The question that has shaped the most serious analysis of Iran in the last half century is: What does the Islamic Republic want? It is a reasonable question, but it is not correct. The Islamic Republic is 47 years old. Iran, as a modern political entity, is five centuries old. Conflating the two sides has produced nearly half a century of failed U.S. policy, collapsed agreements, and a war that few saw coming in its current form.
The most important question is what Iran wants; not this government, not this great leader, but a government whose strategic instinct was formed long before the revolution and has survived every system change since then. The Safavids, Qajar, Pahlavis, and Islamic Republics have each operated from the same geographic and historical heritage. Governments changed. Logic did not.
The question that has shaped the most serious analysis of Iran in the last half century is: What does the Islamic Republic want? It is a reasonable question, but it is not correct. The Islamic Republic is 47 years old. Iran, as a modern political entity, is five centuries old. Conflating the two sides has produced nearly half a century of failed U.S. policy, collapsed agreements, and a war that few saw coming in its current form.
The most important question is what Iran wants; not this government, not this great leader, but a government whose strategic instinct was formed long before the revolution and has survived every system change since then. The Safavids, Qajar, Pahlavis, and Islamic Republics have each operated from the same geographic and historical heritage. Governments changed. Logic did not.
The Iranian plateau is surrounded by the Zagros Mountains to the west and the Alborz to the north, separated by some of the world’s poorest deserts, and is located at the crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Every major land power has had to engage in it. Every naval power with Indian Ocean objectives has had to focus on that sea at its southern end.
That geography provided a solid lesson across dynasties: You cannot protect the interior by protecting the interior. Rulers who based their strategy on the plain eventually lost their pieces. The outsiders, who turned the field from a target to a focal point, endured the most.
Hormuz is where this logic makes the most sense at the moment. About one-third of the world’s oil supply goes through that channel. When Iran decided to block transit at the start of the 2026 war, energy markets reacted before a single tanker could be stopped. A country without nuclear weapons and without a conventional military comparable to the United States can still move international markets because of its location. That is the geographical heritage. It does not collapse with a change of government.
The three judgments are based on Iran’s strategic behavior regardless of who is in power.
The first is that weakness invites intervention. The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 deprived Iran of its Caucasian territories. The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 divided the country into spheres of influence without consulting Iranian officials. Every government since then has read those events as a structural warning: A country that cannot impose restrictions will find its independence managed from the outside. The nuclear program, the regional network, and missile weapons are, on one level, each a response to that warning.
The second belief is that freedom is non-negotiable. The tobacco revolt of the early 1890s, the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951—these were not isolated periods. They were the same reflex in different eras. A 1976 US diplomatic cable, Iranian Ambassador Richard Helms, briefing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, correctly wrote: The nuclear tension exists because of “Iran’s refusal to be interfered with in any way that would undermine its authority.” The verdict was the same in every message from the 2015, 2021, and 2026 nuclear talks.
A third verdict, and one that is often downplayed: Iran does not think of itself as a regional power. The revolution of 1979 has usually been framed in regional terms—the empowerment of Shiite political movements, the reorganization of Gulf security, the emergence of political Islam as a dominant force.
But the effect of the first order was global. In one year, Iran went from being one of Washington’s most important strategic partners to becoming a third-party status among the major powers. The hostage crisis changed American domestic politics for a generation. The Iran-Iraq war attracted the intelligence services and arms industries of the major powers and much of Europe. Iran’s Shahed drones ended up in the war in Europe. The 2026 crisis shifted global energy markets, disrupted shipping insurance in many sea lanes, and forced a recalculation in every Gulf oil-dependent economy—which is a lot of them. The former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said he will transport the revolution to the four corners of the world. He meant it.
The two statements, separated by half a century, make the continuity clear. The first came from Colonel Mojtaba Pashaie, head of Iran’s Middle East secret police directorate, in the 1960s. explaining Why the shah was supporting the Lebanese parties: “We have to fight and prevent the threat (of Nasserism) on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to prevent bloodshed on Iranian soil.” The second one came from the former Chief Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Januaryspeaking to the families of soldiers killed in Syria and Iraq: “If they did not go to fight the enemy there, the enemy would enter the country. We would have to fight them in Kermanshah and Hamedan.” The logic is the same. Governments were not.
The western orientation of the shah was seen, from the outside, as a departure from this pattern. It wasn’t like that. He pursued nuclear capability through the same logic as the Islamic Republic. He sought Israel’s military cooperation. When Washington pushed for nuclear protection to mean outside oversight, he resisted—not ideologically, but because accepting such oversight would confirm a low status that no Iranian ruler in any century has been able to accept.
The same pattern appears now. At the Pakistan talks, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei made it clear to officials in the room that Iran would not negotiate on terms set by others. Washington and Tel Aviv entered the 2026 war wanting something contained – pressure on the nuclear program, missiles, regional internet. Iran expanded the chapter. When military pressure reached a threshold, Tehran closed Hormuz, turning the conflict into a global economic crisis. Every time Washington sets the rules of the game, Tehran changes the playing field.
Deep sanctions, targeted sanctions, assassination campaigns, cyber warfare, proxy support, direct military action—all of these have been tried. No one has delivered the strategic changes they promised. With stability that should itself be taken as data, they provided acceleration: rapid nuclear development, a deeper regional network, a more integrated political system.
2002 “axis of evil” speech is the purest example. In the months after September 11, Tehran cooperated on Afghanistan, participated in the Bonn Conference on the country’s political future, and opened indirect channels to Washington. The reformist camp around President Mohammad Khatami took a real domestic political risk in doing so. Iranian officials believed they had reached out and that equality was possible. My own research on this period at Royal Holloway produced consistent accounts describing former US President George W. Bush’s speech in similar terms to former British foreign secretary Jack Straw’s formulation: “a kick in the teeth for the risks they took.” Former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif later described how a “policy of cooperation” had turned into a “policy of confrontation” within days.
What followed was structurally predictable. Khamenei’s belief that Washington’s goal is regime change, not coexistence, was not challenged during that period. It was confirmed. The nuclear program was accelerated. The regional network continued to expand. Block architecture was expanded. Not because the hard-line planners used it at the time, but because the underlying logic revealed itself once the offer was not answered.
Repressed behavior is not primarily ideological. It is strategic. Demanding that Iran dismantle its deterrence architecture is not asking the Islamic Republic to be moderate—it is asking Iran to accept a condition that five centuries of experience identifies as the condition from which disaster emerges. No Iranian government can deliver that, because to deliver it would prove a fundamental lesson: Weakness invites intervention. Pressure intended to produce agreement instead produces the behavior it was designed to stop.
Kissinger spent years in charge of Vietnam before concluding that the North Vietnamese were fighting for something quite different from what he thought: time, patience, and the gradual erosion of American political will. Tehran works with the same logic. Iran is not trying to win this round. It tries to remain viable when the US needs to leave. Kissinger’s mistake in Vietnam was not escalation, it was the assumption that the other side shared his definition of victory. The Trump administration now faces the same situation: it cannot end the war on terms it can defend domestically, and it cannot walk away without a framework that Tehran refuses to provide. As the conflict drags on, the pain spreads beyond Iran, oil markets, shipping, supply chains, and economies that depend on Gulf stability. Hormuz does not only harm Iran.
The danger of nuclear proliferation is real. The regional network has produced real violence. Analytical reform does not address that concern. What changes are the situations that can be addressed.
An arrangement that provides a real security guarantee, treats Iran as a party with a legitimate interest in deterrence rather than as a problem to be managed, and does not require Tehran to accept the kind of low status that its history makes structurally impossible—such an arrangement has a chance to hold. One that requires Iran to accept conditions it has rejected in every century of its modern history will not, regardless of which government is in power, because no Iranian government can deliver what its strategic logic forbids.
Washington’s current difficulty is not that it has no mediator in Tehran. It’s just that it’s still asking the wrong question.
