Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History, by Vali Nasr. Princeton University Press, 408 pages.
Imagine a nation whose national security doctrine demands that it take on an ever-expanding sphere of interests and obligations to needy clients. The pursuit of this doctrine, which is conditioned by ideological commitments to lead and expand a particular bloc, has engendered a variety of internal economic and political distortions; the leadership that is invested in the doctrine and its ideological impedimenta is aging, largely corrupt, and often unpopular. Diplomatic rigidity and artlessness make the nation unpopular abroad, forcing it to rely more on hard power than it would have to otherwise, aggravating the underlying dysfunctions. While the nation is notionally a democratic republic, broad disaffection with national politics results in low electoral turnout and constant low-level unrest that occasionally breaks out into larger-scale protests and rioting. Entrenched interests and power centers, largely unelected, tend to thwart political efforts at reform.
The nation described, of course, is the Islamic Republic of Iran—although one might be forgiven for seeing something else in all that. There is a Spy vs. Spy mirroring between the United States and Iran, which seems to have something to do with their chronic inability to come up with a mutually tolerable arrangement even when they explicitly want the same high-level goals (say, for example, less American involvement in the Middle East). This is one of the most striking elements in Vali Nasr’s latest book, Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History. Commentators of what one might call the pop-realist strain tend to elide how particular internal conditions do in fact influence the behavior of states, treating any given nation as something that can arrange itself in any given way; Nasr provides a corrective, showing in a particular case how policy often emerges from politics, a fact that introduces a quiet strain of tragedy to history and the affairs of state.
Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has written an admirable primer without hysteria that would make salutary reading for both countries’ leadership, if any politicians in 2025 read books. The United States and Iran’s mutual comprehension is perhaps foremost the result of the historical episodes each nation associates with the other, and the assumptions made about the other’s historical awareness. Most Americans simply do not think much about Iran, or any other nation, for that matter; this is the privilege of being a superpower geographically insulated from the rest of the world. But to the degree Americans do think of Iran, they have generally thought of Iran through the lens of the hostage crisis. By contrast, Iranians have a long list of grievances against the United States—some debatable, some much less so—and, in this writer’s own experience, tend to think of the hostage crisis as a transitory episode that, while perhaps regrettable, is hardly the defining moment of the relationship. For them, far more significant are the overthrow of Mossadegh and the Iran–Iraq War, which, as Nasr shows, was the true blast-furnace in which the Islamic Republic was forged; for most Americans, these events may as well have happened on distant planets.
Nasr very briefly recounts Iran’s years of vulnerability and humiliation in the early decades of the 20th century and at somewhat greater length the rise and ouster of the liberalizing nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, but his tale begins in earnest with the 1979 revolution. America’s role in Iran has been complicated and hapless ever since the U.S. has felt the need to fill, however imperfectly, the role of the British Empire in the Middle East. In some ways, the Americans have never been worse at the game than during the revolution, consistently misconstruing facts on the ground and being embarrassed by predictable, avoidable events. (It is forgotten that the hostage crisis everyone remembers was preceded by an earlier hostage-taking episode, perpetrated not by the followers of the sinister Ruhollah Khomeini but by the equally sinister left-wing cadres that were competing with him for power.) Nasr’s account is thorough, but also clear and brisk, no mean feat for such a complicated and changeable period.
Khomeini’s consolidation of power is only the first ingredient in the development of Iranian strategy; the second came swiftly. The Iran–Iraq War, which dragged on for nearly a decade and left nearly a half-million dead, would have been remembered as one of the cataclysms of the 20th century had it happened in Europe. Saddam Hussein saw Iran’s turmoil, particularly its gutted military, and decided to settle some territorial disputes by force of arms in the autumn of 1980. What he expected to be a swift and limited operation became a debacle. The desperate Iranians cobbled together street militias for guerilla warfare, relying on human wave formations to stop Iraqi advances and clear minefields. The embryonic Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps not only successfully pushed the Iraqis out of Iranian territory, but began to make gains on the other side of the Shatt al-Arab river. Khomeini decided to press his advantage, calling on the Iranians to fight all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam. Years of inconclusive slaughter followed.
The American involvement in the Iran–Iraq War is not creditable. While the U.S. had sanctioned Saddam’s regime for a variety of unpleasant behaviors, it saw the war as a convenient weapon against the region’s new anti-American standard-bearer. The U.S. not only quietly facilitated Saddam’s development of chemical weapons, but gave the Iraqi military the satellite data necessary to target them; on the other side, it supplied the Iranians with materials for maintaining its military assets and funneled the profits to right-wing guerillas in Nicaragua. (As it turned out, this scheme was illegal, and the Iran–Contra affair went down as the Reagan administration’s big goof.) There may be reasons beyond mere prejudice that the U.S. is disliked and distrusted in the Middle East.
The peculiarities of Iran’s position in the struggle against Saddam—that is to say, largely without a professional military—had profound long-term effects on the Islamic Republic’s defense policy and domestic politics. First, it encouraged a lasting preference for unconventional warfare: first aligned guerilla militias, and later ballistic missiles, drones, and (by threat at least) nuclear weapons. Second, it gave the IRGC a commanding place in the Iranian establishment that far exceeds the narrow bounds of defense policy. (Large sectors of Iran’s civilian economy are controlled more or less directly by the Corps.) Nasr shows how these structural and material conditions have shaped and in turn been shaped by Iranian national strategy—and, consequently, how difficult it is for the Islamic Republic to change policies, even when attempting to accommodate or come to an understanding with Western interlocutors. In 2026, asking Iran to stop arming “proxies” or to limit its missile arsenal is comparable to asking the U.S. to give up its Triton submarine program—an almost unimaginable transformation of its way of handling defense for decades. The final chapters deal with the unhappy travails of reformism within Iran and the surprising, almost accidental emergence of the nuclear file as the focal point of U.S.–Iran relations, ending, of course, with President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the prospects for a deal to replace it.
The book shows the signs of having been rushed to press; hasty copyediting has left the text marred by typographic errors and strange sentence fragments. This conjectured push to get it out is understandable—Iran’s Grand Strategy was published in late May of last year, in the furious late stages of American diplomacy with the Islamic Republic to complete a replacement for the JCPOA. Unfortunately, books don’t change history. Three weeks after the publication of Iran’s Grand Strategy, diplomacy ended and the so-called Twelve Day War began.
At time of this review’s writing, the Persian Gulf region is teeming with American military assets, including the Abraham Lincoln carrier group. Trump is again threatening to take some sort of undefined but violent action against Iran unless they cut some sort of deal—the details are, as always, somewhat fluid. Other Middle Eastern states seem pretty freaked out about the prospect of a war; the Turks, Qataris, and Saudis have been scuttling around, racking up the airline rewards miles. There will be (we are told) a new round of talks between the Americans and the Iranians hosted in Istanbul. Yet there is a sense of the inevitable, that the naked nerve will be touched, the clenched fist will fall. Tragedy does not arise from chance, but from the nature of the agonists themselves. In some way, it seems, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran are too similar not to fight.
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