Rarely have things been like this; there are few instances in history where any party felt that confronting the entire world was a condition for its survival and victory. The strikes of Iran, with almost no interval between one strike and the next, have hit Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Cyprus. It has also, in one way or another, hit international shipping, especially in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as oil refineries and export routes. That, in addition to their military bases and interests, has placed countries of the European Union in the line of fire as well.
A number of Arab and Western observers and commentators were struck by the way Iran has antagonized Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar, especially since some of them had waged political and diplomatic battles to prevent this war on Iran, while others had led mediation efforts to contain escalation.
If it were not for the stark human and economic costs of war, and all the suffering they bring, parts of this picture would be ridiculous: Hezbollah, for example, by shelling a base of British soldiers in Cyprus, threatened to pit Lebanon against Britain and, by extension, NATO.
The fact is that we are witnessing something like the practical application of the slogans that ultra radical organizations and revolutionaries had once raised in the 1960s and 1970s: “Let every land become Vietnam” or “Strike the enemy everywhere,” thereby rendering “everywhere” a potential source of enmity.
All of that has happened without Iran receiving anything beyond rhetorical support from major states like China and Russia. Indeed, Western media outlets did not hesitate to speculate about how Beijing would view Iran deciding to close of the Strait of Hormuz, given the costs it would inevitably suffer as a result, or how these two major countries, China and Russia, would conceive of harm to their economies as a consequence of the damage to the region’s economies caused by the war.
Only leaders who feel that this kind of conflictual relationship with the world is a prerequisite for victory and their politics could take such a radically uncompromising approach. In this way, enmity becomes a rolling concept that cannot be defined once and for all. Instead of expanding their circle of friends and narrowing the circle of enemies, as warriors typically would during a conflict, we find the exact opposite principle: Iran’s circle of friends (or the circle of neutral or potentially neutral countries) is being narrowed as its circle of enemies expands.
If we take a step beyond the political and military surface, however, we could claim that this approach does not merely reflect a wartime position within the balance of power. More fundamentally, it reflects an irreconcilability with the world in its broadest sense. It sees no reassuring friendships anywhere. It is well known that the regime in Tehran and its Velayet-e-Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist) doctrine has no parallel anywhere on the face of the planet. It is not without significance, then, that the drive to transform the region- country by country- and its effort to undermine their relations with influential international powers, have been part of its approach from the very beginning.
The rise of the Khomeinist revolution in 1979 led to the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran, with its staff taken hostage. That is how Iran decided to present its birth certificate, which was unique not only in its violation of diplomatic norms, but also in another equally important respect: the extent of hostility it showed the United States that was not- and this happened during the Cold War- linked to a friendly relationship with the Soviet Union and its bloc. On the contrary, Iran consistently affirmed its hostility to “atheist communism” and continued to clamp down on the Iranian Communist Party. At the same time, albeit less importantly, Iran was not known for, as revolutionary forces in the “Third World” did, cultivating friendships with European factions hostile to American policy, nor with influential Americans opposed to their government.
Moreover, one of the first things the revolutionaries did was announce their categorical rejection of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Treaty of 1979, the very year of Khomeini’s victory. It took this hard line despite the fact that the mainstream global view was that the treaty had been an immense victory for peace and a break with a history of perpetual conflict. In doing so, Tehran thus took the conflict back to before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s acceptance of Resolution 242 and the Rogers Plan. When President Anwar al-Sadat was assassinated, it paid tribute to his killer, Khalid al-Islambouli, with a stamp, and it named a street in Tehran after him.
While Lebanon, through a kind of implicit consensus, had been regarded as a country best kept neutral from regional conflicts, and Yemen was seen as an exceptionally sensitive place of immense strategic importance for a great many states and for their economic interests, Iran’s policy was built in explicit opposition to both considerations, disregarding these concerns outright.
As for the friends the Islamic Republic did form, they were either with Islamist or radical organizations, most of which it itself helped create, or regimes that the world’s influential states had had strong reservations and suspicions about.
And those, broadly speaking, are the characteristics of the regime’s formative origins, and they might help us understand certain aspects of this war and some of the policies that underpin it.
