Christopher de Bellaigue
Foreign Affairs, Feb. 25, 2025
“In Khamenei’s view, what matters is the long term.”
Since October 7, 2023, the long arm of Iran has seemingly been everywhere in the crises that have beset the Middle East. With its eye on Hezbollah, Iran’s heavily armed Shiite ally in Lebanon, Israel was wholly unprepared for the devastating ground assault launched from Gaza by Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that was also backed by the Islamic Republic. Nor had the West anticipated that the Houthis in Yemen, a supposedly ragtag militia that had received a large arsenal of missiles from Tehran, would be capable of bringing global shipping in the Red Sea to a near standstill.
The conflicts unleashed by these regional allies have not been particularly kind to the Iranian leadership. Among Iran’s serial humiliations have been the July assassination, in a Tehran government guesthouse, of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader—a stark demonstration of the extent to which Israeli intelligence had penetrated the Iranian security forces—as well as the damage done to Hezbollah and the elimination of most of its senior ranks, including its formidable leader Hassan Nasrallah. In addition, Israel has carried out the largest airstrikes it has ever launched against Iran, reportedly weakening the country’s air defenses, and the Islamic Republic has witnessed the rapid fall of its longtime close partner, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
In Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History, Vali Nasr sets out to make sense of the international statecraft that, over many decades, has led Iran to its current precarious position. A veteran scholar of Iran and the Middle East, Nasr argues that the regime’s strategic vision is informed less by a revolutionary intent to spread Islamist ideology than by a concept of national security rooted in regional rivalries, Iran’s historical experience, and familiar anti-imperial and anticolonial currents of the late twentieth century. “Islam remains the language of Iran’s politics,” Nasr writes, describing the state’s religious underpinnings as a way for Iran to “realize political and economic interests at home and define national interests abroad.” But, he adds, “those aims are now secular in nature.”…SOURCE