Vijay Prashad: How Iran Refused to Lose

A Miscalculated Strike

When Israel and the United States launched their strikes on Iran, they were fighting the wrong war. According to Vijay Prashad, the historian and journalist who has long written on the Global South, the operation was conceived as an old-fashioned regime-change war: decapitate the leadership, destroy a large share of the military infrastructure, and then negotiate surrender terms. What Israel and the United States actually carried out, he argues, was closer to what he calls a "domination strike" — the same shock-and-awe logic Washington used in Iraq, aimed at terrorizing a population into submission rather than genuinely degrading its capacity to fight.

The clearest evidence of that logic, in Prashad's account, was a strike that killed somewhere between 160 and 180 girls at a school. "Basically, it's terrorism," he says of the approach. What Israeli and American planners failed to anticipate, he argues, is that Iran had spent decades preparing for exactly this scenario — militarily, institutionally, and psychologically — and that a strategy built to force quick capitulation would instead run into a state and a society built to absorb the blow.

Eight Layers of Leadership

Much of Prashad's argument rests on how badly Western planners misread the structure of Iranian religious and political authority. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, targeted in the strikes, was a genuine spiritual figure but not the preeminent one in Shia Islam: the tradition recognizes dozens of living marja-e taqlid, or sources of emulation — Prashad puts the number at 56 — and Khamenei only became one in 1994, in an elevation that was itself contested. The most senior marja in the Shia world, Ali Sistani in Iraq, condemned the war on Iran but has pointedly declined to escalate further; he "hasn't blown the whistle" to the Shia militias of Iraq, Bahrain, and elsewhere that could open a much wider front if authorized to act.

Prashad also stresses that targeting an 86-year-old, physically frail Khamenei was a different kind of act than killing the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020 — and that Khamenei, by his account, had already signaled he was prepared to die. His succession undercut the strike's intended effect rather than compounding it: his son Mojtaba is positioned to become the next supreme leader, a continuity Prashad describes as "the king is dead, long live the king," and reads as a deliberate snub aimed at Trump. Beneath Khamenei, he says, Iran maintains roughly eight layers of leadership, giving the state the capacity to absorb repeated decapitation attempts without collapsing.

Just as important, in Prashad's telling, is that Iranian society has been prepared, culturally and historically, to tolerate losses that would break other states. He traces part of that resilience to Shiism's own devotional memory of suffering and martyrdom — "a history of sorrow... of struggle... of holding it within" — and part of it to the trauma and endurance of the Iran-Iraq war. With a population of 100 million, he argues, the country can absorb a level of punishment that denies Israel and the United States the quick, decisive victory they were counting on.

The Escalation Ladder

Rather than surrender, Prashad says, Iran climbed a deliberate "escalation ladder." It began with conventional missiles, which Israeli and American air defenses intercepted, and moved to missiles carrying cluster munitions — warheads that open and scatter dozens of submunitions — which began penetrating those defenses and striking radar installations at Gulf Arab military bases. The message to Gulf states hosting American forces, in Prashad's reading, was blunt: a US base is a target, not a shield, regardless of whether the host country wants a war with Iran.

Yet Iran has kept its most disruptive options in reserve, he says: roughly 2,000 small boats stationed in coastal caverns, unreleased, and a Strait of Hormuz that has been "filtered," not closed, even though a full closure could throw Asian economies — which receive 84 percent of the oil that transits Hormuz — into disarray. Sistani has still not authorized Iraqi Shia militias to rise; Hezbollah is engaged in Lebanon, where Israel has pushed past the Litani River, and, Prashad notes, one in five Lebanese is now displaced.

For Prashad, the asymmetry between the two sides is the real story of the war. Iran still has escalatory options short of catastrophe, while the United States' only remaining step up the ladder is a nuclear exchange — an outcome that would implicate Japan, China, and Russia and reshape politics far beyond West Asia. "The side that has options has won," he argues, which is why an Iranian government spokesperson could credibly claim victory without Iran having defeated the United States outright. He extends the point to global power more broadly: the war has left the United States so weakened, he suggests, that China could move on Taiwan largely unopposed — though he adds that Beijing is deliberately holding back rather than testing that opening.

India's Quiet Betrayal

A substantial part of the conversation turns to India's response, which Prashad treats as both morally and historically indefensible. He begins from the civilizational depth of the India-Iran relationship: Persian's imprint is embedded in the grammar of Hindi and Urdu themselves, inseparable from the literary heritage of poets like Ghalib. It is, he says, a "deeply felt cultural" inheritance so thorough that Hindi "can't effectively" be purged of Persian influence without dismantling the language.

Against that backdrop, Prashad locates the origin of India's estrangement from Iran not with Narendra Modi but with the Congress government of Manmohan Singh, which in 2005 voted against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency in order to secure a civil nuclear deal with Washington. He calls it "a scandalous vote" and the real starting point of India's declining independence on the Iran question — a trajectory he says has since culminated in the current government's silence over the killing of a foreign head of state and the bombing of a neighboring country, delivered while some 50 million Indian Shia Muslims received no acknowledgment from their own government. Prashad singles out Modi's description of the India-Israel relationship — "India is the motherland and Israel is the fatherland" — as a "disgraceful" formulation, made sharper by its timing just after Modi received Israel's highest civilian honor and amid business dealings involving the Adani and Ambani conglomerates.

The episode that animates Prashad most, however, involves an Iranian naval vessel. India had invited Iran to join a naval exercise; Iran sent an unarmed ceremonial ship as its guest. As that ship left Indian waters and passed through Sri Lankan waters — not international waters — a US submarine torpedoed it, killing Iranian sailors. India's government said only that it had "provided information" about the ship's position, a distinction Prashad rejects as meaningless. For him the issue is not only international law but hospitality itself: a government that speaks constantly of Indian values, he argues, cannot reconcile that rhetoric with, in effect, helping to strike a departing guest.

The Political Economy Behind the Tilt

Prashad refuses to lay this record solely at Modi's feet. He expresses particular disappointment in External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, whom he credits with real intelligence — he approves, for instance, of Jaishankar's past rejection of a "NATO mindset" — but faults for having, in his words, no coherent theory on Israel-Palestine at all.

The deeper explanation, in Prashad's account, is political economy. India is a poor country whose population cannot absorb sustained food and fuel price inflation, which means secure, affordably priced energy is a structural necessity — energy that comes from the Gulf Arab states and Russia, not from Israel, which exports none. India's pro-Israel turn, he argues, only became possible once Gulf Arab governments themselves normalized relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords: "as the Gulf Arab states have abandoned the Palestinians, India has been given allowance to abandon the Palestinians," as he puts it, adding pointedly that "it's not like Modi's in the lead here." He traces the ideological affinity further back, to the Hindu nationalist movement's pro-Israel sympathies dating to 1948, and notes that it was the Congress government of P. V. Narasimha Rao, not any BJP leader, that first normalized full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1991-92. The pattern he draws out is one of continuity across India's political elite, with the current government inheriting and later intensifying a policy it did not originate.

Iran's Deep History, and the Republic Gulf Monarchies Fear

To explain Iran's response, Prashad insists on a much longer historical frame than the 1979 revolution. Iran, he says, has existed as a territorial and political unit for roughly 2,500 years, with its sense of statecraft consolidated during the Safavid dynasty, which ruled from the 1500s into the late 1700s. He contrasts this with India, where the British conquest of the Mughal Empire severed a living connection to indigenous traditions of governance — Indians read the Ain-i-Akbari as history, he notes, whereas Iranians can read their own classical texts on statecraft as descriptions of a state they still inhabit.

Viewed this way, the 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh and restored the Shah was experienced in Iran not merely as Cold War intervention but as an affront to that continuous tradition — an irony sharpened, Prashad points out, by the fact that the Shah's own neo-Persianate revival borrowed its central symbol, the Peacock Throne, from an object Nader Shah had looted from India in the eighteenth century. The 1979 revolution, in this reading, was a reassertion of a much older claim to sovereignty and pride, not simply a religious rupture.

Prashad is careful to add that Iran's internal debates — including a real and unresolved argument over mandatory hijab dating to the 1970s, one that Ayatollah Khomeini himself lost before it was later reversed — are legitimate domestic politics, analogous to India's own contested debates over citizenship, and not grounds for outside intervention. "Why should some country come and bomb India" over an internal argument, he asks. He also argues that Gulf monarchies' hostility to Iran has never been primarily sectarian, since those same monarchies maintained close relations with the Shah's Iran; what they cannot forgive, in his view, is that the Islamic Republic proved a Muslim-majority country could also be a republic — a precedent that threatens monarchical legitimacy from Riyadh to Doha, much as Gamal Abdel Nasser's and Muammar Gaddafi's republicanism once did.

Zionism, Messianism, and "Greater Israel"

Turning to Israel, Prashad situates the current war within a much older argument inside Jewish political thought. He cites a recent Tucker Carlson interview with the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, in which Huckabee affirmed the biblical description of Israel's promised territory as stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates — a claim he called impractical for now rather than illegitimate. For Prashad, that exchange illustrates a real constituency that reads scripture as a literal territorial claim.

He sets this against a different, largely defeated strand of Jewish thought: a messianic, diasporic Judaism, exemplified by the correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, that understood Jewish identity as spiritual rather than territorial and had no need of a state defined by blood and soil. That tradition, he argues, lost its argument with Zionism — understandably in part, since European Jews were fleeing real antisemitism and violent pogroms — but an alternative was also available and was not chosen: the Ottoman millet system, under which Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted with communal autonomy in cities like Haifa, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Prashad frames the resulting outcome as a bitter irony: a people who, in his words, created "the vocabulary of the Holocaust, the human rights, the Geneva conventions," now preside over a state whose population overwhelmingly supports its conduct in Gaza.

Structural Violence, and the Search for Serious Intellectuals

For Prashad, individual acts of cruelty become historically consequential only once power and money convert them into structure. He points to a string of disputed or fabricated wartime narratives — the claim that Hamas beheaded 40 children on October 7, later shown to be false; strikes justified by Israeli intelligence networks reportedly built on data more than a decade old; and reports of torture, including nails driven into the knees of an 18-month-old child to coerce a confession — as evidence of how narrative itself becomes a weapon of war. He draws a sharp line between an individual act of violence, like a street fight, and the violence made possible by "amassing enormous amount of wealth" alongside a nuclear arsenal: at that scale, he argues, violence stops being personal and becomes systemic.

As an illustration of how thoroughly capital insulates itself from criticism, Prashad describes young Palestine Action protesters in Britain receiving long prison sentences for direct action against the arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, and a planned public conversation with Noam Chomsky at the Mumbai book festival being cancelled hours before it began, after word leaked that the two intended to discuss Tata's displacement of communities in Odisha. He notes, in the same breath, that Tata Consultancy Services and Tata's cloud business have profited from providing systems used by the Israeli military. He also points out that much of American broadcast television is itself owned by arms manufacturers such as Westinghouse and General Electric, collapsing the distance between the industry of war and the industry that narrates it.

Prashad closes on a more personal note, voicing frustration at what he sees as a vacuum of serious public intellectual life capable of meeting this moment — noting that the philosopher Jürgen Habermas died during the war, that the scholar Tariq Ramadan has been sentenced to eighteen years in prison, and that another prominent Muslim scholar died recently as well. His own discipline offers, he suggests, an unexpected parallel to Shia religious practice: citing Ho Chi Minh's insistence that a Marxist cadre must be someone "to be emulated," Prashad compares this to the Shia concept of taqlid, the emulation of a marja, arguing that real intellectual leadership teaches a method of thinking rather than demanding people copy conclusions. He points to a lineage of interconnected Islamic political thought — running from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani through figures like Hassan al-Banna, Muhammad Abduh, Abul A'la Maududi, and Ali Shariati to Khomeini — as the kind of connected, ambitious intellectual tradition he believes is now largely absent from Indian and Pakistani Muslim thought. His closing appeal is against what he calls simply "cataloging catastrophe": recording each fresh atrocity without building toward an account of how the world could be different. The task now, in his words, is "platforming hope" — restoring people's sense of agency so they can imagine, and therefore act toward, an alternative.