One of Washington's most persistent mistakes on Iran has been to treat the country's national interests and the regime's interests as the same thing. In reality, they are opposites. Global economic integration, diplomatic recognition, and foreign investment would benefit ordinary Iranians - but they would threaten a ruling class that operates an extensive mafia and depends on isolation for survival.
Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls this the Islamic Republic's survival paradox in The Atlantic, "Hvylya" reports. Tehran's "ideology is resistance, its strategy is chaos, and its endgame is survival," Sadjadpour writes.
The carrots America offers the Iranian nation - normalization, trade, reintegration - function as sticks against the men who rule it. And the sticks America wields against the regime - sanctions, isolation, military conflict - serve as carrots for leaders whose power depends on all three. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei chose martyrdom over normalization, Sadjadpour writes. Mojtaba, his son and successor, will likely make the same choice.
Khamenei spent four decades purging pragmatists and filling the regime's upper ranks with fellow principlists - men whose careers and identities depended entirely on ideological loyalty to the 1979 revolution. The result is a system that has selected against the very qualities a political transition would require. Nobody in Tehran wants to be the Iranian Gorbachev - and Khamenei made sure nobody could play the role, Sadjadpour writes.
The regime's paramount goal remains survival. It retains enough coercive capacity to hold on in the near term. In the medium term, that survival looks far less certain - but "men fighting for their lives from bunkers do not think in the medium term," Sadjadpour argues. Ordinary Iranians, many of whom placed undue hopes in swift American intervention, are left navigating between a cruel regime that has repressed them for nearly half a century and a war that has deepened their despair rather than ended it. Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on how Iran's proxy network turned from a shield into a fatal liability.