What Liberals and Conservatives Get Wrong About the Islamic Republic

Both liberals and conservatives in the West tend to misread the nature of revolutionary movements.

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This is a guest essay by Samuel J. Hyde, a Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The past week has shattered an assumption that quietly governed Middle Eastern foreign policy for decades.

The joint American–Israeli war against the regime in Tehran has violently interrupted the rhythm that long defined the Islamic Republic’s relationship with the outside world.

For years, the regime moved through a familiar cycle: confrontation followed by negotiation, escalation followed by diplomatic reprieve. The pattern created the impression that the Islamic Republic was not merely durable but permanent, another entrenched feature of the regional order.

That assumption has now been broken. By abandoning the incremental strategies that had characterized American policy for years and moving directly against one of the world’s most entrenched revolutionary regimes, Washington and Jerusalem have disrupted the aura of permanence that had come to surround the Islamic Republic’s rule.

To understand why this moment carries such uncertainty, however, one must look beyond the immediate military events and confront a deeper misunderstanding — one that has shaped Western thinking about revolutionary regimes for more than a century. Both liberals and conservatives in the West tend to misread the nature of revolutionary movements.

The revolutionary does not inhabit the same moral or psychological landscape as the liberal reformer or the conservative traditionalist. For the revolutionary, the present world is not something to improve or preserve. It is something to abolish.

This distinction may seem obvious in theory. Yet in practice it has repeatedly been misunderstood. Modern revolutionary movements are organized around a particular structure of time. The present is treated as illegitimate, a corrupt order whose institutions must be swept away. Redemption lies elsewhere — either in a promised future or in a mythologized past. The existing world becomes nothing more than a temporary bridge between these two imagined states of purity.

History offers many examples of this logic. In 1917, the Bolsheviks did not seek to reform the Russian Empire; they sought to destroy it. The revolutionary promise was not improvement but rupture, the birth of an entirely new social order that would replace the existing one. Violence was not a tragic necessity but a historical instrument.

A similar dynamic appeared in Germany in 1933. National Socialism framed itself as a revolutionary rebirth of the nation, a moment in which the corrupt liberal order of the Weimar Republic would be swept away in favor of a purified political community. Again the present was treated as illegitimate, an obstacle that had to be removed before the future could begin.

The pattern repeated itself in the revolutionary movements of the 20th century’s so-called Third World. Mao’s revolutionaries imagined history beginning anew through permanent struggle. The Khmer Rouge, the communist regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, carried the idea to its most extreme conclusion, attempting to erase society itself in pursuit of a purified revolutionary world.

Different ideologies, different continents, different historical contexts — yet the same intellectual structure appears again and again. The existing order must first be destroyed before redemption can begin. It is precisely this structure that liberal and conservative political traditions often fail to grasp.

The liberal instinct is to believe that political conflict can be moderated through reform. Institutions can improve. Economic development can soften ideological rigidity. Diplomacy and negotiation can transform enemies into stakeholders within a shared international order.

The conservative approaches the problem from a different direction, but often reaches a similar conclusion. Stability, tradition, and hierarchy embody the accumulated wisdom of societies. If revolutionary turbulence can be contained long enough, order will eventually reassert itself.

Both outlooks therefore share a common premise: that the present world contains something worth preserving. The revolutionary rejects that premise entirely. Because liberals and conservatives see value in the existing order, they assume others must eventually see it as well. They therefore attempt to buy off the revolutionary. Economic incentives, diplomatic recognition, political inclusion, or security guarantees are offered in the hope that prosperity, legitimacy, or prestige will gradually replace revolutionary passion.

But this misunderstands the structure of revolutionary belief. Material gains are acceptable only insofar as they strengthen the revolutionary project. This dynamic helps explain why Western diplomacy repeatedly misreads moments of calm. When Western governments speak of peace, they often mean stability or the absence of immediate violence. Within that framework, a ceasefire or a negotiation appears as progress.

Revolutionary doctrine operates according to a different logic. Ceasefires create time to rebuild. Negotiations create time to reorganize. Periods of calm allow militias to rearm, networks to expand, and ideological influence to deepen. What appears from the outside as de-escalation may simply be the next phase of a longer confrontation.

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran operated precisely according to this logic. It was not simply a state pursuing traditional national interests; it was the most disciplined exporter of Islamism in the modern world. Now-assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did not see himself as the custodian of a nation-state. He saw himself as the guardian of a revolution whose ambitions extended far beyond Iran’s borders.

Iran served as the base from which this revolutionary project expanded outward. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, militias across Iraq and Syria — each became a component in a widening ideological network. Oil revenues became instruments of expansion. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps served as the backbone of an neo-imperial infrastructure built through proxies, intelligence channels, and ideological training. What emerged was not traditional diplomacy but a revolutionary ecosystem, a system of influence assembled gradually through armed movements and political alliances.

And throughout these decades, the West largely approached the Islamic Republic as it would any other state. Policymakers assumed that incentives, negotiations, and economic integration could alter the regime’s behavior.

This assumption reached its most visible expression in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iranian nuclear deal. The logic behind the agreement was straightforward and deeply rooted in Western political thinking: Diplomacy would moderate the regime, economic relief would create incentives for responsible conduct, and a government benefiting from global integration would have something to lose from confrontation.

The result was an extraordinary flow of resources into the Iranian system. Sanctions relief returned tens of billions of dollars to Tehran. International markets reopened. The regime gained renewed financial oxygen. Of course, none of this altered the trajectory of the regime. Iran continued advancing its nuclear program. Ballistic missile development accelerated. Funding for proxy militias expanded. The strategic objective remained unchanged: the endangering of Israel, the weakening of Western influence, and the gradual expansion of Iran’s ideological sphere.

Seen from this perspective, the story of the past four decades becomes clearer. The Islamic Republic was never attempting to normalize itself within the international order; it was attempting to reshape that order. For decades, negotiation alternated with regime expansion. Diplomatic engagement alternated with proxy warfare. Each apparent moment of moderation only generated resources that sustained the long campaign.

In the past week, however, that rhythm has been violently interrupted with the opening of an American–Israeli war against the regime. What follows is now uncertain. Russian–British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once warned that the belief in history unfolding according to predictable laws is among the most dangerous illusions of modern political thought.

If fortune favors the Americans and Israelis (and, really, the entire free world), the consequences could be historic. One can imagine protests reigniting across Iran, this time encouraged by the regime’s ever-increasing vulnerability. The presence of American and Israeli air power may complicate the regime’s ability to repeat the mass repression it unleashed against protesters at the beginning of this year. Under such conditions the possibility arises, faint but real, of a post-revolutionary Iran — a country that might finally step away from the ideological ambitions which have shaped its foreign policy since the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Another scenario, however, lurks beneath the surface. The regime’s military apparatus may conclude that survival requires internal rearrangement. A coup from within the security establishment could be presented to the world as the end of the Islamic Republic. Yet appearances can deceive. Such an outcome will replace one configuration of authoritarian power with another, preserving the machinery of repression and the habits of regional confrontation while discarding a few symbolic figures and ideals at the top.

This leaves one final question hanging over the present moment. Everything now depends on how far the United States and Israel are prepared to go. Whether this intervention becomes the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic, or merely another episode in its long confrontation with the existing world order, will depend on whether the architects of this campaign see their project through to its conclusion.

The worst outcome would be a return to the familiar pattern in which war dissolves back into negotiation while the revolutionary regime remains intact. Such regimes are more than patient. They survive pauses, recover from setbacks, and return to the struggle with renewed determination. If this moment is to break that cycle, it cannot end halfway.

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