Understanding Iran

At once rational and theocratic, the Islamic Republic is an enigma.

A 16th century illustration of the Shahnameh, an epic poem. The depiction of humans, forbidden in Islam, demonstrates a relaxed approach to religion.

If geopolitics had a hot/crazy scale it would rank countries by their global importance and their difficulty for outsiders to understand. China would obviously achieve the highest combined score, but there’s no standout candidate for second place. I’d like to make the case for Iran.

Politically if not economically, Iran is the most important country in the Middle East. Its religious and military patronage networks were a major reason for America failing to pacify Iraq after 2003, for Bashar al-Assad’s monstrous rule over Syria lasting as long as it did, for Lebanon’s state failure, and for the Arab world’s refusal to recognise Israel and put an end to Palestinian suffering.

Just as important is what Iran could have been, and what it largely was until the 1979 Islamic Revolution: a relatively prosperous, secular society with deep historical traditions and a highly developed state, and an ethnically and religiously diverse population with a tremendous cultural output.

Not, in other words, the sort of benighted backwater in which radical Islamism typically takes hold.

This contrast is precisely what makes Iran so difficult to understand. To its sympathisers, including fringe political figures in the West who appear on its state media channels, the Islamic Republic is a courageous holdout against American neo-imperialism, and the sharia law an awkward detail. To its detractors, including much of the Western political establishment, its rulers are religious extremists incapable of acting rationally.

Both views are too simple. After several years of studying Iranian language and history, and a year spent reporting on the country during the 2015 nuclear talks, the best description I can manage is that the Iranian establishment (or ‘regime’, to use the term reserved for the West’s enemies) is a rational actor bounded by an irrational ideology.

The failure to understand Iran has led to Western foreign policy blunders from the 1950s to the present day. Now the Islamic regime is the weakest it has been in years following a blunder of its own: neglecting to keep a leash on Hamas, whose attack on Israel in October 2023 dragged Iran and its other proxies into a fight they couldn’t win.

This gives Western powers a chance to force the mullahs to the negotiating table or else risk being overthrown – but only if they know how to pitch their approach.

An empire undone

Understanding Iran requires an appreciation of its history, which shows a sophisticated society with a positive influence on the world all the way back to the 6^th century BC. Around that time the Cyrus Cylinder, now housed in the British Museum, set out principles for how to govern religious and ethnic minorities within the Persian empire – the first evidence from anywhere in the world of rulers thinking actively about cosmopolitanism.

Some 1,200 hundred years later the Persian empire, exhausted from fighting the Byzantines, was conquered by Arab armies bearing the new banner of Islam. But like the Greeks in Rome, Persians worked their way into the Islamic court and helped transform it from a warband into a civilisation. The flourishing of arts and sciences and the relaxation of Islamic law that made Baghdad the centre of the world can be attributed at least in part to Persian influence.

The Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258 and Iran would never again play a major role in a world-leading empire. Subsequent dynasties came under pressure from the Ottoman, Russian and British empires and fell behind technologically. The ‘great game’, a fight for influence between Russian and British agents across Central Asia in the 19^th century, confirmed Iran’s foreign domination and gave its society an anti-imperialistic reflex that persists to this day.

This tendency can be observed in Dear Uncle Napoleon. Set during the Allied occupation of Iran in the Second World War, the 1973 novel’s titular character is still fighting the previous generation’s battle against the British, whom he suspects of orchestrating his every misfortune. A comically tragic figure, he demonstrates that Iranian hostility towards Western powers dates to well before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

By the end of the war the Shah was weak and increasingly unpopular. In 1952 he was forced to appoint Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist reformer who notably wanted to nationalise Iran’s oil industry. This arguably put Iran on a path towards becoming an independent, secular, constitutional monarchy with what was then the world’s largest proven oil reserve.

Now the Western powers made their greatest blunder. In 1953 British and American spies fomented a coup against Mossadegh, restoring the Shah to absolute power and their companies to unfettered access to Iranian oil. In the short term they profited, but proud Iranians would not be so easily dominated. Another revolution was inevitable and came in 1979 – but this time, with the secular opposition shattered, it would be Islamists who carried the banner.

Neither fish nor fowl

Iran then, like China following the Opium Wars, is a country with an acute sense of its own history and a traumatic experience of domination by Western powers. This is a large part of how the Islamic regime maintains enough public support to survive (alongside a heavy dose of repression), despite its ideological misalignment with Iran’s largely secular population.

State power in Iran is shared among a bewildering array of institutions, some Islamic and some secular. The government is on the surface a presidential democracy, but operates within tight restrictions set by a superior religious power. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime’s praetorian guard, operates independently both of the army and of clerical authorities; it derives revenue – and political power – from sprawling commercial interests from heavy industry to smuggling.

Clearly the Islamic Republic is not a full democracy. But neither is it a full theocracy in the mould of the Taliban, nor a monarchy like the one it overthrew, nor a dictatorship like that of Saddam Hussein – a hated figure after invading Iran in 1980 with the backing of Western powers. It is entirely sui generis, and as such there is no established playbook for how to engage with it.

Iran’s diplomatic corps is an impressive secular institution, bolstering the regime’s support among moderate Iranians and foreigners alike. Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif, whom I met when he was foreign minister during the nuclear talks, invoked international law frequently and Islamic law never – a habit taken up by his successor Abbas Araghchi.

State media is similarly professional, upholding a generally high level of journalistic standards and accuracy. Of course it operates according to radically different assumptions about the world than Western media, but it’s easy to see how people who reject Western hegemony can be convinced by its narratives.

After months of reading Iranian media (as I did when covering the country), one begins to understand the worldview beyond the clerical caricature. Iran does not take political prisoners, the narrative goes: It has a justified fear of American-led regime change and is arresting suspected spies. By contrast, when a Western country arrests an Iranian on the orders of the US for sanctions violations – in other words, trading with his home country – that is a politically motivated hostage-taking.

If an Iraqi militia leader visits Tehran for talks with officials, that’s normal diplomacy between neighbours. But if Americans or Brits deploy special forces to Iraq, that is a distant imperial power ‘meddling’ in an attempt to ‘destabilise’ the region. Even disagreeing with this view, you start to think about the language used by our own media and the implicit biases it reveals.

This is the difficulty of dealing with the Islamic Republic. If you accuse it of being a rogue state, its secular authorities are sophisticated enough to point out your hypocrisy. But if you treat it like a normal midsized power there’s a risk that God will tell the mullahs to do something stupid, like lobbing rockets at Israel – or perhaps nukes, if they had them.

That means Western powers will continue to struggle to engage constructively with Iran. It would be a shame, for the Iranian people most of all, if this historic moment of weakness for the Islamic Republic were to pass without a diplomatic breakthrough.