Ehsan Kashfi, University of Copenhagen

On November 7, 2025, the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a choreographed public celebration broadcast live on state television, unveiled a new statue in Tehran’s Enghelab (Revolution) Square depicting Shapur I, the Sasanian shah, standing triumphantly over the kneeling figure of Valerian, the Roman emperor he captured in battle in AD 260. For a regime that has long claimed to ground its legitimacy in Islamic revolutionary ideology, this monument seemed a stunning ideological shift that took nearly everyone by surprise. And the irony of the location was hard to miss: the very square that revolutionaries renamed from “Reza Shah” to “Enghelab [Revolution]” in 1979 now has a monument celebrating a shah of pre-Islamic Iran. In forty-six years of the Islamic Republic, this early period of history had never received such clear and deliberate state-sanctioned celebration, despite the regime’s periodic flirtations with nationalist symbolism.

This symbolic gesture is but one manifestation of broader and more consequential changes that have reshaped the Middle East in ways unimaginable just two years ago. Iranian missiles have struck Israeli cities directly. Israeli-American bombing has devastated Iran’s military infrastructure. Hezbollah has been significantly degraded, the Assad regime has fallen, and the “Axis of Resistance” that Tehran spent three decades building has, in many ways, weakened significantly. These dramatic changes on the ground might conceal similar changes at the ideological level. Iran, long studied as the paradigmatic ideological actor in Middle Eastern international relations. For decades, while the academic literature has been more nuanced, the Islamic Republic has been represented in popular and policy discourse as a state whose foreign policy is guided mainly by its religious identity and resistance discourse. Iran’s support for proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, its anti-Western positioning in the region, and, of course, its championing of transnational Shia solidarity have all been interpreted as compelling evidence that ideological commitments, not material calculations, drive its behaviour and regional maneuvers. The assumption has been that for Iran, ideas shape interests, revolutionary norms constrain strategic choices, and ideology operates as more than mere rhetoric.

Events like the Shapur monument show dramatic changes in ideological rhetoric and legitimation discourse that fundamentally challenge these assumptions about the primacy of ideational factors. And the statue is one among many examples: the rhetoric of defending holy shrines has been displaced by explicit language about defending Iran’s borders; discourses of Shia solidarity and resistance, at least temporarily, have given way to appeals to Iranian nationalism and territorial integrity. From Revolution Square’s Sasanian shah to a mobile caravan wandering in Tehran displaying Iran’s historic victories on giant LED screens, from performances of “Ey Iran” at the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s request to the rehabilitation of pre-Islamic heritage across the country’s urban spaces, the rhetorical transformation has been remarkably rapid and comprehensive.

This raises questions about the relationship between ideology and strategic behaviour. If ideology was constitutive of Iran’s foreign policy, how could it shift so fundamentally in such a compressed timeframe? If ideological commitments constrained strategic behaviour, why does the state now pursue similar security imperatives under different ideological packaging? And what does it mean when a revolution erects a statue to a shah it once condemned? These questions must be put into context: what happens when a self-proclaimed ideological state confronts existential defeat and the collapse of its regional project? Under what conditions does ideology shape state behaviour, and under what conditions does it give way to other imperatives?

The ideational account in the policy literature holds that Iran’s foreign policy reflects its revolutionary identity and resistance ideology. But if identity can be discarded overnight when material conditions shift, perhaps we need to reconsider the causal weight assigned to ideas, identity and ideology, particularly under conditions of systemic pressure. Iran’s foreign policy, often interpreted through ideological lenses, is better understood through the logic of neoclassical realism, with ideology playing a significant yet subordinate role. Ideology has functioned not as a causal structure determining interests but as an instrumental discourse that legitimates strategic imperatives and mobilizes domestic and transnational support. The partial loss of Iran’s ideological infrastructure in the last two years, I believe, has once again exposed the underlying realist core of its behaviour, not because ideas never mattered, but because when forced to choose between ideology and regime survival, the latter always predominates. When the “Axis of Resistance” fractured, Iran did not uphold its ideological commitments at a strategic cost; it pivoted, at least temporarily, to nationalism.

This is not to argue that ideology is mere window dressing or that the Islamic Republic leaders are cynical manipulators. Ideas clearly matter for how the Islamic Republic, most importantly its leader, pursues security, what alliances it builds, the way it perceives and frames threats, and the domestic and transnational coalitions it mobilizes, as four decades of Islamic Republic rule attest to. But the important question is whether ideology determines strategic choices or whether it adapts to serve security imperatives defined by Iran’s position in a regional system that has long found it threatening. The evidence, I argue, suggests the latter: ideology has proven remarkably flexible, shifting from revolutionary Shiism to defensive nationalism without disrupting core strategic objectives of deterrence, buffer state construction, and regime survival or what the Islamic Republic itself has long publicly termed maslahat-e nezām, the expediency or interests of the regime. To support this argument, I examine a recent case where ideology confronted material constraints: the rhetorical development of Iran’s Syrian intervention. I trace how official discourse shifted from “defending the shrine” to “defending Iran” as material pressures intensified; a turn toward Iranian nationalism following the regional setbacks of 2023–2024.

The Ideological Paradigm

To understand why this rhetorical transformation is so theoretically significant, we must first look at how Iran’s foreign policy and the role of ideology within it have long been understood or explained. Scholars and analysts have approached Iranian foreign policy from different theoretical angles, yet constructivist accounts have largely dominated the conversation, emphasizing ideational factors. For much of the past four decades, constructivist and identity-based accounts have portrayed the Islamic Republic as a state whose revolutionary ideology, Shia identity, and resistance discourse drive its regional behaviour in ways that material calculations alone cannot explain (Adib-Moghaddam, 2008; Takeyh, 2009). Iran’s decades-long support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, its costly intervention in Syria, its backing of the Houthis in Yemen despite international isolation, and its unwavering defence of the Palestinian cause have all been interpreted as evidence that ideological commitment, rather than strategic calculation, defines Iran’s regional policy (El Husseini, 2010; Stein, 2017). The Islamic Republic’s anti-Western rhetoric and its refusal to normalize relations with the United States, even when such normalization might serve material interests, have been presented as further evidence that revolutionary norms genuinely constrain strategic flexibility (Javaid, Naz, Watoo, & Rashid, 2016).

Yet this ideational approach has long faced criticism from an alternative tradition grounded in realist thought, which emphasizes how Iran’s regional behaviour responds to the structural constraints of an anarchic international system, the imperatives of regime survival, and the strategic logic of balancing against perceived threats. From this perspective, Iranian policies often attributed to ideological commitment can be understood as rational responses to security dilemmas, encirclement by hostile powers, and the pursuit of strategic depth (Chubin, 2012; Ostovar, 2016; Wehrey et al., 2009). From this perspective, the Islamic Republic behaves much like other states facing similar structural pressures would, using ideology as a tool for mobilization and legitimation rather than as the primary driver of strategic choice. The present analysis builds on and extends this neoclassical realist tradition, while engaging seriously with the constructivist claims it challenges. The question is not whether ideology matters, it clearly does, but whether it determines strategic behaviour or adapts to serve security imperatives defined by Iran’s position in the regional system.

According to the constructivist account, Iran seeks not simply to maximize security within the existing regional order but to contest that order itself, reshaping norms and institutions in line with its ideology and challenging the legitimacy of a system built on imperialism, capitalism, and American hegemony (Hunter, 2010). The claim is that ideology functions as a constraint, that the regime cannot simply abandon these commitments when they become costly without undermining the very foundations of its legitimacy. The more assertive versions of this reading produce clear behavioural predictions: Iran will sacrifice material interests for ideological commitments, fighting to the end for identity allies like Hezbollah rather than abandoning them for pragmatic gains. In this view, Iran’s foreign policy represents a case where rhetoric genuinely matches action, where stated commitments reflect real constraints, and where revolutionary identity determines interests rather than merely legitimating them.

Yet, the past two years of regional changes, unprecedented challenges to Iran’s strategic position in the region, give us another empirical opportunity to reassess these claims. Do revolutionary norms constrain strategic adaptation, forcing the Islamic Republic to accept material costs to preserve ideological consistency? Or does ideology prove flexible, adapting to serve security imperatives that remain constant across different discursive frameworks? The analytical challenge is one of causal direction. Because Iran speaks in the language of Islamic revolution, anti-imperialism, and Shia solidarity, many have assumed these ideational commitments drive strategic behaviour. But what if the causal arrow runs the other way? What if we are observing realist behaviour patterns cloaked in ideological rhetoric, with ideology providing legitimation and mobilization resources for strategies already determined by Iran’s material position in a hostile regional system like the Middle East?

Syria: From Sacred Duty to National Defence

To examine this question, I trace the rhetorical evolution of Iran’s Syrian intervention from 2012 to 2025 through close readings of Supreme Leader speeches and public addresses, statements of IRGC commanders and other military and political figures, state media coverage patterns (particularly IRIB, Tasnim, and Fars News), and commemorative practices including martyrdom narratives, funeral rhetoric, and cultural festivals honoring the fallen. The Syrian case, I believe, offers particular analytical leverage because it allows us to see how official discourse transformed in real time as material conditions shifted, moving from shrine defence as religious duty, to military intervention as national security imperative, to retroactive justification following collapse.

This rhetorical trajectory culminates in the broader post-2024 nationalist turn, where the regime resorted to a form of Iranian nationalism following Israeli and US strikes on Iranian territory. If ideology constrains strategic choice, we should see the Islamic Republic firmly maintaining ideological commitments even as material conditions deteriorate, or at a minimum, ideological change happening with visible resistance and legitimacy crises. What we see instead is rhetorical adaptation following each material setback, with discourse shifting to justify whatever strategy survival demands while core security objectives, securing buffer states, projecting deterrence, and ensuring regime survival remain constant.

Phase 1: Ideological Framing

When Iran committed substantial military resources to propping up the Assad regime beginning in 2012-13, the intervention was framed almost exclusively through the vocabulary of religious obligation and revolutionary resistance. This was a period when Iran’s economy could still support costly military action abroad, when Russia provided indispensable strategic cover, and when the intervention appeared successful in preventing Assad’s immediate collapse. Under these relatively favourable material conditions, the regime mobilized legitimation discourse that emphasized religious duty and shrine protection. The dominant narrative was the defence of the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab in Damascus against takfiri terrorism, particularly ISIS. Iranian casualties were systematically presented as shahid-e modafe-e haram (shrine defence martyrs), a term that linked the Syrian campaign to the sacred defence (defa-e moqaddas) vocabulary that had legitimated Iran’s own war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988. The intervention was narrated as part of the broader “Axis of Resistance” against imperialism and U.S. hegemony in the region, with frequent religious references to Karbala, Ashura, and the righteous struggle against oppression. This rhetorical strategy clearly positioned Syria not as a foreign intervention but as an extension of Iran’s founding ideological mission.

Khamenei himself articulated this ideological framing in multiple addresses. In one representative speech to the families of the fallen, he declared: “Indeed, both your martyrs and their families, the fathers, mothers, and children, hold a great debt upon the entire Iranian nation. These martyrs possess certain distinctions; one of them is that they defended the sanctity of the Ahl al-Bayt in Iraq and Syria and were martyred on this path” (2016). The framing is instructive: Iranian casualties were defenders of Shia sacred sites whose sacrifice placed the entire nation in their debt. IRGC General Qassem Soleimani used similar rhetoric, describing how General Hamedani, a senior commander killed in Syria in 2015, “was martyred on this path out of his love for the Ahl al-Bayt and the sanctuary of Sayyida Zaynab,” and asserting that “Karbala and Ashura have had significant influence on the fronts in Iraq and Syria” (2016). State media consistently used the shahid-e modafe-e haram designation, and the regime organized elaborate commemorations, ceremonies, festivals, and memorials that paralleled those honouring Iran-Iraq War martyrs. The case of Mohsen Hojaji is telling: captured and killed by ISIS near the Syria-Iraq border in 2017, Hojaji was elevated to near-cult status, with a designated day on the national calendar, public spaces named in his honour, and extensive commemoration as a young man who sacrificed himself defending the shrine and fulfilling sacred duty. The regime’s investment in this commemorative infrastructure was extensive and systematic.

This phase appeared to validate ideational explanations of Iranian foreign policy. Here was a state acting on identity commitments to Shia solidarity and revolutionary ideology despite mounting costs, thousands of casualties, billions in expenditure, and deepening isolation. The consistency of religious framing, the elaborate commemorative infrastructure, and the regime’s willingness to sustain the intervention even as economic pressures grew all suggested that ideological commitments constituted Iran’s interests rather than merely legitimating them.

Phase 2: Strategic Reframing

Yet as material circumstances shifted, so too did the discursive framework. By 2016-17, the Syrian war dragged on inconclusively with no clear end in sight, economic costs became unsustainable under U.S. “maximum pressure”, Russia began redirecting attention toward Ukraine, and the broader “Axis of Resistance” began suffering systematic degradation through Israeli strikes and internal challenges. Under these deteriorating conditions, the official narrative underwent a visible change. The rhetoric of shrine defence did not disappear entirely, yet it was increasingly supplemented by language emphasizing national security, territorial defence, and strategic necessity. Syria was reframed as Iran’s strategic depth, the intervention as forward defence, and the fallen as defenders of the country rather than martyrs for holy shrines or the Ahl al-Bayt.

Khamenei himself hinted at this discursive turn. In a speech that shows a shift from earlier framing, he told an audience: “Someone who goes from here to Iraq or Syria and stands to defend the sanctity of the Ahl al-Bayt against these takfiri groups is, in fact, defending their own cities (Khamenei, 2016).” The rhetorical move is revealing: the speech begins with shrine-defense vocabulary but immediately reinterprets it as territorial defense. IRGC commanders made this even more explicit in their public speeches. One stated bluntly: “God revealed an aspect of the importance of the work of the Defenders of the Shrine, and everyone realized that if they had not been there [in Syria], nothing would have remained of Iran (Abdollahpour, 2017).” Official statements increasingly justified economic expenditure and military budgets in strategic rather than religious terms. State television reports and documentaries on the Syrian campaign began emphasizing geographic maps, strategic corridors, and deterrence calculations rather than shrine protection and religious obligation.

This phase poses a challenge to ideological interpretations of Iran’s regional policy. If ideology genuinely constrained strategic behaviour, the regime should have maintained the shrine defence framing despite mounting costs. Instead, what we observe is rapid, seamless rhetorical adaptation with no visible legitimacy crisis. Officials who had invoked religious duty transitioned to the language of strategic necessity without acknowledging any contradiction. Significantly, the same military interventions continued under a new discursive framework, and the policies remained unchanged while only their justification shifted. The ease of this transition suggests that ideology was never the binding constraint constructivism claimed; rather, it functioned as a legitimation tool that could be recalibrated when the original framing lost domestic resonance

Phase 3: Post-Collapse Rationalization

In late 2024, Assad’s abrupt fall in Syria, the systematic decimation of proxy networks in Lebanon and Iraq, and the devastating Israeli-American bombardment of Iran’s nuclear and military facilities exposed the regime’s military vulnerability and strategic isolation. Under these conditions of acute material crisis, the discursive transformation became complete. The regime now speaks about Syria in exclusively strategic terms, with ideological and religious commitments to resistance rarely invoked, as if they had never structured the intervention’s legitimation. Official rhetoric has shifted to explicit security language: “The Syrian front was Iran’s first line of defence” or “If we had not fought in Syria, we would have had to fight in our own borders and provinces (Kargar, 2025).” Yet no officials claim the Syrian intervention was a mistake; indeed, they continue insisting it was necessary, but none defend it in ideological terms anymore. State media now emphasize the regime’s strategic foresight in recognizing Syria’s importance for protecting Iran, with rare references to shrine defence or the vocabulary of Ahl al-Bayt and Karbala. The complete absence of religious or revolutionary justification, despite decades of such rhetoric, reveals ideology’s instrumental function. When ideological framing served legitimation needs, it was deployed; when it no longer resonated or explained outcomes, it was discarded without difficulty or apparent cost to regime legitimacy.

And this rhetorical transformation about the intervention in Syria was indeed part of a broader post-2024 pivot toward Iranian nationalism that extends far beyond the Syrian case. Following the twelve-day war with Israel, the regime confronted twin crises of legitimacy: a domestic population increasingly alienated from Islamic Republic ideology after years of economic misery, repression, and visible military defeat, and an exhausted ideological vocabulary that could no longer legitimate regime policies or effectively mobilize popular support. The regime thus desperately resorted to a form of nationalism to salvage some relative measure of domestic support. It appealed to sovereignty, territorial integrity, civilizational pride, and defence of the homeland, ready-made themes that could potentially transcend decades-long societal divides, particularly resonant during moments of external threat.

The evidence of this pivot was surprisingly pervasive. In July 2025, Khamenei personally requested Mahmoud Karimi to perform “Ey Iran” (Tabnak 2025), a nationalistic song, during a mourning ceremony, an act unthinkable in earlier decades. Pre-Islamic imagery flooded public space: the Shapur statue in Revolution Square, a statue of Arash, the mythical archer, in Vanak Square, both in Tehran and a statue of Rostam, the legendary hero, in Isfahan (Fararu, 2025). A mobile caravan toured Tehran, displaying the nation’s military victories on giant LED screens. Official rhetoric shifted dramatically. The Mayor of Tehran, a regime hardliner, tweeted: “Enmity toward Greater Iran has no outcome other than eventually kneeling before this historic nation (Zakani, 2025).” References to “civilizational continuity” and “the ever-proud and resilient nation” replaced revolutionary and Islamic vocabulary in official statements.

Conclusion

The Syrian case, when situated within the broader post-2024 nationalist turn, thus offers empirical support for the neoclassical realist tradition, and shows limitations in ideational accounts of Iranian foreign policy, with further implications for how we understand the relationship between identity, ideology, and state behaviour in international relations, particularly in a contested region like the Middle East. Constructivist approaches to Iranian foreign policy rest on several interconnected claims: that Iran’s revolutionary identity constitutes its interests rather than merely reflecting them; that ideological commitments constrain strategic options in ways that material calculations alone cannot explain; and that the persistence of revolutionary rhetoric over four decades demonstrates the causal primacy of ideas over interests. The case presented here suggests that each of these claims may require reconsideration.

The first problem is the direction of causation. When Iran speaks in the language of Islamic revolution and Shia solidarity, pursuing policies that support Shia allies and challenge American hegemony, many infer that identity drives behaviour. Yet the Syrian case shows a different pattern: identical strategic objectives, maintaining buffer states, projecting deterrence, ensuring regime survival, persisted across radically different ideological frameworks. When shrine defence rhetoric lost resonance, it was replaced by strategic necessity; when strategic necessity failed to explain outcomes, the regime pivoted to nationalism. Throughout these discursive changes, core security objectives remained constant. This suggests we may be observing not ideology determining strategy but strategy selecting ideology, with the regime drawing upon whatever discursive resources prove most effective for legitimation and mobilization under given material conditions.

The second problem is the claimed constraining function of ideology. If revolutionary norms genuinely constrained strategic behaviour, the regime should have faced a legitimacy crisis when abandoning ideological commitments. We should see some resistance to rhetorical change, factional conflict over ideological consistency, or at least backlash against perceived compromise of revolutionary principles. Instead, the rhetorical transition proceeded with remarkable smoothness. No officials acknowledged contradiction; no legitimacy crisis followed. The regime’s capacity to shift ideological languages without apparent cost suggests that ideology functions less as a binding constraint than as a flexible resource, deployed instrumentally and discarded when no longer useful. This is not to claim that ideology is infinitely malleable; certain discursive moves remain unavailable, and path dependencies exist, but the range of ideological flexibility seen far exceeds what constructivist accounts would predict.

The third problem is the pace of ideological change, particularly the post-2024 nationalist pivot. Constructivist theories generally assume that identities are sticky, that they change slowly through socialization processes, generational shifts, and gradual norm evolution. The Islamic Republic’s rhetorical shift happened over months, not decades. A regime that had spent forty-six years cultivating revolutionary Islamic identity, that had built elaborate commemorative infrastructures around shrine defence martyrdom, that had systematically suppressed pre-Islamic symbolism as un-Islamic or monarchist, erected a statue of a Sasanian shah in Revolution Square within a year of its regional project’s collapse. This pace is difficult to reconcile with constructivist claims about the constitutive role of identity. If identity genuinely constituted interests, such a rapid transformation should have been far more difficult; the regime should have been trapped by its own ideological commitments. Equally telling is the sequence of change. In each phase examined here, material setbacks preceded ideological adaptation, not the reverse. The shift from shrine defence to strategic necessity followed the war’s prolongation and economic strain; the shift from strategic necessity to nationalist territorial defence followed Assad’s fall, the decimation of proxy networks and direct strikes on Iranian territory. At no point did ideological change drive strategic reorientation; rather, ideological discourse adjusted to legitimate strategies already compelled by material circumstances.

And the post-2024 transformation, dramatic as it appears, is less an aberration than another telling example of patterns visible throughout the Islamic Republic’s history. Even during its most ostensibly ideological phases, the regime consistently subordinated ideological consistency to strategic necessity when the two conflicted. The Iran-Contra affair of 1985-86 is instructive: at the height of its revolutionary fervour and barely six years after the hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic secretly purchased weapons from the United States and Israel (Parsi, 2007). The pattern, ideological rhetoric in public, strategic pragmatism in practice, was established early. What distinguishes the post-2024 moment is not the presence of realist behaviour but its visibility. Previous episodes of strategic pragmatism occurred in shadows, secret arms deals, quiet diplomatic channels, unstated alliance logic. The collapse of the “Axis of Resistance” and direct military confrontation with Israel stripped away this ambiguity. With proxy networks decimated and Iranian territory struck, the regime could no longer point to Hezbollah’s strength or Assad’s survival as evidence of resistance ideology’s viability. The post-2024 nationalist turn represents not a break from previous patterns but their public acknowledgment, the regime reaching for whatever legitimation resources remain when its preferred ideological framework has been discredited by events.

And Iran is not unique in deploying religious or revolutionary discourse to legitimate policies shaped by security calculations. Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism or Qatar’s support for Islamist movements may similarly function as legitimation tools rather than causal drivers. The question is not whether leaders believe their own rhetoric, many probably do, but whether ideology determines strategic choices or adapts to serve them. This also raises questions about regional stability. If Iran’s ideological flexibility reflects instrumental calculation, then the post-2024 nationalist turn may prove equally temporary. Should material conditions shift, the regime might pivot back toward resistance ideology as readily as it pivoted toward nationalism. Those hoping the nationalist turn signals genuine change may be observing tactical repositioning rather than strategic change. Yet, the Shapur statue in Revolution Square stands as a monument to the priority of survival over consistency. Revolutions, it turns out, can honour shahs when survival demands it.

 

 

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