[Free Beacon] In publishing, as in much of life, timing is everything. And by that measure, if by no other, Iran’s Grand Strategy, Vali Nasr’s latest analysis of the Islamic Republic, is a smashing success.
First available just two short weeks before Israel’s stunningly successful aerial campaign against the mullahs, Nasr’s book attempts—but fails—to frame the Islamic Republic as having "evolved into a prototypical nation-state" whose "aims are now secular in nature."
To Nasr, a professor and distinguished Middle East specialist at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies who emigrated from Iran to the United States after the ayatollahs seized power in 1979, Islam is merely "an instrument in the hands of [Iran’s] political class and military leaders to realize political and economic interests at home and define national interest abroad." Iran, he argues, is essentially a normal country following a rational path.
Yet Nasr’s analysis repeatedly undermines his own thesis, as history amply demonstrates how the regime’s insistence on religious and ideological purity has over and over again—including in its most recent humiliation by Israel—stymied the country’s political, economic, and military goals. As Henry Kissinger famously put it in 2006, "Iran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause"; since then, it has repeatedly opted for the cause.
Nasr begins his narration in earnest with the revolution, when the clerics overthrew the shah and kidnapped 66 American embassy employees. He concedes that "Iran’s foreign policy effectively abandoned any pragmatic considerations that could have involved engaging the United States; instead, it became a battle between good and evil."
So, too, did Ayatollah Khomeini’s determination to "export the revolution" to neighboring countries, entailing the expenditure of vast sums on proxy armies across the Levant, short-circuit any reasonable prospects of economic and political success. The absurd nine-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which claimed over one million lives and resulted in no territorial gains, served to consolidate the clerics’ viselike grip on the country and calcify its combative approach to foreign policy. Far from practical, Khomeini announced that "the path to Jerusalem ran through Karbala," a city in Iraq.
His successor as supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has proven even more conceptually rigid. Nasr observes that Khamenei regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the consequence of the dissipation of ideological vigilance and embrace of Western liberal ideas in its stead" and, accordingly, has steadfastly resisted any meaningful efforts at political or religious reform. He repeatedly crossed swords with would-be reformers within the regime, and he always prevailed. Nasr notes that, decades ago, Khamenei articulated a set of industrial, economic, cultural, and technological targets to be reached 20 years hence but candidly acknowledges that "Iran has not progressed on the goals of its Vision 2025." 
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