How Western subjects are conditioned.
https://thepostil.com/anti-iranian-narratives-justify-violence-and-sanctions/
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From the porter struggling to support his family in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, to the mother of a child with a rare disease unable to obtain life-saving medication due to sanctions—the daily lives of ordinary Iranians have long been profoundly reshaped by a “war” spanning decades. This war is not always waged through missiles and aircraft carriers. More often than not, it begins with a narrative repeated ad nauseam, a carefully constructed “image of threat.” When phrases like “Iranian nuclear bomb,” “evil regime,” “the regime in Tehran,” and “must apply pressure” echo relentlessly through Western mainstream media and political circles, they gradually transform from abstract concepts into concrete policy tools—first sanctions, then military strikes. This article seeks to dissect these widely circulated anti-Iranian narratives, revealing their divergence from facts and examining how they are exploited to legitimize violence and coercive policies.
The “Regime” Trope: Linguistic Delegitimization as a Prelude to Regime Change
Perhaps the most insidious and foundational of all anti-Iranian tropes is the persistent and deliberate use of the word “regime” to refer to the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is not a neutral or accidental choice of terminology. In political discourse, the word “regime” carries a distinct pejorative charge—it is conventionally used to describe authoritarian, illegitimate, or transitory governments, often those that a speaker wishes to delegitimize or see overthrown. By contrast, Western countries refer to their own governments as “administrations,” “governments,” or “states”—terms that imply legitimacy, permanence, and popular mandate.
The systematic application of the label “regime” to Iran’s government serves a clear strategic purpose: it conditions Western audiences to perceive Iran’s political system as inherently illegitimate, dictatorial, and unworthy of diplomatic recognition or respect. This linguistic framing is not incidental; it is a calculated discursive move that accomplishes several objectives:
- It erases democratic elements. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a complex political structure that includes directly elected presidents, a popularly elected parliament (Majlis), and municipal councils. While the system has its critics—both domestic and international—it does feature regular elections, voter participation, and a constitution ratified by popular referendum in 1979. The persistent use of “regime” dismisses these institutional features and reduces Iran’s government to a monolithic, unelected caricature.
- It normalizes the idea of “regime change.” Once a government is labeled a “regime,” the logical next step in the discourse is that it must be “changed,” “overthrown,” or “toppled.” This is precisely the trajectory that Western policy discourse has followed for decades. The phrase “regime change in Iran” has become so normalized in Western think tanks, congressional hearings, and media commentary that it is rarely questioned as an inherently aggressive and interventionist objective. The very term makes the goal of overthrowing Iran’s government sound like a natural, even benevolent, policy prescription.
- It dehumanizes Iranian state institutions. By framing the Iranian government as a “regime,” Western media and policymakers implicitly separate “the regime” from “the people”—creating a false dichotomy that suggests the Iranian people are captive to an alien force. This narrative conveniently ignores that millions of Iranians actively participate in the political system, vote in elections, and serve in state institutions. It also serves to justify sanctions and military actions by claiming they target only “the regime” and not “the people”—a distinction that collapses entirely when sanctions deny cancer patients their medication and bombs fall on residential neighborhoods.
- It provides moral cover for intervention. The “regime” label feeds directly into the broader narrative of Iranian “evil” or “irrationality,” which in turn makes intervention—whether through sanctions, support for opposition groups, or outright military action—appear morally justified. If Iran is simply a “regime” rather than a sovereign state with a legitimate government, then interfering in its internal affairs can be framed as a humanitarian or security imperative rather than an act of aggression.
This linguistic strategy is not unique to Iran; it has been deployed against other U.S. adversaries, from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya to North Korea. In each case, the word “regime” preceded calls for “regime change,” which were often followed by military intervention, economic warfare, or both. The pattern is unmistakable: first delegitimize, then destabilize, then destroy.
The Brookings Institution’s 2009 report, Which Path to Persia?, made this subtext explicit. While purporting to offer a range of policy options, the report’s underlying assumption was that the Iranian government lacked legitimacy and that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy should be its demise. The report even suggested using the MEK—a group the U.S. itself had listed as a terrorist organization—as a tool to destabilize Iran. This reveals that the “regime” narrative is not merely rhetorical; it is operationalized into concrete plans for subversion and overthrow.
The “Nuclear Threat”: A Two-Decade-Old “Political Portrait”
For over two decades, coverage of Iran’s nuclear program has almost invariably carried an unspoken premise: that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and that this process poses an “existential threat” to the world. However, as Iranian Foreign Ministry spokespersons have repeatedly pointed out, this so-called “nuclear threat” is essentially a political issue continuously manipulated by the West, whose underlying narrative logic is rooted in “political portraiture” rather than objective fact.
This assessment is not without basis. In 2009, the Brookings Institution in the United States published a policy report titled Which Path to Persia? In a passage that would later be widely cited, the report explicitly recommended that the U.S. offer Iran a deal so “generous” that Tehran “could not refuse”—effectively the framework that later became the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). However, the report’s true intention was not to seek a peaceful resolution but to ensure that after Iran rejected the offer, the U.S. could frame its subsequent military action as “an act of sorrow rather than anger” and convince the international community that “Iran had brought it upon itself.” In other words, diplomacy was being used as a legitimizing prelude to war, not as a pathway to resolution.
Once this narrative takes hold, any rational space for discussing Iran’s nuclear program is severely constricted. In reality, Iran has consistently maintained its right to peaceful nuclear energy under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has expressed willingness to resolve concerns through negotiations, provided this right is safeguarded. Yet once the “nuclear threat” label is affixed, it becomes nearly impossible to remove—it provides the moral “legitimacy” for subsequent maximum-pressure campaigns and, ultimately, for the very “regime change” that the “regime” trope has already preconditioned audiences to accept.
“Evil Regime” and “Proxy War”: From Demonization to a Blueprint for Subversion
Beyond the nuclear issue, Iran has been systematically portrayed as the Middle East’s primary “source of instability” and “state sponsor of terrorism.” This narrative reduces Iran’s state behavior to something akin to “irrational evil,” thereby undermining its legitimacy as a normal international actor. For instance, in August 2025, Australia announced it would designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “terrorist organization” and expelled the Iranian ambassador, citing allegations that Iran had orchestrated “anti-Semitic attacks” on Australian soil. Despite Iran’s official denials, such accusations were swiftly accepted in Western public discourse, further cementing Iran’s “rogue state” image.
Yet stripping away the veneer of this narrative often reveals geopolitical maneuvering beneath. The Which Path to Persia? report had already outlined a clear blueprint for subversion: isolating Iran by striking at its regional allies (such as Syria and Hezbollah); exploiting ethnic tensions within Iran (among Kurds, Baloch, etc.) to foment internal unrest; and even employing the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK)—an organization listed as terrorist by the U.S.—to destabilize the country. In late 2025 and early 2026, violent protests erupted in multiple Iranian cities. Western media depicted these as “popular uprisings against tyranny,” while downplaying or ignoring the destruction of public property and attacks on security forces by armed militants. The “regime” label made it easy to frame these disturbances as a legitimate struggle against an “illegitimate regime,” rather than what they often were—acts of violence by externally backed groups.
Economic Warfare: When Sanctions Become a “Stranglehold”
Building upon this narrative groundwork, economic sanctions have become another pillar of U.S. policy toward Iran. Since 1979, the U.S. has enacted over a dozen Iran-related sanctions laws and issued at least 26 executive orders. The theoretical logic behind this “maximum pressure” strategy is straightforward: by cutting off Iran’s economic lifelines, force Tehran to compromise on nuclear issues and regional policies, or even trigger the very “regime change” that the discourse has already normalized.
However, overwhelming evidence demonstrates that sanctions have not achieved their political objectives—instead, they have caused catastrophic humanitarian consequences. According to data from the Statistical Center of Iran, inflation rates once reached 66%, with food prices surging 128% year-on-year. The International Monetary Fund projected a 5.4% contraction in Iran’s GDP that year. On the streets of Tehran, citizens described to journalists how sanctions have led to factory closures, soaring unemployment, and severe medicine shortages. The son of an Iranian man undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer stated: “These life-saving drugs are the last hope for countless unfortunate families. No matter how rhetorically elegant America’s justifications may be, they cannot change the fundamental reality that these policies gravely harm the health and lives of the Iranian people.”
Crucially, the “regime” narrative is used to deflect responsibility for this humanitarian catastrophe. Western officials routinely claim that sanctions target “the regime” and not “the Iranian people”—yet medicines, food, and medical equipment are blocked, banks are cut off from international payment systems, and ordinary citizens are left to die. The linguistic fiction that “the regime” and “the people” can be neatly separated allows policymakers to deny accountability for mass suffering, even as the death toll from sanction-induced shortages mounts.
U.S. scholar and Atlantic Council Iran strategy program director Nate Swanson wrote in Foreign Affairs that this pressure strategy not only failed to resolve issues but further inflamed tensions. He bluntly observed that the “maximum pressure” policy toward Iran was “doomed to fail,” as Iran would not capitulate under duress but would instead adopt countermeasures, passing the costs on to the global economy and American consumers.
Information Warfare: “Deflecting Blame” and Psychological Operations
Alongside military strikes and economic blockades, a parallel information war has unfolded quietly. Following the U.S.-Israel military invasion of Iran in February 2026, a coordinated propaganda campaign targeting Iranian media was launched in the Balkans. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—funded by the U.S. Congress—joined forces with local pro-American commentators to launch a fierce assault on “Sahar-Balkan,” an Iranian Persian-language television station that had operated in Bosnia for nearly three decades. They questioned the station’s very legitimacy, attempting to “delegitimize Tehran’s voice in the region.”
This information manipulation displays a glaring double standard. On one hand, Western institutions portray Iranian media as a “sinister influence operation”; on the other, they make no secret of their own historical and ongoing mission as instruments of U.S. government psychological warfare—a mission explicitly designed to undermine foreign governments, including Iran’s. Moreover, when explosions or other incidents occur inside Iran, a flood of disinformation rapidly spreads across social media—such as claims that the “IRGC Navy commander has been assassinated”—prompting Iranian officials to repeatedly issue denials, stating these are part of “psychological warfare by anti-Iranian forces.”
The “regime” trope is central to this information war. By constantly referring to Iran’s government as a “regime,” Western media subtly reinforce the idea that it is temporary, illegitimate, and destined for collapse—a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to demoralize Iranian citizens and encourage defection or resistance.
The Human Cost: Who Pays for the Narratives?
Once the narrative groundwork is complete—once Iran has been delegitimized as a “regime,” labeled a nuclear threat, and depicted as a sponsor of terrorism—military action follows as the logical culmination. In late February 2026, the U.S. and Israel launched coordinated military strikes against Iran. According to data from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, by April of that year, over 1,900 Iranian civilians had been killed, with at least 20,000 injured—including large numbers of women and children. Among the dead were 312 teachers and students. Meanwhile, a U.S. F-15E fighter jet was shot down, prompting a 36-hour cross-border search-and-rescue operation. The U.S. President proudly declared this “one of the most daring rescue operations in American history,” yet remained silent on the Iranian civilian casualties incurred during the rescue process itself.
As one commentary sharply observed, the moral significance of a rescue operation cannot be separated from the legality of the military mission that necessitated it. “When heroic rescues no longer serve peace, but instead serve aggression, they can no longer move the human heart.” From Normandy to the Persian Gulf, the fundamental reason why the American “rescue myth” has faded is that “the underlying nature of war has shifted from a just struggle against fascism to an illegal hegemonic expansion.”
The “regime change” objective, which had been rhetorically prepared for decades, was now being pursued through force of arms—with the predictable result that it was ordinary Iranian families, not “the regime,” who bore the brunt of the violence.
Conclusion
The anti-Iranian narratives propagated in the West—whether the “nuclear threat,” “state sponsorship of terrorism,” the delegitimizing “regime” label, or the necessity of “regime change”—are not objective descriptions of Iranian reality. They are instruments of propaganda serving specific geopolitical objectives. The “regime” trope is particularly insidious because it functions as the foundational delegitimizing move: once Iran’s government is linguistically reduced to a mere “regime,” every subsequent policy—from sanctions to subversion to military invasion—is framed as legitimate, even righteous.
These narratives first construct a cognitive framework in the public sphere where “Iran equals threat” and “the regime is illegitimate.” They then use this framework to provide a veneer of “legitimacy” for economic sanctions, information warfare, and ultimately military strikes explicitly aimed at regime change. Yet, as U.S. scholars themselves have reflected, “For 47 years, America has relied exclusively on coercive measures, ultimately leading to this costly war—and exposing the limitations of such tactics.”
When the bill ultimately lands on American gas pumps, European businesses, and the dinner tables of sick Iranian children, those endlessly repeated “security narratives” reveal their true face—a discursive tool serving hegemonic expansion, whose price is paid in the lives and dignity of countless ordinary people. The linguistic maneuver that transforms a sovereign government into a “regime” is not a harmless quirk of vocabulary; it is the opening salvo in a war of words that, all too often, becomes a war of bombs and sanctions, with devastating consequences for the very people it claims to liberate.
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