Long Read: How to Understand “Iran’s Grand Strategy”?

Iranian foreign policy often appears confusing because it moves in several directions at once. Tehran speaks the language of sovereignty, regional stability, and resistance to foreign intervention, while simultaneously relying on armed non-state allies, covert operations, and pressure tactics across the region. It calls for diplomacy when sanctions or military threats intensify, but it also invests in deterrence strategies that alarm its neighbors and invite further escalation. This does not mean Iran acts without logic, as its policy is shaped by insecurity, ideology, regime survival, and the desire to project power beyond its borders. But the result is a foreign policy that is difficult to read: defensive in its self-image, offensive in its instruments, pragmatic in moments of pressure, and ideological in its long-term regional ambitions.

Vali Nasr’s work helps explain why Iranian foreign policy can look confusing from the outside. The Iranian-American political scientist is one of the most influential scholars of Middle Eastern politics, Iran, political Islam, and U.S. foreign policy in the region. Nasr’s work focuses on how religion, state power, sectarian identity, class, and geopolitics shape politics in the Muslim world. He became widely known for The Shia Revival, which argued that the rise of Shia power after the Iraq War would reshape Middle Eastern politics.

His recent book, Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History, brings together many of his long-standing concerns. It argues that Iranian foreign policy cannot be explained only by ideology, clerical rule, or revolutionary rhetoric. Instead, Nasr presents Iran as a state shaped by historical insecurity, the memory of foreign intervention, the Iran-Iraq War, sanctions, and its rivalry with the United States. In this reading, Iran’s “resistance” strategy is not random or purely ideological; it is a long-term national security doctrine aimed at deterring enemies, projecting influence through regional allies, and forcing the United States to reduce its role in the Middle East.

History is still alive

Iran’s foreign policy cannot be understood simply as the behavior of an ideological theocracy or as a set of irrational acts driven by revolutionary zeal. Vali Nasr presents Iran as a state with a coherent, if costly and often destabilizing, grand strategy rooted in its understanding of national security. The Gaza war after October 7, 2023 and the subsequent mobilization of Iran-backed actors across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine revealed the reach of the “Axis of Resistance.” For Nasr, this axis is not merely a loose collection of militias, but the product of decades of Iranian strategy designed to confront Israel, weaken U.S. influence, and give Iran leverage across the region.

Nasr challenges the Western tendency to view Iran mainly through the lens of the 1979 Revolution, political Islam, and clerical rule. He argues that while Islamic language and revolutionary memory remain important, they no longer fully explain Iran’s behavior. The Islamic Republic has evolved into a state that uses ideology as a political instrument, while pursuing secular objectives: security, power, regional influence, and national greatness. Its hostility to the United States is not an emotional reflex, but the organizing principle of a national security doctrine built around “resistance.”

So Iran’s strategy may be misguided, self-defeating, and economically damaging, but it is not random. Iran seeks to exhaust U.S. power in the Middle East, compel Washington to retreat, and secure space for its own rise as the leading power in West Asia.

Nasr explains Iranian foreign policy through the long historical formation of Iran’s insecurity, ambition, and sense of strategic loneliness. He begins with the idea that Iran’s national consciousness is shaped by a feeling of uniqueness and isolation: Iran is a Persian and Shia country surrounded largely by Arab, Turkic, and Sunni neighbors. This sense of being distinct has produced both a claim to grandeur and a deep anxiety about vulnerability. This can be traced back to the Safavid era, when Iran’s rulers adopted Shiism not simply as a matter of faith, but as a strategic decision to distinguish Iran from the Sunni Ottoman Empire and consolidate state authority.

Later, defeats by Russia, humiliating treaties, territorial losses, and British-Russian interference made Iran deeply sensitive to foreign domination and territorial disintegration. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–6 was therefore not only a democratic movement, but also an attempt to save the country from chaos and imperial control. Yet the constitution failed to produce a strong state, leaving Iran vulnerable.

This failure paved the way for Reza Shah Pahlavi, who built a centralized modern state after his 1921 coup. Nasr presents Reza Shah’s project as a “grand strategy of survival”: restoring territorial integrity, creating a national army, suppressing separatism, and building modern institutions. But this strong state also became authoritarian, alienating many of its supporters and the clergy. World War II then exposed the limits of his achievements when Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran in 1941, occupied the country, and forced him into exile.

Nasr argues that two later moments shaped competing Iranian strategic memories. The 1946 Soviet-backed separatist crisis convinced Mohammad Reza Shah that Iran’s survival required alignment with the West, especially the United States. By contrast, the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh convinced later revolutionaries that the main threat to Iran was Western imperial interference. Nasr complicates the usual story of the coup by arguing that Mossadegh’s failure was not his nationalism, but his lack of a viable strategy to defend Iran’s security while confronting Britain over oil.

The Shah’s later strategy sought to make Iran a great regional power through modernization, close ties with Washington, military expansion, and intervention in regional politics, including Iraq, Oman, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf. His ambitions brought Iran influence, but his autocracy separated the state from society.

Today’s Islamic Republic inherited these unresolved debates: how to protect Iran, resist foreign domination, build power, and satisfy society’s demand for rights and prosperity. Iran’s current strategy of resistance is therefore rooted in centuries of historical memory, fear of dismemberment, and competing models of state survival.

“Now all decisions are made in Tehran”

The Islamic Republic’s foreign policy and strategic culture were formed in the first decade after the 1979 Revolution. However, Iran’s current worldview was not produced by ideology alone. It emerged from three formative experiences: the revolution’s demand for independence, the hostage crisis and confrontation with the United States, and the Iran-Iraq War. These events fused nationalism, Shiism, anti-Americanism, and a doctrine of resistance into the foundations of the Iranian state.

The first major theme is independence. In October 1978, when Karim Sanjabi and Ayatollah Khomeini met in Paris to define the principles of the coming revolution, Sanjabi’s draft emphasized that Iran’s future government should be democratic and Islamic. Khomeini added a third principle in his own handwriting: independence. This addition is essential. The revolution was not only a revolt against monarchy or an attempt to build an Islamic order; it was also a revolt against what revolutionaries saw as foreign domination. Khomeini’s claim after victory that “now all decisions are made in Tehran” captures this self-understanding. The Islamic Republic’s enduring commitment to independence became more stable than many of its other revolutionary promises. Islamic observance weakened over time, revolutionary idealism eroded, but the idea of geopolitical independence hardened into a lasting doctrine of resistance.

Anti-Americanism became the main language through which this independence was expressed. In the revolutionary imagination, the United States was not merely a foreign power; it was the architect of Iran’s humiliation after the 1953 coup, the protector of the Shah, and the chief obstacle to Iran’s sovereignty. This reading of history was shared by different factions of the revolution, including Islamists, leftists, and nationalists, although each gave it different meaning. For the Left, anti-Americanism was part of anti-imperialism and economic justice. For Khomeini and the religious revolutionaries, it was linked to Islam, cultural authenticity, and the defense of Iran against Western domination. Khomeini’s language borrowed from both Islamic and leftist vocabularies, using terms such as “Great Satan” and “oppression,” while also appropriating the anti-imperialist legacy of Mossadegh.

The hostage crisis was the event that transformed anti-Americanism from a revolutionary slogan into a pillar of the state. Nasr argues that the seizure of the U.S. embassy in November 1979 cannot be understood only as a reaction to the Shah’s admission to the United States. It was also part of the internal struggle over who would control the revolution. Religious revolutionaries feared that the liberal provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan was moving toward accommodation with Washington. They also feared that the Left would monopolize anti-imperialist legitimacy. By supporting the hostage-taking, Khomeini destroyed the liberal wing of the revolution, outflanked the Left, mobilized the masses behind the clergy, and cut off any immediate possibility of normalization with the United States. The crisis lasted 444 days and became, in Khomeini’s terms, a “second revolution.” It entrenched the belief that defiance could make the United States retreat and that anti-Americanism was necessary for the survival of the Islamic Republic.

Nasr also explains how the revolution tried to project itself abroad. Khomeini’s victory inspired Islamist movements across the Muslim world, both Sunni and Shia. But Iran faced a tension between being a nation-state and being the center of a borderless Islamic revolution. Some figures around the revolution wanted Iran to act as the hub of global Islamic liberation movements. Others, including Ali Khamenei and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, preferred that Iran serve as an example rather than pursue unlimited revolutionary internationalism. Shia communities in Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait were especially affected by the revolution. Lebanon became the most important case. There, Iran helped build the networks that later became Hezbollah, giving Tehran its first durable model of regional influence through an armed ideological ally.

Iran-Iraq War

Nasr then turns to the Iran-Iraq War, which he treats as the decisive event in the making of the Islamic Republic. Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, expecting a weakened revolutionary state to collapse. Saddam Hussein feared the spread of revolutionary Shiism into Iraq’s Shia majority, coveted Iranian territory, and believed that Iran’s purged military could not resist. Iran was caught off guard, partly because its leaders underestimated Saddam and partly because they saw Iraqi threats through the prism of American pressure during the hostage crisis. The invasion quickly became, in Iranian eyes, an “imposed war” and a test of national survival.

The war unfolded in three phases: Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Iranian territory from 1980 to 1982; Iran’s liberation of its territory and decision to carry the war into Iraq from 1982 to 1986; and Iraq’s recovery of the advantage between 1986 and 1988. Nasr argues that the first phase unified Iran. The second phase transformed the war from defense into a costly campaign to topple Saddam. After Iran recaptured Khorramshahr in 1982, Iraq sought a ceasefire. Iran refused. Khomeini and the IRGC argued that Saddam could not be trusted and that Iran would remain insecure unless the Iraqi regime was removed. This was a crucial moment: Iran began to define security not as defending its borders, but as shaping politics beyond them.

The war created the doctrine of “sacred defense.” Iran framed its struggle as a religious and national duty, drawing on Shia memories of Karbala, martyrdom, and resistance. Yet Nasr stresses that this was not purely religious. It was religion placed in the service of national security. The state used ideology to mobilize society, recruit volunteers, justify sacrifice, and sustain a total war. The Basij and IRGC became central to this effort. The IRGC rose from a revolutionary militia into a powerful military and political institution. Its strategy relied on ideological mobilization, irregular warfare, human-wave attacks, and faith in sacrifice rather than conventional military superiority. This approach helped Iran survive, but it also produced immense casualties and entrenched a militarized, ideological view of security.

The war also deepened Iran’s distrust of the international order. Iran believed the United Nations failed to condemn Iraq’s invasion properly, tolerated Saddam’s chemical weapons, and acted only when Iraq’s survival was threatened. Western support for Iraq, American intelligence assistance to Baghdad, sanctions, and U.S. military action in the Gulf reinforced Tehran’s conclusion that Iran had to rely on itself. This experience strengthened Iran’s preference for asymmetric tools: missiles, proxies, militias, guerrilla warfare, and later drones and cyber capabilities.

Axis of Resistance

Iran’s postwar state moved from reconstruction and reform toward a consolidated strategy of resistance under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In 1989, ran emerged exhausted from the Iran-Iraq War and faced the task of rebuilding its economy, institutions, and society. The death of Khomeini and the decline of the Iraqi threat after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait gave Iran a rare chance to reconsider its direction. But the central conflict of the postwar era was never resolved: whether Iran’s security would come from economic development and pragmatic foreign policy, or from ideological vigilance, resistance, and the wartime institutions that had sustained the Islamic Republic.

Nasr presents the postwar Islamic Republic as a state divided between two logics. Hashemi Rafsanjani, president from 1989 to 1997, represented the logic of reconstruction. He believed Iran needed a “rational government,” economic reform, foreign investment, and reduced tensions abroad. For him, development itself was a form of national security. Rafsanjani tried to revive infrastructure, industry, education, health care, and the private sector, and he adopted five-year planning, borrowing, privatization, and technocratic management. He wanted Iran to become a model of Islamic development rather than a state permanently organized around revolutionary struggle.

Khamenei, conversely, represented a different logic. His succession after Khomeini required institutional change because he lacked Khomeini’s senior religious stature. Khomeini’s late doctrine of absolute clerical authority, and the constitutional revisions that followed, gave Khamenei control over the military and security forces and placed unelected supervisory bodies above elected institutions. Khamenei became less a supreme religious jurist than a supreme guardian of the revolutionary state. His worldview was shaped by the Iran-Iraq War, his distrust of the United States, and his belief that ideological vigilance was essential to national defense. He saw reform, cultural opening, and Western engagement as potential paths to regime erosion, especially after watching the Soviet Union collapse.

The tension between Rafsanjani and Khamenei created the enduring duality of the Islamic Republic: elected presidents could pursue development, reform, or diplomacy, but the supreme leader and the deep state retained authority over security, ideology, and the strategic direction of the country. Rafsanjani’s reforms improved parts of the economy but also produced inequality, corruption, and resentment among war veterans, poorer constituencies, parastatal institutions, and the IRGC. These groups came to see development and opening as threats to the revolutionary order. At the same time, the deep state continued assassinations, terrorism, and regional operations, undermining Rafsanjani’s attempt to normalize Iran’s foreign relations.

This unresolved struggle carried into Mohammad Khatami’s presidency after his surprising 1997 electoral victory. Khatami represented the social consequences of Rafsanjani’s reforms: a larger middle class, more educated youth, greater participation by women, and a public desire for normalcy, civil society, rule of law, and engagement with the world. His landslide victory embarrassed Khamenei and revealed that Iranian society had moved beyond the ideological certainties of the war generation. Khatami’s “dialogue of civilizations” was an attempt to reduce Iran’s isolation and soften its international posture. But conservatives, the judiciary, the IRGC, and security institutions blocked his reforms. The 1999 student protests became a turning point. The IRGC and Basij crushed the movement, and Khatami retreated. The deep state concluded that political opening threatened national security.

The conservative backlash culminated in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 victory. Ahmadinejad mobilized poorer voters against Rafsanjani-era inequality and corruption, used populist rhetoric, and opened the state and economy more fully to the IRGC. Under him, the IRGC became a dominant economic actor, gaining contracts, loans, and ownership stakes in major sectors. Ahmadinejad’s bombastic anti-Israel and anti-American language alarmed the West, but it also gave Iran popularity among parts of the Arab and Muslim public angry at the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His presidency marked the deep state’s attempt to combine technocratic capacity with revolutionary ideology, ending the reformist moment while extending the political and economic power of the resistance camp.

Forward defense

After 9/11, Iran briefly cooperated with the United States against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Iranian officials, including Qasem Soleimani’s network, helped the U.S. campaign and participated in the Bonn process. But George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech convinced Khamenei that cooperation would be read as weakness. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq intensified this fear. Tehran believed Washington intended to topple Saddam first and then move against Iran. Khatami’s 2003 offer of broad talks was ignored, reinforcing Khamenei’s view that the United States could not be trusted.

Yet the Iraq War also gave Iran a strategic opening. The United States removed Iran’s greatest regional enemy and destroyed the Iraqi state, creating a vacuum in which Iran could build influence among Iraqi Shia parties, militias, clerics, and social networks. This became the basis of forward defense: defending Iran not at its borders, but inside the Arab world through local allies and armed groups. The IRGC’s Qods Force, under Qasem Soleimani, became the main instrument of this strategy. It built and managed militias, projected power through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and later Yemen, and made the “battlefield” more important than diplomacy in regional policy.

The 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war strengthened Tehran’s belief in forward defense. Hezbollah survived Israel’s assault and denied it a clear victory, proving to Iran that proxy warfare could deter stronger enemies. The Arab Spring then expanded this strategy. In Syria, Iran saw the potential fall of Assad as a direct threat to its bridge to Hezbollah and to its regional depth. The Qods Force deployed advisers, Hezbollah fighters, and Shia militias from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The defense of Shia shrines, especially Sayyida Zaynab in Damascus, helped Iran frame the war in religious and strategic terms. Syria became the crucible in which Iran’s loose network of allies evolved into a more integrated “Axis of Resistance.”

Nasr’s final argument is that forward defense has been successful, but costly. It expanded Iran’s influence, helped push the United States out of parts of the region, and made Iran a central actor from Lebanon to Yemen. But it also provoked Arab fear, Israeli-Arab security cooperation, the Abraham Accords, U.S. sanctions, and the risk of direct war. The Gaza war showed both the reach and danger of the Axis of Resistance: Iran’s allies could mobilize across multiple fronts, but Israel’s attacks on Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian commanders exposed the vulnerability of the network.

The nuclear file fits into this same logic. Rouhani and Zarif pursued the JCPOA to relieve sanctions and reopen Iran economically, but Khamenei and the resistance camp feared that a nuclear deal could weaken ideological vigilance and empower public demands for normalization. The slow pace of sanctions relief and Trump’s withdrawal from the deal confirmed Khamenei’s distrust. For Nasr, the Islamic Republic under Khamenei has become less a clerical state in the original Khomeinist sense and more a security state built around resistance, the IRGC, forward defense, missiles, and the belief that Iran’s greatness depends on exhausting U.S. power rather than accommodating it.