As protests in Iran continue alongside an increasingly harsh state crackdown, during which more than two thousand people are reported to have been killed by security forces using live ammunition, international condemnation has intensified. This has led to growing discussion about the possibility of another US- or Israeli- led intervention, potentially involving airstrikes against elements of the Iranian state apparatus. While I am not opposed to intervention in principle, overt military action risks proving counterproductive. There exist far subtler and potentially more effective forms of influence that can and should be employed. Yet, as both the United States and Israel have increasingly moved away from values-based approaches to foreign policy in favour of a harder-edged realism, the space for such nuanced strategies has narrowed, often to the detriment of long-term outcomes.
The debate about values-based foreign policy has been at the forefront of recent discussions in the West, in which a false dichotomy has been set up that sees values-based approaches as incompatible with realist approaches and vice versa. An art form of politics has been lost since the end of the Cold War, namely the ability of Western elites to hold both esoteric and exoteric views simultaneously. During the Cold War, a large body of realist and non-liberal literature was widely used by senior officials. The most famous example is the well-documented case of Henry Kissinger insisting that Richard Nixon read Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. However, works by figures such as James Burnham, Carl Schmitt, and the Italian elite school on the right, as well as Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci on the left, were also widely circulated within the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and Beltway think tanks.
While these theorists would now be considered uncouth to mention in an undergraduate political science seminar, they were, at the height of the Cold War, widely read in elite policy circles. They were rarely cited explicitly, but their lessons were clearly absorbed. Figures such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and George Shultz were all, to varying degrees, shaped by this literature while remaining committed liberals. Those who view this cynically may see it as hypocritical, but one could equally argue that this deeper understanding of the tension between values and political pragmatism, and of the nature of power itself, was one of the key reasons the Cold War was won.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the immediate need for this style of politics collapsed. While there was a brief dying gasp of it among the neoconservatives during the early Global War on Terror and within parts of the Bush administration, it rapidly disappeared. Exoteric politics became the dominant, and eventually the only, framework. Those versed in political realism were replaced by those steeped in combinations of Adam Smith and John Rawls on the right and left respectively. While these thinkers were far more acceptable in polite company, this shift brought its own failings. Parochial liberal values held by Western societies were increasingly assumed to be universal. The inability to think outside this frame led to numerous foreign policy blunders, in which Western actors, often with the best of intentions, believed they could reshape the world in their own image and would be welcomed for doing so.
Given how stark the failures of this era have been, particularly in the aftermath of the Global War on Terror, it has been easy to critique the unforced errors made during this period. However, what has occurred more recently, particularly under the Trump administration and similarly within the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, is not a return to esoteric realism but rather its elevation into an exoteric strategy, coupled with a far less developed understanding of how power actually operates. For all the criticisms that can be levelled at post-1990s political elites, Oscar Wilde’s observation remains pertinent: “Even the most ridiculous convictions are worth more than none at all.”
In defence of realism and against accusations of hypocrisy, it is often argued that in order to protect one’s values from external actors, one must sometimes violate those very principles. This is undeniably true. It is easy to be a pacifist in times of peace, but far more difficult when bullets are flying. What is often missed, however, is the inverse of this dilemma: the realist impact that values themselves can have. This is where the contemporary approach misses a crucial understanding of how power operates. Soft power can often be more influential and advantageous than hard power, and its effective use is central to how states project strength. For all the proxy wars, nuclear deterrence, and espionage of the Cold War, there is a strong argument that blue jeans and rock and roll did more to undermine the Soviet Union by injecting a sense of Dionysian energy into what was perceived as a grey, austere and Spartan existence in the Eastern Bloc.
Russia has developed a particularly interesting set of ideas in response to this form of influence, which the West often overlooks or dismisses, often due to our myopic view of war as being limited to the Clausewitzian definition: the use of force to compel an enemy to do your will, which results in a clear delineation between war and peace. Oscar Jonsson, in The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines between War and Peace, highlights one of the most neglected elements of Russian strategic thought: spiritual warfare. Traditionally, warfare has been understood as operating across three domains, land, sea, and air, with space and cyber added more recently. Russia argues for a sixth domain, the spiritual. This refers to a society’s social cohesion, its will to fight, akin to Ibn Khaldun’s concept of asabiyyah, as well as its ability to project ideas abroad through soft power. The closest Western analogue is information warfare, but this term often evokes the technological language of the 1990s Revolution in Military Affairs rather than broader cultural influence.
In the West, these ideas are frequently dismissed as conspiracy theory. While it is true that such processes are rarely conscious or centrally directed, this often reflects institutional fragmentation rather than absence of effect. A network of state or state-adjacent actors such as NGOs, development organisations, charities, media outlets, popular culture, and universities may not be intentionally engaging in subversion, but collectively they contribute to the spread of Western hegemony in a Gramscian sense.
Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, in his paper The Value of Science Is in the Foresight, discusses this phenomenon, arguing that modern conflict blurs the line between peace and war. Operations may begin with humanitarian organisations and media outlets, transition into intelligence activity, and then into special forces operations before escalating to overt military force. This paper was later misinterpreted in the West as a blueprint for what became known as the Gerasimov Doctrine. Ironically, it was written as an attempt to understand Western actions following the Arab Spring.
Many so-called Russian hybrid operations can therefore be understood as attempts to replicate what Russia perceives the West to have already mastered, while compensating for its own weaknesses in the spiritual domain through more coercive tools. Active measures and information operations, such as those conducted by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency, were designed to counter the decentralised and organic influence mechanisms available to Western societies.
The spiritual domain itself is far from new. While European colonisation is often viewed primarily through its most brutal excesses, it is worth noting that among the soldier, diplomat, spy, and businessman, the figure who often exerted the greatest long-term influence was the priest. Mao’s assertion that power flows from the barrel of a gun contains truth, but the deeper strength of Maoism lay in its ability to stir the human spirit and offer a vision of something better. Conquering territory is power, but lasting power lies in shaping hearts and minds.
Georges Sorel, in Reflections on Violence, explores the role of myth in politics. Myth, in this sense, is not fiction but a narrative that transcends pure rationality and appeals to emotion. Carl Schmitt, in Political Theology, argues that such myths are secularised versions of theological concepts. Tom Holland, in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, similarly contends that many ostensibly secular ideas, including universal human rights, are deeply rooted in Christian moral frameworks, even when stripped of their metaphysical foundations.
As a result, values often assumed to be universal are in fact deeply parochial. Lacking exposure to alternative frameworks, they appear universally shared. Anecdotally, this contradiction is frequently visible. I have observed acquaintances who have criticised Western colonialism in the Middle East who simultaneously advocated for LGBT protests against the Qatari government during the World Cup, without recognising the cognitive dissonance or how such positions feed into civilisational conflict narratives they otherwise reject.
While these values are not often shared by the majority of populations outside the West, as seen in the war in Afghanistan, if you spoke to a local Afghan villager in the Korengal Valley, the last thing you would hear him say he needed was a gender‑sensitive, multi‑ethnic, centralised state based on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. That being said, there is power in the ability to convert, especially non‑Western elites, to these forms of post‑Christian values.
Anyone who has spent time in international relations departments will likely have noticed a divide between students drawn to kinetic subjects such as war studies, intelligence, counterterrorism, and national security, and those focused on softer fields like international law, human rights, peacebuilding, and development. While the former are often more attuned to the darker mechanics of state power, it is often the latter who function as the shock troops of Western influence, even if they would never frame themselves that way.
Returning to Iran and its protests, it is important to recognise that protests do not automatically represent the will of the people. While there may be widespread dissatisfaction with the regime, politics is ultimately driven by organised minorities competing for the acquiescence of a largely disorganised majority. The UK protests against the Iraq War, often cited as the largest in British history, drew around one million people, a significant number but still only approximately 1.68 per cent of the population at the time. Sympathy does not equate to mobilisation, and participation declines further as commitment and risk increase.
The ability to challenge power depends on organisation. Robert Michels, in Political Parties, outlines the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which holds that organisation and leadership inevitably produce elites. Marxist-Leninist vanguardism is a clear example of this dynamic, in contrast to more anarchistic strains of Marxism. Despite claims to represent the masses, revolutionary movements have often been led by educated, charismatic figures from relatively privileged backgrounds, such as Lenin or Castro.
In Iran, protests over the past two decades have increasingly escalated into kinetic clashes with the security state, but without sustained organisation. These remain revolts rather than revolutions. The Iranian security apparatus, by virtue of its organisation, is therefore better positioned to suppress dissent than it would be against a cohesive and strategically minded opposition. Building organisational capacity would be the essential first step of any intervention. During the twelve-day war, Israeli strikes on Basij and police facilities failed to spark mass mobilisation, resulting only in sporadic demonstrations.
If the United States and Israel were serious about regime change, their primary focus should be the spiritual domain, alongside the insertion of clandestine intelligence, paramilitary, and special forces elements to help shape a vanguard capable of organising dissent. This would require providing leadership that can channel discontent, rather than allowing it to dissipate or coalesce around figures such as the exiled Shah’s son. Additional tools could include cyber operations designed to exacerbate dissatisfaction, such as inducing rolling blackouts or disrupting regime-controlled media.
The continued proliferation of tools like Starlink would also be critical, not only for providing access to external information but for enabling internal information operations once a vanguard exists. David Kilcullen, in Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, discusses the concept of competitive control, whereby insurgents and states compete less over ideology than over the provision of security and services. Disrupting state services through cyber or sabotage, while offering alternatives, can generate popular support.
Only once sufficient organisation and public sentiment exist would it be viable to move towards clandestine arming of the movement, transforming protest into insurgency. At that stage, overt intervention could be considered, particularly if repression escalates beyond the movement’s capacity to respond. Without this groundwork, however, kinetic action risks reinforcing regime control rather than undermining it.
The central lesson of Iran’s current unrest is not that external intervention is futile, but that the form it takes is decisive. History suggests that power is rarely overturned by airstrikes alone, and almost never by force applied without a parallel effort to shape legitimacy, meaning, and organisation. Revolts burn hot but briefly; only movements that develop leadership, structure, and a compelling narrative are capable of enduring long enough to challenge entrenched authority. Without this foundation, even widespread discontent can be absorbed, fragmented, or crushed by a coherent security state.
Western policymakers have too often oscillated between moral universalism and crude realism, mistaking the abandonment of values for strategic maturity. The Cold War demonstrated that this was a false choice. The most successful Western strategies combined hard power with a sophisticated understanding of culture, myth, and aspiration, allowing values to function not merely as ideals but as instruments of influence. By neglecting this tradition, contemporary interventions have either overreached in the belief that liberal norms are universally desired, or retreated into a shallow transactionalism that lacks both conviction and imagination.
If regime change in Iran is genuinely the objective, then the priority must lie in the spiritual domain: cultivating cohesion, leadership, and belief among those willing to oppose the regime, while patiently shaping the conditions under which dissent can coalesce into something durable. This requires restraint, subtlety, and an acceptance that influence is often indirect and long-term. Only once such groundwork exists can more overt measures hope to succeed without producing outcomes worse than the status quo. Power, ultimately, is not secured by dominating territory alone, but by shaping how people understand their world and their place within it.
Written by Féda Murphy
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not represent the views or positions of CISES, its leadership, or affiliated organisations.