In​ a crowded conference room in January 2025, Hossein Marashi, secretary-general of the Executives of Reconstruction Party and brother-in-law of Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, compared the country’s situation after the collapse of the Syrian state to the crisis it faced at the al-Faw peninsula in 1988. During the First Battle of al-Faw in 1986, Iranian forces had captured the peninsula, cutting off Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf. The operation to reclaim it, commanded by Saddam Hussein, made extensive use of chemical weapons. Backed by Soviet weapons and American satellite imagery, Iraqi forces routed their Iranian adversaries, a defeat that helped push the Islamic Republic to accept UN Security Council Resolution 598, ending the Iran-Iraq War. Marashi’s analogy was imperfect – and far from disinterested – but it conveyed the shock felt by many in Iran, as well as the opposition to its current foreign policy among an influential faction within the nezam, or political system. His remarks were aimed at those in the regime who continue to support Iran’s role in the so-called Axis of Resistance (mehvar-e moqavemat): a network of regional states, would-be leaders and paramilitary forces committed to rolling back US and Israeli power across the Levant and West Asia. This was a network forged less by grand design than by the contingencies of popular mobilisation against imperial overreach, colonial ambition and military occupation.

Tehran has consistently denied prior knowledge of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, and its conduct in the aftermath certainly lends some support to the claim that its leaders would have preferred to avoid a full-scale regional conflagration. Over the two years since then, Iran has shown a marked preference for the status quo ante. It is Israel, under Benjamin Netanyahu, that has emerged as the power that aspires to unrivalled regional domination: ethnically cleansing Gaza; unleashing unprecedented levels of violence in the West Bank; decapitating Hizbullah and subjecting Lebanon to collective punishment; degrading Syria’s military infrastructure while extending its occupation beyond the Golan Heights; launching periodic assaults on Yemen; and finally, in June 2025, attacking Iran in Operation Rising Lion. An attack by Israel had long been anticipated, but when it came it stunned not only international observers but Iranians themselves, including the country’s elite. Operation Rising Lion combined aerial strikes with the use of covert ground assets to disable Iran’s missile defence systems, drone operations and advanced intelligence capabilities (reportedly including tools supplied by firms such as Palantir).

Israeli leaders openly called on Iranians to ‘rise up’ against their government. Most Iranians baulked at the notion of the Israeli state as their would-be liberator, but the attack did exacerbate discontent with the country’s leadership. The army responded with a barrage of missile strikes against major Israeli cities. The extent of the damage inflicted remains contested – in part because of Israeli military censorship – but was sufficient to prompt Netanyahu to appeal to the US to broker a cessation of hostilities. This came only after US forces carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan and most notably at Fordow, using 30,000-pound bunker-busting munitions, as threatened by successive administrations for nearly two decades, but finally carried out under Trump.

The Twelve-Day War last June followed more than a year of escalating tensions. After decades of covert operations, the first direct Israeli military strike on Iranian territory was the attack on the country’s diplomatic compound in Damascus on 1 April 2024, which killed the most senior commander in the Levant of the clandestine Quds Force. Iran’s response, Operation True Promise, was launched on 13 April: a deliberately telegraphed missile and drone assault, during which a number of Nato states, as well as Jordan, assisted Israel’s air defences. The pager attacks of September that year, targeting members of Hizbullah, marked a dangerous shift in Israel’s campaign. Leon Panetta, the former US secretary of defence and CIA director, described the operation as an act of terrorism; 42 people were killed, including twelve civilians, and around four thousand injured. Days later, Israel killed Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbullah, using a bunker-busting bomb in a densely populated neighbourhood of Beirut, causing hundreds of casualties in the process. In the aftermath of these events Iran launched its second missile attack, a substantially more powerful barrage that inflicted visible damage on at least two major Israeli airbases.

Each of the Iranian responses was calibrated to counter Israel’s efforts to expand the conflict to the wider region. Iran’s leadership knew only too well that there was widespread domestic discontent with their rule and that their country, weakened by sanctions and arms embargoes for nearly four decades, was in no position to confront Israel and the US directly. A rapid, conventional aerial war would have left Iran decisively outmatched. The difficulty faced by its leaders as they sought to re-establish lines of deterrence was the near total absence of limits imposed by the US: Washington seemed willing to back Israel’s attempt to remake the regional order through unconstrained military power – a process accelerated by Trump’s re-election.

Vali Nasr’s Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History traces the historical and political lineages of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy, from its emergence and consolidation in the 1980s to its recent unravelling. Nasr, who was born in Tehran but has lived in the US since 1979, is the son of the Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was commissioned by Empress Farah to establish the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in 1974. Vali Nasr came to prominence with the publication in 2006 of The Shia Revival, a book that, for all its primordialist undertones, described a regional shift largely of Washington’s own making. The dissolution of the Iraqi state after the US invasion of 2003 had empowered its neighbour to the east: an important check on Iranian influence was removed, while forces aligned with Tehran acquired office and authority within the fragile new Iraqi structure. Not long afterwards, Nasr was appointed to the Obama administration as senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since leaving government and taking up a chair at Johns Hopkins, he has continued to move within the Washington policy world while adopting a rather more critical position on US foreign policy. His co-authored book How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare (2024) argued that the sanctions regime – pursued, in one form or another, by every US administration – has not only had devastating political, social and economic consequences but has proved counterproductive to Washington’s objectives. Iran’s Grand Strategy pushes past the caricature that so often substitutes for analysis of Iran, and seeks to explain the rationale – however flawed – that underpins Iran’s regional strategy.

To understand both the usefulness and the limits of Nasr’s framework, it is necessary to return to the revolution itself. The Pahlavi state was seen by its opponents as a client regime – or, more accurately, as a sub-imperial power which, even as the shah asserted greater autonomy, remained fundamentally aligned with US counter-revolutionary objectives in the region. The war on communists and socialists at home was complemented by attacks on radicals abroad, most notably during the suppression of the Dhofar revolution in Oman, a campaign that lasted from 1962 until 1976 and in which thousands of Iranian troops were involved. The Islamic Republic that emerged in 1979 – forged in revolutionary turmoil – brandished the country’s independence as one of its main achievements. When Ayatollah Khomeini was asked by a Pakistani journalist what the revolution had accomplished, he replied: ‘Now all decisions are made in Tehran.’ The new elite promoted the vision of Iran as an Islamic state, but its members were also shaped by anti-colonial liberation movements from Algeria to Palestine, and imagined Iran as part of the same struggle.

The revolution was unsettling for Iran’s neighbours. Only nineteen months later, with a fractious internal struggle to shape the new order still unresolved, Saddam Hussein invaded. The war that followed proved more consequential in defining the emerging Islamic Republic than the revolution itself. Nasr lays out this history clearly, underscoring the role of the Iran-Iraq War in the formation of Iran’s new political institutions, strategy and sense of its own vulnerability. The war led to the Revolutionary Guards becoming the country’s chief military institution, entrenched a siege mentality and habituated a generation of Iranian leaders to the logic of deterrence, endurance and asymmetric conflict.

Nasr’s account of Iranian ‘grand strategy’ sets its coherent delineation in the mid-2000s, shaped by the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is persuasive as far as it goes, though it risks overstating both the novelty and the deliberate nature of what followed (a danger Nasr acknowledges). Many of the behaviours and relationships that later came to be described as ‘strategic’ had their origins in the revolution’s internationalist impulse and its aspiration to project its values beyond Iran itself. What would later be cast as a fondness for cultivating proxies wasn’t a calculated doctrine so much as an outgrowth of revolutionary activism, forged in a fluid regional environment in which Iran inspired – and alarmed – Islamic militants across sectarian lines. The chief counterattack to the revolution was not carried out by remnants of the ancien régime but by a neighbouring state, backed by the West, the Soviet Union and the Gulf monarchies.

Underlying Nasr’s analysis – though this is not made explicit – is a familiar question in academic work on revolutionary states concerning how, and to what extent, they undergo ‘socialisation’, that is, accept the global interstate system and abandon their universalist ambitions in favour of a more conventional pursuit of national interest. Nasr’s treatment is more subtle than some versions of this argument. At times he advances a largely realist explanation centred on deterrence: by this account, Iran has attempted to offset its military disadvantages by dispersing risk, using missiles, proxy forces and different forms of retaliation, thereby raising the costs of direct military aggression by the United States. It’s an approach with considerable explanatory power, but elsewhere he follows a line more common in Washington, according to which the Islamic Republic is pursuing regional hegemony through its support for proxies. One limitation of this analysis is that it pays insufficient attention to local conditions and degrees of agency within the Axis of Resistance itself. It also obscures important distinctions: some actors are not proxies at all, but are pursuing their own political and ideological projects, while others have relationships with Tehran that are far more contingent and autonomous than is usually acknowledged in Western accounts. It is no secret, for example, that Hamas came into direct conflict with Hizbullah and Tehran during the Syrian civil war, or that the Houthis ignored Iranian advice when they moved to seize Sanaa, Yemen’s capital.

Nasr points​ to the ways in which Iran’s foreign policy is shaped by domestic factional struggles and treated as vital to the regime’s survival. In Revolution and World Politics (1999), Fred Halliday described the ‘antinomies’ of revolutionary foreign policy, emphasising the contradictory pressures under which revolutionary regimes operate. Iran’s record is perhaps best understood not as a linear movement from revolutionary internationalism to the valorisation of national interest, but as a form of what E.H. Carr called ‘dual policy’: the simultaneous pursuit of diplomatic engagement with other states alongside support for sympathetic movements and militants abroad. The balance between these impulses has shifted repeatedly, shaped by domestic struggles and changing international conditions. Nasr is surely right to argue that socialisation has advanced, but he is less forthcoming about what it might entail in future, beyond accommodation to a US-dominated international order. That prospect is not without appeal in Iran. Four decades of sanctions, interstate conflict, authoritarian repression and international isolation have exhausted much of the population; many Iranians are desperate for fundamental change. The regime itself, worn down by prolonged economic warfare and austerity, has increasingly come to frame its role within the Axis of Resistance in nationalist rather than revolutionary terms. It is telling that John Mearsheimer has enjoyed a quiet renaissance among Iranian analysts sympathetic to security-minded elites, for whom the axis is seen less as an outgrowth of revolutionary mobilisation than as a strategy that has allowed Iran to avoid imperial encroachment and regional aggression on its own territory. Career diplomats – most notably Iran’s former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – have, by contrast, supported negotiations and a fundamental reorientation of international relations, and have tended to gravitate towards the Copenhagen School of security studies, invoking securitisation theory to argue that the Islamic Republic has been unfairly cast as an existential threat.

This shift in emphasis helps to explain why one of the unsung protagonists of Nasr’s narrative is Rafsanjani, long cast as the Islamic Republic’s great pragmatist. Leaving that characterisation aside, Nasr’s account at times implicitly suggests that, were the ‘pragmatic’ wing of the regime to prevail, many of Iran’s problems would be resolved. The difficulty with this argument is not simply that it understates the depth of ideological divisions within the Islamic Republic, but that it downplays the aggressive nature of US power. As Nasr’s own account elsewhere recognises, while the political isolation of the Islamic Republic is in part a result of the regime’s miscalculations, internal repression and strategic blunders, the US has remained committed to a policy of containment and neutralisation. Some of this hostility can be traced to the lingering desire to avenge the humiliation of the hostage crisis, when more than fifty Americans were taken hostage soon after the revolution at the US embassy in Tehran and held for more than a year, but it also reflects a deeper imperative: to ensure that the Islamic Republic cannot act as a model for others. As Edmund Burke once wrote, ‘we were at war not with its conduct, but with its existence: convinced that its existence and its hostility were the same.’

The latest iteration of this dynamic is Trump’s demand for Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’. The rial has lost more than 40 per cent of its value since Israel’s attacks last June, contributing to the desperate economic situation that caused protests to erupt across more than seventy provincial towns and cities last month. In their scale and geographic reach, these protests constitute the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic since the uprising of 2022, or even since the Green Movement of 2009. Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’ has long since ceased to mean anything to the population at large. Many Iranians blame their country’s isolation and economic immiseration on their leaders’ foreign policy decisions, which have long been decoupled from the people’s will and their democratic aspirations.

Besieged from without and increasingly brittle within, the government led by Masoud Pezeshkian is eager to negotiate. For the so-called pragmatic faction, of which Marashi is a member, normalisation with the US and incorporation into the global financial system are the goal, and one that large segments of Iran’s political elite, and much of the wider population, would welcome, at least initially. The difficulty is that Trump has shown little interest in offering Tehran any meaningful reprieve, while Ayatollah Khamenei insists on the red lines of nuclear enrichment and continued support for Iran’s partners in the Axis of Resistance. Iranians thus find themselves caught between Western politicians and intelligence services seeking to instrumentalise popular grievances in support of regime change and a state that has responded with an extraordinary escalation of violence against its own population. This wave of protests has already led to one of the darkest and bloodiest episodes in modern Iranian history, claiming the lives of at least five thousand people, including five hundred members of the security forces and pro-regime militias. The scale and character of the repression – reminiscent of the eliminationist logic employed by the fledgling Islamic Republic against Kurdish armed groups and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran – underscore the depth of the regime’s crisis. Convinced that Iran is approaching the precipice, the US is content to press its advantage rather than settle for accommodation.