Understanding Iran’s Crisis Through Vali Nasr’s Iran’s Grand Strategy

The book’s central argument is that Iran’s post-revolutionary establishment has never been guided by ideology alone. Rather, it has been driven by a determination to stand on its own feet — reorganising state and society to resist the West-led international order, even at the cost of deepening isolation. Nasr makes clear that the Mullah regime has long viewed the US as the singular threat to Iran’s national security. Everything it has done — from its nuclear gambit to its “forward defence” strategy of arming proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah to extend its defensive perimeter across the Arab world — should be understood as expressions of a coherent grand strategy aimed at defying American power.

It is this theme — casting Tehran and Washington as the primary antagonists — that makes the book such a riveting read, especially when punctuated by the latest news alert announcing that Trump has urged Iranians to “keep protesting” because “help is on its way”. Among the many causes of the 1979 revolution was the Shah’s close alignment with the US, as Nasr and others have long argued, tracing the rupture back to the British-American coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Nasr extends this argument further. He contends that “independence” is deeply woven into the revolutionary state’s worldview and strategic thinking, and that the revolution ultimately realised what Mosaddegh — despite his pro-democracy credentials — had fought for. This inherent antagonism towards the West has only intensified over time and, Nasr argues, has come to define Iran’s strategic culture.

Nasr assigns particular importance to two formative episodes in the immediate aftermath of the revolution: the 1979-81 hostage crisis and the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War. On the former, he says that the 444-day standoff assumed outsized significance for the revolutionary project. Not only did the fledgling Islamic Republic survive the confrontation but it also concluded that its survival owed much to a fusion of Islamic ideology and popular resolve to confront the US (and, incidentally, to marginalise the Left, though it is not the book’s concern). From this moment on, denying Washington a strategic foothold in the region became the Islamic Republic’s defining objective. Turning to the Iran–Iraq War, Nasr presents it as a defining period that fundamentally reshaped Iran’s understanding of national security. Once again, religion and security were fused: by likening the conflict to the Battle of Karbala, Iran placed faith in the service of a national purpose — namely, the preservation of a secure and sovereign Iran. Nasr closes Part I (‘The Crucible of Revolution and War’) with an important formulation: the revolution gave birth to the Islamic Republic, the hostage crisis defined its posture towards America but it was the Iran-Iraq War that ultimately “shaped the state the revolution wrought”.

Part II (‘Khamenei and the Grand Strategy of Resistance’) examines Ali Khamenei’s approach following his succession to Ruhollah Khomeini: preserving the revolution at home, consolidating regional power for a Shia state encircled by Sunni rivals and Israel, and, finally, elevating the nuclear programme to centre stage within Iran’s strategy of resistance. A crucial point emphasised is the mounting cost. He notes that “a sustainable strategy requires popular support, especially if it demands great sacrifice from the people”. The West’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, after all, devastated the middle class and pushed businesses into greater dependence on the revolutionary state. The problem was that Iran’s decision to sign the nuclear deal, intended to relieve the crushing burden of sanctions, contradicted four decades of accumulated distrust towards the US. Yet, Nasr argues, it revealed a measure of pragmatism within the establishment to preserve the Islamic Republic.

Just three years after the agreement was concluded, Trump withdrew from the deal and the sanctions returned, posing renewed threats to both the economy and national security. Nasr insists that the economic impact of sanctions cannot be overstated. Counterintuitively, however, he also argues that the older generation largely held back from the 2022 protests following Mahsa Amini’s killing precisely because sanctions had deepened their reliance on the state, discouraging them from “rocking the boat”. It is therefore fitting that this chapter is titled ‘The Price of Resistance’. Against this backdrop, the 2026 protests mark a departure from the past, not only in scale but in composition, with members of the older generation joining the unrest.

Nasr’s book serves as a valuable guide to understanding how the revolutionary regime has behaved since its inception, and how it may respond now to intensifying protests and the spectre of a Trump intervention. Iran today is the product of a national security doctrine built around resistance. If security and defiance of American power form the bedrock of the regime’s existence, how should we expect it to react to Trump now? Nasr offers a clue in the book’s closing pages. Drawing on American historian John Lewis Gaddis, he argues that Iran could “either act as a fox which knows many things or a hedgehog which knows one big thing” — that is, adaptability or commitment to a single grand idea. Nasr characterises Khamenei as a hedgehog. The question, then, is whether he and his regime can acquire the fox’s malleability to survive whatever lies ahead.