Iran must choose between paranoia and pragmatism

Iran is in a war that it did not choose in full, yet helped to script in part. The country is also in a leadership rupture that no missile can resolve. Outsiders will claim authorship of the outcome — Washington by force, Israel by daring, Russia or China by opportunism, Europe by handwringing. But Iran’s future, in the end, can only be decided by Iranians — by what they consent to build, and what they refuse to tolerate.

That is not romantic nationalism. It is strategic realism. Military campaigns can shatter infrastructure; sanctions can starve investment; covert action can decapitate elites. None of that produces legitimacy. And legitimacy, more than centrifuges, proxies, or slogans, is what decides whether a country regenerates after trauma or sinks into permanent siege.

Iran has been living through a leadership crisis for more than a century, and the issue keeps reappearing in different costumes. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 produced a Majles and a constitutional framework that many Iranians still cite as the origin of modern political legitimacy — only to be battered by internal factionalism and foreign pressure. The Pahlavis modernized at speed — schools, infrastructure, law codes — while relying on top-down social engineering that treated citizens less as partners than as raw material. The 1979 revolution promised dignity, authenticity, and justice; it delivered a hybrid system where popular politics exist, but ultimate sovereignty is anchored in the doctrine of Vilayat-e-Faqih (guardianship of the jurist), embedded in the post-revolution constitution.

Then came the trauma that hardened everything: the Iran-Iraq war, and eight years of mass death and insecurity. Iran’s strategic reflex — building buffers, cultivating proxies, distrusting the West — has always drawn energy from that wound, as well as from an older one: the 1953 coup that removed Mohammed Mosaddegh and restored the shah, funded by the US and Britain. When nations feel repeatedly violated, paranoia becomes policy. Sometimes it is even rational paranoia.

What makes this moment so dangerous is not only the violence, but also the direction it is taking. Today’s war is widening in the wrong direction. Iranian strikes that spill into the Gulf, dragging Gulf Cooperation Council states into the line of fire, are not “clever escalation.” They are the opposite: a masterclass in turning potential neutrals into motivated adversaries. Analysts have long warned that attacks on Gulf states risk collapsing Gulf neutrality and hardening alignment with the US, widening the anti-Iran coalition rather than splitting it.

This is not merely a diplomatic error. It is an economic own-goal. When shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is threatened, the Gulf is not just a bystander; Iran is clogging the artery. The disruption hits energy markets, logistics and, often overlooked, strategic inputs like helium supply that matters for chipmaking and the AI buildout. Qatar is a major helium exporter; disruption there ripples into semiconductor production and the broader technology economy. If Iran’s goal is to “turn the war into a quagmire for America,” widening the theater to the GCC is a poor way to do it. Quagmires are built by isolating your enemy, not by recruiting friends for them.

There is a second strategic danger: Escalation into the Gulf accelerates Israel’s “day after” vision — an approach that treats fragmentation in neighboring states as a form of security. In Syria, Israel’s leadership has publicly framed policy around demilitarizing swathes of territory and “protecting” specific communities, notably the Druze, in a way that signals comfort with the weakening of central authority. In parallel, Israel’s political imagination for the region increasingly flirts with the idea that semi-autonomous enclaves — ethnic, sectarian, and tribal — can substitute for coherent states.

Meanwhile, credible reporting has described Israeli efforts in the Palestinian arena to arm or empower local militias or clan-based groups as alternative power structures — tactics that can create semi-autonomous pockets and complicate any future reconstitution of credible governance. Whatever one thinks of Hamas, building politics out of armed local fiefdoms is not a blueprint for stability. It is a blueprint for permanent instability, a transaction whose costs are paid in blood and aid convoys.

For Israel the assumption behind fragmentation-as-security is seductive and mistaken. Seductive because it promises a neighbor too divided to coordinate. Mistaken because it produces chronic instability, border volatility, radicalization, and endless micro-conflicts that spill outward. A shattered neighborhood does not become safe; it becomes permanently flammable.

Iran should recognize the trap. A strategy of making the war painful for the US and its partners can end up validating Israel’s most short-sighted instincts — more fragmentation, more local proxies, more “community-based” buffers — and locking the region into a decades-long contest of centrifugal forces. If Tehran’s idea is to turn this war into a quagmire for the US, it may find it is accelerating the very Israeli approach that ensures the region never exits the cycle of insecurity.

There is a better option, and it requires an Iranian policy pivot that many in Tehran will instinctively resist because it feels like concession. It is not concession. It is the oldest form of statecraft: regrouping.

Iran’s strongest move is not to widen the war. It is to narrow the battlefield and widen the coalition for stability. That means an inclusion diplomacy that rebuilds functional alignment with the GCC and Turkiye around three interests that are fundamental, civilized, and therefore revolutionary in this region: stability of borders and shipping routes; economic development and investment confidence; and insulation of domestic pluralism from external manipulation.

The region, including the Gulf, does not need an Iran that wins by making everyone lose. It needs an Iran that wins by making normal life possible again.

Jamil K. Mroue

This is not a utopian “regional harmony” pitch. It is a hard-nosed way to create a strategic incentive for the US — still the dominant superpower — to prefer a stable, investable region rather than a permanent crisis theater that bleeds resources while China expands influence through trade, infrastructure, and technology. Even American strategists who love hard power understand bandwidth. If Washington is forced to prioritize continuous Middle East firefighting, it reduces its ability to compete with China elsewhere. An Iran that repositions itself as part of a stability bloc, rather than the engine of perpetual disruption, changes the cost-benefit calculus in Washington in a way missiles never will.

Iran’s dilemma is not new. It is written into its civilizational self-understanding, most famously in Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh.” This 10th-century epic poem is not just myth; it is a long meditation on legitimacy, kingship, and the ruin that comes when power confuses itself with the nation.

In the tragedy of Rostam and Esfandiyar, a paranoid king, Goshtasp, turns Iran’s two noblest forces against each other. Rostam is the heroic vitality of the realm: independent strength, rooted confidence, national endurance. Esfandiyar is disciplined legitimacy: duty, mission, order, the serious idea of the state. Goshtasp, fearing his own son’s stature, commands Esfandiyar to bring Rostam in chains, manufacturing a conflict within Iran. The result is a duel that destroys a prince, poisons the victor, and weakens the realm.

That is the model of besieged leadership: insecure, divisive, jealous, willing to sacrifice national cohesion to preserve personal dominance. Many Iranians would recognize the pattern in modern clothing. It is not hard to see how a leadership that lives by siege can become addicted to siege, needing external enemies to justify internal control.

What the region hopes — quietly, pragmatically, selfishly — is that Iran will choose a different archetype of leadership: one that harnesses Rostam’s energy and Esfandiyar’s steadfastness without weaponizing them against each other; one that is closer to the Shahnameh ideal of just rule often associated with Kay Khosrow, the king who embodies justice, restraint, and legitimacy rooted in moral order rather than fear. That ideal is not a fairytale; it is a cultural argument about what authority is for.

History is cruel but occasionally generous: civilizational opportunity often springs from war. Countries have turned defeat into renewal when the shock forces institutional reform, resets corrupt bargains, and makes real competence politically irresistible. But this only happens when leadership stops behaving like a besieged Goshtasp — lashing out, widening enemies, tightening the internal corral — and starts behaving like a Kay Khosrow: restraining ego, privileging justice, and aligning strength to rebuilding.

For Iran, that means three immediate strategic corrections.

First, stop treating the GCC as a pressure point. It is a strategic bridge. Attacking Gulf states invites exactly the coalition Tehran fears, while poisoning the economic environment Iran itself will need for recovery.

Second, deny Israel the fragmentation narrative. The region’s answer to partition logic is not counter-partition; it is coordinated support for intact states and accountable governance, so that “minority protection” is not weaponized into permanent dismemberment.

Third, convert “resistance” from a militarized brand into a diplomatic architecture: stabilize borders, de-escalate proxy theaters, and make investment and growth the new national prestige project. That, far more than theatrical escalation, creates strategic interest for the US — because it lowers Washington’s regional policing bill while freeing attention for its competition with China.

Iran can continue to fight like a cornered state and become the justification for every hard-liner’s fantasy map. Or it can fight — politically, economically, and institutionally — for a post-war settlement that restores its dignity through competence and stability. The region, including the Gulf, does not need an Iran that wins by making everyone lose. It needs an Iran that wins by making normal life possible again.

Ferdowsi’s lesson is brutally modern: When leadership is insecure, it turns heroes into enemies. When leadership is just, it turns strength into a future.

• Jamil K. Mroue is Lebanese writer and previous editor of Al-Hayat newspaper in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.
• This article was originally published in Gulf Times