Iran and the Architecture of Endurance

Reflections on Iran

By José Parejo, Founding Partner, José Parejo & Associates

There are states built on territory. Others on institutions. A few are built on belief.

Iran belongs to the third category.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has not functioned merely as a government but as a political theology institutionalized. Its foundation (velayat-e faqih) is not simply a constitutional clause. It is a theory of sovereignty: that legitimacy does not descend from the electorate but ascends from divine guardianship.

This distinction explains what many external observers misread. Iran is not a conventional military regime. Nor is it a populist republic in disguise. It is a hybrid system in which electoral mechanics operate within theological boundaries. The President administers; the Supreme Leader arbitrates history.

The death of Khomeini in 1989 did not weaken this architecture; quite the opposite: Under Khamenei, authority became less charismatic and more structural. Power consolidated around three pillars: clerical legitimacy, revolutionary guardianship, and institutional coercion. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) evolved from ideological militia into state-within-state — military command, economic actor, intelligence apparatus, and guardian of doctrine.

Western analyses often search for cracks in this edifice. But they apply the wrong metric. The durability of the Iranian system has never depended on prosperity. It depends on cohesion.

It survived an eight-year war with Iraq.
It survived waves of sanctions designed to isolate it financially.
It survived the Green Movement.
It survived fuel riots and generational unrest.

Each time, external pressure compressed the system rather than fractured it.

The reason is structural. The IRGC is not merely an armed force but an ideological institution. Its officers are trained not only in tactics, but in theology. Loyalty is not transactional. It is doctrinal. In political theory terms, this creates what Carl Schmitt might have called a decisionist core: a center capable of acting decisively when survival is at stake.

This goes beyond moral judgment and prejudice. It is a geopolitical fact.

China calls for stability. Russia calls for restraint. Neither challenges the structure. Because structures, once embedded in belief, are not easily overturned by force alone.

Iran’s economy has contracted, adjusted, reoriented. It has built an “economy of resistance.” It has rerouted trade. It has internalized sanctions as permanent rather than temporary conditions. The regime has learned to govern under constraint.

To me, therefore, the real question is not whether Iran is under pressure. It always has been, but whether cohesion erodes faster than control.

There is no visible fracture within the IRGC. No public divergence between clerical authority and security command. That absence matters more than rhetoric, more than headlines, more than symbolic gestures of defiance.

History rarely punishes regimes for being struck. It punishes them when they lose the confidence of their guardians.

Iran’s system is neither liberal nor militarist in the classical sense. It is ideological, centralized, and layered. It separates administration from ultimate authority. It embeds coercion within belief. It has proven capable of absorbing economic deterioration without surrendering strategic direction.

This makes it resilient... but not immutable.

All systems built on belief face a paradox: they endure through conviction, yet rigidity narrows adaptation. Over time, compression generates either reform or rupture. Which path Iran eventually takes will depend less on external strikes than on internal recalibration.

Power, as Thucydides understood, is not merely force. It is endurance organized through structure.

Iran has mastered endurance.

Whether it can master transformation is the question history will eventually ask.

— José Parejo

Jose Parejo & Associates

Sunday CEO Strategic Insights | March, 1, 2026

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