The entrenched crisis of the Iranian regime and the fierce wars raging across the Middle East cannot be properly understood without looking into the deep roots of the complex relationship between religion and politics in Iran. This is not a recent phenomenon but one that stretches back centuries, taking various forms while retaining its essence: an ongoing struggle for power between religious legitimacy and the demands of modern statecraft and international law.
At the turn of the twentieth century, as the Qajar state weakened, what became known as the Constitutional Revolution emerged as an early attempt to escape the impasse by establishing a hybrid system that merged modern institutions and religious authority. The clerics played a proactive role in this experiment, but they could never settle the question of their place within it: were they partners of the authorities or the guardians of the system?
This unresolved duality triggered infighting that ultimately undermined the experiment. It collapsed swiftly, leaving a vacuum filled by a military man, Reza Shah, who decided to settle the matter by force. He imposed a coercive modernization program modeled on the authoritarian movements then ascendant in Europe.
This top-down modernization, however, was never anchored in institutions, as it had in Türkiye. It remained disconnected from the country’s social and cultural fabric, resting on the authority of a single man. With the Second World War, Britain and Russia intervened, removing the fascist-leaning Reza Shah and reconstituting political authority with his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, at the center. Here, the old question resurfaced: how does one reconcile a modern state with a religious network deeply embedded in society.
In 1953, Mohammad Mosaddegh tried something different. He built his experiment on national independence through the nationalization of oil, but it did not, as the prevailing narrative holds, fail solely because of foreign intervention and the effort to curtail outside influence. Internal forces also played a decisive role, among them elements of the religious establishment, foremost Abol Qasem Kashani, as they felt excluded from power. Mosaddegh rejected their tutelage, and so the Shah returned from his exile in Rome, this time more convinced than ever that he could tolerate no partners in his modernization effort.
In the 1970s, riding the oil boom, the Shah plunged into an ambitious modernization project accompanied and marginalized the religious establishment without the latter vanishing. It had been expanding in the shadows, drawing on social and historical networks that go back to the Safavid era. When the revolution erupted in 1979, it was not merely a popular uprising but a historic rupture that carried the clergy from the margins of the state to the center.
Yet the new experiment embodied in “Velayat-e Faqih” was not so much a return to the past as it was a complex system determined not to repeat historic mistakes. Combining religious legitimacy with security apparatuses and political economy, this political system succeeded in consolidating domestically through mechanisms of control. However, it faced another dilemma around how to justify its existence in the region.
Its answer was expansion, creating replicas of itself. It began establishing active or dormant subordinate militias across the Arab neighborhood to serve its objectives. As previous empires had done, Iran sought to extend its regional influence by exploiting power vacuums in the Arab world, particularly in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. Some of its officials spoke openly of this reach as a natural extension of Iran's power.
Anyone who reads the literature of this regime and the texts of certain Iranian officials can recognize that this expansion was not a tactical phase but part of a broader vision that revived the concept of “Lebensraum” under ideological pretexts.
But history teaches us that expansion undermines empires more often than it empowers them. Japan, in the first half of the twentieth century, peaked through expansion only to pay a devastating price when it collided with the international order. The Soviet Union similarly collapsed in part because of its overreach. With Iran, the expansionist project appears to have exceeded the state's capacity to sustain it, especially under the weight of economic pressure, international isolation, and the endurance of its neighbors.
The war underway today is not merely a military confrontation. It is a profound test of the idea that has governed the system since its founding: the fusion of doctrine and power, of the domestic and the foreign, within a single project. This war appears, in one way or another, to be redefining Iran's place in the world, from fantasies on an imperial project to a nation-state with clearly defined borders and interests.
The real question is not whether the regime will change, but how it will adapt to this shift. Iranian history is full of transformations, but it is equally brimming with attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable. Today the regime stands before a familiar function: either it redefines itself within the logic of the modern state, or it continues to chase an imperial dream that has no place in a world whose rules are changing fast.
The bottom line is this: the contemporary world has no room for empires.
