From Persepolis to Tehran: One and the Same Art of War

 EDITOR'S NOTE: The study that follows, dedicated to a detailed analysis of the logic of war in the Persian-Iranian spirit and practice in the light of the current conflict with the United States, is not to be read in a single sitting, but in segments; the digital medium is no doubt ill-suited to the length of the text. It is more advisable to print the article and read it on paper. The author offers his apologies in advance to the reader for this inconvenience, but the academic approach followed cannot tolerate a break into several articles, or a summary that would dilute its substance and nuances. Therefore, mea maxima culpa.

On Tuesday, 21 April 2026, late in the evening, Tehran announced that it would not participate in the Islamabad negotiations scheduled with Washington for the following day, citing “prohibitive conditions” imposed by the Americans. The ceasefire, concluded on 8 April after fifty days of open war, had just expired, and Donald Trump found himself compelled to extend it to give the Islamic Republic still more time to reach an agreement. The Strait of Hormuz had been declared fully open to commercial traffic on Friday, sending oil prices tumbling by more than 10%, before Iran closed it again on Saturday, once Washington refused to lift its naval blockade. Donald Trump had declared the ceasefire null and void “Wednesday evening Washington time” while simultaneously dispatching two negotiators to Pakistan. Tehran had, according to the official IRNA agency, described American statements as a “media game” designed to exert pressure through a “blame game” — all while keeping the Pakistani channel open until Tuesday evening, the hour of the dramatic twist. And the dramatic twist is the following: Tehran rejected Trump’s ceasefire, declared the 8 April agreement null and void, and formally reopened the path to a resumption of hostilities…

All this diplomatic confusion unfolding before the entire world, like a dangerous and lowbrow case of mixed signals that defies comprehension, is in fact nothing of the sort. Tehran is applying a doctrine. It is — replayed with the instruments of the twenty-first century (ballistic missiles, FPV drones, oil blockade, communiqués from semi-official agencies) — the same strategic pattern that an attentive observer could have described after Marathon, Salamis, or the Peace of Callias (the very existence of which historians still dispute). For twenty-five centuries, the constants of Persian power under maximum pressure have not changed. Among them figures a subtle and mastered art of alternating heat and cold, of denying what one does while doing it, or of holding the line between war and peace in a state of deliberate indeterminacy.

Contemporary Iran, engaged since 28 February 2026 in the most existentially perilous conflict in the history of the Islamic Republic, thus replays models of confrontation that neither Alexander’s conquest, nor Arab Islam, nor the Khomeinist revolution managed to erase. This recurrence proceeds from geopolitical factors, and therefore from factors invariable across the centuries: the interior geography of power, the logic of the plateau facing the sea, but also of the core facing the periphery — factors that cannot but structure the entire military history of this civilisation.

Seven polemological invariants traverse this continuum.

I — The War of Time, or Sovereignty “on the Threshold”

The first of these constants is no doubt the least evident to an observer not steeped in the habits of Persia and its history. It constitutes, however, the deepest element — and paradoxically the least visible — of the Median strategy: the doctrine of temporality as weapon. What is commonly called Iranian “duplicity” in negotiations is not ordinary diplomatic cunning, in the sense of a one-off lie designed to deceive an adversary on a specific point. Not Ulysses’ Trojan horse. It involves a structural duplicity, constitutive of the doctrine itself, consisting in the capacity to maintain simultaneously two contradictory discourses without the contradiction being experienced as internal incoherence… because it is experienced as the normal management of a temporality that is not that of the Western adversary.

This pre-Socratic esoteric thinking, which the West fails to understand whenever it comes to dealing and negotiating with Tehran, resembles the dynamic monist thesis that Heraclitus of Ephesus (and later Ibn Arabi) defended prior to the emergence of Platonic ontological dualism. According to Heraclitus, opposition is not contradiction, but a tension between two ends of the same principle pulling in opposite directions. In the Persian sense, this non-duality exists between the zâhir, the manifest, the exoteric, and the bâtin, the hidden, the esoteric. The two registers coexist because they belong to different planes of reality. The One contains both poles, of which it is two manifestations. Dissimulation, taqiyya, is therefore not a lie in the Western sense of the term, but the recognition of these two states — separate orders existing simultaneously without contradicting each other. To maintain a double discourse, to hold that all knowledge is defined not in itself but by virtue of the knowledge still to be gained — that is, by the negation of what exists — is consequently a sane and legitimate process, a sign of ontological wisdom. The Iranian oscillation between war and peace is therefore the position sought by Iran. There is no other. Opposites cohabit and are therefore coherent. Enough to drive Westerners mad, who search for the truth behind the mask, when there is no mask — only two “variable positions” of a single posture that has never sought a “logical” unity.

Herodotus’s Testimony

It is Herodotus who, involuntarily, first documents the oldest mechanical translation of this idea in history. After the Battle of Marathon (490 BC), Darius does not capitulate, does not negotiate, does nothing legible that might be rationally comprehended. Somewhat like the Sauron of The Lord of the Rings, he waits and prepares in silence, accumulating for ten years the machinery of the second invasion. After the Battle of Salamis (480), Xerxes withdraws but leaves Mardonius with an entire army in Thessaly. Neither peace nor war, therefore, but a suspended state of strategic indeterminacy that exhausts the Greek city-states politically and economically, far more effectively than a new battle could ever have done. The Peace of Callias (449 BC — the very existence of which historians still dispute, which is itself revealing) would have formally ended the Persian Wars. But the Persians simultaneously continued to finance Sparta against Athens, then Athens against Sparta, turning the Peloponnesian War into an instrument of their policy without ever appearing in it officially. Here lie the origins of today’s Iranian war by financial proxy, by the corruption of élites, and by the deliberate cultivation of chaos in the adversary’s camp — all without a front line, through an invisible game played on the contradictions of others.

What the Greeks did not understand is that the Persians simply did not share their ontological relationship with time. Where the Greek city-state thought in terms of agôn — decisive clash, settled battle, clear-cut outcome — the Iranian empire thought in terms of duration, patience, slow accumulation and deferred reversal. This pattern finds its translation in Islamic jurisprudence itself, through the concept of the hudna, the temporary truce that is not peace — a suspended contract allowing a pause to rearm and reposition before battle resumes. Far from being perceived as surrender, the hudna is a tactical parenthesis in a war whose strategic horizon remains intact. Cyrus and his successors were of course far from possessing this theologico-juridical concept… yet they had nevertheless developed its absolute intuitive practice…

Ambiguity as Strategic Posture

Iran’s nuclear strategy since 2003 — but also that of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which cries victory amid the rubble the moment the enemy’s cannon ceases to thunder — constitutes the modern textbook case of this doctrine. Over twenty years of negotiations, partial concessions, calculated violations, returns to the table, enrichment thresholds crossed then frozen, agreements whose ink had barely dried before their ambiguities of application were already being instrumentalised… For Tehran, the 2015 JCPOA was not an act of disarmament, but an act of temporal management. Through the agreement, Tehran was buying time under maximum pressure, while keeping the threshold within reach for rapid redeployment. And it is the same logic operating currently: denying talks while dispatching delegates, opening the strait on Friday to close it on Saturday, calling the American dialogue a “media game” while keeping the Pakistani channel active…

Iran never deals in ambiguity by accident. It does so because ambiguity is its natural strategic position, the medium in which it has breathed for twenty-five centuries — and which, it knows full well, wears out its adversaries, anchored in the Hegelian diachronic historical time.

What the West stubbornly refuses to understand is that the meaning of History, for the neo-Persians, thus also operates in reverse… but also in transcendence, in that zaman el-latif defined by Sohravardi, that time between times which has no use for the contingencies of diachronic historical time (see in this regard the article published on this site on 7 March 2026 under the title “The End of a Utopia”).

II — The Forward Defence, or War Beyond the Plateau

The second structural pattern is what the Achaemenid strategists practised without naming it and what the Islamic Republic has theorised under the term defa’ pishgin, forward defence. The Achaemenids had understood that the empire’s vulnerability lay in its surface area. Too vast to be defended from within, it was therefore necessary to multiply peripheral glacis and transform the satrapies into militarised buffer zones, in order to fight as far as possible from the Persian heartland. Thus, it was not out of any desire for gratuitous conquest that Darius I had launched his armies into Thrace and Macedonia. His objective was to keep threats at a distance from the Iranian plateau. And it was the same reason that had led Xerxes to cross the Hellespont (today’s Strait of the Dardanelles), only to meet Leonidas’s 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

The Iran of the mullahs reproduced exactly the same logic. Since 1982, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had deployed its advisers — among them the four famous “diplomats” later kidnapped by Elie Hobeika’s Lebanese Forces — in the Bekaa Valley to organise what would become Hezbollah, the first successful experiment of modern forward defence, the first export of the so-called “Islamic Revolution”. Like the Achaemenid satraps who raised their own armies in the name of the King of Kings, the militias of the Axis of Resistance — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Factions — constituted so many militarised satrapies, vassals of Tehran without formally being its arm. The principle advanced by Tehran being that wars must unfold outside Iranian borders so that Persian soil need never be the theatre…

But this principle has always had its interior reverse, which both Achaemenid and Islamic history confirm with regularity: the more the empire projects its power toward the periphery, the more it must compress and lock down its own centre. The satrapal revolts that punctuate Achaemenid history (Egypt, Lydia, Babylon, etc.) are the internal symmetrical equivalent of every major external campaign. It is no accident of timing that the Islamic Republic was massacring its own demonstrators in January 2026, just weeks before launching the war in February. It is the same logic of compression at work, the same imperial reflex demanding that the inside be crushed so that the outside may be attacked. In this sense, forward defence is always, in hollow, an interior tyranny.

III — The Composite War, or the Art of Vassal Coalitions

The Achaemenid army was a constitutive ethnic mosaic, composed pell-mell of Medes, Bactrians, Lydians, Indians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, and so forth. Each satrapy furnished its contingents according to a system of graduated military tribute, the peoples closest to Persia paying fewer taxes while serving more under arms. Herodotus, in his lists of Xerxes’s armies, unwittingly paints the portrait of a power that never fights alone and always wages war through intermediaries. Contemporary Iran has reproduced exactly this architecture. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Iraqi militias and the Houthis constituted a regional network capable of operating below the potential nuclear threshold, imposing diffuse costs on its adversaries without triggering a massive response against Iranian territory itself. One finds even a similar chain of command between Persians and mullahs. The satraps were appointed and controlled governors, the “eyes and ears of the king” who supervised their loyalty. The militias of the Axis of Resistance depend likewise on Tehran’s financial control and military supervision, under the political and religious command of the wali al-faqih, whose transnational Shia doctrine unites the imperial body despite the particularities of each paramilitary force and its milieu. It should be noted, moreover, that adherence to the wilayat al-faqih has ended up overflowing the Shia framework, segments of other communities — in Lebanon, for example — having been “converted”, subtly and subversively indoctrinated in the service of the project, under the cover of a universalist anti-American and anti-Israeli left — the struggle of the oppressed against “the imperialist Great Satan and its regional satellite, the Zionist project” —, of a Palestinian cause abandoned by the Arab countries, or of the ideology of the alliance of minorities and their protection…

IV — The Mastery of Straits, or the Geopolitics of the Bottleneck

Xerxes did not content himself with crossing the Hellespont in 480 BC. He set about mastering it, ordering the construction of a boat-bridge to signify, symbolically and materially, his domination over the passage between two worlds. The Achaemenid navy was fundamentally an instrument of control over sea lanes (the Ionian coasts, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf). For in geopolitics, whoever holds the bottleneck holds the world. This is the oldest and most constant axiom of Iranian strategic thinking.

In 2026, Iran targeted the region’s oil infrastructure, notably ships in the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. The threat of total closure, uttered with growing insistence, reactivates this millennial doctrine. The tactical success of maritime saturation by FPV drones in March 2026 — which replayed the Millennium Challenge 2002 scenario with considerable technological improvements — forced the American fleet into an interception munitions attrition crisis. The Iranians thus demonstrated that swarm warfare is the technological reincarnation of the naval harassment warfare that the Persians already practised against Greek triremes. What played out on Saturday 19 April in the strait — the opening, the closure, and ships caught in fire mid-passage — constituted the same choreographed sequence… with twenty-five centuries in between…

V — The Asymmetric War, or the Ontological Refusal of Frontal Clash

From the Battle of Marathon onwards, the Persians wagered on saturation through arrow fire — the distance weapon, the one that degrades before the engagement — rather than on the phalangic clash. The Achaemenid cavalry was a force of harassment, envelopment and flank rupture, avoiding the central clash at all costs. There is no cowardice to be seen in this refusal of hand-to-hand combat — merely a doctrine aimed at victory through attrition. Where the Greek warrior sought to be decisive, the Persian strategist sought duration… Which goes to show that philosophical thinking inevitably leaves its mark on the means of waging war…

Iran’s long-term strategy has indeed always consisted of avoiding direct confrontation with militarily superior forces, by extending influence through indirect means. In 2026, Tehran adopted a deliberately asymmetric posture: hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles to saturate enemy defences, attacks on energy infrastructure to raise the political cost of the war for Washington and Tel Aviv, and an obstinate refusal of ground engagement that would expose the conventional vulnerability of the Iranian army. Distance as weapon — formerly the bow, today the ballistic missile and the FPV drone — remains the invariant polemological signature of the Iranian warrior.

To this must be added the desire to create several simultaneous fronts, something Che Guevara advocated when he sought to generate “several Vietnams” to exhaust “Yankee imperialism”. The Achaemenid Persian world used the same stratagem to wear down its adversaries and set them against one another.

VI — Decapitation and the Fragility of the Centre

The sixth invariant is perhaps the most tragic. The absolute vulnerability of the command centre, when the forward defence strategy collapses and the war returns toward the plateau, represents the Achilles heel of every empire of this type. Alexander understood in 330 BC that the Achaemenid Empire, despite its immensity, rested structurally on the person of the Great King. To force Darius III to flee at Gaugamela was to decapitate simultaneously the political legitimacy and the military command of the entire imperial machine. Accordingly, the Macedonian generals never sought to hold each satrapy one by one. They aimed at the symbolic and practical node of the empire.

The opening of Operation Epic Fury, on 28 February 2026, eliminated the heart and head of the Iranian regime by targeting Ali Khamenei, simultaneously plunging the Iranian leadership into a profound decisional disorientation. Mojtaba Khamenei was elected on 8 March to replace his father, but the rushed election of a successor — himself the victim of a military strike and whose fate remains uncertain — has not reconstituted the legitimacy accumulated over forty-five years of symbolic power. The New York Times described, at the end of March, a leadership paralysed, its decision-making process severely disrupted. Twenty-five centuries certainly separate the tent of Darius III fleeing Gaugamela from the IRGC bunkers after Epic Fury, yet the structural logic is rigorously identical. An empire built on the will of a single sovereign — whether King of Kings or Supreme Guide of the Islamic Revolution — can be struck down by the elimination of that central node. The difference, no doubt, is that Alexander had the nobility to weep over his enemy’s body and to adopt his mother as his own. Trump, on the other hand… Some will no doubt argue that Darius III deserved noble treatment in the chivalric political logic of respect between friend and enemy and the moral code that accompanies it, whereas Khamenei…

This paralysis of the Iranian centre has produced another consequence, less visible but structurally weighty. The erasure of the Supreme Guide has opened a space of rivalry between the Pasdaran — guardians of the armed revolution whose logic is that of total war and the refusal of any concession — and the political option embodied by the negotiators and part of the Pezeshkian government, more sensitive to the economic and human costs of the conflict. This rift is not new. It had already been silently traversing the Islamic Republic for years, but Khamenei’s assassination has rendered it glaring. Where the wali arbitrated, absorbed the contradictions into the One of his divine person, and could manipulate the scene at will — raising and lowering (Machiavellianism obliges) hawks and doves according to political opportunity — the void now arbitrates by default in favour of the hardliners. And for good reason: in a regime whose legitimacy rests on resistance and revolutionary logic, no political actor can afford to appear as the one who capitulates. It is precisely this mechanism — that of decapitation radicalising the decapitated body — that the Macedonians did not have to confront after Gaugamela, for want of an ideological body sufficiently structured to survive the flight and assassination of the king.

VII — The War of Legitimacy, or the Narrative as Armament

Far from being merely a conflict of armies, the Iranian war has always simultaneously been a battle to define who has the right to wage war and in whose name. Ideological legitimacy and psychological warfare form the two faces of a single pattern: the narrative as prolongation of military violence, and military violence as confirmation of the narrative. Here one finds again this ontological absence of Persian dualism — the zâhir and the bâtin as simultaneously true registers of a single reality.

Persia invented a singular instrument of soft conquest long before the Trotskyist strategy of “entryism”: the Cyrus Cylinder — a narrative war designed to bring Babylon in without fighting, by presenting itself as liberator rather than invader, as restorer of local gods rather than imperial iconoclast.

The Cyrus Cylinder

Written in cuneiform Akkadian, probably in 539 BC, immediately after the conquest of Babylon, the Cylinder is a text dictated by Cyrus — or in his name — in which he presents himself as a “liberator” mandated by Marduk, the supreme Babylonian deity, to restore the order that the previous king Nabonidus had disturbed. He announces the return of deported peoples to their lands, the restoration of temples, and freedom of local cults. It is on this text that the tradition rests — popularised in the twentieth century notably by the United Nations, which had the cylinder reproduced in 1971 — according to which Cyrus would have proclaimed the first charter of human rights.

At the polemological level, the Cylinder constitutes a psychological warfare operation of a sophistication that the twentieth century has not surpassed. Through this Mephistophelian process, Cyrus turns the enemy’s legitimacy against itself by presenting himself in the name of Marduk, the Babylonian deity, whose elected servant he claims to be, rather than in the name of the Persian gods. A symbolic colonisation prior to territorial colonisation. Before the Persian army enters Babylon, the Persian narrative has already occupied the Babylonian pantheon. Nabonidus is delegitimised by Babylon’s own god. Cyrus is merely that god’s expression… In so doing, Cyrus also renders conquest indiscernible from liberation. Babylon is “restored to itself”. It does not fall. This semantic manipulation neutralises all legitimate resistance: to resist Cyrus is to resist Marduk and one’s own restored order. It is the zâhir of tolerance as weapon of the bâtin of annexation…

Does Hezbollah liberate the territory, or does it in its name conquer power in Beirut…?

The ambiguity of Cyrus’s gesture is not accidental. Historians still debate whether the Cylinder reflects his genuine convictions or a pure strategy of manipulation. But once again, the question is simply ill-posed. In the doctrine of “variable positions”, there is no hidden truth behind the text. The zâhir is policy, and the bâtin is also policy, on two simultaneously true registers. Did Cyrus believe in Marduk? The question has no binary answer where the binary itself does not exist. He acted as if he believed it, and his performance was at once sincere and strategic… exactly as the Islamic Republic acts as if its regional mission were theologically mandated and just, without this excluding the coldest calculation of power… and the sacrifice of the revolutionary hearth, territories and human beings.

The Achaemenids thus practised soft coercion before the very category existed. Intimidating embassies, honourable surrender offers, staged displays of royal clemency… so many modalities of a psychological warfare seeking to demoralise the adversary before the first clash. Where Cyrus decentralised legitimacy by respecting local cults, the Islamic Republic centralised it on the unique figure of the Guide — thereby weakening the entire apparatus the moment that node came to be suppressed.

The Parallel with the wilayat al-faqih

Imam Khomeini did not invent the war of legitimacy through narrative. He merely Islamicised and theologised it. Where Cyrus had borrowed the enemy’s god to legitimise himself, Khomeini built, using Shiism, a juridico-theological doctrine — the vicariat of the theologian-jurist — that transforms each militia, each proxy, and each regional intervention into an act of devotion. In neo-Persian logic, Hezbollah is more than Tehran’s armed wing. It is the zâher of the narrative, a community of faith in resistance. And it matters little whether this narrative performance is “true”. What matters is that the daawa — the rhetoric — be operationally effective at the strategic level. Here, the end justifies the means, and there is no time to lose between “true” and “false”, “lie” and “truth”, “reality” and “fantasy”. All this exists in unitary pairs, in the name of a “coherence” called “wisdom” and justified by the ultimate principle of victory…

The wilayat al-faqih therefore plays exactly the same structural role as the Achaemenid propaganda of tolerance. It transforms Iranian regional expansion into a mission of divine tutelage, into a theological mandate over the oppressed community. But where Cyrus played on clemency, contemporary Iranian doctrine has developed what one might call martyropathy — sacrifice as an operational doctrine that transforms death into narrative victory, renders every military defeat legible as spiritual elevation, and welds combatants together in the face of conventional adversarial superiority… while rendering the regime structurally incapable of negotiating defeat without symbolically destroying itself. It is a psychological war turned against itself as much as against the enemy: its ultimate strength is also its absolute limit.

What Solution?

How to deal with such an adversary?

This is the question that Themistocles, Alexander, Henry Kissinger and Mike Pompeo all asked themselves, with radically different answers and unequal successes. It is also the one Trump is asking again in this spring of 2026, without having yet found a coherent answer.

The first error, and the most constant, is to seek to fix the adversary of variable positions, to constrain it to a state defined by an ultimatum. Every announced deadline (“open the strait or we strike”, “last chance to negotiate”) offers it precisely a new opportunity to produce a response that is simultaneously both, so much so that it exhausts the questioner and reveals their mental rigidity. Maximum pressure, founded on the hypothesis that at a certain level of pain the adversary must choose between capitulating or fighting, hits the same obstacle. The adversary of variable positions does not structurally need to choose, because suffering, negotiating, resisting and waiting are not for it exclusive states, but registers it can inhabit simultaneously. Once again, what American doctrine reads as irrationality is in reality a rationality of a different order, operating on a temporal axis that electoral democracies — condemned to the short time of the political cycle — are constitutionally incapable of maintaining.

What works, partially, imperfectly, but as documented by history, is to adopt oneself a share of this temporality, without making it an absolute. If Alexander defeated the Persians, it was not by forcing them to fight by Greek rules. He fought with their speed and mobility while maintaining the superiority of shock at the decisive moment he alone chose. Kissinger, facing Hanoi — another adversary of variable positions and another civilisation “of the threshold” — finally understood that it was necessary to negotiate on two registers: the official table for the zâhir, and the secret channels for the bâtin, without ever demanding that the two coincide.

Transcending Dualism

Concretely, this implies never posing questions to which one demands a binary answer, but rather processual questions: “what is the next step?” rather than “do you agree?”, because a step is accomplished where an agreement can remain simultaneously accepted and refused. One must therefore hold one’s own threshold without announcing it. In this sense, effective deterrence against this actor is opaque deterrence — that which the adversary knows exists without knowing its trigger. This is, after all, what Israel, despite everything, has better understood than Washington in this conflict. But the hardest truth to formulate is perhaps that there will be no definitive treaty with Iran — only a succession of hudna, of maintained unstable equilibria, and of “variable positions” managed over time. Peace with such an adversary is a continuous practice. It is not acquired in a single blow, unless through truly devastating means such as those that had brought Japan to its knees and ended the Second World War. The only total victory over this type of adversary — and Alexander had understood this by proclaiming himself heir to Cyrus, that is, by playing the Persian zâher better than the Persians themselves — presupposes a cultural depth and a strategic patience that no contemporary actor is in a position to deploy. Which leaves the others in the only realistic position: learning to cohabit with the oscillation, to manage the threshold rather than suppress it… and never to confuse a signed ceasefire with the end of the war.

The Boomerang as Structural Law

Beyond all the foregoing, there exists nonetheless a law deeper than the mere recurrence of patterns. This law — which neither Cyrus nor Khomeini knew how to conjure — holds that every Iranian strategy carries within it, structurally, the mechanism of its own inversion. Forward defence creates, in the periphery it seeks to control, the conditions of an adverse coalition that ends up striking the centre. Composite warfare engenders proxies whose partial autonomy escapes central command at the decisive moment. Mastery of the bottleneck transforms the strait into a blockade target the moment the adversary decides to no longer tolerate the blackmail. The doctrine of the threshold and the in-between, finally, eventually provokes the pre-emptive strike it was precisely designed to prevent — because a sufficiently patient adversary always ends up deciding that sustained ambiguity is more dangerous than open war. The Achaemenid Empire learned this with Alexander. The Islamic Republic has just replayed it in 2026. This boomerang constitutes the tragic and necessary consequence, inscribed in the very logic of this empire from the very first day. It carries within it, somewhere, its own limits — even the seeds of its own undoing.

The Tragedy of Continuity

What is striking, at the end of this polemological traversal across twenty-five centuries of Iranian military history, is certainly the resemblance of the warrior forms, but above all the persistence of the same fundamental contradiction. The Iranian projection strategy has always created, in the periphery it intended to control, the conditions of its own reversal. Forward defence produced the strategic boomerang. Composite warfare engendered the opposing coalition. Mastery of the bottleneck transformed the strait into a blockade target. The doctrine of the in-between — this sovereignty “on the threshold” which is the deepest invariant of Iranian power — cannot function indefinitely. It presupposes an adversary incapable of enduring ambiguity over time, and Washington, by striking on 28 February 2026, signified that this patience had a limit.

On this 21 April, the ceasefire has just expired. Tehran slammed the door on Islamabad, invoking prohibitive conditions. Iran denies sending delegates while having sent them until this very evening. It reopened the strait on Friday to close it on Saturday. It declared the negotiations dead while maintaining the Pakistani channel alive — until tonight’s dramatic twist. Cyrus had said, according to Herodotus, that soft peoples come from soft lands. He believed that the Iranian plateau forged hard men. What the long history of Persian power teaches is rather that the Iranian plateau forges empires whose greatness is inseparable from their fragility. Empires of the mastered periphery, of the held threshold — which collapse when the periphery turns against the centre, when the adversary’s time at last catches up with theirs, and when the in-between in which they had for so long flourished closes brutally, like a vice.

Where some continue to see in the Iranian posture some kind of “victory”, one must avoid the perilous slide they are making into the ahistorical world — a world reminiscent of sects cut off from reality. Tehran cannot go on indefinitely biting its own tail in the face of American firepower and an adversary as brutal as the one it currently confronts — for the first time since Saddam Hussein —, an adversary who himself has no use for historical time, nor for democratic principles, and against whom dualism, esoteric thinking and other soft powers inevitably collide with a raw mixture of nihilistic realpolitik, the cunning patience of the businessman, bloody and populist Caesarism, a providentialist messianism that likewise believes itself mandated by God and by America, and vatenguerriste bellicism, all pushed to their paroxysm…

Pull the tiger’s whiskers too long, and one ends up inevitably being devoured.