The Islamic Republic of Iran’s resilience in the face of the unprecedented severity of the U.S.-Israeli assault that began on February 28 should surprise no one who has read Iranian history with any seriousness. Since the early sixteenth century, Iran has fought more than twenty major wars—against the Ottomans, Uzbeks, Afghans, the Russian and British empires, and finally an Iraq that was backed by the Arab world and Western intelligence agencies. The military record is mixed: Iran has lost battles, ceded territory under duress, and signed humiliating treaties. Yet none collapsed the central government, fractured the country along its ethnic lines, or permanently redrew its geographic map.
The current war is several weeks old. The pattern it is following, however, is five centuries old. That record deserves to be the starting point of any serious analysis of where this conflict is heading.
A Pattern Across Five Centuries
The story begins at Chaldiran in 1514. The Ottoman Sultan Selim I defeated the Safavid Shah Ismail I decisively, seizing eastern Anatolia and shattering the myth of Safavid invincibility. By any battlefield measure, it was a catastrophic Iranian defeat. But the Safavid state did not fall. Shah Ismail regrouped, his dynasty endured for two more centuries, and the Shia identity he imposed on Iran became the most durable political fact in the country’s modern history. Chaldiran broke the army, not Iran.
The Ottoman-Safavid wars continued intermittently for 125 years and ended with the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639. Iran surrendered Mesopotamia and accepted a border that, with minor variations, is still the Iran-Iraq boundary today. Yet that treaty did not erase Iran. It confirmed that even the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power could not absorb it. The map drawn in 1639 proved more durable than the empires that drew it.
Three centuries later, the Qajar period brought a more humiliating reckoning. Russia defeated Iran twice—in 1804 to 1813 and again in 1826 to 1828—and the treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay stripped Iran of the entire South Caucasus: what are today Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Iran was left semi-colonial, squeezed between Russian and British territorial ambitions, and forced to grant foreign legal privileges on its own soil. The damage was severe and lasting.
But Iran was not partitioned. No foreign administration replaced the Qajar state in Tehran. The country’s ethnic and geographic core was not reorganized by outside powers. The Qajar dynasty, diminished and humiliated, was eventually replaced—not by a Russian or British imposition, but by an Iranian officer who seized power in 1921 and built the Pahlavi state from the ruins of Qajar weakness. Foreign pressure had hollowed the state; it had not dissolved it.
The most instructive example, because it is the most recent, is the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. Saddam Hussein invaded with territorial ambitions, the financial backing of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, intelligence support from Western powers, and the explicit ideological framing of a civilizational war—the new Qadisiyya, he called it, invoking the seventh-century Arab conquest of Persia. He had every material advantage. Eight years later, the ceasefire line ran almost exactly where the international border had stood before the invasion. No Iranian territory changed hands permanently. The Islamic Republic, barely a year old when the war began, emerged from eight years of mass casualties not broken but consolidated—the external assault having fused the revolutionary state with a nationalism that transcended ideology. Iran lost perhaps a million people. It did not lose its government, its borders, or its coherence.
The pattern across these five centuries is consistent to a degree that should give pause. Adversaries arrive with decisive advantages. Wars are fought at catastrophic cost. Iran absorbs the damage, adapts, and endures. But the most precise way to state what actually survived is this: not just Iran the country, but the specific political regimes that were governing Iran at the time of each war. They were not toppled by foreign military force. They continued—for years, decades, sometimes centuries—until they eventually fell to internal pressures largely of their own making.
Will This Time Be Different?
Israel and the United States have degraded Iranian-aligned forces across the region, especially Hezbollah, and conducted direct strikes on Iranian territory. The strategic logic behind these operations rests on two assumptions: that sustained military pressure will force Iran to change its behavior, or that it will create internal conditions for regime change. Both assumptions have a poor historical foundation.
The behavior-change thesis has rarely worked against Iran. Iranian strategic doctrine—relying on proxies, avoiding direct confrontation with superior forces, and absorbing punishment without conceding fundamental positions—was not invented by the Islamic Republic. It was refined across the centuries previously described. A state that absorbed Chaldiran, Turkmenchay, and eight years of war with Iraq is unlikely to abandon that logic because of airstrikes.
The regime-collapse thesis requires more scrutiny still. The historical record shows consistently that external military pressure has strengthened Iranian governments rather than weakened them. The Islamic Republic was born from anti-imperial resentment and memories of foreign interference. The Iran-Iraq War, launched by a foreign power with foreign money, did not undermine the revolutionary state—it gave it its deepest popular legitimation. There is little reason to believe that Israeli and American strikes will produce a different dynamic. If history is a guide, the more plausible outcome is that external pressure will consolidate Iranian identity around the state, as it has before, regardless of how many Iranians privately oppose the government.
This dynamic is reinforced by a belief that runs deep in Iranian political culture: that every major war in their history was imposed on them. From the Ottomans to Saddam Hussein, major wars are remembered as imposed from abroad. This is not merely official propaganda—it is a reading of history that most Iranians, across political lines, share. And it matters enormously for the current moment. A population that understands itself as the perpetual object of foreign aggression, rather than its initiator, does not respond to external military pressure by turning against its government. It rallies around it. The perception of imposed war has been—across five centuries—one of the most reliable mechanisms by which Iranian states have converted military adversity into political cohesion.
One factor in the current confrontation has no clear historical precedent: the possibility that the campaign aims not merely at changing Iranian behavior but at eliminating the Islamic Republic as a regional power altogether. If Iranian decision-makers conclude that the objective is the destruction of the state itself, the historical pattern becomes even more relevant. States that believe they face existential elimination do not calculate costs and benefits as compellence theory assumes. They fight differently.
An Old Pattern, New Variables
The precedents of Zuhab, Gulistan, and Turkmenchay share a common structure. Iran was defeated militarily—decisively, not ambiguously. Treaties were signed under duress. Territory was lost. And then Iran reconstituted itself: the state survived, adapted, and over time reasserted itself as a consequential regional actor. Territorial loss did not produce national extinction. Humiliation did not produce collapse.
The question today is whether the variables that enabled that reconstitution remain operative against adversaries whose capabilities are categorically different from anything Iran has previously encountered.
The honest answer is that they may not—or not to the same degree. The technological gap between Iran and the Israel-United States alliance is not analogous to the gap between Qajar infantry and Russian imperial forces. It is a gap of a different order: not merely firepower but the capacity to rapidly degrade command structures, air defenses, and strike capabilities. The coordinated strategic architecture of the current alliance has no precedent in Iranian military history.
This does not mean the Islamic Republic will fall. The historical record remains relevant: internal pressures—economic collapse, elite fragmentation, popular exhaustion—have ended every Iranian government that foreign wars could not. The regime may survive in diminished form, as Qajar Iran survived Turkmenchay: still governing, still functioning, but stripped of regional ambition and strategic depth.
But those same historical precedents contain a warning for Iran’s current adversaries. The treaties of Zuhab, Gulistan, and Turkmenchay did not end Iran. They produced a wounded, resentful state that eventually rebuilt its capacity and reasserted its interests across the generations that followed. A militarily defeated Iran that survives as a state is not a permanently solved problem. It is a problem deferred.
Whether the current campaign produces a decisive strategic defeat, enforced contraction, or simply the latest iteration of a five-century pattern of Iranian endurance remains genuinely uncertain. What history makes difficult to sustain is the confidence—evident in the ambitions of both Washington and Jerusalem—that military force against Iran will achieve what it has never achieved before: the permanent strategic elimination of a state that has made survival, in the face of superior force, its most consistent historical achievement.
The burden of proof lies with those who believe this time is truly different. The evidence they must overcome is five centuries old. But the weapons being used against Iran are not.
