Iran’s Grand Strategy — imagining a world without American hegemony

My review in this weekend’s Financial Times of Vali Nasr’s new history of the Islamic Republic, which explores the deep roots of Tehran’s siege mentality.

I wrote this before Israel’s attack on Friday; but the central question of how Iran will react “if it is to survive the contingencies to come” - is spot on.

Vali Nasr opens his book Iran’s Grand Strategy with a stark claim. The west’s understanding of Iran’s approach, he writes, “is hopelessly inadequate and dangerously outdated. The West still looks at Iran through the prism of the 1979 Revolution, and the central role that religion and the clergy played in it.” However one looks at it, the horrific sequence of events that has unfolded since October 7 2023 is reshaping the Middle East. Iran is a central piece of a complex jigsaw undergoing its most dramatic reconfiguration for decades.

Understanding Iranian thinking and perspectives would be important anyway. At a time when sensitive talks are under way around the US-led sanctions regime, when Israel is weighing up its options and when climate change, social freedoms and economic reform are all issues facing the leadership in Tehran, this book could not be more timely.

Nasr, a Washington-based academic of Iranian descent who has advised US policymakers, argues that far from being driven by ideology or theological fervour, Tehran’s foreign and security policies have deep roots. As one senior Iranian official told Henry Kissinger 10 years ago, these are “calculated and pragmatic”. The overarching idea is what the author describes as a “grand strategy of resistance” in which Tehran’s logic, aims and expectations are focused on outlasting and exhausting America.

For Nasr, the decisive moment in Iran’s recent history is the 1980-88 war between Iran and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced in a conflict that cost hundreds of billions and by 1988 consumed two-thirds of the country’s income.

Unsurprisingly, institutions involved in planning, requisitioning and fighting the war became the backbone of the Iranian state. No less important was the sense of national trauma and the emergence of a narrative of “sacred defense” that involved creating a set of alliances and networks through which Iran exercises power and contests regional order. Iran has not been interested in exporting revolution, Nasr argues, but rather “a shared vision” of a world opposed “to American hegemony”. That is just as important to Iran’s strategy as Shia Islam and anti-Zionism.

Seen through this prism, Iran’s leadership, he suggests, never truly saw nuclear weapons as an end in themselves, but rather as a means of securing technological deterrence and strategic leverage. So important was retaining ambiguity and leverage, in fact, that in 2015 the leadership agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

The deal, writes Nasr, “limited but did not eliminate Iran’s missile program” in return for the easing of sanctions. This enabled Iran to preserve its strategic gains while reducing economic pressure. But, it was not a renunciation of resistance.

It was a similar story with the widespread “woman, life, freedom” protests of 2022 that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who suffered catastrophic head injuries after being detained by the morality police. In the west the uprisings were seen as evidence that the isolation of Tehran was working and would force the leadership to loosen its grip. Ayatollah Khamenei, says Nasr, drew the opposite conclusion: the protests and subsequent crackdown showed that Iran was “winning, getting closer to its goals”.

Tactical flexibility is the hallmark of Iranian strategy, says Nasr. Tehran has proved adept at pursuing diplomatic openings, regional rapprochement, disruptive opportunities and also calibrated restraint: all tools that reinforce a deeply held siege mentality. Thus, Iran’s surprise reconciliation with Saudi Arabia in 2023 is presented not as a strategic shift, but a calculated effort to buy breathing space without surrendering the logic of resistance. Similarly, growing ties with Russia and China are portrayed as pragmatic hedges against western pressure, not ideological realignment.

Nasr places Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the principal architect and custodian of Iran’s grand strategy, whose worldview is not just political but civilisational. According to the author, Khamenei sees Iran as a model for the global south and a bulwark against western encroachment. A long-term strategic document, “Vision 2025”, talks of making Iran “the premier political, economic, scientific, and technological power in West Asia”.

Right now, that seems optimistic. Yet it speaks to Tehran’s ambition, its sense of destiny and a view of the past in which Persian, Iranian and Islamic histories are both regionally central and globally relevant. And it is important not to underestimate the skills of a leadership that has been fighting three cold wars for almost 50 years — with Israel, with Saudi Arabia and with the US — while under heavy international sanctions and facing the assassination of key military officers (most notably General Qasem Soleimani in 2020), scientists and influential figures.

What is clear is that Iran, like much of the Middle East, is at yet another crossroads. Sensibly, Nasr does not speculate about what might happen in terms of Iran’s external relations.

He does, intriguingly, suggest that Mojtaba, Khamenei’s second son, is the person to watch. Mojtaba is impeccably connected not only through family ties, but also through his military service in the elite Habib ibn Mazaher battalion. Those ties alone would be a powerful calling card; the fact that the battalion, — and Mojtaba — fought prominently during the war with Iraq is what really matters.

Much now rests, concludes Nasr, on whether Iran “understands that it must adopt the malleability of a fox, if it is to survive the contingencies to come”. These are turbulent and unpredictable times for Iran. Books like this that can help find method and reason behind the thinking at the highest levels within the Iranian leadership shed a welcome light on a country where what happens in the coming months and years will have implications that extend far beyond the corridors of power in Tehran.

To order a copy, visit your local bookshop or order from your favourite online bookseller - or from Princeton University Press.

More soon.