The Failure of Western Policies toward Iran’s Power Projection & Resilience Strategies

Abstract

Today, the Islamic Republic has reached the age of reason after forty-three years in power. Its two pillars of existence are nationalism — reinforced by its exclusion from the international scene — and religion — as an ideological mechanism of resilience to evolve, and above all, to endure over time. This nationalist unconsciousness and the appropriation of its destiny in a logic of religious belief are the unexpected result of multiple offensive Western policies such as economic embargo, maximum pressure, sabotage, and targeted assassinations of Iranian personalities with the aim of putting an end to its nuclear programme and annihilating its unsuspected ambitions of expansion in the Middle East and Persian Gulf region. It seems that these Western, and more specifically American, policies have had the opposite effect and have only accelerated the rise of the principalists to power. Nowadays, this hard-line policy between conservatives and ultra-conservatives is more involved in logic of security and external defence policy to strengthen the economic, military and strategic capacities of the “axis of resistance”, and a new domestic policy called “economy of resistance” (a politico-religious project to counteract economic sanctions, as an alternative for the survival of the Islamic Republic while maintaining its independence from the West). The latter is based on logic of self-defence that aims to achieve economic self-sufficiency to counteract the external enemy, and adopts an internal policy that can broaden its popular partisan base. This would help maintain the goals of the imamate and, above all, keep Iran independent from the West.