Iran's greatest enemy may be the illusion of its own power

Power can protect a state. It can deter its enemies, expand its influence and give its leaders confidence. But power has a dangerous side effect: it can distort judgment. For Iran, that distortion may now be more dangerous than any foreign adversary. A recently surfaced video appears to show Mohsen Rezaei, a senior Iranian security official and longtime commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, discussing the idea of kidnapping 1,000 American soldiers and using them as bargaining chips. The video is authentic, but the remarks date from 2015. Their age matters. Yet so does the mindset they reveal. The more important question is not what Rezaei said a decade ago. It is whether the strategic culture behind such thinking has actually changed. Iran has spent decades constructing an image of itself as a formidable regional power capable of confronting the United States, Israel and their allies through a combination of missiles, drones, proxies, asymmetric warfare and strategic geography. That image has become so deeply embedded in the regime's thinking that it may have ceased to be a description of Iran's capabilities and become a substitute for reality. That is the real danger. War is not a television speech or a military parade. It is a brutal accounting exercise. Weapons are tested. Intelligence is tested. Command structures are tested. Air defenses are tested. Logistics are tested. Above all, assumptions are tested. And wars have a habit of destroying illusions. For years, Iranian officials repeatedly advanced two contradictory but complementary assumptions: America would never dare to attack Iran, and if America did attack, Iran would defeat it. Both beliefs were reinforced by history. Successive US administrations went to extraordinary lengths to avoid a full-scale confrontation with Tehran, even as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran-backed organizations were accused of attacks against American personnel and interests across the Middle East and beyond. Washington's reluctance to escalate may have been interpreted in Tehran not as restraint, but as weakness. That distinction can be fatal. Saddam Hussein made a similar mistake. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, an associate reportedly recalled a conversation with Saddam at a palace barbecue. When asked why he had failed to take adequate precautions against an American response, Saddam supposedly replied that although the Americans could see him through their satellites, they would never dare strike him. They did. The lesson is painfully simple: the enemy's reluctance to use force should never be confused with an inability to use force. Iran appears to have made a similar calculation for years. Its relationship with Israel was more complicated. Tehran understood Israel as a smaller but technologically sophisticated and highly capable military adversary. That fear helped drive Iran's determination to develop a military nuclear capability, while simultaneously constructing an enormous regional network intended to deter or absorb an Israeli attack. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian territories became components of what Tehran viewed as a strategic belt of resistance. Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed groups were treated as forward defenses—forces that could threaten Israel while keeping the battlefield away from Iran itself. For years, this strategy appeared impressive. Iran expanded its missile arsenal. It developed sophisticated drones. It constructed underground military facilities and missile complexes. It invested heavily in proxy warfare. It built an extensive network of tunnels and hardened sites. Iranian-made drones even became important weapons in Russia's war against Ukraine. From Tehran's perspective, all of this demonstrated the emergence of a new strategic power. But there is a difference between possessing military assets and possessing military superiority. That difference becomes visible only when war begins. The doctrine of asymmetric warfare can be highly effective against stronger opponents under certain circumstances. But asymmetry is not magic. Missiles do not automatically neutralize air superiority. Underground facilities do not guarantee survival. Proxy networks cannot substitute indefinitely for national air defenses. And a large arsenal does not necessarily translate into the ability to control escalation. Iran's strategic problem may therefore be less about the quantity of weapons it possesses than about what its leaders believe those weapons can accomplish. There is an old warning in military thinking: when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. Iran's military power appears to have become its hammer—and increasingly, every geopolitical problem has begun to look like something that can be solved with force. Close strategic waterways. Threaten global energy markets. Expand proxy warfare. Launch missiles. Deploy drones. Pressure neighboring states. Challenge Israel. Confront the United States. Each tactic may have its own logic. Together, however, they can produce a dangerous illusion of omnipotence. The test of that illusion comes when a state encounters an opponent capable of striking back with overwhelming technological, intelligence and airpower advantages. If Iran's airspace can be penetrated, if critical military infrastructure can be targeted, if senior commanders can be eliminated and if offensive capabilities can be degraded faster than Tehran can replace them, then the central assumptions of Iranian strategy must be reconsidered. Yet this is where ideological regimes face a particularly difficult problem. Admitting strategic failure can be politically more dangerous than suffering military losses. A conventional government can acknowledge that a strategy failed and change course. An ideological regime often cannot do so easily because its legitimacy rests partly on an image of historical mission, resistance and inevitable victory. Retreat is therefore not merely a military decision. It becomes a threat to the regime's narrative about itself. That helps explain why endurance can suddenly be presented as victory. Survival is indeed a form of victory for any government that believes its primary objective is regime preservation. But survival should not be confused with strategic success. If senior political and military leaders have been eliminated, offensive capabilities severely damaged, defensive systems degraded and strategic assumptions disproved, then simply remaining in power does not erase the costs of war. The more troubling question is what Iran does next. Does Tehran reassess its assumptions? Does it recognize the limits of its military power? Does it distinguish deterrence from provocation, influence from control and resilience from invulnerability? Or does it double down? History offers little comfort to leaders who confuse national pride with strategic competence. Napoleon believed he could conquer Russia. Hitler believed he could do what Napoleon had failed to accomplish. Saddam Hussein believed the United States would not act decisively against him. Each discovered, too late, that confidence is not capability. Iran now faces its own strategic reckoning. Its greatest enemy may not be the United States. It may not even be Israel. It may be the belief that Iran is stronger than it actually is. A country can survive a war and still lose an illusion. And sometimes losing an illusion is the first step toward strategic sanity. But if the Iranian leadership refuses to learn from the battlefield, the next war may not merely expose its weaknesses. It may expose the consequences of believing its own mythology. Please follow Blitz on Google News Channel More News Of This Category