The recent confrontation between Iran and the United States did more than expose a military imbalance. It exposed a strategic illusion that has shaped parts of the Middle East for decades: the belief that ideological fervour can substitute for statecraft. Iran’s recent experience is among the clearest examples of where that illusion leads. If this conflict is viewed apart from emotion, it becomes clear that the issue is not one strike, one administration, or one episode of escalation. It is the result of a much longer political and strategic trajectory, in which events were interpreted through a particular lens and decisions were made accordingly. The consequences of that approach are now difficult to ignore. At its core, the problem may be reduced to three recurring errors: turning political conflicts into religious causes, dealing with global powers through idealism rather than realism, and allowing the memory of past grandeur to obscure present realities.
Religious and Revolutionary Narrative
From the outset, Iran tied its regional role to a religious and revolutionary narrative. Political conflicts were no longer treated merely as political or geopolitical disputes. They were elevated into sacred struggles, ideological fronts, and elements of a larger historical mission. Behind this outlook was a powerful religious imagination: the belief that expanding influence across the region was not simply a matter of statecraft, but part of a broader moral project that would ultimately prepare the way for a just global order under the Mahdi, the messianic redeemer in Islamic belief. That framework gave foreign policy a kind of ideological sanctity. Decisions came to be shaped less by material constraints, diplomatic possibilities, and the balance of power than by loyalty to a larger religious vision.
Entanglement with Historical Grievances
This outlook was not limited to hope for a future order of justice. It also drew energy from older sectarian memories, political grievances, and unresolved historical conflicts. Present politics became entangled with inherited wounds, devotional loyalties, and a sense that history itself remained unfinished. In that setting, strategy could easily become moralised and symbolic, increasingly detached from the discipline that statecraft requires. This helps explain why Iran came to function not only as a state, but as the centre of a broader network of armed groups, proxy forces, and regional clients. From Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and beyond, allied militias and transnational networks became part of its regional architecture. For a time, that gave Iran real influence and strategic reach. But it also created deep fear across the region, especially among Arab states. For many of them, the threat was not only Israel or Western intervention. It was also a neighbouring power seeking to project ideological influence far beyond its borders.
Regional Consequences and Western Presence
That fear had consequences. It pushed several Arab governments to deepen ties with outside powers, host military bases, and, in some cases, regard American or Western presence not simply as an imposition, but as a strategic necessity. This does not erase the hypocrisy of major powers, nor their selective use of moral language. But it does mean that Western presence in the region cannot be explained only in terms of imperial ambition. It must also be understood against a real history of regional fear, mistrust, and imbalance.
Confronting Global Powers
Iran made a second, equally consequential mistake. It confronted global powers in revolutionary language, while international politics operates less through moral passion than through interests, institutions, power, and balance. For decades, slogans such as “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and “the Great Satan” were sustained as part of a civilisational narrative of resistance. The public was encouraged to believe that defiance itself was strategy, and that historical righteousness would eventually reverse the balance of power. But slogans are not outcomes. America did not weaken. Israel did not disappear. The international order did not collapse. Iran, meanwhile, became more economically constrained, more diplomatically isolated, and more internally strained. That raises the central question: if after half a century the adversary remains firmly in place while your own society grows more burdened and more restricted, by what measure has the strategy succeeded? And if those same global powers ultimately impose the terms within which de-escalation or peace becomes possible, whose success is it in the end?
International Order and Hypocrisy
There is another reality worth facing. The modern language of human rights, laws of war, negotiations, ceasefires, and legal legitimacy emerged largely within an international order shaped by powerful states that gradually imposed certain restraints upon themselves. It is true that these same powers violate those principles whenever their deepest strategic interests are threatened. That hypocrisy is real. But it is also true that, compared with much of earlier history, the present international order leaves at least some room for negotiation instead of endless war, for coexistence instead of total destruction, and for political compromise instead of apocalyptic confrontation.
Strategic Imagination Out of Step
This is precisely where Iran’s strategic imagination has often appeared out of step with the age. Modern conflicts, however imperfectly, are usually managed not through the total elimination of the other side, but through arrangements that competing powers can endure. Political conflicts are resolved politically. They are not settled through fantasies of civilisational annihilation. Iran, by contrast, often preserved the dream of total confrontation in a world increasingly governed by deterrence, bargaining, and uneasy equilibrium.
Muhammad Hassan Ilyas
The writer is the Director of Research at Ghamidi Center, Dallas.
