Iran’s growing strategic ambitions

“Iran has come out of these wars now stronger, and the United States, which is the main patron and ally of Israel, has come out weaker.” That is the core assessment Vali Nasr, author of Iran’s Grand Strategy and professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, offers Gideon Rachman on The Rachman Review. The episode dissects how Iran’s leadership has transformed a war that was supposed to topple the Islamic Republic into a strategic windfall—seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, extracting new demands from Washington, and fundamentally altering the balance of power in the Middle East.

The unchanged goal, the transformed method

Iran’s grand strategy has not changed in its ultimate objective: it still sees the United States as the primary existential threat and is committed to pushing American military power away from its borders. What has changed, Nasr explains, is the means. Under the new leadership in Tehran, Iran has discovered that the Strait of Hormuz is a far more powerful strategic lever than its nuclear program ever was. Closing the strait was initially a wartime tactic, but Iran quickly realized it could be used to force concessions from the United States that years of nuclear negotiations had failed to deliver. Crucially, the war also proved that America’s most potent tool against Iran—aerial bombardment and missile strikes, short of a full land invasion—no longer works.