In publishing, as in much of life, timing is everything. And by that measure, if by no other, Iran’s Grand Strategy, Vali Nasr’s latest analysis of the Islamic Republic, is a smashing success.

First available just two short weeks before Israel’s stunningly successful aerial campaign against the mullahs, Nasr’s book attempts—but fails—to frame the Islamic Republic as having "evolved into a prototypical nation-state" whose "aims are now secular in nature."

To Nasr, a professor and distinguished Middle East specialist at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies who emigrated from Iran to the United States after the ayatollahs seized power in 1979, Islam is merely "an instrument in the hands of [Iran’s] political class and military leaders to realize political and economic interests at home and define national interest abroad." Iran, he argues, is essentially a normal country following a rational path.

Yet Nasr’s analysis repeatedly undermines his own thesis, as history amply demonstrates how the regime’s insistence on religious and ideological purity has over and over again—including in its most recent humiliation by Israel—stymied the country’s political, economic, and military goals. As Henry Kissinger famously put it in 2006, "Iran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause"; since then, it has repeatedly opted for the cause.

Nasr begins his narration in earnest with the revolution, when the clerics overthrew the shah and kidnapped 66 American embassy employees. He concedes that "Iran’s foreign policy effectively abandoned any pragmatic considerations that could have involved engaging the United States; instead, it became a battle between good and evil."

So, too, did Ayatollah Khomeini’s determination to "export the revolution" to neighboring countries, entailing the expenditure of vast sums on proxy armies across the Levant, short-circuit any reasonable prospects of economic and political success. The absurd nine-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which claimed over one million lives and resulted in no territorial gains, served to consolidate the clerics’ viselike grip on the country and calcify its combative approach to foreign policy. Far from practical, Khomeini announced that "the path to Jerusalem ran through Karbala," a city in Iraq.

His successor as supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has proven even more conceptually rigid. Nasr observes that Khamenei regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the consequence of the dissipation of ideological vigilance and embrace of Western liberal ideas in its stead" and, accordingly, has steadfastly resisted any meaningful efforts at political or religious reform. He repeatedly crossed swords with would-be reformers within the regime, and he always prevailed. Nasr notes that, decades ago, Khamenei articulated a set of industrial, economic, cultural, and technological targets to be reached 20 years hence but candidly acknowledges that "Iran has not progressed on the goals of its Vision 2025."

In the 2000s, Iran turned toward developing its nuclear program, which Nasr unconvincingly claims "was motivated not by ideology but rather by deterrence and Tehran’s pursuit of national interest." The chaos wrought by the Iraq war spurred the mullahs to implement a costly strategy of "forward defense," i.e., empowering and arming Shiite militias across the border, who targeted American troops, and in Lebanon, where Hezbollah, whose leader vowed loyalty to Khamenei, menaced Israelis.

Soon thereafter, the ayatollahs invested heavily in shoring up the regime in Syria led by Basher al-Assad, a member of a Shiite offshoot, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, a Shiite group destabilizing another impoverished Arab country. Both adventures led the Islamic Republic more deeply into military and economic dependence on Russia. In parallel, the clerics cleverly advanced their nuclear ambitions diplomatically and scientifically, as a 2015 international agreement appeared more or less to ratify Iran’s self-proclaimed right to enrich uranium. And, at home, the regime continued to batter a struggling democratic opposition.

Things began to turn in 2018, when President Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal and successfully targeted the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Russia’s war in Ukraine drained Moscow’s resources and commitments to Tehran. Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel resulted in the pulverization of Hezbollah, which in turn collapsed the regime in Syria. Stripped of its proxies, the Islamic Republic’s leadership, nuclear sites, and ballistic missile facilities proved fatally vulnerable to Israeli airborne attacks in June. And now the regime itself teeters; the cause has subverted the nation.

Perhaps the most apt metaphor illustrating how the clerics’ slavish devotion to its genocidal ideology sabotages its objectives can be found in the "Doomsday Clock" the regime established in central Tehran, counting down the moments until 2040 when Israel will be destroyed. That clock went offline in 2021 amid massive nationwide power outages, and it was destroyed by an Israeli missile last month.

Apart from this basic misperception, Iran’s Grand Strategy suffers from other mischaracterizations. Nasr writes that "on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian group Hamas launched an audacious attack on Israeli towns and kibbutzim" without acknowledging what kind of group Hamas is (terroristic, bloodthirsty, merciless) or what kind of "audacious" attack it launched (a massacre of hundreds of women, children, elderly, and other innocent Israelis).

He also trumpets the "bold manifestation of the ascendance of the Axis of Resistance" that was "formed and backed by Iran" and that stretches through Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon without noting that Israel has over the past two years systematically dismantled and humbled that Axis. (Elsewhere, he labels as terrorism some of Iran’s activities abroad.) Less consequentially, yet embarrassingly, he also misattributes to John Lewis Gaddis Isaiah Berlin’s famous metaphor of the hedgehog and the fox.

To his credit, Nasr challenges the regnant progressive assumption that the Western powers engineered the 1953 coup that ousted the leftist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. "There is," he argues, "sufficient evidence to cast doubt on the idea that Washington and London acted as puppet masters deftly manipulating the street." He’s also unafraid to fault Mossadegh himself for his stubborn refusal to compromise. And he’s willing to criticize the regime for its repeated suppression of human rights, recognizing the "yawning chasm between state and society."

Indeed, Nasr does identify one notable Iranian leader who managed to unify the nation in a manner that was "nothing short of miraculous," but that leader was no mullah. He was Reza Shah Pahlavi, who in the 1920s "restored Iran’s territorial integrity, ended the chaos and decay, and built fundamental institutions for a modern state to propel commerce and industrialization."

Then, too, at times Nasr appears to appreciate how the mullahs’ ideology has reigned supreme. "The Islamic Republic’s wrongheaded pursuit of independence," Nasr admits, "only accentuated the very security concerns that Iran had long worried about." These words were written before Israel laid waste to the regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs in the Twelve Day War.

Hopefully now, at long last, the brave people of Iran shake off the ideological straitjacket the mullahs have used to restrain their subjects and achieve the freedom and prosperity they so richly deserve. Then, and only then, can Iran again become a normal country.

Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History
by Vali Nasr
Princeton University Press, 408 pp., $35

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.