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A sharp critique of Western narratives on Iran, exposing how the ‘hardliner vs moderate’ binary distorts political realities and fuels Iranophobia.
By PROF JUNAID S AHMAD
The laziest word in Western commentary on Iran is not ‘theocracy’, ‘proxy’, or even ‘threat’. It is ‘hardliner’. Its compulsory twin, of course, is ‘moderate’. Together they form one of the most intellectually threadbare binaries in contemporary foreign-policy discourse: a childish morality play masquerading as analysis, a vocabulary of caricature presented as expertise. The terms do not clarify Iranian politics; they flatten it. Worse, they do political work. They convert a complex debate inside the Islamic Republic into a fairy tale for foreign consumption, one in which ‘moderates’ long nobly for Washington’s embrace while ‘hardliners’ snarl irrationally at the gates of diplomacy. It is a taxonomy built less for understanding Iran than for absolving the United States of understanding it.
The first absurdity is conceptual. The factions lazily translated into ‘hardliner’ and ‘moderate’ are not divided over whether the 1979 Revolution was a historic rupture worth defending. They are not divided over whether the Islamic Republic, despite its failures, remains a singular achievement in Iranian political history. On these questions, the overlap is profound. Across the establishment, one finds argument about competence, corruption, distribution, institutional balance, cultural policy, and strategic prudence. One does not find some vast pro-Revolution camp opposed by an anti-Revolution governing faction secretly waiting to midwife a post-revolutionary order in concert with Washington. That fantasy survives only because it is useful to outsiders who cannot imagine that an indigenous political project might retain legitimacy even among those who criticize its implementation.
The second absurdity is diplomatic. The notion that so-called ‘hardliners’ are inherently opposed to negotiation with the United States is not merely false; it is refuted by the actual history of the last two decades. Iran negotiated. Iran signed. Iran complied. The nuclear file did not collapse because an Iranian faction discovered the metaphysical importance of intransigence. It collapsed because Washington demonstrated, with imperial vulgarity, that its signature could be reversed by whim, factional pressure, and domestic spectacle. The central cleavage inside Iran, therefore, has never been between diplomacy and anti-diplomacy. It has been between different assessments of American reliability. That is not ideological extremism. It is elementary pattern recognition.
To call one Iranian official a ‘moderate’ because he favours talks, and another a ‘hardliner’ because he doubts the utility of those talks after repeated sabotage, is to confuse temperament with principle and prudence with pathology. The real question is not whether Iran should talk. Nearly everyone of consequence in Tehran has accepted, at one point or another, the strategic desirability of reducing pressure, lifting sanctions, and avoiding war. The real question is whether the United States approaches negotiation as a mechanism for settlement or as an instrument of attrition, delay, humiliation, and deception. That is not a factional dispute unique to Iran. It is the sort of judgment any serious state must make when dealing with a stronger adversary that has repeatedly treated diplomacy as both theatre and trap.
And here the moral fraud of the ‘hardliner/moderate’ binary becomes especially pernicious. Once the categories are accepted, Washington’s betrayals disappear into the background and Iranian scepticism itself becomes the story. The victim of bad faith is recast as the author of mistrust. A state that watched the United States tear up a multilateral agreement, intensify sanctions, and repeatedly oscillate between talks and coercion is told that its real problem is excessive ideological rigidity. This is not analysis. It is gaslighting elevated to regional studies.
It also feeds something darker: Iranophobia dressed up as sophistication. The language of ‘hardliners’ does not merely distinguish factions; it subtly civilises some Iranians for Western approval while pathologising others as incurable fanatics. The approved Iranian is the one imagined to be closest to Western preferences, furthest from revolutionary conviction, and most willing to reinterpret sovereignty as pliability. The disapproved Iranian is not simply mistaken but excessive, theological, emotional, opaque. Thus an entire political class is read not through the normal vocabulary used for other states — interest, memory, deterrence, bargaining, mistrust — but through a colonial lexicon of temperament. Iran’s strategic calculations are psychologised; America’s are normalised.
The result is a discourse that cannot explain even the most obvious fact: both the supposedly moderate and supposedly hardline wings of the Iranian establishment have repeatedly sought some modus vivendi with the United States, whether for genuine détente or simply to be left alone. What differs is not the desirability of peace, but the estimated probability that Washington is capable of it. One camp gambles that a narrow opening, however improbable, may still be worth testing. Another judges that the same ritual will once again be used as cover for pressure or aggression. Those are not metaphysical opposites. They are rival readings of the same evidence.
Iranian leaders, across factional style and institutional habit, broadly share a commitment to the revolution, to sovereignty, and to avoiding war.
In other words, the decisive distinction is not between moderation and hardline ideology, but between different degrees of trust in an American state that has worked tirelessly to make trust irrational. Once this is admitted, the familiar vocabulary collapses. What remains is something both simpler and more disturbing: Iranian leaders, across factional style and institutional habit, broadly share a commitment to the revolution, to sovereignty, and to avoiding war; what divides them is how many times one should touch a hot stove before concluding that it burns.
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That, of course, is precisely the conclusion Western commentary is designed to prevent. For if Iran’s so-called ‘hardliners’ are not enemies of diplomacy but realists about American bad faith, then the pathology lies less in Tehran than in the discourse that keeps pretending otherwise.
Prof Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
