Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History

"Iran’s Grand Strategy by Vali Nasr is a more manageable read because it focuses on just one country. It’s also interesting because it’s a country whose perspective we don’t often take the time to consider. Why is Iran’s government so focused on opposing the US, when the price of resistance has been so high, impoverishing the country’s people and gutting the middle classes? Tracing Iran’s turbulent 20th-century history, Nasr argues it’s not about religious ideology and that our understanding of Iran’s strategic calculations is “hopelessly inadequate and dangerously outdated.’ Rather, it is about resisting imperialism and maintaining national sovereignty. Even the signature moniker the Ayatollah Khomeini used for the US—’Great Satan’—was apparently “lifted from communist propaganda literature of the 1950s.” Interestingly, the book came out before US air strikes on Iran, and one can’t help but wonder what impact they have had on the ‘grand strategy.’"