The World Keeps Asking Iran the Wrong Question

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 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.

Key points

• 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 cha…
• The Safavids, the Qajars, the Pahlavis, and the Islamic Republic have each operated from the same geographical and historical inheritance.