Stop Treating Iran as a Rational Actor

The war has “finally” broken out between Israel and the US on the one side, and Iran on the other side. Here, a few days in, a lot has already happened. Ayatollah Khamenei is dead – confirmed by Iranian state media itself, which announced 40 days of mourning – as is the case for a number of other senior leaders in the Iranian regime, including top security officials and members of Khamenei’s own family. Hezbollah has now entered the fight as well, launching rockets and drones at Israeli targets “in revenge” for Khamenei’s killing, and several Arab states have been dragged into the fighting, as Iran launched retaliatory strikes on US assets across Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Oman. Civilians have, sadly, already been found among the casualties, both in Israel and in Iran, as well as in a number of other countries.

We know that this is going to be a hard war to fight, for both sides, and that it will cause suffering. We also know that it comes as a result of the Iranian regime’s refusal to meet requests to tone back their aggressive and threatening stance, which includes a declared goal of Israel’s destruction, combined with the massive ballistic missile armament and enrichment of uranium far beyond what civilian use would require. Add to that the history of Iranian regime support for terror factions in the Middle East and sponsorship of terror attacks on – among others – American targets, and it should be clear that the Iranian regime is an entity that cannot be reasoned with.

What we don’t know is if this war will solve that problem, because – yes – the Iranian regime is a problem. Only those who wish to paint the West – particularly Israel and the US – as the cause of all things evil, will insist otherwise. But too many of those who insist otherwise are applying frameworks that have nothing to do with the actual dynamics at play, substituting ideological reflexes for genuine analysis, rather than acknowledging the complexities of the reality we find ourselves in today. But these are not the people we will engage with here – that would be a waste of time, their minds as set in their views of the world as the regime being discussed.

Here is the core problem: too many military “experts” and commentators are applying Cold War-era rational-actor models to an entity that does not operate within that framework. Consider nuclear policy analyst Joe Cirincione, who wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the very day the strikes began that “Iran does not pose an imminent threat to the United States, our troops, or allies” and that “Iran’s nuclear program is dormant; it is not racing to a bomb.” Or Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, who told Al Jazeera that “Trump chose an avoidable war over a good deal,” insisting Iran had offered major nuclear concessions. On Democracy Now, Parsi described Iran’s strategic thinking in purely transactional terms: “The Iranians have a different calculation. They believe that they have the ability to inflict significant damage on the United States in the short term […] and as a result, it would get the United States to back off.” This is not limited to American analysts. In Denmark, defense analyst Peter Viggo Jakobsen of Forsvarsakademiet declared the strikes futile and regime change impossible, applying the same conventional military frameworks without ever engaging with the religious dimension of the regime’s logic.

These voices declare the futileness of this war, claim the US doesn’t know what it wants, and insist Israel is acting on irrational expansionist intents – though both claims are clearly incorrect for those who care to listen to what is actually being said. They treat the Iranian regime as though it follows the same cost-benefit logic as a Western state, but they fundamentally misunderstand the logic the regime is following.

This is not about conservative military assessment of risks and opportunities. This is about eschatological deterministic reasoning, rooted in the spreading of the “Islamic revolution” initiated by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. For the regime and the IRGC, there are only two options: success or failure in preparing the ground for the return of the Mahdi – the 12th divinely ordained Shi’a imam. The eradication of Israel is not merely a geopolitical objective; it is framed as a necessary precondition for the Mahdi’s return. The IRGC has been explicitly told it must be on a “war footing” to prepare for Mahdi’s army. Hostility toward the US and the destruction of Israel are understood through this prism – not as bargaining positions, but as religious imperatives. See for example “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the Rising Cult of Mahdism: Missiles and Militias for the Apocalypse” by Saeid Golkar and Kasra Aarabi:

“There are signs today that the preparations for the return of the 12th divinely ordained Shi’a imam are becoming of pivotal importance to the IRGC’s lens on the world. The rise of a militaristic Mahdist cult among the senior ranks of the IRGC is now not inconceivable and the repercussions far-reaching.“

How dangerous this lacking understanding can be was demonstrated in real time. On March 1, Mona Yacoubian, director of the CSIS Middle East Program, wrote that even Khamenei’s killing “does not appear to have altered” Hezbollah’s calculus, and that Hezbollah’s “reaction remains remarkably muted.” Less than 24 hours later, Hezbollah launched rockets and drones at Israeli targets “in revenge” for Khamenei’s death. This is what happens when analysts project conventional cost-benefit logic onto actors driven by a fundamentally different imperative – and the consequences of being wrong are not merely academic.

By treating the Iranian regime as an entity that we can reason with through conventional diplomacy, rather than seeing their claims to “diplomacy” for what they are – stalling for time – these analysts have encouraged us, for years, to allow the Iranian regime to prepare for their idea of the final battle. And this is the regime that enriched uranium to 60%, far beyond any civilian purpose and just short of weapons-grade, while the IAEA uncovered undeclared nuclear activities at previously unknown sites. A regime whose covert scientists were, according to US intelligence, working on a faster path to an atomic weapon, even as the world debated whether to delist the IRGC as a terrorist organization. The consequences of allowing this regime to achieve its nuclear ambitions, driven by the eschatological imperative described above, would be far more dire than what we see now.

Ironically, these same “experts” treat Israel as the irrational entity, though Israel has consistently proven that when adversaries stop fighting and accept the existence of the Jewish state, Israel stops as well. The peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt demonstrate this. So do Israel’s attempts at reaching out to Arab states through the Abraham Accords, and the functional relations Israel maintained with both Turkey and Iran – until both countries were taken over by religious actors who not only declared their hostility to Israel, but acted on it. One can disagree with specific Israeli policies – and there is legitimate ground for criticism – but Israeli actions follow a discernible and consistent logic: “pose as a threat against us, and we will act.” The concept of “never again” is not an empty declaration, as it too often is among self-proclaimed “humanists” in the West. For Israel, it is an operational concept of survival.

The question remains – are we in the West ready to acknowledge that not all actors on the global scene play by our rules? That some use diplomacy not to resolve conflicts, but to buy time, building strength while we sit on our hands, convinced that negotiations are conducted in good faith? Years of warnings about Russia’s intentions were dismissed by the same class of analysts who insisted an invasion of Ukraine would be “irrational” because the costs outweighed the benefits – right up until the tanks crossed the border. The logic was different; the failure to recognize it was the same. Yet here we are again. Will we in the West insist on our “red lines” instead of letting actors with ill intent treat Western inaction as a weakness to exploit? Or will we keep letting ourselves be misled by experts too locked into their preferred frameworks to acknowledge realities that don’t fit their thinking?