For nearly half a century, Washington has made one fundamental mistake about Iran: too often, it has confused an ancient nation with the revolutionary regime that seized it in 1979. Marco Rubio understands the difference.
After Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, few names in contemporary American diplomacy command as much respect among Iranians as Rubio. From my student years in security studies through my field research on Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, I have followed his words and speeches and had the privilege of attending several. He understands both the “book of the Shiite mullah" and Iran’s history-an uncommon combination that matters profoundly when dealing with Tehran.
The Islamic Republic is not Iran. It neither represents nor resembles Iran’s culture, literature and civilization. It is, in my view, an Islamic caliphate built around Velayat-e Faqih, a system of clerical rule that elevates one religious authority above a nation. This distinction is not academic; it is a matter of American national security.
For decades, Western policymakers have searched for moderates inside the regime, but reformists, the Islamic Left, self-described moderates and hard-liners, whatever their differences in language and tactics, have operated within the same political structure. Elections exist, but the decisive institutions of power remain beyond meaningful popular control. Washington should therefore ask a fundamental question: Is America negotiating with Iran, or with a revolutionary system whose overriding purpose is its own survival?
Rubio appears to understand that question, as well as the fact that instability radiating from Tehran does not stop at Iran’s borders. The regime built regional influence through the Revolutionary Guards and allied armed groups, turning revolutionary ideology into an instrument of foreign policy. American diplomacy cannot afford to confuse tactical negotiation with strategic understanding. To understand the system across the table, however, one must understand what was constructed in 1979-and what its founders themselves said they intended to build.
On Aug. 30, 1979, the Palestinian Hizb ut-Tahrir told Khomeini plainly: “The Islamic system is not, in principle, a republican system. It is a caliphate." Khomeini’s own language was hardly ambiguous. He described his envisioned order as a “compulsory order" and spoke of drawing the sword “until corruption no longer remains," “exporting the revolution to the world," raising “the banner of Islam," and establishing “Islamic justice with the sword of Islam." These were not stray theological flourishes. They articulated a conception of political power in which revolutionary religion stood above individual liberty, national identity and political pluralism.
Yet much of Iran’s intellectual class failed to confront what was taking shape. Islamic propaganda and the revolutionary fever of 1979 wrapped clerical power in a false mantle of sanctity, while followers of Mossadegh who collaborated with Khomeini helped legitimize his Islamic project as liberation. Abolhassan Banisadr captured the spirit of the period when he declared: “Do not say Iranian first and Muslim second. Iranian identity finds its meaning within Islam."
Almost nobody asked the obvious question: By what authority could a political movement subordinate an ancient national identity to its own ideology? Soon, even invoking Iran’s pre-Islamic identity could verge on heresy, while the heirs of an ancient civilization were instructed that their identity acquired meaning only through a political interpretation of religion.
Khomeini was equally explicit about dissent. “Those who did not vote for the Islamic Republic and boycotted the vote are hypocrites," he declared in 1979, adding that they would be suppressed. On another occasion he thundered: “Do not gather so much. Do not speak. Do not issue statements. Do not publish." These were declarations about power, not obscure theological disputes. They revealed something American policymakers should never forget: revolutionary language was not ornamental rhetoric surrounding the Islamic Republic; it helped define the political order being constructed. The regime’s ideology was not an accidental excess of the revolution. It was embedded in its architecture.
That history helps explain why many Iranians remain skeptical when Western policymakers or media organizations portray factions within the Islamic Republic as substitutes for fundamental political change. This does not mean that every official or faction is identical; it means that factional competition has occurred within a system whose essential architecture has endured. Iran, meanwhile, is something vastly larger than that system. Iran is a civilization; the Islamic Republic is a political regime. Iran has endured for millennia, while the present order has existed for less than half a century. To treat the two as synonymous grants Tehran’s rulers something they have always coveted: ownership of Iranian identity itself.
The distinction also matters whenever regime officials claim to speak for “Iran." A government may control ministries, borders, prisons, television stations and armed forces; it does not thereby own a civilization. Governments are temporary. Nations can outlive them. This is where Rubio’s instinct is important for American policy. Diplomacy has value when it advances national interests, but it becomes dangerous when the act of negotiating is mistaken for a strategy. Understanding an adversary does not require accepting that adversary’s description of itself, just as refusing illusions does not require abandoning diplomacy. Serious diplomacy begins instead with clarity about who sits across the table, what that government wants, what it has done and what interests America is there to defend.
For Iranians, the stakes are no less profound. A young generation has spent decades searching for a history revolutionary ideology tried to bury. The clerical state promised justice and independence; in my view, it instead delivered repression, ideological isolation and a political order increasingly detached from the civilization it claims to govern. Iran does not live in the seventh century, nor should its people remain prisoners of a medieval political imagination. They know their history, are rediscovering their identity and increasingly understand the price their country has paid for a revolution that sought to subordinate Iranian nationhood to revolutionary ideology.
America does not need to choose Iran’s future; Iranians must do that themselves. But Washington must understand the country before designing policy toward it. It must distinguish the Iranian nation from the Islamic Republic, Iranian interests from clerical interests, and diplomacy from illusion. Rubio has an opportunity to make that clarity central to American policy-not by deciding Iran’s destiny, but by refusing to confuse those who rule Iran with Iran itself.
Nearly half a century after 1979, the United States and Iran remain trapped in the consequences of a revolution that transformed the relationship between the two countries. History offers no guarantee of how that chapter will end, but it leaves open another possibility: that the regime which turned the American Embassy in Tehran into a symbol of revolutionary hostility will one day be gone, and that the United States and a different Iran may again speak as nations rather than permanent enemies. Perhaps, after nearly half a century, we will see the doors of the American Embassy in Tehran open again.