An honorary Iranian
The countless revelations of Sohrab Ahmari
6 March 2026
Sohrab Ahmari is a man who has discovered the truth several times, and each discovery has been utterly sincere. He is the Augustine of the late-night substack: restless, intense, forever converting himself to something new. He appears before us as a man permanently in mid-epiphany, the intellectual equivalent of someone who has just discovered a new diet and insists that it has changed his life. One year he is denouncing Marxists, the next he is quoting them; one year he is defending liberal order, the next he is explaining that liberal order was the problem all along. He is an enthusiast. And there is always something slightly alarming about an enthusiast.
Incarnating the post-liberal future
Ahmari inhabits that curious transatlantic realm where American magazines, Washington panels, Catholic theology, and Twitter polemics mingle like guests at an awkward wedding reception. He writes columns, launches journals, convenes alliances, debates economists, and quotes papal encyclicals with the confidence of a man who has only just discovered them. He may look like a mild-mannered policy wonk in a blazer, but spiritually he is a crusader with a laptop. One thinks perhaps of Chesterton — or at the very least of a graduate student who has just read Chesterton and would very much like you to know about it.
His books arrive thick with ideas and endorsements, the intellectual equivalent of artesanal preserves in handsome jars. They are full of stories about warehouse workers, philosophers, saints, trade unions, medieval kings, and the moral crisis of late capitalism. One senses a man who has read widely and digested vigorously, though not always in chronological order. The reader is ushered briskly from Marx to Aquinas to Foucault to Leo XIII, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph, as though the entire history of Western thought were a particularly lively dinner party and Ahmari a fussy host determined that everyone should meet.
There he is in one essay defending tradition against the barbarism of liberal neutrality. There he is again in another explaining the tyranny of corporate power. Here he is quoting Karl Polanyi, there he is quoting Saint Louis of France, and here again he is founding a magazine designed to unite socialists, Catholics, and anti-woke populists under a single editorial roof. One suspects that the roof leaks slightly, but the ambition is magnificent.
He debates liberals, admonishes conservatives, courts socialists, and scolds libertarians. One week he is explaining the necessity of moral authority; the next he is exposing the predations of private equity. He moves through ideological territory with the cheerful confidence of a man who assumes all roads will eventually lead to the common good. The fact that these roads often travel in opposite directions does not appear to trouble him.
In photographs he has the thoughtful air of someone contemplating the fate of civilisation over coffee. In prose he is a giant among arguments, though occasionally the arguments turn out to be standing on each other’s shoulders. He is the sort of writer who produces manifestos with titles that sound faintly ecclesiastical and policy proposals that sound faintly Rooseveltian. One never quite knows whether one is reading a Catholic sermon, a labour pamphlet, or a strategy memo for the Republican Party.
Ahmari is someone, in short, in whom all the possibilities of ideological reinvention appear permanently alive. He is not simply arguing for a new politics. He is trying to synthesise one in real time, with all the exuberance and occasional confusion that such experiments entail. He is not merely writing about the post-liberal future. He is the post-liberal future.
He also likes to call himself an Iranian
Total ignorance
Now, Ahmari has once again demonstrated his total ignorance of the country he claims to represent. His recent article in the Washington Post argues that Iran has been held back for over a century by an obsessive national quest for “purity”. The piece presents itself as sober reflection, but in reality it recycles some of the most tiresome interpretive habits in Western writing about the Middle East. The argument is less an analysis of Iranian history than the hysterical performance of an old imperial discourse — one that replaces historical explanation with civilisational psychology and treats anti-colonial politics as evidence of cultural pathology.
The central claim is simple. According to Ahmari, Iranian politics has been repeatedly driven by a deep cultural impulse toward absolutism and purification. From the tobacco protest of the nineteenth century to the oil nationalisation of the 1950s and finally to the Islamic Revolution, Iran supposedly demonstrates a recurring pattern: moralistic idealism colliding with geopolitical reality. The result, he suggests, has been stagnation and self-inflicted decline.
“The answer lies, in part, in the absolutism of Iranian political culture and statecraft. A yearning for purity drives the country toward passionate idealism.”
This argument might appear persuasive if one ignores the intellectual tradition it reproduces. For more than two centuries Western commentators have explained political events in the Middle East through precisely this kind of cultural diagnosis. The Orient, they argued, was governed not by institutions or interests but by emotional and religious impulses. Societies there were supposedly prone to fanaticism, incapable of compromise, and permanently trapped in cycles of absolutism. It is remarkable how effortlessly Ahmari’s language echoes this tradition.
The first move in this rhetorical pattern is to transform historical events into symptoms of national character. Instead of asking why particular actors made particular decisions under particular circumstances, the argument invokes a timeless cultural disposition. Iranian politics becomes an expression of “yearning for purity,” a psychological tendency that allegedly explains a century of revolutions, protests, and state formation. Once this premise is accepted, history dissolves into anthropology. The complexities of politics vanish into a civilisational temperament.
Such reasoning is not analysis but caricature. Iran’s modern history cannot be reduced to an emotional drive toward purity any more than British politics can be explained by an innate national obsession with parliamentary procedure. The Iranian constitutional revolution emerged from concrete struggles over sovereignty, taxation, and foreign economic domination. The tobacco boycott was a coordinated protest against a British concession that granted monopoly control over a major domestic industry. The oil nationalisation campaign sought to overturn an exploitative arrangement that allowed the enemy to capture the vast majority of Iranian petroleum profits. These were political conflicts over power and resources, not eruptions of cultural neurosis.
Yet the column repeatedly reframes these conflicts through the language of ritual contamination and moral absolutism. Anti-imperial resistance becomes evidence of irrational purity anxiety. The tobacco protest is portrayed not as an early nationalist mobilisation but as a reaction to the supposed horror of Christians touching Iranian tobacco. When discussing the 1890 tobacco boycott, Ahmari quotes a French historian claiming:
“[Iranians] will never reconcile themselves to the idea that their tobacco should pass through the hands of Christians, who, in their eyes, render impure what they touch.”
The implication is clear. The problem was not the concession itself but the mentality of the people resisting it.
The tobacco protest was one of the first major anti-imperial mobilisations in modern Iran, aimed at overturning a British monopoly on the tobacco trade. For Ahmari, however, the protest was neither economic resistance, nor nationalist mobilisation, nor anti-colonial politics; it was religious contamination anxiety.
This rhetorical manoeuvre should be familiar to anyone who has read the archives of empire. Colonial administrators routinely dismissed nationalist movements as expressions of religious fanaticism or cultural backwardness. When colonised populations protested foreign control of their economies or territories, imperial commentators explained the unrest through superstition, tribalism, or irrational pride. The political grievances themselves were quietly pushed out of view.
Pahlavi fan boy
Ahmari’s treatment of the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh follows the same pattern. The coup organised by British and American intelligence agencies is acknowledged but immediately diluted. Perhaps Mossadegh would have fallen anyway, the reader is told, because his politics were too uncompromising. The possibility that the decisive factor might have been external intervention receives only passing attention.
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This is a curious interpretation of events that have been extensively documented for decades. The coup was not an incidental footnote to Mossadegh’s downfall but a central mechanism in it. British officials planned the operation after the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company threatened their strategic interests. American intelligence agencies joined the project when Cold War anxieties turned Mossadegh’s independence into a perceived geopolitical risk. The resulting operation overthrew a democratically elected government and restored the authority of a monarch who would rule for another quarter century with extensive Western backing.
To treat this intervention as a secondary factor while attributing the episode primarily to Iranian cultural tendencies requires a remarkable act of interpretive discipline. The explanation effectively removes imperial power from the story and replaces it with national psychology.
Even more troubling is the breezy way Ahmari casts the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty as the nation’s “salvation.”
“Iran’s salvation would come not through democracy, but from the ambition of a Cossack officer called Reza Khan, who would crown himself Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, which, including his son’s tenure, ruled the country from 1925 to 1979. An Atatürk-like figure, Reza Shah set out to modernize Iran from on high, and succeeded to an astonishing degree.”
This is an extraordinary claim, and an extraordinarily revealing one. Reza Khan did not rescue Iran from chaos so much as seize power through a military coup and consolidate a highly centralised authoritarian state. The modernisation projects that followed were real, but they were imposed through coercion, censorship, and the systematic destruction of political pluralism. Parliament was reduced to a façade, dissenting newspapers were shut down, tribal communities were violently suppressed, and opponents of the regime were imprisoned or exiled.
To describe this process as national redemption is to adopt the old colonial logic that authoritarian modernisers are justified so long as they build roads and railways. It is the same logic that once celebrated imperial administrators for introducing infrastructure to the societies they ruled. In this narrative, political freedom becomes an optional luxury, while the construction of bureaucratic and industrial institutions is treated as proof of progress.
That framing not only sanitises the authoritarian character of the Pahlavi state but also erases the long Iranian struggle for constitutional government that both Reza Shah and his son repeatedly suppressed. If the column truly wishes to criticise absolutism in Iranian political culture, it might begin by acknowledging that the Pahlavi monarchy itself represented one of its most durable modern expressions.
Iran during the monarchy was not some paradise of freedom — it was a brutal police state under the Shah’s SAVAK secret police, with torture chambers funded by the CIA and Mossad. The Islamic Revolution wasn’t a “hardcore religious takeover,” it was the people rising up to reclaim their dignity, their independence, and their Islamic identity after centuries of colonial domination.
Of course, there are “Iranians” like Ahmari who oppose the Islamic Republic — no country has unanimous support for its government. But those shouting loudest from London or Los Angeles are the privileged children of the very elites who benefited from the Shah’s dictatorship.
Gimme that old time tutelage
The article’s conclusion completes the picture by presenting Western alignment as the sober alternative to Iranian idealism. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the reader is told, achieved stability and prosperity because they accepted the “reality principle” of Western alliances.
“Comparable powers in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, sheltered their aspirations for development and independence within the reality principle — and under Western alliances, even tutelage.”
The key word here is tutelage, and the implication is unmistakable. Political maturity consists in accommodating oneself to the global hierarchy dominated by the United States and its partners.
This is not a neutral observation but a deeply ideological claim. It reflects the worldview of the postwar liberal order, in which alignment with Western strategic interests is treated as pragmatic realism while attempts at geopolitical autonomy are dismissed as ideological excess. The same logic once justified colonial protectorates, mandates, and spheres of influence. Nations that resisted external control were depicted as reckless dreamers who refused to recognise the limits of their power.
What disappears from this narrative is the simple possibility that countries might pursue independence because they regard foreign tutelage as unacceptable. The desire to control one’s own resources and policies is recast as evidence of political immaturity.
Equally absurd is Ahmari’s attempt to measure national success by the number of countries a passport can access without a visa. In this curious metric of civilisational achievement, geopolitics dissolves into the etiquette of airport immigration desks. The reader is invited to conclude that Turkey and Saudi Arabia must be thriving societies because their citizens can more easily book holidays abroad, while Iran’s predicament is revealed by the limited destinations available to its passport holders.
“The citizens of Turkey and Saudi Arabia today enjoy rising living standards, relative security and passports that open access to many international destinations (passports from Turkey and Saudi Arabia allow travellers to visit 113 and 88 countries, respectively; for Iran, it’s 40).”
This is not analysis but parody. Passport rankings primarily reflect diplomatic relations, sanctions regimes, and alliance structures, not the moral or political maturity of a society. Judging the quality of a civilisation by the speed with which its citizens clear passport control at Heathrow is like measuring the intellectual vitality of a university by the length of the queue at its coffee shop. It confuses administrative convenience with cultural achievement. The fact that Ahmari deploys such a trivial statistic as a sweeping indictment of Iranian political culture tells us far more about the intellectual thinness of his argument than it does about Iran itself.
Secular fundamentalism
Equally striking is Ahmari’s secular teleology. Religious politics appears only as repression, fanaticism, or puritanical purification. The Islamic Revolution becomes another manifestation of the national obsession with ideological purity. The broader context in which the revolution occurred receives little attention. Decades of authoritarian rule under the Pahlavi monarchy, supported by Western governments and enforced through an extensive security apparatus, vanish into the background. The revolution appears less as a political uprising against dictatorship than as a cultural eruption of theological absolutism.
This framing fits comfortably within a familiar Western narrative in which modernity is equated with secular liberalism and any deviation from that path is interpreted as regression. Societies that refuse to follow this trajectory are described as trapped in archaic identities that prevent them from entering the rational world of modern politics.
The irony of the column lies in its confident denunciation of ideological purity. The author condemns Iranian leaders for ignoring geopolitical realities while simultaneously advancing a remarkably tidy interpretation of history. Every episode confirms the same thesis: Iranian culture generates absolutism, absolutism produces disaster, and the cure is pragmatic accommodation to the existing international order.
History is rarely so convenient. Iran’s modern trajectory reflects a tangled interaction of domestic struggles, imperial interventions, ideological experiments, and geopolitical pressures. To reduce this complexity to a cultural obsession with purity is not simply an analytical shortcut. It is a return to a mode of thinking that has long served to justify the dominance of powerful states over weaker ones.
Readers should recognise these interpretive habits for what they are. The language may be contemporary, but the structure of the argument belongs to an older tradition in which the political history of the Middle East was explained through the supposed psychological deficiencies of its inhabitants. When this discourse appears today in the pages of prestigious newspapers, it deserves not respectful engagement but firm rejection.
Iran does not require platitudes from Zionists about civilisational temperament. It requires the same analytical seriousness we apply to any other country: attention to power, interests, institutions, and historical contingency. Until Western shills like Ahmari abandon the reflex to interpret Middle Eastern politics through the lens of cultural pathology, they will continue to reproduce the intellectual habits of the empires whose shadows still loom over the region.
