Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History
By Vali Nasr
Liberty Publishing
ISBN: 978-6277626693 408pp.

It is very difficult to take seriously most modern Western ‘scholarship’ and media discourse on the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the majority of these narratives lack nuance and balance. Instead of understanding the Iranian perspective — which, if included, is limited to critics and opponents of the Islamic Republic — we usually see cartoonish tropes centred around ‘mullahs’, ‘terrorism’ and the Islamic Republic’s ‘proxies’, especially in West Asia, trotted out.

That is why one was a bit hesitant to pick up Dr Vali Nasr’s Iran’s Grand Strategy, a book that attempts to analyse the subject of its title. There is no doubting the US-based academic’s scholarly credentials. But his dislike for the Islamic Republic, particularly its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, and his closeness to the US foreign policy establishment, made one wonder if this would be an honest appraisal.

Surprisingly, Dr Nasr has done a fairly decent job of describing the Islamic Republic’s post-1979 grand strategies, from ‘sacred defence’ — birthed during the brutal Iran-Iraq war — as well as the more recent and complementary ‘forward defence’ — formulated after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, and further refined during the Syrian civil war. In the latter, Iran played a central role in propping up Bashar al-Assad’s regime until the jihadist takeover of Damascus in December 2024. Of course, there are moments of open bias in the work but, overall, the book is useful for........

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