This temptation lies at the heart of Vali Nasr and Narjes Bajoghli’s recent Foreign Affairs essay, ‘Iran's New Grand Strategy’. The article deserves serious attention precisely because of where it appears and who wrote it. Foreign Affairs remains the house journal of the American foreign policy establishment, and Nasr is one of the foremost scholars of Iranian strategy. When a scholar of this calibre argues that the recent war has produced ‘a new Iran’ that ‘will reshape the Middle East and influence the course of geopolitics for years to come,’ the claim deserves scrutiny.
The authors offer an elegant but conceptually flawed argument. The war, they contend, did not break the Islamic Republic but transformed it. Rather than collapsing under bombardment, sanctions, and leadership decapitation, Iran reorganised its institutions, empowered a younger technocratic elite, decentralised military command, strengthened nationalist sentiment and discovered new strategic leverage through control of the Strait of Hormuz. ‘The new generation has separated revolution from statecraft,’ they write, while Tehran supposedly regards the wartime outcome as ‘a new balance of power.’
The difficulty is that this is not evidence of a new grand strategy. Much of what the article describes is organisational adaptation under wartime pressure rather than strategic transformation and restored deterrence. Military institutions facing existential threats often adapt and innovate to survive. Grand strategy concerns the alignment of military, political, and economic means with long-term political ends and, ultimately, the ability to shape the behaviour of adversaries. The authors conflate institutional adaptation with grand strategy and resilience with strategic effect.
Much of the article accords with the existing literature. Scholarship on authoritarian resilience has long argued that external coercion can strengthen entrenched regimes, while studies of air power cast doubt on its ability to produce regime collapse. The literature on the Islamic Republic likewise emphasises its capacity for institutional adaptation and crisis survival. Iran's endurance under military pressure should therefore surprise few scholars.
Iran's wartime conduct may well have generated a degree of intra-war deterrence. By threatening the Strait of Hormuz and imposing costs across the Persian Gulf, Tehran appears to have complicated US operational calculations and demonstrated an ability to raise the price of escalation. Yet this coercive leverage was exercised only after Iran suffered the decapitation of much of its senior political and military leadership—including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—extensive damage to its cities, and the systematic degradation of its defence-industrial infrastructure. To establish the existence of a ‘new balance of power,’ it is necessary to show that wartime adaptation altered the capabilities, behaviour, or strategic calculations of Iran's adversaries. Instead, the article echoes the Islamic Republic's narrative with remarkably little analytical scrutiny and conflates it with strategic reality.
Much of the article's account of a 'battle-hardened' Islamic Republic describes organisational rather than geopolitical change. Military organisations facing existential threats adapt or fail. Dispersed missile forces, decentralised command structures, and accelerated decision-making may improve operational resilience, but they do not, in themselves, constitute a new grand strategy. The relevant question is whether those adaptations produced a lasting strategic advantage over equally adaptive adversaries. Military competition is reciprocal. Israel has demonstrated repeated operational innovation, intelligence penetration, and integrated campaigning since 7 October, while the United States and Persian Gulf states possess comparable capacities for institutional learning. The question is therefore not whether Iran learned from war, but whether it learned faster than its rivals. The article never establishes that it did.
Its discussion of the Strait of Hormuz rests on a similar assumption. The authors argue that Tehran has abandoned the pursuit of sanctions relief in favour of geographic leverage, describing the Strait as ‘an economic lever and a deterrent against future attacks’. Iran's Deputy Parliament Speaker Ali Nikzad has similarly described Hormuz as Iran's ‘nuclear bomb’, suggesting that strategic geography can substitute for conventional deterrence.
There is force to this argument. The ability to threaten a vital maritime chokepoint undoubtedly raises the costs of military action. It does not necessarily follow, however, that such leverage is durable. As Schelling argued, coercive power derives less from its repeated exercise than from the manipulation of risk. Once weaponised, a threat invites adaptation.
Maritime history suggests precisely this dynamic. The Tanker War drew external powers more deeply into the Persian Gulf. More recently, Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have prompted multinational naval coalitions, rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, higher insurance premiums, and renewed investment in alternative supply chains. Persistent threats to commercial navigation encourage adaptation across markets as much as militaries, as insurers reprice risk, energy markets diversify routes and suppliers, governments invest in alternative infrastructure, and external powers deepen security cooperation to preserve freedom of navigation. If Hormuz derives its leverage from global dependence, its weaponisation may erode the very dependence on which that leverage rests.
There is a wider irony here. The article perhaps overstates the strategic maturity of a supposedly technocratic generation that has finally ‘separated revolution from statecraft’. The students who seized the US embassy in 1979 likewise believed they had secured a strategic triumph through an act of revolutionary audacity. Instead, they burdened the Islamic Republic with an international legacy that many officials would later regret, both publicly and privately. The closure of Hormuz risks becoming this generation's hostage crisis, another intoxicating display of defiance that appears to strengthen the regime in the short term while imposing long-term strategic costs.
The treatment of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ further reflects the authors’ tendency to substitute assertion for analysis. They argue that Tehran ‘will manage [its proxies] with more strategic discipline and less ideological romanticism’ as part of a ‘coherent regional strategy’, and that Iran has ‘learned its lesson’ from allowing Israel to fight the ‘different nodes’ of the Axis ‘one by one’. Yet none of this is demonstrated. The relevant question is not whether the Axis provides strategic depth, an argument Nasr himself has long advanced, but why a network weakened by sustained military attrition should become more coherent and centrally directed.
The authors never explain this. The cumulative degradation of the Axis since 7 October, including the loss of leadership and Syria as a strategic corridor, may increase Tehran's leverage over its partners. It is equally plausible that it may exacerbate the principal–agent problems inherent in proxy warfare, encouraging fragmentation rather than coordination. The article conflates one possible consequence of the Axis’s decline with an established outcome, substituting speculation for evidence.
The article's treatment of Iranian domestic politics is perhaps its most extraordinary claim. The authors claim that the war has blurred ‘the sharp divide between state and society’ and given rise to a new social contract. This is a startling conclusion to advance mere months after the January 2026 massacre, one of the bloodiest crackdowns on civilian protest in modern history, while the Islamic Republic continues to execute its citizens with grim regularity, and a traumatised nation reels from successive wars and hyperinflation exceeding 80 per cent. Thousands of families are still searching for loved ones whose fates remain unknown.
Nor does the regime's own conduct support such a conclusion. Governments reconciling with their societies ‘not through persuasion or repression’ but through a shared experience of war do not need official exhortations that loyalists should 'not leave the streets', communications blackouts, or the grotesque spectacle of nightly 'caravans' as menacing displays of their monopoly on violence. The instinct to defend Iran, or to mourn the destruction of its cities, history, and civilisation, should not be mistaken for acquiescence in the regime that claims to embody them.
‘Iran's New Grand Strategy’ reads less like analytical scholarship than an elegant reframing of wartime survival as strategic renaissance. Stripped of its more ambitious claims, the article makes a compelling case for the Islamic Republic's resilience and capacity for adaptation under pressure. It is less persuasive, however, in arguing that those qualities amount to a transformed regional order so soon after the events in question, while the war itself remains unresolved. The Islamic Republic may yet reshape the regional balance, but until its wartime adaptations demonstrably alter the strategic calculations of its adversaries, resilience remains an explanation for survival, not evidence of strategic renaissance.
Dr Reyhaneh Noshiravani is a Research Associate at the Freeman Air and Space Institute (FASI). She completed her MA and PhD at King’s College London, and is also a graduate of Trinity College at the University of Toronto.