Dr. Bilal al-Lakkis
Many believed its progress and success to be impossible. It has operated within systems fundamentally different from what is dominant in both East and West, and among Muslims and Arabs alike. Yet after 47 years, its weight and stature continue to grow, despite an intensification of surrounding challenges unprecedented for any comparable socio-political experience.
No regional state—and not even a global power—has previously confronted the United States (as the leader of the West), withstood it, and managed to survive, persist, and advance.
Germany collapsed after two decades, and the Soviet Union did not survive four decades after World War II before disintegrating and collapsing.
We are speaking of a trajectory of challenges that have accompanied this revolution since its victory, challenges unmatched by any anti-Western experience in history.
Not a single year passed without threats, intimidation, tightening measures, sanctions, distortion campaigns, and both overt and covert wars. Yet it preserved its resilience and course, advancing toward the production of the aspired polarity according to its own vision, until it has today become one of the few most consequential wills in our world, alongside global powers such as the United States, China, and Russia (and it appears that Germany is returning as well).
The paradox is that we are speaking of a regional state with limited geographical foundations, yet as it approaches the fifth decade of its revolution, it appears determined, willful, and dynamic—building its diplomatic, political, intellectual, artistic, scientific, social, and military model, supported by a level of popular backing unprecedented for any revolution so long after its establishment.
You see it advancing, challenging, exercising patience, maneuvering, confronting, playing on the edge of the abyss, fighting, waging wars, negotiating, imposing its conditions, maintaining internal cohesion, launching satellites into space, competing in medicine, engineering, sciences, philosophy, literature, art, and cinema, and offering the world lessons in the manufacture of stature and parity rather than begging for them.
It presents a methodology worthy of contemplation in building power, self-reliance, and refusal to shelter under the shadow of any global power or seek their appeasement. In other words, it asserts that polarity can be built according to a new definition of the components and elements of a pole.
Polarity should not be confined exclusively to military, economic, and technological dimensions; rather, it may be constructed upon other foundations. This is closely linked to understanding human needs, preferences, and crises, and identifying those capable of responding to them. A sound idea can restructure the global power architecture if its conditions are met.
In this sense, the Islamic Republic succeeded in avoiding the traps of stagnation, monotony, dissolution into other systems, or submission to the realities of international equations and rules by becoming merely an imitation, an echo, or a shadow presence.
Some states build their policies and influence on maneuvering and exploiting the contradictions of others; by contrast, it can be regarded as a creator and producer of space, an expander of it—not a filler of voids or a gambler on external contradictions. It carries a banner; it does not slip under others’ banners.
From its first day, it set out to produce—first in the regional environment and then globally—a distinct discourse that spoke to peoples and to a human need for dignity, justice, and parity. The call of Resistance is an action, not a reaction.
Resistance, as it understands it, is the language of our current era: a complete ethical and intellectual system that bends power—where possible—toward truth, not truth toward power.
Primacy belongs to truth, to will, determination, self-confidence, and peoples; to wisdom and courage; to challenging hegemony rather than flattering it—yet a smart challenge. Primacy belongs to a correct understanding of the world and its deep needs, to the soundness of motivations, and to the tight linkage between motive, goal, and impact (one of America’s greatest problems today).
Through this, it succeeded in generating attraction for many across the world. It was both revolution and reform at once: it overthrew the Shah’s tyranny through popular power while confronting the head of tyranny, the United States, and at the same time integrating whatever was positive in the cumulative human experience.
In a world governed by the logic of the jungle, it sided not with brute force but with courage; in a world of impulsiveness, with wisdom; in a world of arrogance, with humility; in a world of “peace through force,” it adopted peace through right grounded in strength; in a world that despises peoples, it moved to enhance their participation and presence; in a world dominated by material motivations, it elevated ethical and moral ones; and in a world of haste, it chose patience and steady, cumulative progress.
Thus it distinguished itself from the West as well as from many Islamic religious currents and states, refining a discourse of its own without compromise for the sake of arrival, as other religious trends have done.
From day one it challenged and confronted, ensuring the purity of the experience and preventing its distortion. Its revolution was not delivered by an external “midwife,” nor did it arise through Western assistance; it was a rare revolution that confronted one of the world’s most powerful security apparatuses (SAVAK). It was a victory over the Shah, a Western agent and a partner of Israel—and, in its depth, a victory over the United States and Israel.
The revolution did not judge rulers by gender or sect, but by conduct and position. Hence, it differed profoundly from many Islamic interpretations, a distinction the world is gradually coming to understand—most recently underscored by its stance on the war on Gaza, during which it experienced isolation amid international silence and betrayal.
Today, the United States and Israel openly speak of overthrowing the experience of the Islamic Republic in Iran and are working forcefully toward that end. They have failed thus far—and are likely to fail disastrously—simply because Iran’s foundations and the context of its rise are strong and solid, while the foundations and context of its enemies’ actions are weak.
Through its path and positions, Iran has drawn the world and peoples closer to itself and farther from the United States and Israel, undermining their legitimacy, particularly in the recent confrontation with the Resistance Front. It has altered the stance of regional states and regimes toward it and their hostility to it, as they have come to understand that their interests lie not in conspiring against it but in preventing such conspiracies. It has reaffirmed that standing with Palestine—as the central cause of the region—is a shared interest for all of them and their states. Its people are more united around it and more embracing of its system, while on the opposite side—America, Israel, and the West—everything is inverted: Arab pillars have collapsed, American society is deeply divided, and sharp polarization grips it.
A war on Iran lacks consensus; it is opposed by the majority, and neither global nor legal support for it exists. Moreover, such a confrontation would not be with a regional power alone, but with a religious and political Resistance current with effective reach across the region and the world.
The United States has been accustomed, since the mid-twentieth century, to fighting wars against weak states and fragile regimes, wars backed by substantial external and internal—and sometimes legal—support.
Despite this, it failed catastrophically, with its own leaders acknowledging the strategic disasters those wars produced. How, then, today—when rivals lie in wait, and it faces a real, capable power backed by peoples with legitimacy, capacity, and long endurance?
Those who once claimed that this experience and discourse ran contrary to the global trajectory and had no horizon for success misjudged reality and must now reconsider. They acknowledge that its insistence on weaving its uniqueness, building self-confidence, and producing what resembles it—and what it deems a genuine human need rather than a falsification of preferences—has placed it today in a higher position among nations.
They recognize that it now articulates the discourse of the world’s oppressed with will and resolve, a fortified shelter that protects them all, and an Islamic voice marked by fraternity and dignity.
These elements, combined with the major challenge it currently confronts in facing the United States in these historic days—bearing threats but also opportunities—may place it at the threshold of global polarity if it succeeds in overcoming the present challenge and thwarting the enemy’s objectives, whether through negotiation or, should it occur, military confrontation.
Most likely, it will succeed, because its internal, regional, and international contexts are favorable, and its resilience and capabilities are solid, while the context of America—and of Trump—stands at one of the lowest points in U.S. history, as noted, and because wars in today’s world are no longer primarily military.
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