GOA –To assert that "Iran is a civilizational entity" highlights its long history and cultural depth, dating back to ancient civilizations like the Elamites and Achaemenids, which goes beyond the modern nation-state of Iran. 

This perspective emphasizes Iran's continuous influence, cultural legacy, and role as a historical crossroads, including its contributions to art, philosophy, and science. It also shapes modern Iranian identity and foreign policy, which often references this grand civilizational heritage. 

This gives to the affirmation that Iran is not merely a nation-state; it is a civilizational entity whose political horizons are inseparable from its vast historical, cultural, and philosophical inheritance. For millennia, Iran has produced ideas, poets, statesmen, mystics, and movements that have shaped the intellectual geography of West Asia and far beyond. This deep civilizational self-awareness gives Iran a political posture fundamentally different from that of states built on narrower identities or recent colonial boundaries. Its modern policies, be they in diplomacy, resistance, regional engagement, or cultural outreach, each of these draw from this longue durée of identity, memory, and moral imagination. To understand Iran’s strategic decisions is therefore to understand a civilization that sees itself not as a peripheral actor, but as a central, enduring force in the region’s historical continuity and its future possibilities.

Long-lasting distorted international narratives on Iran 

Who stands to gain from this distortion? Slanted narratives persist because long-standing strategic frames (nuclear threat, regime irrationality, terrorism links) are repeatedly recycled by policy communities, media gatekeepers, and think-tanks; these frames are amplified by political actors who profit from a simple, securitized storyline. Bureaucratic incentives (funding, careers), partisan politics (domestic opponents who want confrontation), and private security/energy interests that gain from instability all lock the narrative in place. The benefit is diffuse: hawkish policymakers, arms and intelligence contractors, and political constituencies who win domestically from portraying Iran as an existential threat. Scholars call this a durable “Iran narrative” that domestic politics in consumer states also exploit. 

Where Iran’s pluralism is most visible, global discourse tries to erase it. Iranian pluralism shows up in competing political blocs (reformists, pragmatists, conservatives), vibrant urban social movements, a lively public sphere in Persian literature and cinema, and autonomous provincial economic networks; these fault lines drive policy debate inside Tehran as much as ideological rivalry does. Global discourse flattens that complexity because it favours easily communicable dichotomies (friend/enemy, nuclear/non-nuclear) and because external analysts often privilege elite security sources over ethnographic or local reporting — which makes nuance politically and commercially inconvenient. The erasure is therefore structural: it’s cheaper and safer for audiences and policymakers to package Iran as monolithic. 

Simultaneously with this demonization campaign, there are neo-colonial efforts to gain control over West Asia’s resources. Under these circumstances, Tehran would likely pursue a multiform strategy.

First, Iran should opt for diversification, expanding and deepening economic partnerships beyond Western markets. Straightforward options include reinforced ties with China, regional trade corridors, and non-Western financial mechanisms.

Secondly, Iran could choose to harden and disperse critical energy infrastructure while retaining export resilience. This would further economic sustenance and sustainability. 

Thirdly, Iran should assume facilitative and direction in prime regional multilateral arrangements that legitimize Iranian stewardship of shared resources. Diplomatically, Iran could combine de-escalatory confidence-building with public technical transparency that are geared to blunt pretexts for perceptible interventions while using cultural and trade diplomacy to make isolation both costly and less credible. Recent analyses of sanctions and strikes show how damaging economic isolation is, so resilience and regional integration are core priorities. 

Legitimate human-rights advocacy vs. geopolitical weaponization

Iran must assert that there be consistent standards with the core being rootedness in human-rights claims. The spillover should be grounded in transparent, methodologically rigorous documentation and routed through independent monitors, not partisan briefings. 

Accompanying must embrace privilege of domestic civil-society voices and corroborated testimony rather than anonymous intelligence leaks. A factor that is non-negotiable is that Iran insulates humanitarian channels from coercive sanctions that overwhelmingly punish civilians. 

An ultimate political form should condition international advocates who couple to name-and-shame with concrete support for accountability mechanisms (legal aid, forensic documentation, UN processes) so rights work advances justice rather than becoming an instrument of geopolitical leverage. This is not to downplay genuine abuses, but to preserve credibility and avoid the instrumental use of human-rights language. 

In this regard, West Asia’s colonial-era cartography and the mandating of boundaries have set structural fault lines (identity, minority/majority cleavages, artificial states) and created long-term vulnerabilities. But contemporary geopolitics — great-power rivalry, resource competition, and state policies since the Cold War - have activated and reshaped those fractures repeatedly. 

In short: colonial architectures created the map of problems; recent strategic choices and interventions have frequently deepened and weaponized them. Addressing instability therefore requires both structural historical reckoning and immediate diplomatic reforms. 

The most harmful double standards include: the selective enforcement of non-proliferation and sanctions (punishing some actors while excusing allies’ transgressions), asymmetrical human-rights scrutiny, and tolerance of proxy networks when they serve certain strategic interests. 

Diplomatically, confronting these requires coalition-building among non-aligned and middle powers to insist on uniform norms, pushing for institutional reform in multilateral bodies (more representative mechanisms for assessments), and public diplomacy that calls out inconsistencies while proposing concrete, rule-based alternatives. Naming double standards plainly, backed with practical proposals (inspection regimes, impartial monitoring, equal application of sanctions criteria), is more effective than rhetoric alone. 

In the arena of diplomacy, cultural diplomacy is a natural strength for Iran: poetry, cinema, music, and scholarship can humanize Iranians across audiences unreachable by statecraft. 

Expanded translation programs, international literary, film and music exchanges that foreground non-state voices, joint cultural heritage projects with neighbours, and curated soft-power campaigns can stress shared regional histories. These low-cost, high-trust channels build constituencies that make hard-line securitized frames harder to sell. There are models of “Rumi diplomacy” and heritage diplomacy that Iran could scale up to tangible effect. 

In the ultimate analysis, Iran must stand singularly independent and inter-dependent with an assertive political identity steeped in political integrity, but unwilling to be pushed into the chasm of imperialist – colonialist ruses.  

Ranjan Solomon is an essayist exploring culture and the politics of liberation