This essay situates the wars of 2025 and 2026 within a longer genealogy of state resistance in modern Iran. It argues that the Islamic Republic’s strategic victory against Israeli and US aggression must be read against a century-long discourse that has made autonomy, nonalignment, and resistance to imperial and colonial domination central to Iranian statecraft. Its claim of victory is therefore historical and asymmetrical, measured against a modern experience in which imposed wars repeatedly produced territorial loss, occupation, foreign domination, humiliation, or prolonged attrition. The essay traces state resistance from Sayyed Hassan Modarres’ neutralism, through the nonalignment discourses of the National Front and their successors, alongside religious currents that linked anti-dependence to authenticity and Islam, to its revolutionary synthesis under ‘Neither East nor West’. After 1979, this discourse became a governing doctrine extending across military, political, economic, and cultural fields. The first imposed war consolidated its logic, while indigenous defense capabilities, the Axis of Resistance, and the resistance economy expanded afterwards. The essay argues that the second and third imposed wars vindicated the pursuit of true independence as state resistance’s central claim: a comprehensive conception of independence capable of sustaining autonomy and defining the terms of survival against imperial power.
Sina Emami (Mon,) studied this question.