THE PUNDIT

Washington entered this war convinced it understood how it would end: pressure, calibrated violence, and familiar tools would fracture Iran from within. Instead, it has rediscovered—once again—that societies are not governed by material incentives alone, and that liberal theory, for all its confidence, captures only a narrow slice of political reality.

Perhaps one of the most consequential American miscalculations—and part of what explains Donald Trump’s visible frustration, his erratic escalation, his alternating threats and retreats—has been reliance on a familiar illusion. It is an illusion refined during the Cold War, then triumphantly rebranded after its end, when thinkers like Francis Fukuyama suggested that liberal democracy marked the endpoint of ideological evolution.

At its core are two assumptions.

First: that human beings are primarily driven by individual self-interest—income, stability, personal advancement—and that anything beyond that, whether religion, nationalism, or ideology, is at best rhetorical decoration, and at worst manipulation imposed by authoritarian systems.

Second: that the world divides neatly into democratic societies of free citizens and authoritarian states ruling over fearful, inwardly resentful populations—people who are simply waiting for the right moment, or the weakening of coercion, to rise and align themselves with the “natural” liberal order.
This framework was never just theory. It was embedded in decades of Cold War propaganda, where the world was reduced to a moral binary: “free” versus “unfree.” It made for effective messaging. It made for poor analysis.

There were moments when reality appeared to cooperate. The so-called Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe seemed to validate the model: regimes collapsed, and societies transitioned—relatively smoothly—into liberal democracies. But what was treated as universal was, in fact, highly specific: cohesive societies, functioning institutions, and a gravitational pull toward Western Europe.

The same template was later exported, almost mechanically, to very different contexts. What changed was the geography. What didn’t change was the diagnosis: find the pressure point, apply force, and the population will do the rest. When that failed in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, the lesson drawn was rarely that the model was wrong — only that it had been applied imperfectly, or to the wrong regimes, or with insufficient resolve.

Today, it is being replayed in Iran — with the same confidence, and the same blind spots. The expectation—barely concealed in policy circles—is that sufficient pressure will trigger internal rupture. That beneath the surface lies a society eager to shed its political order, waiting only for a decisive external push.

What this view consistently fails to grasp is not just the resilience of the state, but the existence of belief. Not uniform belief, not uncontested belief—but real belief nonetheless. Enough to sustain cohesion under pressure. Enough to complicate any neat theory of collapse. Enough to render threats, sanctions, and even war less decisive than expected.

This is precisely where the framework — call it the liberal reduction: the assumption that political behavior is ultimately traceable to individual material calculation — breaks down. It assumes that when material costs rise high enough, political systems will unravel. But history offers countless counterexamples: societies enduring far greater hardship when anchored in identity, religion, or collective purpose.

The irony is that this misunderstanding is not confined to Washington.
For decades, a parallel version of the same illusion has taken root across much of the Arab intellectual landscape. Since the 1970s, there has been a steady drift toward dismissing ideology altogether. Grand narratives—Arab nationalism, political Islam, socialism, even the language of justice and resistance—have been reduced to empty slogans, relics of a failed past.

Peoples shaped by these traditions are often spoken of with a kind of quiet contempt: backward, irrational, trapped in obsolete frameworks.

In their place, a different ideal emerged. Not a political system, but a lifestyle. Dubai became less a city than a metaphor: order without politics, prosperity without ideology, consumption without conflict, a life stripped of existential questions. A clean, efficient present, detached from history and unburdened by meaning. The implicit promise was that this was not an absence — it was an arrival. That shedding ideology was itself a form of liberation. That the endpoint of political development was, in fact, the elimination of politics.

At the same time, much of the region’s opposition discourse collapsed politics into a single variable: how rulers are selected. Authoritarianism became the master explanation for everything. Remove it, and societies would reset themselves.

Within this flattened worldview, radically different systems became indistinguishable. Khamenei, Sisi, MBS, Putin and Xi Jinping were often grouped together as variations of the same phenomenon. The differences — in ideology, legitimacy, institutional depth, social contract, and historical trajectory — were treated as secondary details, noise around the central variable: the absence of competitive elections. As if the only thing difference between Tehran and Paris, or Cairo and Tokyo, was a ballot box.

None of this is to deny the failures of ideology in the region. Many of its dominant expressions—from the Ba’ath Party to other movements—were compromised, coercive, and often destructive. Nor is it to dismiss the very real damage caused by authoritarian rule.

But reacting to that history by denying the continued power of belief is not analysis. It is overcorrection. The Iranian case, whatever one’s position on its regime, exposes the limits of this entire intellectual framework. Societies are not interchangeable. People are not governed by a single logic. And political order cannot be reduced to either material incentives or institutional design alone.

History did not end. It continued in forms that liberal theory had no grammar for. What ended, or should have, is the confidence that it did.