Understanding Iran’s Strategy—Then, Now, and Next
The more the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign attempts to change the Iranian regime, the more it looks like it will stay the same. Though strikes have killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many of the senior security officials in the country, including Ali Larijani, who was tasked before the war with shepherding the country through the anticipated crisis, the government of Iran remains intact. The selection of Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as the new supreme leader demonstrates this continuity. President Trump has gone from telling Iranians to “take over your government” to quietly “testing” negotiations with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—the speaker of the parliament and a moderate, but hardly an anti-establishment figure.
When this war ends, the regime established in the 1979 Islamic Revolution is likely to remain. So it is more important than ever to attempt to understand its motivations and strategy. Vali Nasr’s “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History” is a useful guide.
Nasr’s book was both perfectly and inconveniently timed. The foreword was written in August 2024, and in the nine months between its completion and publication, Iran’s strategic position shifted significantly. Israeli attacks in September and October killed the leader and decimated the rank and file of Iran’s most powerful regional partner, Hezbollah; then, in December, Iran lost its only Arab state ally when Syrian rebels blitzed to Damascus and seized control. The targeting of Hezbollah gets brief mentions in the book, but these intervening events make some discussions of Iran’s network of allies outdated—for instance, that Khamenei sees the Oct. 7 attack and its aftermath as empowering them as “regional power brokers.” The book appeared on May 27, 2025, only for Iran’s situation to change again two weeks later, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes targeted Iran’s nuclear program and set off waves of Iranian retaliatory missile attacks. These would change the status of Iran’s nuclear program, the subject of Nasr’s penultimate chapter, from an important feature of its regional strategy to a reconstruction project.
While Nasr’s descriptions of the contemporary balance of forces show Iran in a stronger position than it is today, it also anticipates what is coming. He explains that Iran perceives its rivalry with Israel not only through its support for Palestinians’ national aspirations but increasingly as an issue of the regional balance of power, with Israel being the largest impediment to Iran’s rise as a regional power. And Israel, having made peace with much of the Arab world (de jure with Egypt, Jordan, and the Abraham Accords states, and de facto with most other states that share its antipathy to Iran), “has now set its sights on Iran” in a “competition for regional supremacy.” The stakes are ratcheting upward, he writes, climbing “an escalatory ladder that points to a dangerous denouement.” In the 10 months since the book’s release, that competition has resulted in two direct wars between Israel and Iran.
The strength of Nasr’s book lies not in its description of the specifics of the current conflict, but in its analysis of how Iran, Israel, and the United States got here. Nasr traces Iran’s history over the course of a century, and how shifts in the country’s security environment have influenced its policies. As with almost all grand strategies, Iranian leaders from Shah Reza Pahlavi to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have prioritized survival. Pahlavi saw the greatest threat to Iran emanating from the Soviet Union, which occupied much of the country after World War II; to balance against the Soviets, he bound himself to the United States. The theocratic regime that came to power in 1979, forged by the shah’s reliance on the United States to prop up his rule and repress opponents, perceived a greater threat from the West. “Whereas the Shah’s grand strategy was to protect Iran from Communism and the Soviet Union, for the revolutionaries that succeeded him, taking their cue from Mossadegh, a grand strategy had to protect Iran from the West and its interference in Iran’s politics,” Nasr writes. This conceptualization of the United States as a threat to the survival of the regime has been foundational to Iran’s grand strategy since.
The Iran-Iraq War reinforced this understanding of Iran’s security environment and has been the formative experience for Iran’s senior leadership for the past four decades. The Iraqi invasion in 1980 demonstrated to Iran’s leadership the severity of its isolation. It was surrounded by adversaries; Iraq led the charge, but Saddam would come to be bankrolled by the Arab Gulf states and at times supplied by Iran’s bête noire, the United States, which would also intervene directly against Iran’s navy in what Iranian leaders viewed as an “undeclared war.”
Iran’s response to this threat was the development of its doctrine of “Sacred Defense,” a strategy that rooted security in the country’s ideological fervor and commitment to “resistance”—to conflict with the United States and Israel, which Iran has long perceived as a U.S. proxy. Iran’s leaders still invoke these concepts today; in one of the bizarre, AI-generated propaganda videos that Iran’s state media has released since the start of the current round of fighting, a voice raps, “Sacred defense, we protecting the soil / while you sacrifice soldiers to pay for your spoil” as LEGO missiles launch into the night sky.
Putting Sacred Defense into practice, Iran’s leadership developed economic institutions to try to insulate the country from foreign coercion. They would continue to elaborate these policies as the United States and others levied sanctions on the country. More significantly, the Iranian government developed a security system that emphasized revolutionary ideology and asymmetric combat.
At the core of that system is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Nasr traces how Iran’s reliance on the IRGC’s irregular forces in the Iran-Iraq War, and the 1980s Lebanese Civil War, empowered the group to develop Iran’s defenses. As the United States continued to isolate Iran, and then deployed troops to both its east in 2001 (in Afghanistan) and west in 2003 (in Iraq), the IRGC extended Sacred Defense to encompass “Forward Defense.” The IRGC’s expeditionary Quds Force, under the leadership of Qassem Soleimani, doubled down in support of partners that Khamenei would call the “Axis of Resistance”—Hezbollah, Hamas, the Badr Brigade in Iraq and later the Popular Mobilization Forces, as well as pro-regime Shiite militias in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen.
These forces extended Iran’s defense perimeter and were intended both to deter U.S. and Israeli action and to extract diplomatic concessions from the United States and other states negotiating Iran’s nuclear program and broader foreign policy. But as is apparent now, they also fueled principal-agent problems and a nasty security dilemma between Israel and Iran. While Iran may have seen Forward Defense as a means of checking U.S. and Israeli attacks, extending its strategic depth to Lebanon and Gaza only reinforced Israel’s perception of threat. This threat was realized on Oct. 7, 2023—even without Iran’s explicit support. With the IRGC having armed and trained militants in Gaza, Hamas could launch a war that it hoped would draw in Hezbollah and Tehran, which were more reluctant to attack.
Nasr, citing a Foreign Affairs article about how quickly the war in Gaza spilled over to other fronts, from Lebanon to Yemen, writes that “Tehran saw Hamas’ attack and the subsequent war on Gaza as a strategic victory for Iran. The war resurrected the Palestinian issue, set aside sectarian divisions along with memories of Iran and Hezbollah’s support for Assad, focused regional attention once again on the Levant, and upended efforts to normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.” But the war in Gaza does not seem to have been a war of Iran’s choosing, and this positive assessment is probably less accepted in Tehran today.
Nasr explains the IRGC’s rationale behind its Forward Defense strategy, but perhaps even more interesting is the political history that has entrenched the IRGC role in the Iranian government and society. Grand strategy is holistic, and Nasr charts both the development of Iran’s military strategy and its oscillating diplomatic strategy. He describes how Khamenei begrudgingly allowed moderate presidents, notably Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami in the 1990s and Hassan Rouhani in the 2010s, to explore pragmatic cooperation with the United States. Each of these openings ended in dramatic rebuffs. Within months of the United States and Iran coordinating with one another during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, President George W. Bush was naming Iran a member of the “Axis of Evil.” And Rouhani’s diplomatic engagement resulted in the 2015 nuclear agreement, only for the Trump administration to withdraw and apply “Maximum Pressure” in 2018. Nasr writes that each time, Khamenei was left feeling vindicated in his distrust toward Washington and more bound to the IRGC to defend the country and the Basij to maintain his power domestically.
The leadership’s increasing dependence on the IRGC has extended the IRGC’s reach beyond security and politics, and into the economic sphere. In the 1990s, Nasr writes, the IRGC took on construction, telecommunications, and energy contracts, taking over private companies to front the work. The IRGC’s takeover of economic sectors has accelerated since the United States initiated its Maximum Pressure economic sanctions campaign. The development of a “resistance economy” created opportunities for the IRGC to further expand its control over the private sector, while also expanding its influence in the country’s political scene. Iran’s new supreme leader exemplifies this melding of the IRGC and the clerical establishment, having fought in the IRGC’s bloody battle to retake Khorramshahr in the Iran-Iraq War before attending seminary. “The close ties between the IRGC and hard-line clerics—embodied in Mojtaba Khamenei’s background and current role [at the time, principal adviser to his father]—has ensured that the security mindset and mantra of sacred defense remain at the core of the Iranian state,” Nasr writes. The IRGC and its doctrine have become inseparable from the regime. By the time of the book’s publication, Nasr concludes, “the IRGC has grown into much more than the Praetorian Guard of the clerical leadership. Now it has become the state itself.”
This context should have been considered by U.S. policymakers before they began shooting first and looking for potentially pliant successors later. As U.S. intelligence agencies concluded before the war, Iran’s regime rests on strong, durable institutions populated by ideologues who have risen to the upper echelons of the regime in large part through their commitment to Sacred Defense, including experience in the IRGC’s wars and concurrence with Khamenei’s skepticism of diplomacy with the United States. The story Nasr tells shows how the government came to be dominated by hawks who would be empowered by the current crisis.
Now that the war is occurring, this history should inform how U.S. officials read the regime’s signals. It’s possible that the U.S. negotiating team meeting with Iranian diplomats were too dilettantish to understand the deal Iran was offering; it also seems possible that the Trump administration was set on war even as it went through the motions of diplomacy. But going forward U.S. officials should understand why, regardless of whether it was negotiating in good faith or bad, the Iranian leadership sees the Trump administration’s outreach as just the latest feint by Washington. The new war has only reinforced Tehran’s lack of faith in negotiations and the hardliners’ position in the government.
There may be room for some modest change. Nasr notes that Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker with whom the administration has been communicating, has advocated for some reforms after the domestic protests in 2022; but so did Ali Larijani and Ali Shamkhani, both leading defense officials who have been killed in the past three weeks. Their support for domestic reforms to relieve pressure on the regime was not in tension with their commitment to Sacred Defense. Nasr’s book explains how commitment to Sacred Defense has come to be foundational to the regime, and why the United States and Israel cannot just kill their way to a change in Iran’s grand strategy.
