Since the 1920s, Iran has experienced two defining political moments that have shaped its internal character and international relations. The first was the Pahlavi monarchy, which began in 1925 with Reza Khan Pahlavi's ascension to the throne and ended with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This era saw Iran as a secular, modernizing nation firmly aligned with the Western-led camp during the Cold War. Tehran recognized Israel after its creation in 1948, supplied oil to Western markets, and served as Washington's chosen guardian of the Gulf.
Central to the Pahlavi project was a deliberate effort to anchor the monarchy's legitimacy not in Islam, but in Persia's imperial past. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi consciously linked his rule to the ancient Achaemenid Empire. The grandiose 1971 celebrations at Persepolis, marking 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, were the most theatrical expression of this claim. However, beneath the surface of modernization and imperial grandeur, the shah was nakedly authoritarian. SAVAK, the feared secret police, was synonymous with torture and repression. When mass protests erupted in 1978-1979, every geopolitical partnership the shah had cultivated proved worthless.
From the ashes of the shah's rule emerged the Islamic Republic of Iran, founded under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's doctrine of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist). It became only the second Shia state since the Safavid Empire. The new republic was built on the premise that Islamic principles should govern not just religious life, but also politics, economics, and social life. The public sphere was to be controlled, morality enforced, and Iran's cultural identity explicitly de-Westernized.
Where the Pahlavis had embraced the United States and Israel, the Islamic republic constructed its identity in explicit opposition to both. Its foreign policy became defined by resistance: support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias across Iraq and Syria—a network of proxies Tehran calls the "axis of resistance." In economic governance, the regime looked eastwards, aspiring to a model akin to China's: authoritarian in politics, state-directed in economics, independent of Western institutions.
That independence came at an enormous price. More than 3,600 different sanctions have been imposed on the republic—a cumulative siege that has devastated the lives of ordinary Iranians. Three major armed conflicts have scarred its existence: the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), a 12-day war involving Israel and the United States in June 2025, and the ongoing conflict beginning on February 28. Each war deepened the siege mentality at the core of the regime's identity—the conviction that today's Iran is perpetually encircled and its very survival is under threat.
Today, the Islamic republic is neither the confident revolutionary power it was in the 1980s nor a stable religious state capable of indefinitely managing its contradictions. Mass protests over the past two decades have raised profound social, economic, and political questions about the nature of the social contract it offers. Simultaneously, its regional influence is declining, its nuclear program has led to direct military confrontation, and its economy—devastated by sanctions and endemic corruption—cannot deliver the prosperity needed to secure popular acquiescence.
Several scenarios loom for what comes next. The regime could survive in its current form. A reformed Islamic republic might retain its Shia theological identity while abandoning its most confrontational postures, though such a transition would require a political class willing to negotiate and an opposition capable of responsibly holding power—neither condition is clearly present. A more turbulent scenario—fragmentation, civil conflict, and a power vacuum—cannot be ruled out in a country encompassing Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis, held together increasingly by coercion alone. Iran's next chapter will not be written by foreign powers, the clerical establishment, or the protest movement alone. It will emerge from the collision of all these forces—internal and external, historical and immediate. This new Iranian moment is a leap into the unknown, with consequences that will reverberate across the region and the world.
Source: www.aljazeera.com