Siamak Naficy
In the shadow of Israel’s air campaign and amid the policy whiplash of the Trump administration’s return to the scene, Iran finds itself cornered, battered, and yet, utterly unmoved. The Islamic Republic has absorbed military strikes on critical infrastructure,
watched its economy plunge further into crisis, and received a vague threat from Washington that may or may not be real. And yet Tehran’s red lines, particularly on uranium enrichment, remain firmly in place. Why?
Because in Iranian strategic culture, compromise with a heavy-handed force isn’t pragmatism—it’s weakness. And weakness invites destruction. It’s dangerous to confuse tactical success with strategic victory—legitimacy is fluid,
and humiliation can be politically generative. Deterrence doesn’t die with generals, political bureaucrats, or nuclear scientists. Deterrence is a wicked problem—it adapts, it mutates. Likewise, regimes don’t always end when their air defenses fall. They end when people stop believing in their necessity and legitimacy.
Iran’s security doctrine has rested on two assumptions: first, that the international system is inherently hostile to its regime; and second, that no foreign partner—no matter how transactional—can be counted on when it matters.
Too often, American policy assumes that pain is a useful teacher. The US assumes that when punished sufficiently, states will moderate their behavior to meet American interests. But for Iran’s leadership—steeped in revolutionary paranoia,
grievances both real and imagined, as well as the memory of abandonment during the Iran–Iraq War, pain is not deterrence. It is confirmation. Each new military humiliation, each economic blow, simply proves the point: the West cannot be trusted, and only self-reliance ensures survival.
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