Dogmatic Slumber
Seeing Iran's regime clearly through the fog of war
For decades, Iran has been engaged in wide-ranging campaigns of terrorism, proxy conflicts, subversion and a genocidal war against Israel. But the rules of international relations seem not to apply to them.
For example, just weeks after murdering thousands, Iran was elected vice-chair of the UN commission on social development “whose priority theme will be promoting democracy, gender equality, and ensuring tolerance and non-violence.”
Why is this?
First, the comprehensive support that Iran enjoys from China, Russia, Pakistan and other corrupt and/or authoritarian states counts for a great deal.
Yet Iran’s long-term impunity cannot be explained by support from dictators alone.
In Iran’s case, leading democracies seem to have suspended judgement. We treat Khomeinist regime violence as insensate — a series of inevitable or uncaused effects. To see why, we need to cite four interlocking factors:
Ideological capture: Parts of the academy, media, and NGO world have long framed the Islamic Republic as an authentic ‘anti-imperialist’ force resisting U.S. hegemony and Israeli power. This view goes back to the 1979 revolution itself, which some intellectuals initially romanticized. It hardened during the era of the Iraq war and post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ fatigue. Iran’s self-presentation as champion of the ‘oppressed’ (Palestinians, Shia communities, Global South) aligned neatly with a post-colonial willingness to prioritize Western sins over theocratic repression. Terms like ‘axis of resistance’ were often adopted uncritically, making it difficult to counter Hamas infiltration of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, the UN Relief and Works Agency or the government of Lebanon at all levels. This uncritical attitude was not universal — some conservative outlets, Israeli media, Gulf Arab states, and Iranian dissidents highlighted the threat — but it prevailed in media and universities.
Iran’s sophisticated influence and disinformation apparatus: Tehran runs documented ‘soft war’ programs targeting democratic elites. The leaked post-2014 Iran Experts Initiative showed the Foreign Ministry cultivating academics, think-tank analysts, and journalists in Europe, the US, UK, Canada and other countries to place sympathetic op-eds, shape policy debates, and downplay threats — sometimes via ghostwriting. Iran operates state media (Press TV), proxies, and cyber networks that amplify ‘both-sides’ or victimhood narratives on social platforms, exploiting open democratic debate without reciprocal access. Iran also has well-known, large-scale initiatives targeting cultural, academic, student and diaspora groups.
Policy and economic incentives for ‘engagement’: European governments and the Obama administration during the post-2015 era of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) prioritized nuclear diplomacy and trade over confrontation. Highlighting Iran’s full aggression would have complicated deal-making, sanctions relief, and Airbus/Boeing sales. Post-Iraq/Afghanistan war weariness reinforced reluctance to “beat the drums” for another conflict. Realpolitik also played a role: some saw Iran as a counterweight to Sunni extremism or a market worth courting. This created a feedback loop where media echoed official talking points about ‘moderate’ factions and ‘pragmatic’ Rouhani or Zarif.
Asymmetric aggression is harder to dramatize: Unlike Russia’s tanks rolling into Ukraine or China’s South China Sea bases, Iran’s method — deniable proxies, missiles via Houthis, assassinations via cutouts — is diffuse and incremental. The Israel-Palestine framework often subsumes Iran’s role into a broader ‘cycle of violence’; Tehran’s eliminationist rhetoric and arming of proxies are downplayed. Narratives focus on protests, crackdowns and sanctions — but rarely on long-term effects on Iran’s people or the Middle East as a whole. The regime kills thousands — in January it killed tens of thousands — but rarely produces a single ‘shock’ image that sustains outrage. There is still no visual from the January 2026 state-sponsored mass slaughter of Iranian protesters analogous to ‘tank man’ on Tiananmen square in 1989. This allows narratives of ‘mutual escalation’ to persist.
In the preface to a book published in 1783, philosopher Immanuel Kant credited his encounter with the skepticism of David Hume, whom he had first read in the 1760s, with awakening him from a “dogmatic slumber”.
For too long, our political debate has given Iran’s aggression a virtual pass. The regime weaponizes Western divisions and deploys its own hybrid toolkit. It prioritizes revolutionary violence over the welfare of Iranians — and is putting the stability of the whole Middle East into jeopardy. It’s time to wake up to the reality of an aggressive, revolutionary Iran. We need to put aside dogmatism, knee-jerk anti-Americanism and resurgent Anti-Semitism to see this threat as it is.
Dogmatic Slumber
Seeing Iran's regime clearly through the fog of war
Response to Chris Alexander
Chris,
I read this slowly, and I suspect where it comes from.
Not just the argument—but the frustration behind it.
Because what you are pushing against is real: the sense that something persistent, long-running, and consequential has been treated as diffuse, or secondary, or somehow explainable away.
And that creates a kind of intellectual impatience— the feeling that we have been looking at something directly, and still not quite seeing it.
But I wonder if part of the difficulty is not only what we are seeing, but how we are trying to see it.
Your four factors—ideology, influence, incentives, asymmetry—are all valid in themselves.
They describe mechanisms.
They explain why responses have been inconsistent, delayed, or muted.
But they also point to something slightly different:
👉 not a failure to see, but a system that processes threats unevenly.
Because democracies do not react to intent alone.
They react to:
clarity
attribution
scale
and timing
And Iran, for decades, has operated precisely in the spaces where those are blurred.
Not absent.
Blurred.
What is hardest to confront is not always what is hidden— but what is visible without ever becoming decisive.
That is where I would gently shift your framing.
It is not only that Iran’s actions are misunderstood.
It is that they are distributed.
Across:
proxies
regions
timelines
thresholds of escalation
And that distribution matters.
Because it prevents accumulation into a single, unambiguous moment of response.
Russia crossing a border produces a line.
Iran rarely produces lines.
It produces gradients.
And gradients are politically difficult.
They invite interpretation.
They sustain disagreement.
They delay decisions.
So yes—there has been, at times, ideological indulgence.
Yes—there are influence operations.
Yes—policy incentives have shaped perception.
But even without those, the structure of the problem would remain difficult.
Because the question democracies keep asking is not:
👉 Is this harmful?
But:
👉 Is this the moment to act?
And with Iran, that moment is always just slightly deferred.
You also point to something else that I think is important:
the absence of a single defining image.
That matters more than we often admit.
Political systems—especially open ones— still respond to symbols.
To moments that crystallise complexity into something undeniable.
Without that, even very real patterns remain… arguable.
But there is another layer here.
If we step back from actors and look at structure, what we see is something broader:
👉 a system where different types of power operate on different clocks.
Conventional military power → immediate, visible
Economic pressure → delayed, measurable
Information and proxy power → cumulative, ambiguous
Iran has leaned heavily into the third.
And the third does not trigger responses in the same way.
Not because it is less significant.
But because it is harder to resolve.
Systems struggle not with what they ignore— but with what they cannot resolve cleanly.
That, I think, is where your argument becomes strongest—
and where it might also be sharpened.
Not by saying:
👉 “we have been asleep”
But by asking:
👉 “why does this type of pressure not produce the same response as others?”
Because that question moves the discussion from moral clarity (which you already have) to structural understanding (which makes it harder to dismiss).
And it avoids something I suspect you are not aiming for:
reducing disagreement to bad faith or blindness.
Most of the time, it is neither.
It is systems operating with different thresholds, trying to decide when ambiguity becomes certainty.
And with Iran, that threshold has been repeatedly approached— but rarely crossed in a way that forces convergence.
Which leaves us where we are:
not in a dogmatic slumber, but in a prolonged state of incomplete recognition.
And that is, in its own way, a more difficult place to move from.
Because waking up is easy when something is clearly asleep.
Recognising a pattern that never quite resolves— that takes longer.
But that, I think, is the conversation your piece is opening.
And it is a worthwhile one.