Iran’s great gamble: the rise of the East

Peyman Jafari

In a rapidly changing international order, Iran is the flashpoint of both old and new conflicts. Khamenei is gambling that the world order is changing fundamentally in favor of his Islamic Republic. How do Iran’s political elites perceive these changes and conflicts, and how do they define and justify their own status and actions within them?

The power of history

“That delusional fantasist claimed that Iran has been weakened,” declared Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on January 20, 2025, in response to President Trump’s claim about Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” (Hamas, Hezbollah and Assad’s regime). He begged to differ: “Just as Saddam Hussein, under the illusion of Iran’s weakness, launched an invasion against the country, and Ronald Reagan, with the same delusional belief, provided him with significant support. They and countless other deluded individuals all met their demise, while the Islamic Republic has grown stronger day by day.”[1]

Historical references like this reveal the importance of history for the leaders of the Islamic Republic. Many Western policy makers, however, either ignore these historical references or deride them as self-victimization, but they regularly refer to their own historical and contemporary grievances about the Islamic Republic. For instance the occupation of the American embassy in 1979-80, sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah, support to Iraqi militias’ attacks on the American army after its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the nuclear program, long-range missiles, and military aid to Putin’s Russia.

Understanding how the leaders of the Islamic Republic interpret the history of their conflict with the West, and connect it to present policies and future possibilities is crucial for at least three reasons. First, the actions of the Islamic Republic didn’t emerge in a geopolitical vacuum, but were in part a response to the actions of US, Israel and European powers. Second, the foreign policy circles of the Islamic Republic of Iran, let alone its citizens, do not think and act homogenously. Third, the perceptions and policies of the Islamic Republic have changed over time in reaction to both domestic and international pressures and crises.

 

Revolution and war

History is more than abstract context; it refers to the continuation of power structures, inequalities, threats and mistrust that connect the past to the present. For instance, during the 1979 revolution against the Pahlavi monarchy, anti-American sentiment was what the CIA termed ’the blowback’ from the 1953 coup, which it had orchestrated with British MI6 against the liberal Prime Minister Mosaddeq. The coup derailed Iran’s indigenous democratization, and American support for the Shah’s autocracy paved the way for the Islamists that under Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership took power in 1979. This marked an ideological shift in the anti-colonial movements of the Middle East, which was paradoxically enabled by the successful American and Israeli crackdown on secular communist and nationalist forces. It started in 1953 in Iran and continued in the 1950s and 1960s with attacks on Nasser’s Egypt as the harbinger of Arab secular nationalism. When Nasser planned to nationalize the Suez Canal, Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt in response. And when Nasser moved closer to the Soviet Union, the US aided the region’s ultra-conservative and authoritarian monarchies under Saudi leadership to undermine Egypt. Finally, Israel defeated Egypt in the 1967 and 1973 wars, and the US pushed it to sign the Camp David Accords in 1979.

That year marks the demise of secular nationalism in the Middle East. But the opposition against Western domination of the region and Israeli oppression of Palestinians continued in a religious form with the rise of political Islam. After its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran, declared to stand up for the “repressed of the world,” and against both American and Soviet imperialism. This message resonated with the multitudes in Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Bahrein and occupied Palestine that believed secular forces had failed to stop political and social injustices.

 

New grievances against the West

The hostage crisis of 1979-80 deepened American animosity toward the Islamic Republic and allowed Khomeini to marginalize proponents of relations with the West. The US further strained relations by refusing to condemn the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980. After Iran gained the upper hand in 1982, the US started providing Saddam critical military aid even as he used chemical weapons.[2] In 1987, the US practically intervened on the side of Iraq and its allied Arab countries against Iran, which had started targeting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in retaliation against Iraqi attacks on Iranian oil tankers. The American intervention forced Iran to accept an unfavorable peace deal in August 1988. But before that, another wound was opened in the Iran-US relations when an American navy ship mistakenly but recklessly shot down an Iranian passenger flight over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people in March 1988.

The Iran-Iraq War shaped Iran’s security doctrine, defined the leading role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), forward defense (containing or repulsing military aggression as close to the original line of contact as possible), mobilization of allies (“proxies”), self-reliance (building domestic weapons, especially missiles), and asymmetrical warfare (due to the lack of advanced military technology, especially on sea and in the air). Since the 1990s, these strategies have evolved with lessons from modern wars and US military doctrines.

 

Encircled by American and other NATO-members

The post-war period highlighted divergent foreign policy strategies within Iran’s elite. While Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei (1989 – present) pursued an anti-status quo foreign policy challenging US hegemony, Presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989 – 1997) and Mohammad Khatami (1997 – 2005) sought rapprochement with the West. Rafsanjani restored ties with Saudi Arabia and sought WTO membership, which the US vetoed until 2005. Khatami promoted a “dialogue between civilizations” and collaborated with the US against the Taliban in 2001. However, relations with the West soured when President George Bush labeled Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” in 2002, the US’s occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq reinforced Iran’s perception of a military encirclement, and hawkish politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv advocated for an attack on Iran.

The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq also reinforced the Islamic Republic’s perception of NATO as an offensive force and an extension of American power in the region. After invoking Article 5, NATO assumed command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from 2003 to 2021. NATO was also involved in the occupation of Iraq, through amongst others the NATO Training Mission-Iraq (NTM-I) from 2004 to 2011. Projecting its power further into the Middle East, NATO also initiated the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) in 2004, which Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have officially joined.

Viewed from Iran, it looked very much as if it was being encircled by American and other NATO-members’ troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf. This, and Iran’s inclusion in the “Axis of Evil” shaped the threat perception among Iran’s military leadership and changed Iran’s political trajectory.[3] Domestically, it undermined the proponents of relations with the West, and in foreign policy it pushed the IRGC further towards asymmetrical war and forward defense: Iran branded its alliance the “Axis of Resistance” in response to the “Axis of Evil”, supported Iraqi militia’s attacks on American troops to force their departure from the region, and expanded its strategic depth by supporting Assad’s regime.[4] Crucially, it built its missile and nuclear program as a fundamental part of its deterrence doctrine.

From 2003 to 2015, Iran’s nuclear program became a focal point of conflict with the West. Despite Iran’s insistence on the program’s peaceful nature, the West and Israel demanded an end to uranium enrichment. A decade of sanctions, cyberattacks, and assassinations of Iranian scientists culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which lifted sanctions and acknowledged, de facto, Iran’s right to enrichment in exchange for strict inspections of Iran’s nuclear program.

 

The turn to the East

The fate of the Nuclear Deal is another fork in the road in the Iran-US relations. Having gone into effect in January 2016, Iran barely benefited from it. As already promised during his presidential election campaign in 2016, Trump teared it up, and by the time he had won the election in November 2016, very few European businesses dared to invest in Iran. In May 2018, Trump announced the US departure from the Nuclear Deal and in the following November reintroduced the sanctions against Iran that by targeting its oil export and banking system greatly reduced its income and increased inflation. As in the early 2000s, the moderates around President Hassan Rouhani (2013-2021) and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif, who had knotted their political fate to the economic windfall of the Nuclear Deal, were undermined. The hawkish elements that claimed the US can’t be trusted were strengthened.

This had two crucial consequences for Iran’s international politics. First, as Iran could not retaliate against the American sanctions with economic means, it intensified its asymmetrical warfare showing that it could inflict economic and military pain on the US and its allies. Its allies in Iraq increasingly targeted US military bases and and the Yemeni Houthis were assisted in their war against Saudi Arabia that supported Trump’s “maximal pressure” on Iran. This conflict came to a head when oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and Saudi oil installations were attacked in 2019, and attacks on US military bases increased. In response, the US assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy chief of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces. Iran retaliated by attacking two American airbase in Iraq to showcase its ballistic missile capabilities and restore deterrence.

Second, the US withdrawal from the Nuclear Deal and the disappointment with the EU’s failure to provide an alternative pushed Iran further into the arms of China and Russia. In October 2018, Khamenei admonished President Rouhani and his supporters for trusting the West and told Iran’s elites to “look East,” a call he has repeated ever since, which marks a departure from the 1979 revolution’s “neither West, nor East” slogan.[5] In 2021, Iran signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement with China, and in early 2025 it signed a similar 20-year agreement with Russia. Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2023, and the following year it joined BRICS.

 

The US as a declining superpower

This Iranian turn to the East, however, is not only rooted in the failure of the Nuclear Deal. It also reflects a deep conviction among Khamenei and his conservative co-thinkers that the US is a declining superpower and that the East is rising. Khamenei’s official website has even a special page titled “American decline” and conservative thinkers such as Foad Izadi and Mohammad Marandi theorize it by referring to economic (diminished share in global production), political (domestic polarization) and military (de facto defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, and inability to defeat Russia in Ukraine) weaknesses.[6]

Other members of the political elite, such as current President Massoud Pezeshkian and Zarif, his Vice President for Strategic Affairs, have a more realistic assessment of the balance of power in international politics. They argue that while Iran should build closer relations with its Arab neighbors and the East, it should also de-escalate and normalize relations with the West. Rather than American decline, they see “a post-polar era where global actors can simultaneously cooperate and compete across different areas.”[7] Khamenei, however, is gambling that the world order is changing fundamentally in favor of his Islamic Republic.

 

Dangerous moment

Following the weakening of the Axis of Resistance, the Islamic Republic and international politics have arrived at an extremely dangerous moment. Some in Tehran have started whispering that it should change its nuclear doctrine and take steps towards weaponization as the ultimate deterrence. Some in Tel Aviv and Washington exaggerate Iran’s weakness to present the current moment as a window of opportunity to attack Iran’s nuclear installations.[8] But even Israeli generals have warned against this option as it would depend on US involvement, which is not a given and would spread the war regionally and even globally. Most importantly, it would fail to fully destroy Iran’s nuclear program while giving its leaders the excuse to get out of the NPT, build a nuclear bomb, and fully securitize and militarize the political system. Even without military attacks, the “maximum pressure” through economic sanctions has harmed Iran without changing its course, while driving it further into the arms of Russia and China.[9]

To navigate a peaceful path out of this conundrum, diplomacy and negotiations are still the least costly option – certainly in terms of human suffering. But this process cannot start without trust building and a mutual understanding of the security concerns of the involved parties. Like all states, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy is driven by concerns rooted in history and contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Taking stock of them without necessarily accepting them is an important starting point.

One possible objection to negotiations is, of course, the authoritarian nature of the Islamic Republic that is at odds with “Western values.” That objection, however, would have some credibility if Western states would not negotiate and closely collaborate with authoritarian states, such as the members of the NATO-led Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, let alone ignore or attack the International Criminal Court for condemning Israel’s war crimes. A more important objection is the fate of the people in Iran, many of whom have suffered under, and rebelled against the Islamic Republic’s repressive policies, corruption, and economic mismanagement. International conflicts, economic sanctions and threats of war, however, have strengthened and militarized the state in Iran, while they have undermined the mobilizing and democratizing capacities of its civil society.

Once more, we have arrived at a crossroads. On the one hand, a window of possibility has opened for negotiations between the Islamic Republic and the US, as the conservative’s domestic and international policies in Iran have hit a wall and President Trump seems to realize that the “maximum pressure” and the regime change efforts of his previous administration did not yield the intended results. On the other hand, in an increasingly volatile world, the possibility of a military escalation still exists, and is favored by some hardliners in Iran, in Washington and in Tel Aviv.

 

[1] BBC News Persian (January 22, 2025). Translated by author, https://www.bbc.com/persian/articles/c87dj4d3djdo

[2] Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, “Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran,” Foreign Policy (blog), August 26, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/.

[3] Daniel Heradstveit and G. Matthew Bonham, “What the Axis of Evil Metaphor Did to Iran,” Middle East Journal 61, no. 3 (2007): 421–40.

[4] Amr Yossef, “Upgrading Iran’s Military Doctrine: An Offensive ‘Forward Defense,’” Middle East Institute (December 10, 2019).

[5] Radio Farda (October 18, 2018). https://en.radiofarda.com/a/look-east-says-khamenei-disappointed-with-europe-s-efforts-to-save-jcpoa/29550531.html

[6] See https://farsi.khamenei.ir/usa-decline/

[7] Mohammad Javad Zarif, “How Iran Sees the Path to Peace,” Foreign Affairs, December 2, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/how-iran-sees-path-peace-mohammad-javad-zarif.

[8] John Haltiwanger, “How Weakened Is Iran, Actually?,” Foreign Policy (blog), February 4, 2025, https://foreignpolicy-com.us1.proxy.openathens.net/2025/01/22/iran-weakened-trump-israel-hezbollah-hamas-nuclear/.

[9] Nicole Grajewski and Or Rabinowitz, “Will Iran and Russia’s Growing Partnership Go Nuclear?,” Foreign Affairs, January 28, 2025.

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