The question that has organized most serious analysis of Iran for the past half-century is: What does the Islamic Republic want? It is a reasonable question, but not the right one. The Islamic Republic is 47 years old. Iran, as a modern coherent political entity, is five centuries old. Conflating the two 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 more useful question is what Iran wants; not this government, not this supreme leader, but the state whose strategic instincts were shaped long before the revolution and have survived every change of system since. The Safavids, the Qajars, the Pahlavis, and the Islamic Republic have each operated from the same geographical and historical inheritance. The governments changed. The logic did not.
The question that has organized most serious analysis of Iran for the past half-century is: What does the Islamic Republic want? It is a reasonable question, but not the right one. The Islamic Republic is 47 years old. Iran, as a modern coherent political entity, is five centuries old. Conflating the two 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 more useful question is what Iran wants; not this government, not this supreme leader, but the state whose strategic instincts were shaped long before the revolution and have survived every change of system since. The Safavids, the Qajars, the Pahlavis, and the Islamic Republic have each operated from the same geographical and historical inheritance. The governments changed. The logic did not.
The Iranian plateau is ringed by the Zagros Mountains to the west and the Alborz to the north, bisected by some of the world’s most inhospitable desert, and positioned at the junction of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Every major land empire has had to engage with it. Every naval power with Indian Ocean ambitions has had to reckon with the strait at its southern end.
That geography produced a consistent lesson across dynasties: You cannot secure the interior by defending the interior. Rulers who confined their strategy to the plateau eventually lost pieces of it. Those who projected outward, who turned the plateau from a target into a hub, persevered the most.
Hormuz is where this logic becomes most legible in the present. Roughly a fifth of global oil supplies pass through that strait. When Iran moved to restrict passage at the outset of the 2026 war, energy markets reacted before a single tanker was stopped. A country without nuclear weapons and without a conventional military capable of matching the United States can still move global markets because of where it sits. That is a geographical inheritance. It does not collapse with a change of government.
Three convictions run through Iranian strategic behavior regardless of who holds power.
The first is that weakness invites intervention. The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 stripped Iran of its Caucasian territories. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 divided the country into spheres of influence without consulting Iranian officials. Every government since has read those events as a structural warning: A state that cannot project deterrence will find its sovereignty administered from the outside. The nuclear program, the regional network, and the missile arsenal are, at one level, each a response to that warning.
The second conviction is that sovereignty is not negotiable. The tobacco revolt in the early 1890s, the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951—these were not isolated episodes. They were the same reflex across different eras. A 1976 U.S. diplomatic cable, Ambassador to Iran Richard Helms briefing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, captured it precisely: The nuclear tension exists because of “Iran’s unwillingness to concede any outside interference which may derogate from its sovereignty.” The sentence belonged equally in every dispatch from the nuclear negotiations of 2015, 2021, and 2026.
The third conviction, and the one most consistently underweighted: Iran does not think of itself as a regional power. The 1979 revolution is usually framed in regional terms—the empowerment of Shiite political movements, the reorganization of Gulf security, the emergence of political Islam as a governing force.
But the first-order effect was global. In a single year, Iran moved from being one of Washington’s most important strategic partners to a state pursuing a third path between the superpowers. The hostage crisis changed U.S. domestic politics for a generation. The Iran-Iraq War drew in the intelligence services and arms industries of both superpowers and most of Europe. Iranian Shahed drones ended up in a European war. The 2026 conflict moved global energy markets, disrupted shipping insurance across multiple oceanic routes, and forced recalculations in every economy that depends on Gulf oil—which is most of them. Former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said he would export the revolution to the four corners of the world. He meant it.
Two remarks, separated by half a century, make the continuity plain. The first came from Col. Mojtaba Pashaie, head of the Iranian secret police’s Middle East directorate, in the 1960s, explaining why the shah was backing parties in Lebanon: “We should combat and contain the threat [of Nasserism] in the east coast of the Mediterranean to prevent shedding blood on Iranian soil.” The second came from former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in January 2016, speaking to families of soldiers killed in Syria and Iraq: “If they had not gone to fight the enemy there, the enemy would have come inside the country. We would have had to fight them in Kermanshah and Hamedan.” The logic is identical. The governments were not.
The shah’s Western orientation looked, from the outside, like a departure from this pattern. It was not. He pursued nuclear capability through the same logic as the Islamic Republic. He sought the Israeli military partnership. When Washington pushed for nuclear safeguards implying external oversight, he resisted—not out of ideology, but because accepting such oversight would have confirmed a subordinate status that no Iranian ruler across any century has been able to accept.
The same pattern is visible now. In the Pakistan talks, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei made 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, the missiles, the regional network. Iran expanded the frame. When military pressure reached a threshold, Tehran closed Hormuz, converting the confrontation into a global economic crisis. Every time Washington sets the rules of the game, Tehran changes the playing field.
Comprehensive sanctions, targeted sanctions, assassination campaigns, cyberwarfare, proxy support, direct military action—all of these have been tried. None produced the strategic transformation they promised. With a consistency that should itself be treated as data, they produced acceleration: faster nuclear development, a deeper regional network, a more consolidated political system.
The 2002 “axis of evil” speech is the cleanest case study. In the months after Sept. 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 absorbed real domestic political risk in doing so. Iranian officials believed they had extended a hand and that reciprocity was possible. My own research on this period at Royal Holloway produced consistent accounts describing former U.S. President George W. Bush’s speech in terms similar to former British foreign secretary Jack Straw’s formulation: “a kick in the teeth for the risks they had taken.” Former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif later described how a “policy of cooperation” became a “policy of confrontation” within days.
What followed was structurally predictable. Khamenei’s conviction that Washington’s objective was regime change, not coexistence, was not challenged by the episode. It was confirmed. The nuclear program accelerated. The regional network deepened. The deterrence architecture expanded. Not because hard-liners manipulated the moment, but because the underlying logic reasserted itself the instant the offer went unanswered.
The behavior being pressured is not primarily ideological. It is strategic. Demanding that Iran dismantle its deterrence architecture is not asking the Islamic Republic to moderate—it is asking Iran to accept the condition that five centuries of experience identifies as the condition from which catastrophe comes. No Iranian government can deliver that, because delivering it would confirm the foundational lesson: Weakness invites intervention. The pressure intended to produce concession instead produces the behavior it was designed to stop.
Kissinger spent years managing Vietnam before concluding that the North Vietnamese were fighting for something entirely different from what he assumed: time, endurance, and the gradual erosion of U.S. political will. Tehran is operating on the same logic. Iran is not trying to win this round. It is trying to remain viable when the United States needs an exit. Kissinger’s error 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 bind: It cannot end the war on terms it can defend domestically, and it cannot exit without a framework that Tehran is currently refusing to provide. The longer the confrontation drags on, the more the pain spreads beyond Iran, oil markets, shipping, supply chains, and economies that depend on Gulf stability. Hormuz does not hurt only Iran.
The nuclear proliferation risk is real. The regional network has produced real violence. An analytical correction does not dissolve those concerns. What it changes are the conditions under which they can be addressed.
An arrangement that provides genuine security guarantees, treats Iran as a party with legitimate deterrence interests rather than as a problem to be managed, and does not require Tehran to accept the kind of subordinate status its history makes structurally impossible—such an arrangement has a chance of holding. One that requires Iran to accept terms it has refused in every century of its modern history will not, regardless of which government is in power, because no Iranian government can deliver what its own strategic logic prohibits.
Washington’s current difficulty is not that it lacks an interlocutor in Tehran. It is that it is still asking the wrong question.
