CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Long War: Iran’s Oldest Strategy

Photograph Source: Cattette – CC BY 4.0

Most discussions of Iran revolve around oil, escalation, and regime change. Yet Iran today feels easier to understand as part of a much older pattern. For more than 2,500 years, states on the Iranian plateau have favoured patience, distance, and endurance over any kind of immediate full-on confrontation with stronger enemies.

To understand Iran today, it therefore helps to trawl through Persian military history.

Iran has been described, unfairly, as two deserts—one with salt and one without, though it is also forested and full of mountains. From all this has emerged one of the world’s most durable martial traditions.

From the chariot nobles and “Immortals” of the Achaemenid Empire to the armoured cavalry of later dynasties—and ultimately to the modern Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—Iranian military institutions have repeatedly adapted.

During the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi forces saturated the battlefield with chemical weapons while much of the world looked away. Yet Iranian forces endured. That experience still shapes the country’s strategic thinking.

Today, Iran famously emphasises asymmetric warfare—indirect and comparatively inexpensive methods designed to offset the technological advantages of powers such as the United States and Israel. But across the centuries, Persian warfare has often favoured similar patience, mobility, and indirect pressure.

Long before the Persian Empire came about, Indo-Iranian tribes spread like seeds across the Eurasian steppe. The ancestors of Persians, Medes, and Scythians were nomadic pastoralists whose warrior culture centred on horse archery and mobile raiding.

I will always remember the late Iran expert Michael Axworthy telling me at the French House in central London how Persian culture liked to preserve the memory of its warrior elites in the Shahnameh, where heroes famously fought knowing that “a man’s renown is what remains of him.”

Over time groups such as the Medes and Persians formed states. Emerging from these tribal warrior societies, they became more than capable administrators and empire-builders, though their romantic steppe heritage—particularly elite cavalry—continued to shape Iranian........

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