Get audio access with any FP subscription. Subscribe Now ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Get audio access with any FP subscription.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

In moments of crisis, Iran’s leaders do not speak about the future but about eternity. As military pressure mounts, they invoke not policy or strategy but millennia: a civilization “6,000 years old” that has outlived empires and will outlast its current enemies.

The message is meant to project strength. But it also conceals a deeper paradox. Iran is a state that claims to think in centuries often governs as if it cannot see beyond the next crisis.

In moments of crisis, Iran’s leaders do not speak about the future but about eternity. As military pressure mounts, they invoke not policy or strategy but millennia: a civilization “6,000 years old” that has outlived empires and will outlast its current enemies.

The message is meant to project strength. But it also conceals a deeper paradox. Iran is a state that claims to think in centuries often governs as if it cannot see beyond the next crisis.

In the last three weeks, Iranian leaders have again turned to the familiar language of historical endurance. President Masoud Pezeshkian declared that Iran is “the heir to a civilization at least 6,000 years old,” insisting that “[a]ggressors have come and gone; Iran has endured.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi similarly described Iran as a “nation with a rich culture originating from 7000 years of civilization,” warning that such a country cannot be intimidated by external threats. Senior advisor Ali Larijani, who was killed on March 17, framed the confrontation in similar terms, vowing that Iran would defend its “[6,000-year-old] civilization” and reminding adversaries that powers greater than the United States had already failed to eliminate the Iranian nation.

But the Islamic Republic’s invocation of civilizational time masks not strategic depth but the absence of it.

These statements are not merely rhetorical flourishes. They draw on a long-standing narrative in Iranian political culture that casts the country less as a state than as a civilization whose continuity transcends political regimes. Empires have risen and fallen around Iran—Alexander the Great, Arabs, Mongols—but the country absorbed its conquerors and carried on. Yet the state that invokes this history of endurance often governs with strikingly short-term thinking. It speaks in the idiom of millennia but behaves as if tomorrow scarcely exists.

The appeal to historical endurance has deep roots in Iranian political culture. The narrative draws on familiar historical episodes. When the Mongols conquered Persia in the 13th century, they devastated cities and dismantled political authority. Yet within generations, the conquerors themselves........

© Foreign Policy