In February, Donald Trump launched a war with the expectation that American and Israeli attacks would finally topple the Islamic Republic. Instead, he has presided over a historic defeat for the United States. Reports from Washington suggest he is considering further escalation in an attempt to claim some kind of victory, but Iran is unlikely to make any concessions to the Americans or relax its new control over the Strait of Hormuz. Whatever Trump does next, Iran's leadership is determined not to back down, no matter how much worse things get.

“The survival of the Iranian state against the full spectrum of US coercion,” the editors of Equator wrote in April, “has clarified the outlines of a post-American world. The material strength of the American empire remains immense. But what cannot be recovered is the plausibility of the American story: the overarching narrative of the US as a model for all of humanity; the rational centre of human progress around which the world was destined to orbit.” Iran has been the author of this defeat, which may figure prominently in future histories of American decline. But this vindication of the Islamic Revolution’s anti-colonial doctrine has come at great cost to the nation and its people.

Vali Nasr is the most clear-eyed analyst of Iran working inside the American foreign policy establishment. In his 2025 book Iran’s Grand Strategy, he argues that Western policymakers have repeatedly misread Iran because they cannot accept that the country's foreign policy is driven by nationalism and anti-imperialism, not by Islamism. More recently, he has written that this war has given rise to a different state, led by a more radical generation. Iran’s new leaders, who came to power after their predecessors were assassinated by Israel and America, are increasingly confident, but they will face a difficult reckoning when the war ends. How long can the state and its society endure the mounting price of the independence it has fought so hard to secure?

Jonathan Shainin: I want to start with the question of Iran’s role in the American imagination. To what extent do the US policy and intellectual class remain haunted by 1979?

Vali Nasr: 1979 was a historic event both for the Middle East and for the US, in part because Iran had been a vital ally. American policy towards the Global South was based on close alliances with authoritarian regimes to keep communism at bay – but the US failed to anticipate that these regimes might be vulnerable to a different kind of uprising. The Shah had successfully contained the communist threat, so the revolution caught everyone off guard. Iran also endangered the American position in the Middle East in entirely new ways. It wasn’t a Soviet threat to the Persian Gulf or to global energy supplies; it was an unforeseen revolutionary instability. What if Saudi Arabia or Egypt caught this ‘fever’?

For decades, American military and foreign policy had been geared towards containing communism – and it had done a good job, though with a lot of blood on its hands in many places. It was completely unprepared to deal with Islamism as an ideology, which was indigenous to the Middle East, not a Soviet import.

The US had a playbook for revolutions – George Kennan’s containment doctrine: you stop revolutions from spreading, whether in Russia, China or Vietnam. But after the war in Vietnam fell apart, the US outsourced containment to regional powers – and Iran was the prime example. The Shah was supposed to become the gendarme of the Middle East.

So the entire global framework for projecting power and defending American interests collapsed with the Iranian revolution – followed immediately by the humiliation of the hostage crisis. By holding the hostages for 444 days, the Islamic Republic brought the pains of this new revolution into American living rooms and onto their television screens. Every night they saw angry crowds burning flags and chanting “Death to America”; a spectacle of American impotence that clinched, for a generation, the idea of Iran as both hostile and indigestible.

Every subsequent American administration seemed to open in a new, painful chapter in this story. From the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings to IEDs in the Iraq war, American leaders have not lacked reminders of what they dislike about revolutionary Iran. Their only solution was to help Arab governments build a wall of containment – which lasted a long time.

You mention the failure of containment in Vietnam. Would it be fair to say that the end of the Cold War and the triumphalist spirit of 1989-1991 helped to heal some of the wounds of that defeat, but couldn’t erase the humiliation of the Iranian revolution?

Yes, the Cold War was built on the ideological and intellectual foundation of containing two massive communist revolutions: Russia and China. Iran’s revolution was not part of that story. Yet it was a great revolution, on par with the French, Russian, and Chinese. It is the third great revolution of the twentieth century.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was perhaps the only person in the Carter administration who understood this. There’s no satisfactory way to manage a revolution in its ‘hot’ period. Revolutions do not work like standard authoritarian regimes; they can’t be toppled. The West failed to topple the Bolsheviks and failed to contain Mao. They are still trying to overthrow the Iranian revolution. Historically, successful revolutions are not replaced by external overthrow. If they change, the successor regime comes from within: China is still ruled by the Communist Party.

After the Cold War, Iran was not a global threat like communism – but it remained a regional threat. And the revolution still permeated American thinking: at some level, American policymakers believed that the September 11 attacks were the fault of the Iranian Revolution, because Iran had set in motion an ideology that metastasised in the Sunni world into Al Qaeda and ISIS. So the logic was to fight Bin Laden, invade Iraq, and then deal with Iran. George W. Bush’s idea in 2003 was much like Trump’s today: “I’m going to finish these guys off!”

You were a graduate student in the US when the Cold War ended. As a young scholar, did you witness the way this neuralgic memory of 1979 distorted the intellectual picture of Iran that was produced in America?

It’s not just a distorted view of Iran; it’s a distorted view of Islam. There was a great difference between the perception of communist revolutions and that of the Iranian revolution. Very quickly, Western thinking began to conflate religion with ideology: Islam with Islamism, and Iranian nationalism with the Islamic Revolution. Maybe it’s because communism was born in the West – you had German communists, French communists – whereas Islamism as an idea comes from outside the West.

Policymakers analyzed Iranian politics, and still do, not in revolutionary terms, but as an expression of “seventh-century archaic thinking”. This warps how they interpret and deal with the country. To them, it’s not a battle of socialism versus capitalism, but one of modernity versus premodernity. You can still hear this in the rhetoric of someone like Marco Rubio, who refers to the Iranian leadership as “apocalyptic”.

That’s very ironic. How much has this view of Iran changed in the decades since you finished your PhD?

It has ebbed and flowed. The West struggles to accept that it is not dealing with a return to the Crusades. Even though religion has become much more important to American political discourse during this period, most Americans still can’t comprehend the complicated ways you can have a modern government led by religious people – that this intrusion of religion into public life does not mean Iran cannot be modern or revolutionary.

This inability to appreciate what they’re looking at is why the US has been caught off guard by the sophistication of Iran’s weaponry and strategy. Because they derided the adversary for being archaic, modern behaviour came as a shock.

You have roots in Iran, and an interesting family history – your father was a prominent philosopher in Iran, and his father was a doctor to the royal family – and a complicated relationship to the revolution. Now you’re in the US, and you’re teaching at Johns Hopkins, you worked for Richard Holbrooke, you’re within the American foreign policy establishment.

But you also seem separated from that establishment, perhaps because of both your subject and your background. How do you picture your role in this conversation? Do you imagine your task is to push back against these Western misperceptions of Iran? Or do you feel that your project is an attempt to understand Iran on its own terms, as a society that is entirely modern but one that has taken a different path to modernity?

I was about 18 when the revolution happened. It changed the course of my life: it severed my ties to my country, and I became an exile in the US. I felt a great deal of bitterness about losing my childhood and my connection to home. But that experience shaped my intellectual life. When I went to graduate school, I wanted to understand what happened in Iran, how to explain the intrusion of religion into politics, the nature of Islamic ideology. But soon it became clear to me that to be a serious scholar, you cannot be driven by your own emotions. Of course your experience shapes you. But to be an academic you have to present the most rigorous analysis, just like someone who studies microbes.

Over time, I sensed that much of the analysis in academia was flawed, because it admitted colonial assumptions about Islam and the Middle East. If your foundations are based on a partial worldview, your analysis will be, too. I pushed against that. It is not that the Islamic Republic or Islamists are desirable, but that we must stop conflating Islam with Islamism. Yes, Islam is important in these societies, it shapes the language and values of politics. But there is real politics. I found that this kind of reductionism, this colonial outlook – which Edward Said and others critiqued – seemed to permeate everything. I was always uncomfortable with that. I was an exile from Iran, but I am an Iranian by 5,000 years of heritage, and a Muslim by 1500 years. So I felt these biases when I encountered them.

I think this reality became clearer for me the more that I travelled in other Muslim countries. The picture looks very different if you never leave the West. When I was visiting Pakistan, or the Arab world, I was seen as a Muslim scholar, as someone whose research and analysis is a reflection and a representation of these societies, something for them to be proud of.

The scholar Bernard Lewis wrote an essay once about the role of ‘dragomans’ – the Ottoman court interpreters and diplomatic intermediaries. He saw himself this way, as the translator of the Arabs into Western languages. I believe his whole enterprise was ultimately based on such colonial assumptions.

Many of the academics of my generation saw ourselves as dragomans of a more authentic sort than Lewis – though he might accuse us in turn of bias. I’m not claiming to have a monopoly on truth. But increasingly I became convinced of these distortions. It’s difficult, because I do not have charitable views of the Islamic Republic and the way it has ruled over Iran. But to have value, my writing has to be level-headed.

What are your recollections of the revolution? Where were you in 1978 and 1979?

I was at school in England, but my family was in Iran. I went home for vacations – in fact, the last time was two weeks before the Shah left. Shortly after, my family fled. There is no greater pain than losing your country. The West doesn’t fully accept you, your new home doesn’t accept you, and your old home has rejected you; you’re in a no-man’s-land. There was no going back; the country was unwelcoming and we had been rejected. We survived by the skin of our teeth. I couldn’t become an American overnight.

I have always been intrigued by the ways in which scholars are shaped politically by their personal experience. You can see in Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism – her analysis is unimpeachable but it is more powerful because she was so close to it. I feel that in my own work.

This is a revolution that sees itself as both modern and anti-colonial: I’ve heard you say that Khomeini believed the Islamic Republic was the first time in Iran’s history that it was truly independent. On that view, Iran is a nation that comes very late to decolonisation, and then makes a kind of autonomous existence for itself, surrounded by Arab rivals.

Until recently, you might have said that Iran’s leaders were too committed to this kind of anti-colonial resistance, at great cost to Iranians. But I wonder if that looks different now: after decades of pressure, the regime has withstood the most extraordinary efforts by Israel and America to topple it. Does this war represent a sort of vindication for the revolutionaries? Has it made Iran the emblematic anti-colonial state of this era?

It’s a good question. Like China, and unlike India, Iran was never directly colonised. But like India, or say, France, Iran is a country with an enduring and influential intellectual class – and anti-imperialism has been a powerful current in Iranian thinking since the nineteenth century. That tradition helped to fuel the revolution, but initially it was overshadowed by Islam and social justice and the state-shattering qualities of a grand revolution. Looking back over 47 years, while the Islamic rhetoric has faded, the anti-imperialist core has only strengthened.

In my recent book, Iran’s Grand Strategy, I argue that the Iranian state and its foreign policy, certainly under Khamenei, were shaped more by nationalism and anti-imperialism than by Islam. Within Iran, the war with the US and Israel is framed as a defence of national sovereignty, not a jihad against America. That religious vocabulary is largely gone.

So it is time for stocktaking. Many Iranians have come to believe that Khomeini and Khamenei were correct about the subjugation of the Pahlavi and Qajar eras. In this war, Iran has demonstrated a self-reliance that is unique in the Global South; it is a country that, despite being unable to buy arms or trade on the open market, has held its own against militaries armed to the teeth by the US.

But Iran has chosen a radical, uncompromising form of anti-imperialism, and that has imposed extraordinary costs. It has achieved independence but at the expense of infrastructure and prosperity. Is the population willing to pay the price?

In the diaspora, of course, there are many who say no – independence is not worth it. Some even invite the US and Israel to attack Iran in the hopes of changing its course. But some senior figures inside Iran are also beginning to question the wisdom of continuing on this path, to wonder if it is time for an opening to the West, a Nixon-to-China moment.

My impression is that between the 12-day war with Israel last year and the US war this year – even in spite of the brutal and repressive crackdown in January – many ordinary Iranians see these wars as confirmation that actually, we must live like this to survive as a nation, but how long can we be expected to keep it up? Can you defy American hard power forever?

That’s exactly right. They need to survive the war, because surrender would be a catastrophic denouement for a regime whose legitimacy rests on winning independence since 1979. But once this war ends – with Iran now under new leadership – this will be the central question. Iran has suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage from the war, millions of people have lost their jobs in industries hit by the bombing, inflation is squeezing the population. Even at the highest levels, there is a sense that in the long term this is not a sustainable course.

The failed attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic, and more specifically the regime’s ability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, must surely be seen as a defeat for the US, maybe even a humiliating one. How has this war reshaped global perceptions of American hegemony?

America’s prestige was already suffering, because of Trump and the moral decay visible in Washington. But the Iran war has shown the limits of American and Israeli power.

Obviously, after Gaza there is a collapse in soft power. Still, with regard to hard power, during the Gaza war, first the Biden administration and then Trump’s advisors began to see Israel as a very powerful proxy. Israel is willing to accept the moral and ethical cost of doing whatever it takes. If you give it weapons, it will destroy Hezbollah, destroy Hamas, bomb Qatar, and it will try to destroy Iran. This strategy has now failed. Last year the Israelis went to war with Iran and fell short, so this year they brought in America.

If Iran secures a strategic victory in the Strait of Hormuz, the US faces a dilemma. If the US gives in, that’s an outright defeat. If it escalates further and puts troops on the ground, that will mean combat deaths.

The myth of a cost-free war – where the US bullies the world into submission with sanctions and threats and kidnap – has collapsed. If Iran can constrain the US, other powers will notice, and the result will be something the US can no longer manage.

Since 1979 the United States had been able to maintain, with authoritarian regimes and with Israel, a particular order in the Middle East. But the US took an axe to that order by attacking Iran and putting the Gulf states in danger – and since then it has shown that it is not willing or capable of defending the region. The US has caused this order to fall apart, and it cannot fix the situation. Donald Trump, even after this war ends, has no vision for a new order in the Middle East. So the more the US is seen around the world as the destroyer rather than the builder, the more both its soft power and hard power come into question.

The Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy has said that the West’s message to the developing world was “our present is your future” – that as countries like India or Iraq or Iran ‘grow up’ and become developed, it is their fate to look more like the West, to become liberal democracies with market economies, privatised state assets, and so on. Is Iran viewed as ‘irrational’ because it has rejected that consensus?

Iran’s rejection of the US has been total – no embassies or even dialogue, except for the nuclear talks during the last decade. But the new potential consensus in Iran might actually be for something like the China model, which does not require democratisation as a prerequisite for modernity, and which offers a form of state capitalism that is economically successful and is stable.

Iran might eventually reach a kind of accommodation with the US: perhaps even embassies and dialogue; you don’t attack us, we don’t fight you in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. We will not join the Abraham Accords, but we’re not going to counter you aggressively. What we want is to be like a BRICS country, more like China than the West.

How should we describe this new generation of leaders? Are they more ruthless than their predecessors?

They are the more extreme people whom the previous Supreme Leader had sidelined. But they have also learned that his moderation did not bring them peace; it actually brought them war. They believe the US only respects extreme violence and pressure. But they are also a generation born after the revolution. These are not the young activists and ideologues who languished in the Shah’s prisons and then came to power, your Trotskys and Lenins. These guys are more state-minded technocrats, they are Brezhnevs and Stalins.

Are we going to see more repression along the lines of January’s massacres?

Iran is nationalistic, angry, depressed. It’s a very difficult domestic situation. Yes, there are now more cultural freedoms. But the economic situation in Iran is horrible, and the Islamic Republic is not going to reform politically. On the other side, they’re being invaded and bombed. And it’s not the regime that’s being bombed – it’s the Iranian people and their livelihoods.