Iran’s refuses to bow. The question now is: can it afford to take a stand?

The Islamic Republic of Iran is that rare entity among the family of nations, in that it constitutes a regressive and progressive force at one and the same time. In other words a state in which a reactionary and revolutionary impulse occupies the same political and geopolitical space.

The Islamic Republic was established, it should be pointed out, on the back not of a revolution but a counter-revolution. The actual Iranian Revolution of 1979 was waged and won by a popular front consisting of Islamists, communists, trade unionists, nationalists and adherents of various other political and ideological currents. Upon the Shah’s overthrow the Islamists, at the direction of the Ayotollah Khomeini, promptly turned against and ruthlessly purged their erstwhile allies in the name not of justice but power.

Since then the country has trod an uneasy path between reaction at home and revolution abroad, forging a schizophrenic identity at once incompatible with modernity but also a committed disciple of it. In this respect, the Islamic Republic bears comparison with the 1868–1912 Meji Restoration in Japan, which sought to combine Japanese cultural traditions with Western modernisation in a process that led directly to the rise of Japanese imperialism as an antidote to Western imperialism.