How Iran Won the West

Few events have symbolised the strength of Iranian soft power quite as effectively as an activist in Chicago last April urging his attentive American audience of ‘trainee protesters’ to chant ‘marg bar Emrika’ (‘death to America’). The bizarreness of the episode, footage of which was widely shared on social media, was made all the more acute by the dawning realisation that the chanting participants had little idea what they were being taught. There seemed at that moment to be few limits to the reach of Iranian soft power, as Ayatollah Khamenei, leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, thanked students on Western campuses for their ‘support’.

There can be little doubt that the devastating war in Gaza has been a (modest) boon to the image of the Iranian state abroad, even if it has failed to galvanise its own population in support of the Palestinian cause. Most Iranians, drowning in an ocean of domestic problems, are bewildered by the apparent appeal of the Islamic Republic beyond its borders.

Some aspects of that appeal can be easily explained, especially the growth of Iran’s regional influence. Western fatigue and indecisiveness have created a vacuum in the Middle East that the Iranians, well versed in the diplomatic arts, have been only too keen to exploit. An appreciation of regional languages, culture, a shared religion (notwithstanding the frictions between Shi’ism and Sunnism) and, above all, personal networks, have worked to Iran’s advantage. These have been helped by a liberal disbursement of funds and arms – and a willingness to thumb their noses at the United States.

This last point has proved important in enhancing Iranian prestige, especially as the US has proved reluctant to respond to its provocations, many of which have taken the form of rocket attacks by Iranian-backed local militias against US and other Western forces in the region. The perception of American weakness has encouraged some states, such as Saudi Arabia, to seek their own ‘peace’ with the Islamic Republic, drawing away from an explicitly Western orbit in the process.

This influence nonetheless has its limitations. As the Cold War in the Middle East has on occasion turned hot, Arab states have shown themselves reluctant to accede to all of Iran’s demands. It was notable that when Iran decided – unusually – to flex some hard power towards Israel in April 2024, a number of key regional states, not least Jordan, were unwilling to give it a free hand.

Guilty fools

But if Iran has worked hard to cultivate its regional influence – albeit with mixed success – it is much harder to explain its continuing appeal in the West, to which it has done very little to cultivate affection and very much to provoke hostility. One answer of course lies in its explicit and often bold antagonism towards Western governments, which appeals to many disaffected and disenchanted constituencies whose antipathy towards the US, and capitalism more broadly, trumps all.

The late Fred Halliday described this as the ‘anti-imperialism of fools’. In this telling, Iran becomes the plucky hero against a Western hegemony so malign and incompetent that Iran’s own misdemeanours are either justified or explained away. Asked, in 2015, whether the ‘death to America’ chants were evidence of an Iranian desire to destroy the US, then secretary of state John Kerry replied: ‘I have no specific knowledge of a plan by Iran to actually destroy us.’

Indeed, the sense that the West owes Iran for past misdemeanours (real and imagined) extends to many in office, and if the ghost of 1953 (the Anglo-American coup which overthrew prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq) hangs heavy in the public imagination, few appreciate just how distant the current regime is from Mosaddeq’s secular liberal ideals. Guilt about the past translates into generous interpretations today.

One notable recent example of this in action was the public attitude to the abrupt and unjustified incarceration of the British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Even if we accept the notion that Britain owed Iran money for undelivered tanks contracted before the revolution, there was no moral or legal justification for the abduction of a private citizen in pursuit of this claim. Yet throughout the tragic saga the muted criticism of Iran was as nothing compared to the opprobrium unleashed against the British state, which at times might have led some to conclude that it was the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office that had abducted her.
 

Word association

Such positioning, of course, has less to do with Iran’s innate appeal and more to do with a general antipathy towards the US and the broader Western world. It is in sum a push rather than a pull factor. It still does not explain the wider appeal that Iran enjoys despite its own best efforts to either ignore or insult the West. It is at best an observer of a process from which it undoubtedly benefits. Why? For this we need a deeper dive into the West’s relations with Iran, or more accurately ‘Persia’.

A good way to explore this proposition is to start with a basic exercise in word association. If you ask someone what they might immediately associate with the word Iran, the likely response would be ‘Islam’, ‘mullahs’ and, very possibly, ‘extremism’. If you then asked the same person what they might associate with Persia, the response is likely to be more exotic, civilised and even romantic. Persia conveys a set of sentiments which I often summarise as: cats, caviar and carpets. Both words relate to the same place, but one – Persia – relates to the traditional Western name and reading of the country. This is ironic when one considers that the Iranian government insisted on the native appellation Iran in all international correspondence in 1934 because they believed Persia conveyed an image of decadence and decay.

Much like the ancient Greeks, from whom many of the central ideas about Persia descend, Western appreciation of Persia is nuanced and respectful. Persia is part of the foundation myth of the ‘West’. Think of the centrality of ‘marathon’ races, invented as part of the modern Olympics, and now a feature of the sporting calendar of almost every major Western city. Reimagined in 1896 to make a connection with the glories of ancient Greece, it basically marks a Persian defeat. (To appreciate how curious this is one simply needs to replace ‘marathon’ with another significant battle.)

This classical inheritance is crucial to any understanding of the relationship between Iran and the West, especially when one recognises just how many of the Western political and intellectual elite would have read Classics as part of their general education. Westerners ‘knew’ Iran – or at least thought they did, and certainly appreciated the inherent sophistication that came with its longevity. The Iranians – Persians – were an ancient nation which, for all its foibles, commanded some respect.

This was further reinforced by biblical teaching in which the Persians were presented in a positive light through the dominant role played by Cyrus the Great in the liberation of the Jews from Babylon. If the Classics conveyed an aura of oriental despotism, in the Bible Persia had a distinctly enlightened quality. Cyrus in particular – reinforced in turn by Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (a great favourite of many Enlightenment thinkers) – became a byword for just government and liberalism. The name Cyrus was popular among North American Puritans and remains so in the US today. At least two (very different) presidents in recent memory – Barack Obama and Donald Trump – have been identified as the ‘new’ Cyrus, the latter by Evangelical Christians in the build-up to the 2020 elections when Trump-Cyrus ‘prayer coins’ were available for purchase.

People power

Western travellers to Iran in the modern period (after 1600) were regularly disappointed that the reality did not seem to match their Persian expectations. But even this never entirely eliminated Persia’s inherent romance. George Curzon may have painted late-19th-century Iran as a decrepit and ageing relative, but it was a relative nonetheless, while the noted Persianist Edward Browne was charmed by ‘the versatile and subtle wit’ of the Persians, even as he ridiculed the notion put about in the British press that the shah, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (1848-96), was a descendant of Cyrus.

As more travellers arrived in the 20th century – Iran was once part of the ‘hippy trail’ – the country’s distinctiveness proved as captivating as the familiarity of Persia. Besides, there remained subtle areas of familiarity between Iran and the West, not least in language – Persian is an Indo-European language and as such relatively accessible to Europeans – and culture, where Iranians appeared remarkably open-minded, iconoclastic and possessed of a literary oeuvre so vast that it exuded ‘civilisation’.

Iran benefits from the fact that Persia is part of a broader Western imagination. There is a reservoir of cultural goodwill that affords Iran a benefit of the doubt that would be refused others. It is a rare form of political capital that, while not wholly spent, is being denuded at some pace. Not least as the pace of protests and violent repression increases, and the gulf between the revolutionary state and ordinary Iranians becomes unignorable.

We might all learn from Edward Browne, whose Year Amongst the Persians (1892) taught him not to confuse the people with the government, a mistake he felt the British government were making and which many continue to make. If there is any benefit to be given, it should be reserved for the long-suffering people of Iran. They are the real producers of the nation’s cultural power.

Ali Ansari is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews. His latest book is Iran (Polity, 2024).