From Exporting the Revolution to Open War: The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Question of Survival Through Crisis

From the very first days of its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran did not emerge merely as a new state within the conventional framework of the international order. Rather, it defined itself as an ideological, revolutionary, and transnational project. From the outset, this system was focused not only on seizing power inside Iran, but also on reshaping the political and ideological balance of the region. For this reason, the behavior of the Islamic Republic cannot be understood without grasping its underlying logic: survival through crisis.

What has been observed over the past four and a half decades in the Islamic Republic’s domestic, regional, and global policies has not been a series of scattered or accidental actions, but rather the components of a continuous strategy: exporting the revolution, organizing ideological forces, building proxy arms, carrying out assassinations and intimidation beyond its borders, developing missile capabilities, advancing a nuclear program shrouded in ambiguity, and turning hostility toward the United States and Israel into a central element of the regime’s political identity.

The hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was the first major display of this logic. In that event, the Islamic Republic showed that it neither feared foreign crisis nor regarded it as an unwanted cost. On the contrary, it could turn such a crisis into a tool for internal cohesion, the elimination of rivals, and the legitimization of a newly formed structure of power. From that point onward, it became clear that this system defined security and diplomacy not on the basis of the classical rules of statecraft, but on the basis of revolutionary and ideological logic. Within such a framework, tension was not an exception but a necessity—a necessity that could both keep domestic society in a state of permanent mobilization and allow the regime to suppress any opposition by branding it as aligned with a foreign enemy.

In this context, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) became the most important institutional pillar of this project. The IRGC was never merely a military force. From the beginning, it was created to protect the revolution, control society, engineer domestic politics, and expand regional influence. Gradually, the IRGC came to dominate not only Iran’s security structure, but also its economy, politics, culture, media, and foreign policy.

From this perspective, the Islamic Republic cannot be understood without the IRGC, just as the real structure of power in Iran cannot be found merely in its ostensibly elected institutions. Presidents, parliamentary speakers, ministers, and other official figures may be more visible in the media, but on strategic matters, it is the IRGC and the hard core of power surrounding the Supreme Leader that determine the regime’s main direction. For this reason, the differences between figures such as Rouhani, Qalibaf, Raisi, or other regime actors are less substantive than tactical and cosmetic. What has remained constant is the dominance of the security-military structure over the entirety of Iran’s political system.

The principle of exporting the revolution has also been one of the most fundamental components of the Islamic Republic’s policy. This policy went far beyond rhetoric and, in practice, led to the creation and strengthening of a network of aligned forces and organizations across the region. Instead of remaining a national power confined within Iran’s borders, the Islamic Republic sought to build a kind of ideological sphere of influence and quasi-imperial regional order. Hezbollah in Lebanon was the clearest and most successful example of this policy—a model later reproduced in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. By organizing, training, arming, and financing Shiite armed groups and other aligned Islamist movements, the Islamic Republic created for itself a form of “strategic depth,” the purpose of which was to transfer the costs of war and conflict beyond Iran’s borders and to build an asymmetric strike capability against regional and international enemies.

This proxy network—later known as the Axis of Resistance—became the principal pillar of Tehran’s regional strategy. In Lebanon, Hezbollah became a state within a state; in Iraq, Shiite armed groups became decisive actors in both security and politics; in Syria, the Islamic Republic deployed vast manpower, weapons, and military organization in order to preserve Bashar al-Assad’s regime; and in Yemen, the Houthis became an instrument of pressure against Saudi Arabia, vital maritime chokepoints, and even the order of global trade.

The result of this strategy was not merely the expansion of Iranian influence, but also the weakening of national state structures across the region, the increasing sectarianization of conflicts, and the transformation of the Middle East into a theater of exhausting proxy wars. In this way, the Islamic Republic became not a factor of stability, but one of the most important producers of structural instability in the region.

At the same time, extraterritorial assassination and the export of state terrorism were also inseparable parts of this strategy. Opponents of the Islamic Republic—especially Kurdish activists, opposition figures, intellectuals, and dissidents—have repeatedly been targeted over the decades in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the world. The message of these assassinations was clear: the regime considers itself entitled not only to eliminate opponents inside Iran, but also to physically remove them beyond its borders.

Through this policy, the Islamic Republic both intimidated the opposition and signaled to the world that it would guarantee its survival at any cost. At the same time, widespread allegations regarding Tehran’s role in supporting terrorist operations and non-state armed groups gradually produced an image of the Islamic Republic in which statehood and terrorism appeared not as two separate spheres, but as two dimensions of a single logic.

The Islamic Republic’s nuclear and missile programs must also be analyzed within this same framework. These programs were not merely defensive tools or symbols of scientific progress; they were part of an architecture of power that the regime built to consolidate its position at home and in the region. Iran’s nuclear program, from the beginning, was accompanied by ambiguity, secrecy, denial, and bargaining. Tehran sought to reach a point at which it would neither formally enter the club of nuclear weapons states nor be transparent enough to fully dispel international concerns. This strategic ambiguity was one of the regime’s most intelligent—and at the same time most dangerous—tools. On the one hand, it created a permanent threat for the West and Israel; on the other, it preserved Tehran’s ability to bargain diplomatically and extract concessions.

The missile program was the complement to this same policy. The Islamic Republic knew full well that in a conventional war—especially in the fields of air power and advanced technology—it was vulnerable in comparison to major powers. Therefore, by developing its missile and drone arsenal, it sought to create a form of asymmetric deterrence: a deterrence capable of placing Israel, U.S. bases, Arab states in the region, energy, and vital routes of global commerce under threat. In other words, for the Islamic Republic, missiles and drones were not merely weapons; they were the language of its foreign policy—the language of threat, attrition, and the imposition of costs.

Alongside these elements, ideological hostility toward Israel has occupied a central place in the identity of the Islamic Republic. The rhetoric of eliminating Israel, destroying the “Zionist regime,” and denying its right to exist has not merely been propaganda; it has been part of the regime’s strategic framework. For years, the Islamic Republic sought to turn the Palestinian issue from a national and Arab cause into an instrument for building its own regional legitimacy. In this process, supporting Palestinian and Lebanese armed groups was part of a policy aimed not simply at defending Palestinians, but at turning Iran into the center of gravity of the anti-Israeli front in the region. For this reason, threatening Israel has never been a secondary issue for the Islamic Republic; it has been a central pillar of its ideological and geopolitical identity-building.

In recent years, this hostility has moved from the level of shadow war and proxy confrontation toward direct confrontation. Reciprocal attacks, targeted operations, cyberwarfare, the assassination of commanders, and then direct missile and drone strikes have shown that the conflict between Iran and Israel has entered a new phase. A war that previously unfolded mostly in the shadows and through intermediaries is now closer than ever to direct confrontation. In this context, the role of the United States has also been decisive, because any major confrontation with the Islamic Republic—whether in terms of Israel’s security or the regional order—inevitably draws Washington into the field.

The recent war is an important turning point in this regard. It has shown that, despite all the pressure, sanctions, internal crises, and economic weaknesses, the Islamic Republic still possesses the capacity to generate broad instability and impose costs. At the same time, this war made clear that striking Iran’s nuclear, missile, and military infrastructure does not necessarily lead to the collapse of the regime. It is precisely this reality that has brought the issue of negotiation back to the center of attention. But the central question is this: if negotiations with the Islamic Republic are limited only to the temporary containment of its behavior, they may in practice reproduce the very threat they are supposedly intended to contain.

The fundamental problem is that many Western diplomatic approaches view the Islamic Republic as though it were a conventional state whose behavior can be regulated through a combination of agreements, incentives, sanctions, and guarantees. But the Islamic Republic is not merely a state with a few reformable policies; it is an ideological-security structure for which crisis is not an exceptional condition, but a prerequisite for the reproduction of power. Therefore, any agreement that merely limits part of the nuclear program, or simply reduces the level of military tension, while leaving the IRGC, the proxy arms, the assassination machine, the expansionist ideology, and the regime’s capacity for reconstruction intact, does not solve the crisis—it merely postpones it.

From this perspective, if the United States and Israel, after inflicting damage on the Islamic Republic, ultimately accept some form of compromise that preserves the regime’s power structure, this would not be the defeat of the Islamic Republic but another form of its victory. A regime that can survive a major war with global powers, even if temporarily weakened, will present itself domestically and regionally as an undefeated and enduring actor. Such survival, especially in the Middle Eastern context, can become an enormous asset for Tehran: an asset for rebuilding its military capabilities, reviving its proxy networks, intensifying domestic repression, and promoting the claim that even a coalition of major powers could not eliminate it. In such a scenario, the Islamic Republic could emerge even from a devastating war with the image of a wounded but powerful actor—and that alone would be enough for it to become once again the principal pole of threat in the region.

For this reason, the central issue is not merely whether one should negotiate with the Islamic Republic, but rather what such negotiations are about and toward what end they are directed. If the aim is simply a temporary ceasefire, short-term containment of the nuclear program, or the buying of time, then such negotiations will not bring peace; they will give the regime an opportunity to rebuild. But if the issue is viewed at its real level, it becomes clear that the crisis in the Middle East will continue to reproduce itself so long as this ideological-military structure remains in place. For the main source of threat is not this or that government figure, but the system itself—a system with the IRGC at its core, while all the other components, from the Supreme Leader to the government and parliament, ultimately move within the orbit of that same hard nucleus of power.

On this basis, it can be said that the issue of the Islamic Republic is not a matter of behavioral change, but of structural change. A regime that derives its legitimacy from crisis is not reformed by the reduction of crisis. A regime that has survived by exporting instability does not become a normal actor through a limited agreement. A regime that defines its very existence through permanent hostility, ideological mobilization, and proxy networks will not abandon this logic in exchange for a few diplomatic concessions. Therefore, any solution that leads only to compromise with the Islamic Republic, rather than to ending the structure that reproduces it, will in the long run serve that very regime.

In conclusion, since 1979 the Islamic Republic of Iran has been not a force for stability, but one of the principal centers for the production of crisis in the Middle East and beyond. The export of revolution, state terrorism, the creation and support of Shiite militias, the development of nuclear and missile programs, threats against Israel, and the use of proxy wars have all been parts of a single strategy. The recent war has not altered this reality; it has only made it more nakedly visible. If this regime survives the war and is ultimately saved through compromise, then even in a weakened condition it may reconstruct itself as a more entrenched power in the Middle East. From this angle, the main issue is no longer merely containing dangerous behavior, but ending the structure of power that continuously produces this danger.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)