Better Ways to Deal with Iran

Hostility between America and Iran is not the norm.  The history of their rich and mostly amicable relations suggests more constructive approaches to the Islamic Republic than war.

Most Americans do not realize the tragedy that is represented by the current estrangement between Iran and the United States.  Past generations of Iranians and Americans enjoyed cordial and even warm relations.  Persia (as it was long known) was familiar to American school children and churchgoers from the classical histories of Greece and from the Bible as the empire that freed the Israelites from the Babylonian Captivity and allowed the return to their homeland.  When Russian and British imperialists carved up Persia into spheres of influence in the nineteenth century, Americans remained aloof and retained the favor of Persian liberals in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11.  An American economist, Morgan Shuster, served in the Constitutional government, and his book, The Strangling of Persia, excoriated the power grabs by Russia and Britain.  Like the British, the Americans eventually disappointed Persia’s resistance fighters by refusing to support the liberal Revolution.  Yet one exception stands out: my great uncle Howard Baskerville. 

Howard went to Persia in 1907 as a Presbyterian missionary.  He had no plans to participate in a political revolution, though he had studied constitutional government and international law with none other than Woodrow Wilson, at a time when Wilson was formulating his political ideas.  The story of how Howard became inspired by the Constitutional Revolution, how it vivified his Christian faith and helped him apply it in the public service, which was the reigning ethic at Wilson’s Princeton University, to the point where he eventually had no moral choice but to become an active participant in the cause and lay down his life for it – all this is told in Reza Aslan’s powerful biography (1).  To this day, Howard’s sacrifice has inspired Iranians hoping to free themselves from different tyrannies and establish a democratic society.  Even the current Islamic Republic at least professes to honor his legacy.

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This remained true, despite further deteriorations in Iranian-American relations.  Disappointment turned to resentment during the Cold War, when the US government supported the repressive Pahlavi dynasty and even restored the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi following his ouster by the government of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953.  Iranian-American relations never recovered from this perceived betrayal, which led straight to the darker Revolution of 1979, begun with the capture of American hostages by militant students.

Today the Islamic Republic has become the regime that some American policymakers love to hate.  The US supported Iraq’s bloody war against Iran in the 1980s and spurned conciliatory overtures.  Since the events in Gaza, relations have deteriorated still further, culminating in the war that many feared and some clearly wanted.

I will not defend the current regime, nor its violations of basic civil liberties.  But I am sure that war is not the way to confront it, which is now driving the population into the arms of a regime that otherwise enjoyed questionable popularity.  

Until now, the confrontation has been between regimes, not peoples.  Iranians generally remained favorable towards Americans.  Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Iranians were the first and most vocal with their sympathy.  Now this will change, with American warmongering rekindling the popular resentment against the United States that led to the Islamic Republic in the first place.

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But another, deeper reason should help Americans, English-speakers generally, and other Westerners feel empathy with Iran, empathy that may pacify the violence now upon us.  Ironically, this may be the very thing most likely to provoke hostility, and it may be that a more focused look at Iranian-Western relations may also help us discover something about ourselves.  

What most perpetuates animosity towards Iran today is the “irreconcilable religious fanaticism” (in the words of columnist Melanie Phillips) and the Islamist Revolution of 1979 that brought the current regime to power.  The “imbecilic western belief that religious fanatics negotiate in good faith and are governed by rational self-interest,” considered thus, seems to justify irrational behavior by us as much as by the “fanatics” themselves

It is this that consigns Iran to the role of “rogue state” (some call it our “white whale obsession”) that successive US and western administrations have sought, with dwindling success, to make a pariah.  It has even reached the ironic point where western governments sponsor more brutal Islamist terror groups, such as one now ruling Syria, in an effort to overthrow the current Iranian government.

I am not going to assess how far Iran deserves that characterization today, if it ever did.  I am more concerned with the dynamics involved and how they might be directed toward stability and peace.

One way is to grasp the nettle that westerners find the most irritating by trying to understand the dynamics driving the religious fanaticism.  For not only has religious militancy been a decisive feature of the global political landscape for decades now; it is in fact another experience we share with Iranians.

Westerners today have trouble understanding religious radicalism, which is ironic because we invented it.  Radical religious movements that proliferated in late medieval Europe and especially during the Reformation have shaped the modern West.  It was English Calvinists who carried religious dissent to the point of inventing the modern revolution – a phenomenon without which the Iranian Revolution of 1979 is inconceivable (2).  And let’s not forget that what became the United States was also started by religious “fanatics”.  Puritan radicals began populating New England just as their comrades back in Old England were instigating a revolution as theocratic in some ways as what the mullahs established in Iran. 

Some may find this comparison between religious fanatics in Iran and America objectionable.  But Americans’ attitudes toward the religious radicals in our own past are often as negative as what we express toward those in today’s Middle East.  The modern liberal conviction of our own “tolerant” superiority leaves us embarrassed that they even existed and impedes understanding of our own origins. 

Yet this legacy is one that Americans should embrace as a source of understanding rather than deny out of shame.  The Puritans’ successors furnished the popular agitation for the American Revolution that inspired Howard Baskerville, far surpassing in numbers the Enlightenment figures we venerate as our “Founding Fathers.”  They went on to lead the abolition of slavery, provided the organizational structure for the early working-class and trade-union movements, opposed World War I and Vietnam, mobilized for civil rights in the 1950s-1960s, and more. 

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All this furnished the historical milieu in which Howard Baskerville was raised.  He inherited the missionary religion of Presbyterianism, a creed originating in the Scottish Reformation that reached its political apogee in England’s Revolution.  For Howard, the most recent of its many self-reinventions was Wilson’s progressivism.  “Politics was no mere civic duty,” Aslan shows of both men; “it was a religious obligation.”  For Wilson and then for Howard, political involvement was about “translating principle into social action.”  Wilson’s axiom that “individual salvation is national salvation” (and the inverse) came straight out of Puritanism (3).  

This “fusing of politics and piety” was likewise not so different in its political effects among those Howard fought alongside in Tabriz, the city of the Constitutional Revolution.  “Religion in Tabriz, and especially the majority religion, Shi’ism, has long been viewed as a form of protest, a vehicle for dissent, a call to action.”  Is it far-fetched to suggest that his immersion in such circumstances accelerated in Howard Baskerville a reawakening, already begun at Wilson’s Princeton, of similar potential within his own religion’s past, which lay dormant beneath decades of the cautious “individualism” of the missionary societies and liberal Evangelicalism?  As Aslan asks of Wilson and Howard, so of the resistance fighters in Tabriz, “How, then, could it [religion] possibly be divorced from politics?  Religion was politics.”

In that earlier Revolution, liberals and clerics fought together against the Qajar shahs.  In fact, they reconstituted their alliance against the Pahlavis in early stages of the 1979 Revolution.  Yet in that later revolt they eventually split – much in the manner of “classic” revolutions in England, France, and Russia – with the moderates first dislodging the monarch and hoping to form a liberal democracy, before themselves being displaced by the extremists, in this case the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini (4).  We live with the consequences to this day.

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This is not the place to describe the complexities of radical Islamism, but Iran’s version is set apart by features reminiscent of western and especially Anglophone experience (5).  The starting point is to understand that radical religion in general thrives on resentment – a dangerous emotion in politics that Iran has had numerous occasions to experience in its long history: from humiliating conquests by Greek, Arab, Mongol, and Turkish armies, to exploitation by British and Russian imperialists and other foreign interests, to American perfidy in the Mossadeq affair.  The Shi’ite version of Islam, which since the sixteenth century has held a central place in the Iranian national identity, is especially suited to express a conviction of persecution and in turn to inspire an ethic of martyrdom.  Founded on the martyrdom of the Imam Husain, an event that is regularly commemorated throughout the Shi’ite world with rituals that can become violent when the faith is perceived as under threat, it promises eschatological resurrection for those who follow his example.  If we give them cause, Iran’s clerics both within and outside the regime have the weapons and experience to mobilize that resentment against America and its allies.

But the connection between radical religion and resentment is more complex than the question of whether the resentment is justified, which can never be objectively assessed.  For radical religion does not simply express resentment; nor can it generate resentment where it does not already exist.  In fact, religion generally tries to discourage and repress resentments and social enmity.  But in the very process of repression, it also starts to control, harness, organize, and channel the enmity into its own purposes.  This is the beginning of radical, often politicized religion.  Whether its purposes are benign, as the American Evangelicalism acted upon by Howard Baskerville, or repressive in a more coercive sense, with theocracy and violence, can vary with the circumstances.  Which outcome results may also be within our power to influence.

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We speak of the “Islamic world” as one of the world’s major civilizations, albeit a weak one today, and recent campaigns of self-assertion through radical Islamism have usually made it weaker still.  But the Islamic world is not monolithic, and Iran exhibits important differences from other Islamic societies.  

Almost everywhere that Islamist forces overrun a country the result is catastrophic, with repression and dysfunctional government:  Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Egypt, and now Syria.  But this has not been wholly true of Iran, despite difficulties and challenges involving individual freedom of the Islamic Republic.  Whatever the conflicts involved in its founding 45+ years ago, it has evolved into a flawed but functional state and one that has survived by moderating the ideological fervor that brought it to power.  The current attack follows repeated color revolutions and other attempts at regime change by US policymakers.

Iran has long sought to demarcate itself from other Islamic countries, with which it existed in rivalry for centuries, most notably Arabs and Turks.  Throughout most of the Islamic world, the very concept of a “nation” as a loyalty separate from Islam is strained if not anathema.  But Iranians have a strong sense of nationhood dating back centuries.  Iran’s adoption of Shi’ism under the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century, represented a conscious effort to stake out a specifically Persian version of Islam. 

But Iran today is much more than an Islamist theocracy.  It is highly conscious of itself as one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, with one of the richest cultures, including its political culture.  The ancient Achaemenid Empire is credited with having practiced the most sophisticated and benign rule of any empire prior to the Romans.  It won the admiration of Persia’s Greek enemies like the historian Herodotus.  Our word “satrap” comes from its practice of “indirect rule”, as it was later known when imitated by the British and French Empires, allowing local rulers a measure of self-government, a legacy that continues in prosperous federated states like India and Nigeria.

Persian kingship was an especially renowned and influential institution.  The concept of farr or divine favor found its way to the West, where it inspired the “divine right of kings” that provoked the political upheavals that formed early-modern states like England and France.

During the 19th century, the Shi’ite clergy assumed the role of advisors and loyal critics to the monarchy – reminiscent  to the role of Christian churchmen in the West over the centuries – with its concept of the “two swords”, spiritual and temporal – a role that is generally lacking in most Islamic countries.  That loyalty was overturned by growing monarchical corruption, to the point where many clergy were radicalized, but whose fault that was is a matter of debate.

In any case, it was then that Iran became one of the few Islamic or Asian countries with a history of constitutional government, during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11.  Brief as that was, it still figures in the Iranian national memory.  One institutional legacy is the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, where specific seats remain reserved for Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities.  Because of the Majlis, political authority in the current regime is not wholly monolithic.  It serves as an alternative source of power and even as guarded opposition to the Supreme Leader and President.

This rich political history and culture helps explain why Iran is the only Islamic country that produced a true, full-fledged revolution – comparable to the “great” revolutions of modern history in England, America, France, Russia, and China (6).  Some may not consider this a positive achievement, and it is certainly true that few of these revolutions turned out well, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 included.  America is one of the few, though the English alone voluntarily reversed their revolution and restored a constitutional monarchy.  

One reason why the two Anglophone revolutions both happened and were more benign than others was because both countries were already further along the path of developing  strong national identities and had already achieved rich and complex political cultures on which to draw, with civically literate and sophisticated populations.  Multiple intellectual cross-currents competed and made it difficult for ideologues like the Puritans to dominate events.  While Puritan intellectuals in England and neo-Puritan agitators in America played major roles in these revolutions, they were not themselves able to monopolize power as, for example, the Bolsheviks did in Russia.

Here too, Iran’s precocious search for a unique national identity led to adopting a religion that helped precipitate its revolution.  Shi’ism’s capacity to express convictions of persecution and inspiring martyrdom, even more than Sunni Islam, may have given it an appeal similar to what Puritanism furnished the English, Jacobinism the French, and Bolshevism the Russians.

Fanatical ideology did dominate the final stages of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, including the new regime, but such fervor tends to dissipate with time and the responsibilities of governing.  Indications are that this has been happening in the Islamic Republic.  Competing values like Persian national identity, patriotism, pluralism, and religious toleration were not extinguished by Islamicization.  Iranians still take pride in them, and they can be encouraged.

For better or worse, countries that experience major revolutions also tend to become world powers soon afterwards.  Iran, belatedly, may turn out to be no exception.  Whatever the aims of the founders, its complex culture, cross-cutting power centers, and the determination of western governments have so far constrained the Islamic Republic from exporting its revolution.  But it could yet establish itself as the Islamic world’s dominant power, and we may now see if it has enough friends to withstand a western attack and even become strengthened by it.

Prominent voices today are predicting that the future lies with “civilizational” states rather than traditional European-style nation-states.  If this turns out to be even partially true, Iran is the most likely to be the command center of an Islamic regional power.  The fear of some that Israel now faces a crisis of existential dimensions adds credibility to that prediction.  But with or without the presence of Israel, it would not necessarily be the disaster that some now suppose and a militarily chastened Israel could contribute to a moderate Iran assuming constructive Islamic leadership.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rhetoric about Jewish-Persian friendship since Cyrus the Great contains some truth, even if he commandeered it for belligerent purposes.

By the way, I have resisted the temptation to point out the obvious “religious fanaticism” driving Israel’s own foreign policy.  This should not be belittled or dismissed, any more than Iran’s.  It has, after all, helped the Jewish people and Israel survive, prosper, and punch far above their weight.

As for the notion of influential American Evangelicals that God’s promise to Abraham mandates unconditional US government support for modern Israel, the crude theology on which it is based has been repeatedly refuted and illustrates a debased side of America’s Puritan legacy (7).

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Whether Iran’s Shi’ism can be channelled into humane and constructive reform is a question I leave to the experts on Islam.  Readers of Reza Aslan’s biography of Howard Baskerville – which recounts how the idealistic Muslim students alongside whom he fought in the Constitutional Revolution eagerly absorbed his ideas about constitutional government – might be tempted to think so.  In any case, there is plenty of room today to explore such informal, cultural diplomacy between Americans/Westerners and Iranians.

Does this mean that we all (at least in the Abrahamic world) have within our pasts religious episodes that can manifest themselves as fanatical terror or heroic devotion: the Persian revolutions of both 1906-11 and 1979?  Is Islamism the Puritanism of our time and Islamist fanaticism a stage that the Muslim world must work through in order to achieve modernity and settle down to a stable and prosperous liberal democracy, as the Anglophone nations did in the centuries following the Puritan-driven revolutions?

I am not sure I want to go that far.  In any case, while the responses are different, it is still possible that the two religions appeal to similar needs.  And it is more than possible that understanding the religious backgrounds and drives in both nations offers a more constructive approach on which to develop Iranian-American relations than aggressive, quasi-holy war.

If we want to diffuse radical Islam, one alternative may be to understand the needs to which it appeals and then endeavor to offer or substitute connected but better principles.  I suggest Christianity, because I understand how Christian principles did successfully process social resentments and enmities into constructive ends in the West, but I do not preclude other religious principles.  This does not mean resurrecting Puritanism in all its militancy, though modern liberal Christianity may be inadequate, for reasons similar to why it was inadequate for Howard Baskerville.  

One need not even be a Christian or other believer to recognize the political utility in this, and it is more than cynical to suggest that utility renders the religion itself more impressive and plausible, especially given religion’s longstanding and inevitable interaction with politics.  If nothing else, it would seem to render imperative some serious discussions of comparative religion.

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Here we should recall something essential about Howard Baskerville that today is deeply unfashionable:  He was foremost a missionary.  We might like to see him as a youthful 1960s-style countercultural rebel.  But if we are honest about his place in the history of both America and Iran, we will remember that the first purpose of his presence in Persia was to save souls.  (His nervous superiors in the missionary society took that distinction to the point of instructing its missionaries to “put aside their concern for the civil and temporal conditions”; Aslan describes the agony this presented for Howard.)  Aslan suggests that he and his fellow missionaries did not convert many Muslims, and the reason may be that Iran already had its own missionary religion, one that could also inspire political opposition.  Today, that religion is making a comeback in more militant form largely because of the failure of both Western governments and secular radicalism to deliver on their promises to post-colonial societies.

Many today belittle missionary religion, perhaps rightly.  Some argue that secularized missionary zeal is responsible for the neo-Wilsonian foreign policy that led to the current debacle.  Reading Aslan’s account of Howard’s intellectual formation under Wilson, a glaringly inappropriate irony emerges: that the idealist approach to international politics associated with Wilson should now inspire such enmity against the country that Howard Baskerville came to love – to the point of obeying the biblical injunction to “lay down his life for his friends.”

Yet of all aspects of colonialism, it is religious faith that has left the most enduring and favorable impression on post-colonial societies and the one they themselves most willingly perpetuate.  Today it is missionaries from the global South who are re-evangelising the West.  Whatever their historical limitations, missionaries understand a truth that we seem intent on denying to our cost but that the Iranian-American tragedy illustrates vividly: that, like it or not, religion is an inherent and unavoidable part of the human condition, and suppressing it in one form will lead to its emergence in another.  

It is now especially likely that a realist, hard-nosed stance toward the Iranian regime will remain necessary for some time.  But realism does not preclude diffusing tensions and pursuing alternatives to war.  An Iranian-American dialogue over the impact of religious values on our respective political cultures and in nation-building generally – including questions like how religious faith can address problems like injustice, inequality, poverty, ignorance, superstition, and corruption and help to build societies that are stable, prosperous, and free – this might be a constructive way to honor the legacy of Howard Baskerville and restore the affection which Iranians and Americans once held toward one another.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Political Studies at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw and author of Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (Routledge, 1993; Wipf & Stock, 2018).  A shorter version of this essay was originally published by the Baskerville Institute in the spring of 2024, though they are not responsible for the contents.

1. An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville (Norton, 2022).
2. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Harvard, 1965); Stephen Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (Routledge, 1993; Wipf & Stock, 2018).  Iranian revolutionaries in the 1970s drew principles from not only Islam but also radical republicanism, nationalism, and communism.
3. Aslan, American Martyr, 15.  On “national salvation” in Puritan political theology, see S. Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword, ch. 2.
4. In the English Revolution, Presbyterians (Howard’s religious progenitors) had been the moderates, later eclipsed by the radical Congregationalists, comparable to the Iranian liberals represented by Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, who led the early stages of the 1979 revolution before being similarly overtaken by more radical followers of Khomeini.
5. I have described this in “Religion and Radicalism: The Puritanism in All Revolutions,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 16, no. 1 (2022).
6. The recent pattern of Islamism – with numerous insurrections but only one enduring revolution – uncannily parallels Christian radicalism in our own history.  When Calvinism swept northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it provoked numerous political upheavals: Switzerland, France, Flanders, the Netherlands, Scotland, Bohemia, Hungary.  But only in England did it produce a revolution.  
7. John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Clarendon, 1970.)