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This final chapter assesses Iran’s national security thinking and policies today. It discusses Tehran’s contemporary military interventions, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It also engages the contentious Iranian nuclear file and the regime’s tumultuous relationship with the United States and its regional partners from President George W. Bush to President Donald Trump and his decision to kill Qassem Soleimani.

Iran has had a vested interest in shaping the outcomes of the Arab Spring. The IRGC had learned with the fall of Saddam that it could successfully exploit power vacuums for strategic gains. Syria’s civil war and the war against ISIS in Iraq were new entryways for the organization. Under Qassem Soleimani, the IRGC’s Qods Force led Iran’s campaigns in both countries. These were strategic efforts designed to protect Iran’s allies. But their resilience was rooted in religion. The IRGC saw these conflicts as part of a larger Sunni Arab and Western conspiracy against Iran and its allies. It was a war intrinsically against Shiism and the family of the Prophet. To defeat the jihadist scourge and its Sunni Arab benefactors, the IRGC mobilized pro-Iranian, pro-Shiite supporters in Syria and Iraq. These relationships helped Iran advance its agenda and expand its influence. They also intensified sectarian hatreds.

This chapter discusses how tensions between principled and cognitive interpretations of US interests towards Iran saw the Trump administration on the brink of conflict as Trump struggled to reconcile his desire to re-establish US dominance, while at the same time avoiding war. Beginning early in his presidency, Trump asserted principled appeals in order to justify withdrawing from the Iran Nuclear deal or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which eventually occurred in May 2018. On the heels of the US' withdrawal from the JCPOA, its relations with Iran quickly deteriorated as Trump reconstructed the principled threat posed by the Iranian regime. These tensions resulted in Trump's authorization to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani. In turn, Iran quickly retaliated with a missile strike against an Iraqi airbase leaving over 100 US soldiers injured. Trump repressed the impact of these strikes to de-escalate the crisis and avoid war rather than becoming entrapped in a wider regional conflict.

September 11th opened a window for brief collaboration between Tehran and Washington. Through Iranian diplomats, the IRGC’s Qods Force, and its chief, Qassem Soleimani, provided intelligence to American diplomats on Taliban positions and provided advice on how to defeat their shared enemy in Afghanistan. Any budding trust between the two ended after President George W. Bush’s designation of Iran as a member of the “axis of evil.” However, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban—Iran’s two main enemies—greatly benefited the IRGC. The IRGC utilized ties to Iraqi Shiite organizations and developed a cadre of Shiite client militias to gain influence in Iraq and target US forces. Washington’s pressure on Iran, and allusions to potential war, help legitimize the IRGC’s influence in Iranian and Iraqi politics. The IRGC helped elect President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who became a stalwart patron for the IRGC’s hardline politics and foreign adventurism.

This chapter surveys the period of reconstruction after the Iran-Iraq War. It discusses how the regime consolidated power and undertook key reforms in the security and military sectors to ensure its survival in the aftermath of the war and the transition of power from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The chapter argues that this period was instrumental in allowing the regime to lay out the groundwork for the next phase of the revolution: Its expansion.

President Barack Obama sought a new beginning with Iran, but the violence that followed the contested re-election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad made that impossible. The IRGC and Basij were deeply involved in the brutal suppression of the protests that followed Iran’s 2009 election. They saw the protests as an American plot to destroy Iran’s Islamic system. Washington increased pressure on Iran through sanctions on its nuclear program and the IRGC. At the same time, Iran blamed Israel for an assassination campaign against Iranian scientists. The Arab Spring exacerbated tensions between Iran and its Arab neighbors, who competed for influence in the changing region. The combination of pressures provoked a response by the IRGC, which was linked to assassination plots targeting Saudi and Israeli officials in several countries, including in the United States.

The Conclusion answers questions first posed in the Introduction pertaining to the drivers shaping Iran’s national security thinking and policies, including its nuclear and missile programs, support for armed militias and terrorist groups, and regional interventions. It argues that the elements of continuity described throughout the book demonstrate that the core assumption held in the scholarship on revolutions—according to which revolutions necessarily mark a total departure from the part—may not capture the complexity of countries’ national security thinking. And Conclusion also discusses the policy implications of this finding and warns that a different regime in Iran may not act fundamentally differently from the current one as many may hope.