What if the West has been misreading Iran for 40 years?

The enduring temptation in Western strategic thinking is to treat Iran as a problem to be managed rather than a civilisation to be understood. That misreading has proven costly. Beneath the daily churn of sanctions, proxy skirmishes, and nuclear brinkmanship lies a far deeper story—one of continuity, identity, and power that predates the modern state system by millennia. Iran is not merely a Middle Eastern actor reacting to pressure; it is an inheritor of Persian statecraft that has survived conquest, revolution and isolation, and has repeatedly adapted its instruments of influence to shifting global orders. From the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE—stretching from the Indus Valley to the Balkans and governing an estimated 44 per cent of the […]