Transcription
Let me tell you something that should disturb you. In June 2025, Israel and the United States launched one of the most audacious military strikes in modern history, a 12-day air campaign against Iran's nuclear infrastructure, missile cities, and military command structure. Analysts declared it a decisive blow. Commentators filled television screens announcing that Iran had been fundamentally set back. Western think tanks published victory maps.
And yet, 8 months later, Iran was already rebuilding its underground missile silos, accelerating construction at Parchin, burying new centrifuge halls deeper than any previous facility, and drawing on Chinese supply chains to reconstitute solid fuel propellant production. The regime had not collapsed. The supreme leader was still in power. And Tehran's strategists were not sitting in the rubble mourning. They were drawing lessons.
This is the central problem with how most people in the West, and frankly in much of East Asia, think about Iran. They mistake damage for defeat. They confuse tactical setback for strategic elimination. And in doing so, they miss the entire logic of what Iran is actually doing, has always been doing, and will continue doing regardless of how many air strikes are launched, how many sanctions are imposed, how many proxies are degraded, or how many nuclear facilities are bombed. I want to walk you through what everyone is missing, and I promise you by the end of this conversation, you will never look at a Middle East headline the same way again.
Every time a crisis erupts involving Iran, whether it's a Houthi missile slamming into a Red Sea shipping lane, a Hezbollah rocket barrage lighting up northern Israel, an Iraqi militia drone striking a US base in Jordan, or Iranian ballistic missiles arcing over the Gulf, the Western commentaries rushes to ask the same question: What is Iran trying to achieve? And the answers they give are always tactical. Iran is trying to deter an Israeli strike. Iran is trying to raise the cost of American presence in the region. Iran is trying to protect Hezbollah. Iran is trying to distract from domestic unrest. Iran is playing games with oil prices.
These answers are not wrong, but they are profoundly incomplete because they address the tactics without ever confronting the strategy. And strategy, as any serious student of statecraft knows, operates at a completely different level from tactics. Tactics are about what you do in a particular situation. Strategy is about what kind of state you are trying to build, what kind of world you are trying to create, and what logic animates every decision across decades.
So, the right question, the question almost nobody is asking, is this: What is the Islamic Republic of Iran fundamentally trying to do? Not this week, not this year, but as a revolutionary state with a specific ideology, a specific reading of history, and a specific vision of what the Middle East should look like? When you ask that question seriously, Iran's behavior stops looking erratic. It stops looking irrational. It stops looking like a regime stumbling from one crisis to the next. Instead, it looks like what it actually is: a 47-year project of patient, methodical, ideological, coherent state-building. One that has survived the Iran-Iraq War, comprehensive economic sanctions, repeated covert operations against its scientists and facilities, the assassination of its top military commanders, and now direct military strikes by the most technologically sophisticated air forces in the world. That is not weakness. That is a kind of strategic endurance that deserves to be taken seriously rather than explained away.
The ideological foundation nobody wants to talk about. Here is the first thing everyone misses and is the most fundamental. Iran's strategy cannot be understood without understanding the ideology of the Islamic Republic, specifically the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. Western analysts are deeply uncomfortable with ideology. They prefer rational actor models, game theory, interest-based frameworks. They want to believe that if you just get the incentives right, offer enough carrots, apply enough sticks, Tehran will behave like a normal state pursuing normal interests.
This assumption has driven 30 years of failed diplomacy, from the Clinton era engagement efforts through the Obama JCPOA to every subsequent negotiation framework that has collapsed in recrimination and distrust. The reason this assumption keeps failing is that it fundamentally misreads what the Islamic Republic is. It is not a normal state that happens to have a theocratic veneer. It is a revolutionary state whose foundational claim to legitimacy is not national interest, not ethnic identity, not even Shia Islam in the conventional sense. It is a specific political theology that insists the proper governance of Muslim societies requires clerical guardianship and that this guardianship is in perpetual conflict with what Khomeini called the arrogant powers, a category that essentially includes the United States. And in a different but related sense, Israel.
This matters strategically because it means the Islamic Republic cannot simply trade away its anti-American and anti-Israeli posture in exchange for economic normalization without fundamentally undermining its own claim to legitimacy. The conflict with America is not a policy choice for Tehran. It is an existential identity claim. The support for Palestinian resistance is not simply strategic calculation; it is a theological commitment that the leadership cannot abandon without conceiving that the entire edifice of the Islamic Republic was built on a lie. I'm not saying this makes Iran's leadership right. I'm saying that unless you understand this, you cannot predict Iranian behavior and you cannot design effective policy toward Iraq because you are constantly trying to solve a problem that the other side does not believe is solvable in the way you're proposing.
The second thing everyone misses is the extraordinary time horizon across which Iran operates. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has operated under the assumption that the United States is a declining hegemon in the Middle East, that it lacks the domestic political will to sustain indefinite military commitments in the region, that each intervention ultimately produces blowback that weakens American standing, and that time therefore is on Iran's side. This is not wishful thinking. It is a strategic bet that has been partially validated by events: the US withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984 after the Beirut barracks bombing, the chaotic exit from Somalia in 1993, the grinding exhaustion of the Iraq occupation, the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Iran has built its entire strategic architecture around this reading of American staying power. The proxy network—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, various Shia militia networks in Syria—was never primarily about creating military capabilities to fight America directly. It was about creating a distributed system of strategic depth that could impose costs on American and Israeli presence across multiple theaters simultaneously, making the region too expensive to dominate, too complex to pacify, and ultimately too exhausting to sustain.
Think about the geometry of this for a moment. By developing allied or client forces across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza simultaneously, Iran created what military planners call a multi-front problem for its adversaries. Any American or Israeli action in one theater immediately raises the question of escalation in every other theater. This is not an accident. It is a deliberate strategic design, refined over decades, that turns Iran's relative military weakness into something approaching strategic leverage. The Axis of Resistance, and I want to be precise here because the term is often used loosely, was not primarily a force designed to win conventional battles. It was designed to make winning conventional battles irrelevant because winning a battle against Hezbollah in Lebanon does not solve the problem in Iraq, and solving the problem in Iraq does not solve the Houthis, and dealing with the Houthis does not address the Popular Mobilization Forces, and on and on in an endless, distributed, resilient network that reconstitutes, adapts, and persists.
Now, I want to address what happened in 2025 because it is genuinely important and because the way it is being interpreted in the West is almost entirely backwards. In the 12-day war of June 2025, Israel struck Iran's nuclear facilities, missile production infrastructure, and military command nodes in a sustained, sophisticated campaign that drew on years of intelligence preparation. The Axis of Resistance largely failed to respond in a coordinated way. Hezbollah, already devastated by the 2024 campaign that had killed Secretary General Nasrallah and most of its senior military leadership, was a shadow of its former self. Hamas was absorbed in Gaza ceasefire negotiations and unwilling to sacrifice its political position for Iran's conflict with Israel and the United States. The Houthis were under relentless bombardment and had limited capacity to project force beyond the Red Sea. The Western reading of this: Iran's strategy has collapsed. The axis of resistance is broken. Tehran has been fundamentally set back and now faces a strategic crossroads.
Here is what I think is actually more accurate: 2025 revealed a fundamental structural vulnerability in Iran's strategy, but it did not eliminate the strategy, and the lessons Tehran is drawing from the experience may make Iran significantly more dangerous over the next decade. Let me explain what I mean. The axis of resistance as a strategic concept rested on the assumption that shared ideological opposition to Israel and America would translate into operational solidarity when Iran faced direct military attack. What 2025 demonstrated is that this assumption was partially wrong. Hamas defected from the axis not because it had abandoned its ideology, but because its local interest—a ceasefire in Gaza, the survival of its political organization, the protection of its diplomatic relationships with Qatar and Turkey—overrode its strategic obligations to Tehran. Hezbollah responded because it had to, but from a position of extreme weakness rather than strength. This is a genuine strategic failure. But notice what kind of failure it is: it is a failure of alliance management, not a failure of the underlying strategic concept. Iran built a network that was supposed to be resilient because it was distributed, but it turns out that distribution creates coordination problems that adversaries can exploit. That lesson has now been absorbed by Tehran's strategists.
What are they doing about it? They are doing three things simultaneously, and all three are being missed in the Western commentary.
First, Iran is not simply rebuilding what was destroyed. It is rebuilding deeper, more hardened, more dispersed, and with a completely different vulnerability profile. The construction activity at Parchin, specifically the facility that American and Israeli analysts assess is designed to house high-explosive testing for nuclear weapons development, reflects a strategic decision to move the entire nuclear program into configurations that are substantially harder to target from the air. This is not just about digging deeper; it is about learning from the specific vulnerabilities that Israeli strikes in 2025 exploited. Iran's missile cities, the vast underground complexes housing ballistic missile production and storage, were targeted at their entrances, effectively sealing them. Iran responded during the conflict by dispersing launch capability to eastern regions beyond Israeli strike range. The reconstitution doctrine now being implemented involves not just rebuilding entrances, but creating fundamentally different access architectures that cannot be sealed with the same attack profiles that worked in 2025. In parallel, Iran has been acquiring new planetary mixtures for solid fuel propellant production from external partners, almost certainly through Chinese and potentially Russian supply chains, precisely because it assessed that its solid fuel missile program was its most critical deterrence capability, and its reconstitution is being prioritized above almost everything else.
Second, here is something that I find genuinely alarming and that I think is not receiving the serious attention it deserves. In July 2025, Iran suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency—not suspended nukes activities, but suspended IAEA access and inspection protocols. The parliament passed this unanimously. The Guardian Council endorsed it. Iran remains technically a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it is now operating without the visibility mechanisms that have, however imperfectly, provided some insight into the program's trajectory. This is strategically significant because of the lesson Tehran appears to have drawn from June 2025: the nuclear threshold status that Iran had achieved by May 2025—highly enriched uranium stockpiles, advanced centrifuge arrays, weapons design knowledge—did not deter Israel from striking. This is a profound challenge to Iran's deterrence logic. If threshold status is not sufficient to deter attack, the conclusion some within the Iranian leadership may draw is that only actual nuclear weapons capability provides genuine deterrence. I'm not predicting Iran will build nuclear weapons. The theological objections are real. The NPT constraints create real diplomatic costs. And the fear of preemptive strike, if weapons development is detected, creates a genuine dilemma. But I'm saying that the strategic incentive structure facing Tehran after 2025 has shifted in a direction that makes weaponization more attractive, not less. And that the IAEA suspension makes it harder to monitor whether that shift is being acted upon.
Third, and this is the most sophisticated and the least discussed, Iran is not simply trying to rebuild the old axis of resistance. It is redesigning the network based on the lessons of 2025, specifically the lesson that a network dependent on ideological alignment and centralized direction is vulnerable to disruption when the center is under attack and when local actors have divergent interests. The new architecture, which I would call Axis 2.0, though Tehran would never use that term, has several distinctive features. First, it is more technologically autonomous. Rather than relying on direct Iranian weapons transfers, which create identifiable supply chains and attribution chains, the network is being rebuilt with local manufacturing capability. The Houthis, for example, have already transitioned substantially to a domestic military-industrial complex, local assembly of weapons using imported critical components, specifically because this eliminates single points of failure in the supply chain. Destroying a central Iranian arms factory no longer halts production and merely shifts the assembly line. Second, the network is developing shared technological standards, what analysts have described as a "common technological language," so that technical knowledge and capabilities can be shared across the network without requiring direct Iranian involvement in each transfer. This creates a kind of distributed redundancy. If Hezbollah loses its missile engineers, it can draw on knowledge embedded in other parts of the network. Third, and most provocatively, the network is developing electronic warfare and signals intelligence capabilities that were previously absent. Recovered debris from the Red Sea and from Ukraine—the Houthis have been sharing technology with Russia's war effort and receiving feedback in return—shows integration of advanced anti-jamming navigation systems. This is not the proxy network of 2006. It is being rebuilt as something substantially more sophisticated.
I want to spend some time on something that is almost entirely absent from Western commentary on Iran because it is missing a crucial variable that completely changes the strategic calculus: China. China's relationship with Iran is not simply about oil imports, though it is certainly about that. Iran has been selling roughly 1.5 to 1.8 million barrels of oil per day to China through various sanction evasion mechanisms, transactions that provide Tehran with a financial lifeline that keeps the economy functional despite comprehensive Western sanctions. Without Chinese demand for Iranian oil, the economic pressure of sanctions would be substantially more constraining.
But the energy relationship is the smallest part of the story. China's strategic interest in Iran is about the architecture of the multipolar order that Beijing is trying to construct as an alternative to American hegemony. Iran occupies a critical geographic position. It sits astride the Persian Gulf, controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20% of globally traded oil passes, borders Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and has maritime reach into the Caspian Sea and the Gulf of Oman. For China's Belt and Road ambitions and for the construction of alternative financial architectures that do not depend on American-controlled choke points, a stable and functional Iran is strategically important.
This means China has a sustained interest in ensuring that Iran is never so weakened by sanctions or military strikes that it becomes a failed state or client of American power. China does not want a nuclear-armed Iran that creates regional instability that threatens Chinese investments across the Gulf states. But it also does not want an Iran that is so thoroughly defeated that the Middle East becomes a domain of unchallenged American primacy. The Chinese interest is in a multipolar Middle East where multiple powers constrain each other and where American hegemony is limited, and Iran is one of the instruments through which that outcome is pursued. This is why the supply chains for Iranian missile reconstitution run through Chinese networks. This is why Chinese banks have developed elaborate structures for processing Iranian oil payments outside the SWIFT system. This is why Chinese diplomatic interventions, including Saudi-Iranian detente brokered in Beijing in 2023, tend to create political configurations that complicate American and Israeli strategic options in the region.
I want to be careful here not to overstate this. China is not running Iran's strategy. Tehran makes its own decisions, often in ways that Beijing finds inconvenient and destabilizing. The 2025 conflict created genuine diplomatic complications for Chinese investments across the Gulf, and Beijing was unhappy about it. But the structural alignment between Chinese interests limiting American hegemony and Iranian interests in resisting American pressure means that no strategy for dealing with Iran that ignores the China dimension will be adequate.