CHATHAM HOUSE - Research Paper - Competing visions of international order 04 Resistance: the mantra behind Iran’s worldview Professor Vali Nasr Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

 

CHATHAM  HOUSE - Research Paper - Competing visions of international order

04 Resistance: the mantra behind Iran’s worldview

Professor Vali Nasr

Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

After decades of both defying and attempting to coexist with the West, Iran’s rulers detect structural shifts in the liberal international order which they believe will reward their anti-US strategic outlook.

Iran is today a revisionist power that sees the liberal international order as inimical to its national interest. Iran proclaims its desire to revise that order, and in practice bypasses it where possible. This makes for an uneasy coexistence with the liberal international order, wherein Iran seeks advantage within that order opportunistically, but challenges it and looks to circumvent it. There is revolutionary ideology behind Iran’s attitude, but the country’s experiences with the liberal international order since the revolution in 1979 have reinforced its suspicions of the world order.

Iran’s foreign policy posture and its outlook on state, society and the economy reflect not only its ideological predispositions, but also how it views experiences such as the 1979 revolution, the 1980s war with Iraq and the collapse of the nuclear deal in 2018. Another factor is the difficulty for Iran of balancing its fundamental antagonism towards the world order with the imperative of working within it and contending with the West.

Criticisms of Iran’s strategic outlook and conduct abound in both academia and public debates. There are obvious arguments against the assumptions of Iran’s foreign policy and questions regarding whether its goals are achievable. The aim in this essay is not to reiterate those criticisms or judge the wisdom of Iran’s foreign policy thinking and behaviour. Rather, the chapter will seek to capture the country’s strategic outlook, how it sees its national interest, and how it then seeks to balance strategic proclivities with pragmatic choices in dealing with the international order. That balance is shifting as the nature of the world order undergoes profound change.

Revisionism informed and boosted by global events

Iran’s posture is not irrational genuflection by an authoritarian theocracy to outside pressure. It instead reflects a national security doctrine that is anchored in a particular view of national interest, one that has roots in Iran’s history. Iran’s current foreign policy outlook can be most readily traced back to the revolution of 1979 and the Islamic Republic’s founding Islamic ideology.62 Equally important, Iran’s understanding of the world order and its effects on Iranian interests has been forged by the Islamic Republic’s experiences since 1979. The most salient of these experiences have been its eight-year war with Iraq;63 the US-led containment of Iran since 1979; 9/11 and the War on Terror; US invasions of Iran’s neighbours to its east and west, namely Afghanistan and Iraq; Iran’s experience of a nuclear deal with the West and the ever-tightening noose of sanctions around its economy64 – and going forward, the lessons inherent in the recent regional conflagration following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the West’s response to it, culminating ultimately in the decimation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and fall of the Assad regime in Syria. These experiences have enveloped one another to shape Iran’s conception of its national security, and of how to protect itself within the current world order. As Ayşe Zarakol has argued, anxiety cinches the psychology of states, and that will in turn shape their conceptions of insecurity and status, and their approach to the world.65

In this context, global developments that have challenged or changed the established international order have been of particular interest to Iran’s foreign policy elite. For a period, the world order that Iran confronted appeared stable. Yet, the past decade has witnessed an acceleration of fundamental changes to the world order with direct implications for Iran’s strategic outlook. Iran’s rulers have noted the palpable decline in the salience and coherence of the current world order – a theme that peppers the speeches of the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and of the political and military elite. They have noted an end to US unipolar dominance over the global order; the receding footprint of globalization as the dominant international economic framework; the alienation of China and Russia from the liberal international order; and the rise of the BRICS.66

Iran’s rulers see validation of their own long-held worldviews, and even despite setbacks in the region, they detect long-run advantage and opportunity in structural shifts in the world order. Khamenei has gone as far as to claim credit for Iran’s role in altering the balance of power in the world order. Since 2018 Iran has increased its economic and strategic tilt towards China and Russia, seeking strategic depth in the de facto emergence of a contiguous Eurasian ‘axis of resistance’ to the US.67 Russia is now committed to opening a north–south trade corridor running via Iran and on to the Arab monarchies on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf – which once were impermeable to relations with Iran.68

Iran’s rulers see validation of their own long-held worldviews, and even despite setbacks in the region, they detect long-run advantage and opportunity in structural shifts in the world order.

There is strategic convergence between Iran, China and Russia. Khamenei recently opined that both China and Russia tried to realize their national aims by embracing the US-led world order only to discover what Iran has maintained all along: that the liberal international order is not an even playing field for all; rather, that it is an instrument of US hegemony, and that the path of other challengers to great power status will be blocked by the US. Having seen Iran’s perspective and now finding themselves in the crosshairs of the US, those great powers are moving in Iran’s direction (as much as Iran is moving in theirs).

The crisis facing the liberal international order is therefore giving rise to a strategic space at the global level that is aligned with and boosts Iran’s revisionism. That space will only grow as US conflict with China and Russia becomes more embedded in US foreign policy; it will to an increasing extent also shape the dynamics of the global order. For the first time since the start of the Iranian nuclear crisis in 2003, at the meeting of the Board of Governors of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency in June 2024, China and Russia broke with the US and Europe to join Iran in rejecting a motion to censure Tehran, embracing the notion that the UN agency was serving as an instrument of American foreign policy.69 However, in practice the promise of this strategic space has not lived up to the expectations that Iran’s most ardent advocates of a ‘look east’ policy have of it. China and Russia have provided Iran with strategic depth, but neither has provided the much-needed military support nor an economic outlet that could effectively buoy up Iran’s economy. So Iranians debate the extent to which the country should continue to rely on China and Russia, but this has not obviated their abiding suspicion of the liberal international order.

How resistance defines the ruling elite view of world order

It is commonly assumed in the West that Iran’s defiance of the US and the West is ideological – reflecting the anti-Western tilt of Islamism – and is a facet of the Islamic Republic’s theocratic nature. Although this explanation has validity in that the language of the state is Islamic, and ideology accounted for the Islamic Republic’s virulent anti-Americanism early on, the value of this perspective has waned over the decades.70

The mantra of Iran’s foreign policy today is ‘resistance’. This is an idea that draws on Islamism’s antagonism to the West but has been increasingly defined in strategic and national security terms. It is now less an ideological posture and more a national security doctrine for Iran. Even at the ideological level it does not reflect the religious stamp of the revolution as much as it does the Third Worldist view of its leadership. According to Iran’s Supreme Leader, who is the Islamic Republic’s chief strategist, resistance is a modern-day version of the anti-imperialism that was in vogue among the New Left in the 1960s and the 1970s. At its core, Iran views the US as a rapacious imperialist hegemon bent on world domination.71

Iran seeks to resist US imperialism, but its own aim is development and great power status, which are outlined in a grand vision for the state and the economy in national documents. Iran is adamant that development cannot be achieved in a state of ‘dependence’ on the US and acceptance of its hegemony. Echoing the decades-old ‘dependency theory’ in political science, Iran’s view is that development in a system designed to ensure the supremacy of the West and the subservience of the rest means perpetual underdevelopment. The path to veritable development must start by rejecting imperialism and the world order that supports it. The US, Iran’s Supreme Leader has argued, is blocking Iran’s path to development.72 That is the root cause of the conflict with the US, and why Iran must resist in order to develop in accordance with its own plans.73

There are few religious harangues and much nationalistic defiance in how Iran defines its resistance. In nationalist terms, resistance is cast as a continuation of Iran’s struggle for independence, heir to the nationalist movement of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the 1950s to secure Iran’s right to its national resources. Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry was undone by what Iran’s rulers believe was an American- and British-engineered military coup. Regardless of its accuracy, this is the operative historical memory that underpins the Islamic Republic’s worldview. Their latter-day resistance, argue the doyens of the republic, is succeeding where Mossadegh failed. In this they make clear that resistance to the US has roots in contemporary Iranian history, and in Iran’s struggle for national independence.

Why Iran is at odds with the liberal international order

This surly view reflects a deep distrust of the West that has been reinforced by the Islamic Republic’s experiences since 1979. All revolutions challenge standing international orders, and Iran’s revolution was no exception. One of its defining events was the defiance of international law when American diplomats were held hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran for 444 days. However, as revolutionary zeal gave way to bureaucratic behaviour during its first decade, and the Islamic Republic increasingly approximated the Weberian legal-rational state, opposition to the international order moved beyond mere ideological posturing. That opposition then reflected more and more the lessons of Iran’s harrowing eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s. During that war Iran’s rulers concluded that the liberal international order provided no protection to Iran, nor did it serve the country’s interests. To the contrary, at every turn its rules were deployed to ensure Iraq’s advantage and block Iran’s path to victory. Even the UN was biased and protected Iraq.74 The world body did not acknowledge or condemn Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Iranian territory. Economic sanctions then prevented Iran from buying arms while European countries armed Iraq.75 The US provided Iraq with battlefield intelligence to dull Iranian offensives. When Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian troops, first in 1982 and then threatened to do so against Iranian cities, Western powers and the UN remained silent.76

Iran concluded that it failed to defeat Iraq because the US and Europe supported Iraq militarily, US regional allies bankrolled Iraq, and international organizations failed to condemn Iraq. Those conclusions led Iran to view the liberal international order as a tool of the West and a cudgel to be used against Iran – it was an adversarial order, one which Iran had to live with but defy if it were to realize its national aims.

More recently, Iran has viewed the liberal international order as deeply biased towards Israel in the Gaza war.

This dark view of the world order has persisted and has even gained greater currency in Iran since the 1980s. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018 and the imposition of severe sanctions on Iran confirmed the belief in Tehran that international agreements hold no value and provide no protection; they serve merely as instruments of convenience for the US to further its own interests. The argument that Iran should not give up hard national assets like a nuclear programme for the promise of a deal in accordance with rules of the international normative order has grown louder in Tehran since 2018.

More recently, Iran has viewed the liberal international order as deeply biased towards Israel in the Gaza war. However, this time Iran sees a larger swath of the Global South arrayed against selective application of international norms. Iran sees vindication in this.77 Tehran argued that it decided to retaliate against Israel with a barrage of drones and missiles in April 2024 only because the UN failed to condemn an Israeli attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus. That justification is indicative of Iran’s mindset towards the liberal international order and its institutions, and why Iran sees the weakening of that order as a strategic gain.

Iran and the end of globalization

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Iran was the most sanctioned country in the world, and it certainly continues to be among the countries that have been under sanctions for the longest and subject to the most severe economic pressure.78 The goal of economic sanctions against Iran has been to deny it access to global trade and financial networks – the pillars of globalization. As a result, Iran has developed its economy by circumventing sanctions and deliberately violating the rules governing global trade and financial transactions.

Yet various international developments have boosted hopes in Tehran that economic possibilities outside the Western-led world order will expand – and that a growing number of countries will share Iran’s worldview and trade with it. Factors spurring those hopes have included the recent populist revolt in the West against globalization, as evident with Trump’s presidency in the US, Brexit and the electoral successes of populist parties in Europe; the proliferation of economic sanctions across the world alienating more and more countries from the West, allowing Iran to make common cause with them; and the implications of the US economy decoupling from China.

The imposition of economic sanctions on Russia and China has expanded the share of the global economy that is now subject to US economic pressure that is exerted using the mechanisms of the liberal international order. Strategic common ground now exists between Iran and the expanding list of countries impacted by US sanctions, and this presents the possibility of circumventing sanctions more effectively. Iran’s economic strategy of working around sanctions and finding space to grow despite them has developed allies around the world and has gained greater resilience to oppose the US-dominated international economic order. Iran now sees the emergence of a continent-wide Eurasian zone encompassing itself, Russia and China which is large enough to counter US economic pressure and to pose as the base for an alternate global economic order.79

Over the past four decades and especially since the imposition of ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, Iran has been forced to restructure its economy. Reduced oil revenue has compelled greater reliance on taxation as well as direct control of the manufacturing and services sectors. This process has expanded the state’s reach into the economy and society – and particularly has expanded the deep state security apparatus. The process has unfolded in tandem with greater reliance on black market trade and financial networks. These channels circumvent regular global economic networks. As such, the viability of Iran’s economy is now dependent not on the dominance and health of the global economic order, but on a growing number of economies grappling with the impact of US sanctions, the availability of loopholes in its networks, and the willingness of a growing number of states and actors to violate its rules.80

The retrenchment of globalization and the factors behind it have given Iran the belief that its so-called resistance economy will be viable and will find room to grow. The overuse of sanctions by the US will degrade their effectiveness as an international economic regime.81

Although Iran sees a convergence of interests with China and Russia, the three countries do not always see eye to eye. Iran came close to signing a strategic partnership with China, but Tehran found the financial terms onerous, whereas Beijing saw limits to how much it could invest in Iran given the scope of economic sanctions on the Iranian economy. Both China and Russia have sought to balance their ties with Tehran with their economic interests in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Both have supported the demand of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that Iran settle its dispute over three islands that Iran appropriated from the UAE in the 1970s as Iranian territory. That support has irked Tehran, but such discord does not override the large convergence among the three. Importantly, Iran has been persuaded by both Beijing and Moscow to improve ties with its Arab neighbours – and conversely Beijing and Moscow have shown Tehran that they can override the standing US policy of containment of Iran to persuade GCC states to normalize ties with Tehran. Iran has seen the greater roles played by China and Russia in the Persian Gulf as a sign of declining US influence there and a source of potential benefits.

Although the promise that China and Russia will compensate for Iran’s exclusion from the world economy holds much allure, so far the reality falls short of expectations.

The tightening of US sanctions has effectively ended Iran’s trade with the West. Chinese manufacturing and supply chains have replaced European suppliers, and Iranian trade routes increasingly run north to Russia, east to China, and to neighbours around Iran.82 In 2023, the Iranian government estimated that in five years the revenue earned from its trade with Russia (also under Western sanctions) would exceed Iran’s revenue from oil sales. It is not just state revenue that has become increasingly divorced from economic interactions with the West. The Iranian private sector, which was previously rooted in trade with the West, now also has vested interests in Iran’s ties with China, Russia and regional trade. This economic reality has reinforced Iran’s ‘look east’ strategic posture.

Although the promise that China and Russia will compensate for Iran’s exclusion from the world economy holds much allure, so far the reality falls short of expectations. The same is true of the hope Iran has placed in a more rapid and fruitful shift towards a multipolar world system. The realization of this has stoked the debate over how far Iran should tilt to the east and become dependent on Russia and China, and whether it is instead prudent to maintain at least a semblance of coexistence with the liberal international order. The election of a reformist to the presidency in 2024, and the return of diplomats who oversaw the 2015 international nuclear deal, suggests that Iran recognizes that it must find some accommodation within the existing world order and balance its ‘look east’ stance with coexisting with the West.

The end of the unipolar moment

The Islamic Republic has come of age contending with US containment. Since the 1990s Iran’s most serious security threats have been from the US. In refusing to bend to US will, or to change course and abandon its resistance, Iran has anchored its national interest in defying US containment, and in weakening the US position in the Middle East. Iranian rulers have said that Iran can only achieve its national goals by defying US policies and forcing America to abandon the Middle East.

The Iran nuclear deal was a single occasion when Iran signed a major international agreement. Although not a treaty, it was nevertheless given the status of an international agreement by the UN – which Iran was led to believe would protect the deal. By unilaterally withdrawing from that deal, and then preventing other signatories from abiding by it, the US convinced Iran that there was no value in international agreements or protection under the liberal international order. In the best tradition of realpolitik, Iran is now open to transactional deals with the US, but no longer takes seriously the liberal international order, the UN, or agreements under the purview of international organizations.

Iran’s rulers believe that the US will never accept the Iranian revolution or be reconciled to its great power status in the region. The US will block Iran’s path at every turn, but more worryingly for Tehran, Washington seeks to weaken Iran and topple its regime. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 alarmed Tehran and led to the consensus among Iran’s rulers that the Islamic Republic would be safe only if the American project in Iraq were defeated and the US pushed out of the region. Iran’s rulers were convinced then that the US would shift the war in Iraq into Iran. Concern over US intentions fuelled the drive by Tehran to bog the US down in a quagmire in Iraq, and to acquire advanced nuclear capability. Iran’s nuclear posturing and its regional strategy of asymmetric warfare against the US and regional allies both have their roots in the post-9/11 policies pursued by the US in the Middle East. US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq have redoubled Tehran’s efforts. The Supreme Leader has bragged that Iran should be credited with forcing the US to shrink its regional footprint, and even with its decline as a global power.

Iran’s rulers perceived their handling of the US in Iraq to be a success in terms of deterrence and protection of their country’s security against the US. As a result, the idea of ‘Forward Defence’ – that is, protecting Iran’s interests through asymmetric means inside the Arab world – became rooted in Iran’s security doctrine.83 Between 2003 and 2024, Iran aggressively pursued building a regional axis (to encompass Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen) to exert regional influence and further reduce US presence in the Middle East. The strategy exacted a great cost: tens of billions of dollars of investment in allied militias, which happened as the Iranian economy was retrenching and social misery inside Iran was rising. The Forward Defence strategy suffered a major setback in 2024, with Israel battering Iran’s allies in its regional axis, Hamas and Hezbollah, and with the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in December. Forward Defence did not survive the test of direct confrontation with Israel. The fate of the strategy is now being debated in Iran, and as recent exchanges of drones and missiles between Iran and Israel have shown, Tehran is increasingly reliant on those tools to manage its regional security goals.

It is too early to determine the direction that Iran’s regional policy will take, and if Iran’s rulers are ready to change their outlook on the world order. All evidence suggests that it is unlikely that Iran will easily revise its posture towards the liberal international order. Iran will respond to tactical defeats with tactical adjustments, but a strategic shift is not imminent. Setbacks in Lebanon and Syria have not disabused Iran of its belief that the larger trends in the Middle East and the world are moving – and will continue to move – in its desired direction, and that the wars in Gaza and Lebanon that began in 2023 have accelerated the decline of the liberal international order.84 Iran’s calculation is that the pressure it is enduring will not last, and as with a J-curve, the nadir point will be followed by a sharp ascent.85 Iran will have to survive in the short run to reap the benefits it expects in the long run.