“WE don’t wish for war, but if it’s imposed on us, we won’t [shirk],” Iran’s last Shah (King of Kings) said in an interview at the height of his reign.
“[This is] our jugular vein; we live by that ... nobody could invade us without being forced to crush us, because we are not going to surrender,” he added, referring to his country’s military presence across the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important chokehold.
What makes the statement stunning is that it not only echoes the uncompromising rhetoric of Tehran’s current leadership but also that it came from America’s then closest partner in the Middle East. The Shah was so close to America that he managed to gain access to the much- vaunted “Top Gun” F-14 Tomcat fighters ahead of all United States allies on Earth.
He also convinced the US to help Iran build the foundations of what one day would become a sprawling nuclear programme. Far from vacuous chutzpah, the Shah reflected a millennia-old Persian strategic culture, namely the country’s profound sense of strategic destiny and a quest for a place of pride among “great powers” (Tamadonhaye-e-Bozorg).
In Persian Fire, historian Tom Holland argues that had the armies of emperors Darius and Xerxes fully vanquished Greek city-states such as Sparta, much of southern Europe and the cradle of “Western” civilisation would likely have become Persianate. Defeats at the hands of Macedonians, Arabs, and even Mongols didn’t end the Persian civilisation-state, though. If anything, it thrived again, but eastward.
“For nearly a millennium, Persian was the lingua franca of Asia: the language widely used by political and intellectual mandarins and necessary, too, for travellers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, who both deployed the language in China,” explains Pankaj Mishra, Indian novelist, essayist, and political commentator.
Against this backdrop, the Persian state has exhibited remarkable continuity across ages despite radical shifts in external attributes. Whereas the Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran tried to transform the country along Western lines into a major powerhouse, boasting the world’s fourth-largest military by the 1970s, the successor regime continued a different version of the same “grand strategy” under radically different circumstances.
Following the 1979 Revolution, which upended the decades-old Iran-US special partnership, Iran adopted Islamist revolutionary ideology as a bedrock of its quest for regional leadership. Necessity also played a role.
As Iranian-American historian Vali Nasr argues, Iran shifted to a “forward defence” strategy after suffering traumatic losses following a full-scale invasion by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime, which was backed by all major powers and almost the entirety of the Arab world. The upshot was an “Empire of Proxies”, which has allowed Tehran to project power across the Greater Middle East but also invite aggressive pushback by the US and its threatened allies.
Unable to access Western defence platforms due to sanctions, and unwilling to become overdependent on opportunistic Eastern powers like Russia and China, Iran instead built its own domestic defence industry. Home to the fifth-largest number of engineers on Earth, and blessed with the largest combined reserves of oil and gas, Iran always had a deep well of human and natural capital to draw on.
This explains why a nation under the world’s largest sanctions regime for the past half-century has managed to mass-produce modern missiles and drones, which have transformed 21st-century warfare not too dissimilar from how Ukraine humbled giant Russia.
“They clearly have a [massive] industrial base to support this,” former Admiral Rommel Ong told me when asked about Iran’s ability to sustain 50 waves of missile attacks recently.
The implication is clear: Iran can replenish its missile-and-drone armada, likely even amid war, since many production sites are underground. And this gives it an “escalation dominance” in the ongoing battle over control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Both Ukraine, the former cradle of Soviet-era industries, and Iran, a self-reliant semi-industrialised country, show that even midsized nations can become militarily formidable if they have a strong industrial-defence base.
Confronting the looming threat from China, which is threatening Philippine patrimony in the West Philippine Sea and operationally preparing for the invasion of Taiwan in the coming years, the Philippines should adopt a comprehensive industrial policy strategy, which both upgrades our service-oriented economy as well as the domestic defence industry. Unless we strengthen our state and industrial base, we remain helplessly vulnerable in a new world disorder. — Philippine Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network
Richard Heydarian is a Filipino political scientist, public thinker and media personality.
