Jack Straw’s formulation: “a kick within the enamel for the dangers they’d taken.” Former Iranian Overseas Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif later described how a “coverage of cooperation” turned a “coverage of confrontation” inside days.
What adopted was structurally predictable. Khamenei’s conviction that Washington’s goal was regime change, not coexistence, was not challenged by the episode. It was confirmed. The nuclear program accelerated. The regional community deepened. The deterrence structure expanded. Not as a result of hard-liners manipulated the second, however as a result of the underlying logic reasserted itself the moment the provide went unanswered.
The conduct being pressured is just not primarily ideological. It’s strategic. Demanding that Iran dismantle its deterrence structure is just not asking the Islamic Republic to average—it’s asking Iran to simply accept the situation that 5 centuries of expertise identifies because the situation from which disaster comes. No Iranian authorities can ship that, as a result of delivering it could verify the foundational lesson: Weak point invitations intervention. The stress meant to provide concession as an alternative produces the conduct it was designed to cease.
Kissinger spent years managing Vietnam earlier than concluding that the North Vietnamese have been preventing for one thing completely totally different from what he assumed: time, endurance, and the gradual erosion of U.S. political will. Tehran is working on the identical logic. Iran is just not attempting to win this spherical. It’s attempting to stay viable when america wants an exit. Kissinger’s error in Vietnam was not escalation, it was the belief that the opposite facet shared his definition of victory. The Trump administration now faces the identical bind: It can’t finish the struggle on phrases it may well defend domestically, and it can’t exit and not using a framework that Tehran is presently refusing to offer. The longer the confrontation drags on, the extra the ache spreads past Iran, oil markets, delivery, provide chains, and economies that rely on Gulf stability. Hormuz doesn’t harm solely Iran.
The nuclear proliferation danger is actual. The regional community has produced actual violence. An analytical correction doesn’t dissolve these considerations. What it modifications are the situations underneath which they are often addressed.
An association that gives real safety ensures, treats Iran as a celebration with legit deterrence pursuits somewhat than as an issue to be managed, and doesn’t require Tehran to simply accept the sort of subordinate standing its historical past makes structurally unattainable—such an association has an opportunity of holding. One which requires Iran to simply accept phrases it has refused in each century of its trendy historical past won’t, no matter which authorities is in energy, as a result of no Iranian authorities can ship what its personal strategic logic prohibits.
Washington’s present problem is just not that it lacks an interlocutor in Tehran. It’s that it’s nonetheless asking the improper query.
