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 governments changed. The logic did not.
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.
