The Banality of Resistance: How We Keep Misreading Iran
Western analysis of Iran suffers from a persistent, almost comforting delusion: that the Islamic Republic is fundamentally irrational. It’s easier that way. If Iran is driven by theology, fanaticism, or some opaque revolutionary mysticism, then its behavior can be dismissed rather than understood. Strategy becomes pathology. Policy becomes moral posture.
But what if the opposite is true? What if Iran is not irrational—but rational in a way we refuse to take seriously? Because once you grant that premise, the last four decades of Iranian behavior stop looking erratic. They start looking disturbingly coherent.
Note that this is not an argument for sympathy. The Islamic Republic isn’t benign, and its leadership is not misunderstood in any charitable sense. But the prevailing story is analytically lazy. It replaces strategy with caricature.
If you actually listen—really listen—to how Iranian leadership understands itself, a different picture emerges. Not a nicer one. A more dangerous one, precisely because it is coherent. At its core, the Islamic Republic does not think of itself as a religious project. It thinks of itself as the end of a historical condition: a century of humiliation, intervention, and subjugation. That’s the starting point. Miss that, and everything else looks like madness.
Like China’s 1949 revolution and the search for justice and retribution for a century of humiliation—communism, like Islamism—isn’t simply a cover, but the very lens through which sovereignty, independence, and great power ambitions are framed.
We fixate on Islam because that’s the most visible layer. The slogans, the clerics, the symbolism—it’s all there. But the behavior? That’s not explained by religion. It’s explained by something far more familiar: a state convinced it is locked in a generational struggle for sovereignty against a more powerful adversary.
In this telling, 1979 wasn’t just a revolution—it was a correction. A historical reset after the 1953 coup, after the long 19th century and early 20th century of British and Russian interference, after what is perceived as the systematic denial of Iranian agency. And once you accept that premise, everything else starts to click into place.
- The hostility toward the United States isn’t ideological—it’s structural.
- The obsession with deterrence isn’t paranoia—it’s doctrine.
- The willingness to absorb pain—sanctions, isolation, war—isn’t irrational—it’s strategic endurance.
You don’t have to agree with any of it. But you do have to understand that Iran has a grand strategy and that it is internally consistent.
Persian Proxies and Partners—from Hezbollah to Sparta
Iran’s proxy warfare strategy is often misunderstood as purely ideological. In practice, it is far more flexible. The so-called “Axis of Resistance,” is less an alliance of shared identity than an axis of convenience. While these actors have operated under the umbrella of the “Axis of Resistance,” their differences outweigh their similarities, making their political, economic, and security cooperation rather peculiar. For instance, Iran is a Persian-dominated Shia theocratic republic, while Hezbollah, though Islamist, is an Arab armed political group within the state of Lebanon. Former allies in Syria, on the other hand, portrayed themselves as a secular state and a chief defender of Arab nationalism.
In this view, such partnerships represent a strategic realpolitik response to Iran’s comparatively constrained conventional military strength, constituting a significant aspect of its regional security policy. A group’s Islamic credentials (or lack thereof) matter less than its willingness to converge with the Iranian leadership’s aim at self-preservation. In this way, for many decades Iran, a self-styled Islamic Shia republic, has supported a variety of secular, leftist, Christian, and Sunni Islamist groups.
This is not new. Long before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Shah’s Iran cultivated proxies and partners for similar reasons. The Shah made use of his secret service—the SAVAK—which, like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard today, specialized in external operations and internal repression to build up potential allies and undermine the state’s opponents. SAVAK delivered weapons to Lebanese Christian Maronites and CIA archives demonstrate knowledge aiding and abetting Israeli military aid to Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga. Its support of the Lebanese Shia was channeled through the Pahlavi Foundation (Bonyade Pahlavi), and continued, as the Alavi Foundation, after the revolution.
The Shah also channeled money to Lebanese Shia through Iranian Ayatollahs, local Arab ayatollahs, and religious schools. He funded these and other groups strategically, in hopes that they could be useful to challenge Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism. Note that the justifications are virtually identical: “We should combat and contain the threat [of Nasserism] in the East coast of the Mediterranean [Lebanon] to prevent shedding blood on the Iranian soil.”
History offers a useful parallel. During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta—locked in existential struggle with Athens—found an unlikely ally in the form of Persia. A decade earlier, Persia, a sprawling empire, fought against Sparta. The Sparta-Persia alliance was not ideological. It was strategic. And it proved decisive. The war remained undecided until the intervention of Persia. Led by the Spartan leader Lysander, the Spartan navy—funded by Persian aid—ultimately defeated Athens, marking the period of Spartan hegemony across Greece.
A Radicalized Future
Cut off from conventional military power, Iran has built something else: a distributed, asymmetric defense architecture. Cut off from conventional military procurement, unable to build a modern air force or compete symmetrically, Iran built something else: an innovative, distributed, and asymmetric defense architecture. Call it what you want—“Axis of Resistance,” proxy warfare, regional destabilization, a mosaic defense—it is all of those things. But it’s also something else: a low-cost deterrence system. Iran’s defense budget is a mere $10 billion compared to the trillion-dollar one of the United States (something like 60 times greater).
Faced with overwhelming conventional inferiority, Iran substitutes militias for divisions, geography for fleets, and denial for dominance. It’s crude, it’s often brutal, but it’s not stupid. And here’s where the irony bites: what looks like expansionism from the outside is experienced, from Tehran, as forward defense. A buffer against encirclement. A way to keep the war away from Iranian soil, until it didn’t.
But even before the current war, the Islamic Republic was in trouble, and the system was at risk of a legitimacy collapse. Widespread protests, a population increasingly indifferent—or openly hostile—to the revolutionary narrative. Some reports suggest that at least eighty percent were angry, with maybe only fifteen percent loyal. The rest, likely, exhausted.
And then the war came, and it altered that trajectory. External threat compressed internal divisions—not because the population embraced the regime, but because survival reordered priorities. People rallied around the country, even if not the state. That distinction matters. But in wartime, it often doesn’t matter enough.
At the same time, the war did something else—something far more consequential in the long term. It resolved, almost overnight, what should have been a prolonged internal struggle over succession.
More consequentially, the conflict appears to have accelerated elite consolidation. So, no Deng Xiaoping moment. No gradual pivot. Instead: a consolidation of the hardest-line elements. Older, arguably more restrained, more pragmatic generals were assassinated and replaced by younger generals and colonels—commanders eager to prove themselves during a crisis. Iran’s chief security officer, Ali Arashir Larijani, an author of multiple books and a Kantian philosopher with decades of diplomatic service was killed and then replaced by a hardline ex-Revolutionary Guard commander, Mohammad Zolghadr, whose chief experience comes from his experiences of the bloody Iran-Iraq War. In this way, the current war didn’t just stabilize the system—it actually may radicalize its future. If sustained, this shift could narrow the regime’s strategic flexibility for years to come.
What Iran Actually Wants (Stripped of Rhetoric)
There’s an old line that is attributed to the Taliban—but actually goes back at least to the Vietnam War—that should make policymakers uncomfortable: “You have all the watches, but we have all the time.” This is not merely rhetorical but also a strategy. Iran is not trying to win quickly. It’s trying to make winning too expensive for everyone else.
- Stretch the conflict.
- Strain supply chains.
- Agitate global energy markets.
- Turn duration into leverage.
This is insurgent logic applied at the state level. And it pairs perfectly with geography. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a chokepoint—it’s a bargaining chip. A reminder that even a weaker power can hold the global economy hostage without ever achieving traditional military superiority.
In that sense, Iran may have stumbled into something more effective than its earlier reliance on proxies: proximity-based deterrence. It is cheaper, harder to neutralize, and immediately consequential.
So, what does Iran actually want, stripped of rhetoric? If we can set aside the slogans, the maximalist demands, and the ideological packaging, what’s left is surprisingly simple. Iran likely wants two things:
- Security – credible assurance that it will not be attacked.
- Economic access – the ability to function in the global economy.
That’s it. Everything else—missiles, militias, maritime disruption—is leverage toward those ends. This doesn’t mean compromise is easy. In fact, it makes it harder. Because from Tehran’s perspective, these are not negotiable preferences. They are existential requirements. The uncomfortable part the U.S. need understand is that the regime does not distinguish between itself and the state. To them, regime survival is national survival. You can reject that premise. But you can’t ignore that they believe it.
There’s a final twist here, and it’s that is rarely acknowledged. The more the United States uses a kind of modern-day Melian Dialogue: a maximalist, even imperial language in other contexts—the more it reinforces the very narrative Iran’s leadership relies on. Every threat of war crimes, every careless map, every offhand remark about regime change, every nonchalant threat to its territorial integrity, and every rhetorical overreach—all of it becomes evidence. Not fabricated propaganda or “fake news,” but a corroboration of the regime’s darkest narratives.
And in that sense, the conflict is not just military or economic—it’s narrative. Competing stories about what this war is, and why it exists. Iran calls it anti-colonial and anti-imperial resistance. The U.S. calls it stabilization or spreading freedom. Both sides likely believe their version is obvious.
The 1979 revolution, as a lived ideology, is already fading. The population is moving on—even if the state is not. That tension didn’t simply disappear because of the war, it likely only got postponed. And when the war ends—whether in two years or ten—it will likely come roaring back. That’s because no amount of strategic coherence can indefinitely suppress a society that no longer believes in the story its leaders are telling. The real question then isn’t whether the Islamic Republic survives this war. It’s whether it can survive what comes after—when the bombs stop falling, and the people start asking, again, what, exactly, was all of this for?
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