To say that Nasr’s criticism of Tehran is usually muted would be quite the understatement. He has written many articles arguing that US-Iran tensions result from misunderstandings by Americans; for example, his recent essay, “Iran’s Roads Not Taken: Tehran, Washington, and the Failures That Led to War,” [1] the US government missed many opportunities to improve ties.
In this light, Iran’s Grand Strategy offers a very pleasant surprise, being a solid account, amply footnoted, and sober in its judgments. To be sure, Nasr occasionally lapses into “blame-America-ism,” such as a glancing reference to the debunked conspiracy theory about Reagan’s team cutting a deal with Tehran to delay the release of the US embassy hostages until after the 1980 US presidential elections. (Fortunately, he uses qualifiers with those blessedly few slips into political fantasy.)
Most of the book fleshes out the introduction’s statement that “over the past four and a half decades, Iran has embraced a particular vision of national security . . . inimical to the United States and [which] seeks Iran’s security and greatness in keeping US influence at bay.” It is beyond startling to find Nasr document in detail the evidence that Iran’s national security strategy causes tensions with Washington.
Nasr goes further, asserting that ordinary Iranians reject their country’s foreign policy: “More and more Iranians are unhappy with the high cost they must pay for valiant resistance. . . . A growing segment of the Iranian public has become angry, tired of resistance, dubious about its logic, and disenchanted with those who have advocated it.” Nasr then notes the crucial role of that foreign policy: “Iran today is the state that national security has built. . . . It is strategic considerations rather than managing dissent and domestic stability that is front of mind for Iran’s rulers.”
Iran’s Grand Strategy had unfortunate timing, having been completed before the December 2024 fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the June 2025 Twelve Day War. Yet those developments largely fit Nasr’s evaluation that “the strategic and economic costs of forward defense [relying on proxies abroad] continue to mount and political resistance [at home] to it has continued to grow.”
This is easily the best book on US-Iran political relations, being well written, accessible, and rich with information.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/irans-roads-not-taken-nasr
Patrick Clawson, The Washington Institute, Washington, D.C.
