Book Review: Vali Nasr, “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History”, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).
Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The Islamic Republic of Iran faces its greatest moment of crisis since the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. After Israel struck nuclear, military, and civilian sites in Iran on June 13, the two countries have been exchanging attacks for six days, with more than 224 people being killed in Iran and 24 in Israel. Key Iranian military leaders, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander-in-chief Hossein Salami, have been assassinated by Israeli airstrikes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes no secret of his intention to achieve regime change in Tehran, but this appears a far-fetched goal unless the US adds its military might to the Israeli war effort. So far, the US has refused to intervene in the Iran-Israel war, with US President Donald Trump reportedly stopping Israeli plans to assassinate the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
In turn, Iran has refrained from attacking US military bases or interests in the Middle East. However, the longer the war drags on, the more likely a US intervention will become. Experts assess that Israel alone can significantly set back Iran’s nuclear program, but the US airborne capabilities are needed to destroy Iran’s subterranean sites at Fordow.
How Iran and its political system will emerge from this conflict is unclear. Ali Khamenei, 86 years old, is confronted with a dilemma. As Crisis Group’s Iran Project Director Ali Vaez noted on the first day of the attacks, the Supreme Leader “faces no good options…If he escalates, he risks inviting a more devastating Israeli attack that the U.S. could join. If he doesn’t, he risks hollowing out his regime or losing power”.
The situation for the authorities in Tehran is made more difficult by the weakness of its long-time network of alliances in the Middle East, the ‘Axis of Resistance’. Israel has severely decimated Hamas and Hezbollah, whereas Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria came to an end in December 2024.
Khamenei, and the key policymakers surrounding him, need to make decisions in the coming days that might shape Iran for decades. The size and urgency of the current challenge are unprecedented, and there is no obvious blueprint for it. Still, it is safe to assume that policymakers in Tehran will operate within the framework of the Islamic Republic’s decade-long grand strategy.
This is the object of study in Vali Nasr’s recently published book, “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History”. Nasr is a Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University. In his book, he offers a highly valuable account of Iran’s security policies that will help readers make sense of the most recent events.
The book differs from many others in that it does not focus on value judgments or how Iran is perceived by its neighbors and the world. Instead, Nasr seeks to understand how the Middle East region and the broader world (especially the US) are seen from Tehran. The book covers events up to November 2024. For an update on the developments during the last months, readers can go to Nasr’s recent article for Foreign Affairs.
Against widespread assumptions, Nasr argues that Iran’s security policies cannot simply be explained by Islamic ideology or the intent to expand the Iranian Revolution. However popular notions of “mad mullahs” might be, the truth is that “there is reasoning and calculation behind Iran’s choice even when its behavior appears irrational and self-defeating.”[1] Apart from ideas of Islamic governance, a key motivation of Khomeini in calling for and then decisively shaping the Iranian Revolution was restoring Iran’s independence.
To those who made the revolution, the Shah appeared as a lackey of Western powers. This feeling increased after the US and the UK contributed to a 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and re-installed the Shah in power. Although Nasr sees the Western powers’ role in Mossadegh’s overthrow as secondary, this is not the view of other historians who have recently expanded our understanding of the 1953 coup, such as Ervand Abrahamian or David Painter and Gregory Brew.
What is clear is that the desire to prevent a repetition of 1953 was a key driver behind the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, which decisively set the revolution into an anti-American course. For all its revolutionary fervor, the new clerical leadership did not implement a massive purge of the military, which had largely remained loyal to the Shah. This proved an intelligent choice when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980.
As Nasr describes, the new Iranian leadership successfully rallied the population against the invasion with its revolutionary ideology. Still, for those who were not convinced by the religious rhetoric of Iranian leaders (such as many officers in the Iranian military), nationalism was a strong enough reason to defend Iran against the Iraqi troops. All the while, historian Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet notes, the Islamic Republic managed to forge “yet another culture of Iranianness” in which religious fundamentalism became “one more expression of nationalism.”
After eight years of war, Khomeini decided to accept a ceasefire with Iraq. The lesson Khomeini, and his successor after 1989, Ali Khamenei, drew from the war was that Iran had been unable to defeat Iraq because it lacked the required conventional military capabilities, explains Nasr. The gap, however, could not be easily closed due to economic destruction and international isolation after the war.
Thus, the new strategy focused on moving the theater of future conflict away from Iranian territory in an effort of “forward defense”. This security policy is coordinated by the IRGC independently from the regular military forces and consists of sponsoring state and non-state actors in the Middle East. These actors, partially aligned with Iran but with their domestic constituencies and priorities, are expected to step up to Iran’s defense if under attack, increasing Iranian deterrence.
Iran developed its network of regional allies by exploiting opportunities in regional politics, such as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (which led to the creation of Hezbollah), or the US invasion of Iraq (which resulted in the emergence of Shia Iraqi militias tied to Iran). This is the genesis of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’, which appeared comparatively strong after the October 7 attacks against Israel but could now be on the course of unraveling.
The end of the Iran-Iraq War, during which Iran suffered chemical weapons attacks, preceded Iran’s decision to re-activate its nuclear program, first developed under the Shah and paused after the success of the Iranian Revolution. The program, which Iran has always defended as destined for civilian purposes, came to light in 2002.
The discovery initiated a severe period of tensions with the international community, in which sanctions on Iran were followed by further uranium enrichment, creating a vicious cycle. After years of negotiations, the cycle was broken in 2015 with the signature of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which provided sanctions relief to Iran in exchange for stringent limits and controls on Iran’s nuclear program. Nasr writes that “the deal was important not only in that it engaged with the immediate crisis that loomed over the Iran nuclear program but also served as the first time Iran and the United States had met at a high level and signed onto an agreement.”[2]
As Nasr remarks, the road to the deal was complicated by mutual mistrust, but also by the fact that in Iran “there was a political economy in opposition to the deal.”[3] Powerful societal groups (among them important sectors of the IRGC) had developed vested interests in the black-market economy and inefficient economic structure that had flourished under sanctions.
However, it was not internal Iranian opposition to the deal that collapsed the agreement. The cause needs to be found on the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016. There are two key dates in Washington’s move away from the JCPOA. The first and most notorious is May 2018, when the US exited the nuclear agreement arguing that the JCPOA did not limit Iran’s regional activities and that a new, better deal was possible.
Contrary to Trump’s expectations, Iran did not capitulate and remained compliant with the deal, partly because it hoped trade with the EU could make up for some of the economic opportunities lost when the US abandoned the agreement. The second turning point came in April 2019, notes Nasr. On that date, the US decided to tighten sanctions on Iran, with the “maximum pressure” campaign initiated the previous year reaching new levels.
After this, and one year after the US exited the deal, Iran started to enrich uranium above the levels allowed under the JCPOA. Since then, there have been two instances when a new version of the JCPOA appeared within reach. The first one was in spring 2022 while the second developed in recent months, with multiple meetings mediated by Oman between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.
This second window of opportunity, however, appears to have closed with Israel’s attack against Iran on June 12. With Trump asking for Iran’s total surrender and threatening Khamenei with assassination, the Middle East might be in the wake of a major war. The Iranian leadership is far less able to mobilize the population than it was in 1980. And yet, Israel and the US should not underestimate the nationalism and willingness to foreign-imposed change among the Iranian population.
[1] Vali Nasr, “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History”, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), p. 9.
[2] Ibid., p. 239.
[3] Ibid., p. 241.
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