What Iran Wants

Since October 7, 2023, the long arm of Iran has seemingly been everywhere in the crises that have beset the Middle East. With its eye on Hezbollah, Iran’s heavily armed Shiite ally in Lebanon, Israel was wholly unprepared for the devastating ground assault launched from Gaza by Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that was also backed by the Islamic Republic. Nor had the West anticipated that the Houthis in Yemen, a supposedly ragtag militia that had received a large arsenal of missiles from Tehran, would be capable of bringing global shipping in the Red Sea to a near standstill.

The conflicts unleashed by these regional allies have not been particularly kind to the Iranian leadership. Among Iran’s serial humiliations have been the July assassination, in a Tehran government guesthouse, of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader—a stark demonstration of the extent to which Israeli intelligence had penetrated the Iranian security forces—as well as the damage done to Hezbollah and the elimination of most of its senior ranks, including its formidable leader Hassan Nasrallah. In addition, Israel has carried out the largest airstrikes it has ever launched against Iran, reportedly weakening the country’s air defenses, and the Islamic Republic has witnessed the rapid fall of its longtime close partner, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

In Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History, Vali Nasr sets out to make sense of the international statecraft that, over many decades, has led Iran to its current precarious position. A veteran scholar of Iran and the Middle East, Nasr argues that the regime’s strategic vision is informed less by a revolutionary intent to spread Islamist ideology than by a concept of national security rooted in regional rivalries, Iran’s historical experience, and familiar anti-imperial and anticolonial currents of the late twentieth century. “Islam remains the language of Iran’s politics,” Nasr writes, describing the state’s religious underpinnings as a way for Iran to “realize political and economic interests at home and define national interests abroad.” But, he adds, “those aims are now secular in nature.”

Drawing on Nasr’s close monitoring of generally overlooked Iranian sources, this informative and useful book comes at a potential turning point for the Islamic Republic. With U.S. President Donald Trump determined to revive the “maximum pressure” campaign of his first administration, Iran’s 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, faces a dilemma: capitulate to Washington, which would bring sanctions relief but require a far more restrictive nuclear deal and the drastic curtailment of Iran’s assertive foreign policy, or pursue a nuclear weapon, inviting preemptive—and this time, potentially catastrophic—Israeli and American strikes. Last October, one of Khamenei’s senior advisers asserted that if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear sites, the supreme leader might reconsider his earlier decrees outlawing the development and use of weapons of mass destruction. In trying to fathom how Iran will react, it will be equally important for the West to abandon outmoded ways of seeing the regime in Tehran and to identify the true sources of its conduct and outlook, many of which lie in the past.

KARBALA COMPLEX

In 2001, Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) asserted in one of its official histories that the eight-year war that the country fought against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s would affect “every issue of internal and foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran for at least the next several decades.” It is a view that Khamenei has repeatedly endorsed, including as recently as 2022. Western analysts have often downplayed the significance of the Iran-Iraq War, in part because it ended in stalemate and in part because the United States and many of its allies, having supported Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship, went on to make an embarrassing about-face and overthrow him 15 years later. For their part, exiled Iranian opposition figures see no profit in praising the heroic defiance of the Islamic Republic in the face of its tyrannical neighbor.

Nasr restores the war to its rightful place as the defining event of post-revolutionary Iran. He argues that this horrendous, drawn out, attritional conflict—as many as a million people were killed on both sides—engendered the strategic culture that has guided Iran’s behavior over much of the subsequent three and a half decades, including in the present era. He describes that culture as rooted in a vision that blends “encirclement fears and outsized ambition”—a combination that has led Tehran to use proxy forces and clients across the Middle East, as well as asymmetric means, to hurt better-equipped enemies such as Israel and the United States.

For Saddam, the 1979 Iranian Revolution represented an opportunity. Having watched the overthrow of the U.S.-backed shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and the diplomatic crisis that was triggered when followers of the country’s new leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 Americans hostage, the Iraqi leader saw a chance to seize territory, liberate Iran’s Arab minority from the Persian yoke, and strangle the fledgling theocracy that had been urging Iraq’s Shiites to overthrow his own Sunni-dominated government.

In Khamenei’s view, what matters is the long term.

But the invasion that Saddam launched in September 1980 had the unintended effect of strengthening Iran’s new clerical regime. It took the Iranians less than two years to recover the territory they had lost in the initial Iraqi attack and throw the enemy back across the Shatt al Arab, the two countries’ riverine border. By this point, Khomeini had undertaken a purge of liberals and leftists; supplanted the army he had inherited from the shah with a militant new force, the IRGC; and situated himself at a contemptuous—and, to millions of Muslims across the greater Islamic world, inspiring—distance from both the Soviet Union and the United States. When a Pakistani journalist asked the ayatollah to explain the benefits of the revolution, he answered, “Now all decisions are made in Tehran.”

Fearful that Khomeini’s radicalism would prove contagious, the West, the Soviet bloc, and much of the Arab world rallied around Saddam. France sold him Mirage fighter jets, the Reagan administration gave him U.S. intelligence, and the Soviets supplied tanks and missiles. From Saudi Arabia, he received billions of dollars of loans and rations for his troops. Subjected to an almost watertight international arms embargo, Iran was forced to rely mostly on self-sufficiency, religious zeal, and patriotism.

Interviewing veterans of the war in Iran two decades ago, I learned how powerful this zeal was. I heard about teenage members of the volunteer Basij militia putting on aftershave before a suicide mission in order to smell good for their maker. Young women deliberately chose husbands from among soldiers who had been terminally poisoned by Iraqi chemical weapons, which had been developed with the help of dual-use materials and precursors supplied by companies in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The former fighters I spoke with in the central Iranian city of Isfahan would sometimes break off midsentence, coughing feebly, their faces red and their chests tightening as the gas they had inhaled more than a decade earlier slowly destroyed them.

In the summer of 1982, what the regime had dubbed “the sacred defense” became an offensive campaign when Iranian forces crossed the Shatt al Arab. In the end, nearly a decade of war against a vastly better-supplied foe cost Iran up to half a million lives, even as Iranian forces failed to topple Saddam or permanently gain any Iraqi territory. The new aims of the war, the leadership asserted, were to wipe out Israel and inspire the people of the mainly Sunni Gulf monarchies to rise against their Western-backed rulers. A popular slogan among Iranian volunteers was, “The path to Jerusalem runs through Karbala,” the central Iraqi city that contains revered Shiite shrines.

In fact, the path ran through Lebanon, where Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that Iran had set up in 1982, battled Israel’s occupying army and staged huge attacks against U.S. and French troops. It ran through Mecca, where, in 1987, a demonstration by Iranian pilgrims was suppressed by the Saudi authorities. Around 400 people died in the clash, including more than 200 Iranian pilgrims. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and Khomeini’s closest confidant at the time, responded by calling on the faithful to “uproot the Saudi rulers” and “remove the colossal and precious wealth belonging to the Islamic world . . . from the control of criminals.” And long after the formal end of hostilities between Iran and Iraq, the path to Jerusalem ran through Buenos Aires, where Argentine authorities and international investigators accused Iran of masterminding the bombings of Israel’s embassy in 1992 and of a Jewish cultural center two years later.

In July 1988, a U.S. warship shot down an Iranian airliner, Iran Air 655, over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. The United States, which was trying to contain Iranian airpower, claimed that it had misidentified the aircraft as an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. (President Ronald Reagan expressed regret for the error, although without apologizing.) The downing of flight 655 broke Khomeini’s resolve. He likened his subsequent acceptance of a UN-brokered cease-fire to drinking poison. He died in 1989 and was succeeded by his protégé, Khamenei, who has, in Nasr’s words, “towered over Iran’s politics” ever since.

Noted for his tenacity and cunning, Khamenei is also a man of conviction, and his hatred for the United States is deeply felt. “America is like a dog,” Nasr reports him as saying at one meeting of Iran’s National Security Council; “if you back off, it will lunge at you, but if you lunge at it, it will recoil and back off.” From President Jimmy Carter’s decision to admit the shah into the United States after his overthrow in 1979—the event that triggered the U.S. embassy takeover—to President George W. Bush’s inclusion of Iran in his 2002 “axis of evil” speech, to Trump’s unilateral withdrawal, in 2018, from the nuclear deal that Iran had signed with world powers and his imposition of hundreds of fresh sanctions, the supreme leader can call on much evidence to support his contention that the United States has long sought regime change in Iran.

SOLEIMANI’S LABYRINTH

By the early years of this century, however, the prospect of peace and a flood of U.S. investment held much appeal to more pragmatic Iranian politicians, notably Rafsanjani, who had served as president in the 1990s and who, with supporters among the clerical establishment, was rumored to have pursued a “grand bargain” with “the Great Satan”—the United States. He was succeeded by Mohammad Khatami, a moderate who more overtly sought to improve relations with Washington. Drawing on his interviews with Kha­tami, Nasr reports that when, in 2003, Khatami showed Khamenei a letter that he had drafted to Bush offering to resolve all outstanding differences with the United States, the supreme leader advised him not to send it. “America will let you down and will construe the letter as weakness,” Khamenei warned. Kha­tami sent it anyway, but Bush didn’t reply, and the Iranian president was forced to acknowledge that the supreme leader had been proved correct.

In Khamenei’s view, what matters is the long term. The pursuit of ideals is more important than their attainment, setbacks will always turn out to be temporary, and it may take generations to achieve victory. Costly and inconclusive as it was, the Iran-Iraq War taught Iran how to get around Western sanctions by using shell companies and middlemen. The war also gave the IRGC a taste for private enterprise, anticipating the economic dominance, notably in energy and infrastructure, that companies linked to the corps enjoy today. It also gave the regime, or at least its most ideological, committed parts, a belief in its resilience and Iran’s ability to rebound from setbacks.

Perhaps most significant of all, the war transformed Iran into a technological autarky capable of manufacturing the sophisticated roadside bombs that Iranian-backed Shiite militias used to kill hundreds of American soldiers following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the drones and ballistic missiles that Iran fired at Israel last October, and, of course, the spinning centrifuges that have propelled the Islamic Republic, in the teeth of international opposition, to the brink of becoming a nuclear weapons state. Saddam’s attack on Iran also inspired Tehran’s strategic doctrine of “forward defense,” which it formally adopted in 2003. What Iran’s rivals and adversaries see as aggression that sows chaos through sectarianism and dirty tricks is, in the regime’s view, a defensive attempt to neutralize threats before they reach the country’s borders.

The Islamic Republic consolidated the power of its Shiite allies in Iraq at the expense of Sunni factions (including the zealots of the Islamic State, or ISIS), subordinated the Lebanese body politic to Hezbollah, and sent thousands of IRGC and foreign fighters—mostly Afghan Shiites—to help Assad fight the rebels who wished to oust him in Syria. For much of the second decade of this century, these efforts were overseen by the man who became the leading exponent of forward defense: Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Iranians are fiercely protective of their country.

In his early twenties at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, Soleimani joined the IRGC and undertook acts of sabotage inside Iraq. He rose fast and in 1998 was given command of the IRGC’s Quds Force—its “Jerusalem” brigade, as the corps calls its overseas operations arm. He was also no inflexible ideologue, and following the September 11 attacks, he gave the United States intelligence that helped it topple their shared enemy in Afghanistan, the Taliban. But Soleimani harbored no illusions about any “grand bargain.” He likened Washington’s relationship with Iran to that of “a wolf and a sheep.” Nor was he impressed by the quality of the Syrian forces he was obliged to work with when directing Iran’s military intervention in that country. “The Syrian Army is useless!” he told an Iraqi politician, according to a New Yorker profile of Soleimani that appeared in 2013. “Give me one brigade of the Basij and I could conquer the whole country.”

Regardless, Soleimani’s achievements were significant. In 2015, he personally persuaded both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Hezbollah leader, Nasrallah, to intervene in the Syrian conflict, in the process allowing the Assad regime to survive for nearly a decade. That same year, he also orchestrated the recapture, by Iraqi and IRGC forces, of the important Iraqi city of Tikrit from the Islamic State. He combined the bravado of a gladiator, the guile of a spymaster, and the imperiousness of a viceroy. A former senior Iraqi official described Soleimani as “a shrewd, frighteningly intelligent strategist.” In one of the many revealing quotations that Nasr deploys, he reports that Soleimani told Khamenei, “We put the pill in Assad’s mouth, but as soon as we turn our face, he spits out the pill.”

To preserve the spirit of the Iran-Iraq War, the Islamic Republic has built “sacred defense” museums around the country and sought to promote the values of fervor and self-sacrifice that were so central to that era through films, video games, and popular music. But these efforts have been largely unsuccessful. The 60 percent of Iranians who are under the age of 30 have no memory of the fighting. Many of them, confronted with economic isolation and eroding prospects at home, are incensed that the regime is diverting billions of dollars to the “axis of resistance,” which is what it calls its network of proxies and partners. Whenever Iran suffers one of its periodic spasms of unrest, as happened at the end of 2022 following the death of a young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody, protesters criticize Iran’s overseas entanglements.

A recent video clip that was widely circulated on Iranian social media showed an Iranian boys’ school whose headmaster was shouting, “Death to Israel!,” to which his pupils replied cheerfully, “Death to Palestine!” In 2022, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was prime minister in the 1980s but turned against Khamenei in 2009 following a disputed election and who has been under house arrest ever since, lamented that the Islamic Republic was supporting Assad’s “child-killing regime” and stirring up violence across the region. As evidence of what he called “the wickedness of this wrong path,” he cited the “millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead in Syria, [the] tarnishing [of] Hezbollah’s name, sectarian and ethnic wars in Yemen, the willingness of Arab states to join hands with Israel to confront the ‘Shia crescent.’”

THE NUCLEAR KNOT

In light of Iran’s recent missteps and the heavy blows that Israel has delivered to its regional prestige, it is tempting to regard Soleimani’s assassination in 2020 by a U.S. drone as a masterstroke by Trump, who authorized it near the end of his first term in office. If Soleimani had still been alive and able to influence events, it seems less likely that Hezbollah would have launched its ill-advised attack on Israel after Hamas’s October 7 atrocities—a decision that led to furious Israeli retribution that not only cost the life of Nasrallah and many of his senior commanders but also disrupted the flow of arms and money that it was receiving from Iran. And Iran might not have allowed Assad to fall so easily last December, which was a crushing blow to Khamenei: a senior IRGC commander once described Syria as “the key to the region; what we lose in losing Syria exceeds what we have at stake in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.”

There is no straightforward way for Iran to recover from the setbacks of the last year. “Today, even if the Islamic Republic chose to abandon forward defense, it would not be easy to do so,” Nasr writes—and that was before Assad’s fall in December. The nuclear dilemma makes Tehran’s position all the more fraught, by likely forcing it into a headlong confrontation with the Trump White House. And unlike in the years after the Iran-Iraq War, when Iran had the advantage of a comparatively youthful leadership, Khamenei and his inner circle have become a gerontocracy, and a new generation is increasingly impatient with clerical rule.

But it may not be the end yet. For all the Islamic Republic’s exhaustion and brittleness, and the readiness of millions of Iranians to take to the streets to express their disdain for it, the people are fiercely protective of their country, and outside attacks tend to bring them together. Increasing the uncertainty is the question of the Iranian succession. Khamenei’s preferred choice to follow him as supreme leader seems to be his second son, Mojtaba, who is 56 and whom Nasr describes as his “principal adviser.” In a recent interview, Abbas Palizdar, a close associate of Mojtaba, referred to widespread corruption in the “ruling circles” of the Islamic Republic and expressed his confidence that should Mojtaba take over from his father, he would not only “break the neck of the corrupt” but also increase social freedoms and release political prisoners. That would put him in the same category of reforming modernizer as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

And yet Mojtaba spent the Iran-Iraq War serving in a battalion of the IRGC that was known for its ideological purity and, according to Nasr, wishes to “perpetuate the strategies of resistance and forward defense born during the war.” He has also shown no sign of being any less committed to the nuclear program than was his father. If Mojtaba does indeed become supreme leader, not only will the Islamic Republic come closer to becoming a hereditary monarchy, but the forward defense may get a second wind.