In Iran, what comes after victory?

Throughout the extended confrontation with the United States and Israel, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly invoked imagery of the ancient Persian relief known as Naqsh-e Rostam, at times to signal resolve in the face of repeated threats from the Trump administration, and at others to frame the terms of the agreement that ended the war as a victory on Iranian terms.

This symbolic choice may seem unremarkable to outside observers, particularly Egyptians, who are accustomed to deploying ancient motifs as reference points not only in political conflicts but in football matches and other occasions of national solidarity.

Yet the Iranian case carries a distinct significance. Since its founding in the early 1980s, the Islamic Republic had systematically downplayed pre-Islamic Persian heritage in favor of the Shia Islamic component of Iranian identity.

Iran’s conversion to Islam shortly followed the collapse of the Sassanian Empire during the Arab conquests. Although Iranian identity persisted, expressed above all through language — no matter the distance between contemporary Persian and its Sassanian predecessor — the fall of the empire and Iran’s absorption into the Arab Caliphate has long been treated as a national catastrophe of the first order.

This distinguishes Iran’s historical experience from Egypt’s: Egypt was merely a province of the Byzantine Empire, and its gradual conversion to Islam occurred after centuries of substantial discontinuity with ancient Egyptian culture. It is therefore unsurprising that opponents of the Islamic Republic have long treated the affirmation of pre-Islamic Persian identity as a form of resistance to a theologically grounded political order.

Invoking Persian heritage

Since the Twelve-Day War, the Islamic Republic has shown a markedly greater openness to drawing on pre-Islamic Persian heritage, and Naqsh-e Rostam in particular. The site, located in Fars Province in southern Iran, contains two prominent bas-reliefs commemorating the victories of Shapur I (r. 240–270 CE), the second Sassanian king, over Byzantium.

The first relief depicts Shapur on horseback, sword sheathed, extending one hand toward two figures in Roman dress: one kneeling — the Emperor Valerian, defeated and captured at the Battle of Edessa, where he remained a prisoner until his death — and one extending his hand in submission, the Emperor Philip the Arab, of Damascene origin, who succeeded Valerian and was compelled to conclude an agreement entailing significant concessions to the Sassanian king.

The implication is clear: for Iran, the Americans and the Israelis are the Byzantines of today. The regime’s turn toward its pre-Islamic heritage reinforces its ideology of resistance at a moment of existential pressure.

The second relief introduces a significant tension for the Islamic Republic: it depicts Ardashir I, founder of the Sassanian Empire, receiving the crown from Ahura Mazda — the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian deity, represented here as a mounted human figure.

In moments of collective mobilization, symbols tend to expand, with the religious and the national merging into overarching narratives of steadfastness, resistance, and dignity. This is hardly unusual, even for a theocratic system. But what can be read into the discursive shift at this critical juncture, a moment that might be described as the Islamic Republic’s second founding, is the growing salience of the Persian component alongside the Islamic one, not only in the regime’s self-conception but in how it addresses its own population.

The regime’s message is unambiguous: Iran and Iranians are the priority. This logic explains the insistence on sanctions relief, the return of frozen assets, and other measures designed to place the Iranian population on a path toward economic recovery after prolonged suffering under sanctions and war.

This priority has been substantively present at the negotiating table. So has the regime’s regional strategic vision, extending well beyond domestic concerns to encompass the construction of durable alliances with political and armed actors across the region. These actors share with the Islamic Republic at least the resistance dimension of its worldview, if not the doctrine of Vilayat-e Faqih, with the strategic objectives of encircling Israel and expelling the United States from the region.

The regime’s ideologically driven regional position has frequently come at the expense of its domestic commitments. Iranian support for armed resistance movements in Lebanon and Palestine generated successive rounds of sanctions that progressively excluded Iran from much of the global economic system, which remains under American leadership.

The 2015 nuclear agreement represented a successful, if temporary, reconciliation of these two dimensions: Iran preserved its nuclear program, albeit with reduced enrichment capacity, in exchange for sanctions relief and renewed economic growth, while its ballistic missile program and support for regional armed factions remained unconstrained.

The strike that strengthened Iran

On the eve of the most recent war, Iran appeared trapped within the 2015 agreement framework, while the Trump administration deployed aircraft carriers and strategic bombers to permanently neutralize the Iranian nuclear program, restrict Iranian missile range, dismantle regional armed networks, and potentially bring down the Islamic Republic altogether, reinstating the Shah’s son or some other client to govern the country in American and Israeli interests.

Now, the war is ostensibly over and Iran appears to have successfully restored the essential terms of 2015, having exhausted the American option of force without yielding any discernible results beyond the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which had not been closed before the war began.

Nietzsche’s dictum “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” is an apt description of Iran’s current position. Yet this does not mean the ruling system has resolved the contradictions that have governed its choices for decades. It continues to face a legitimacy deficit compounded by successive economic crises over the past decade.

At the same time, it has demonstrated remarkable institutional cohesion and resilience; and perhaps most significantly, it rests on a sufficiently broad political class that allowed it to absorb the loss of its leadership on the first day of the war without structural collapse.

The regime now faces a fundamental strategic choice between two options. The first is to continue along the existing path: reinvesting in the reconstruction of military capabilities and regional alliances in preparation for future confrontations, with the ultimate aim of producing a nuclear deterrent against any future aggression.

The second is to pursue a course oriented toward recovery, legitimacy reconstitution, and economic revitalization, including the possible civilian application of its existing technological and industrial base, through integration into global trade and investment, premised on an understanding with a United States that has now tested the limits of its own power and measured the cost of alignment with Israeli interests.

There is a degree of space in which elements of both paths can be reconciled, by anchoring Iran’s regional role in direct security interests rather than in an ideological commitment to exporting revolution or sustaining resistance as an end in itself.

In any case, this will not be straightforward. It will test the new configuration of the regime’s capacity to coordinate among actors with divergent priorities, and it will test the new elite’s ability to re-establish the political system on a renewed popular foundation.