Iran Is Not Venezuela

There’s a recurring pathology in US foreign policy that confuses moral condemnation with strategic understanding. Washington is remarkably good at convincing itself that because it dislikes a regime - and because American and allied media audiences dislike a regime - that regime must also be weak, brittle, isolated and close to collapse. Time and again, that assumption has proven catastrophically wrong.

But Trump takes this long-standing American weakness and puts it on steroids. Previous administrations were often arrogant, ideological and disastrously overconfident. But they were still constrained - at least partially - by institutions, process, expertise and caution. Trumpism strips this away. It replaces strategic patience with impulse, analysis with ego, and diplomacy with spectacle. That makes an already dangerous pattern even more reckless.

The Trump Regime made precisely this mistake with Iran. It and Israel seemed to believe Iran could be coerced into rapid capitulation through bombing, intimidation, sanctions and internal destabilisation. Beneath that assumption sat another, largely unspoken one: that Iran was essentially another Venezuela - economically pressured, internally hollowed out, politically exhausted and vulnerable to fracture.

But Iran is not Venezuela. Iran is a 5,000-year-old civilisation with deep institutional memory, fierce nationalism, sophisticated statecraft and a highly developed understanding of asymmetric power. You don’t need to admire the Iranian regime to recognise this reality. In fact, serious analysis requires the opposite. Because you can’t understand an adversary if you insist on caricaturing them with tribal thinking.

Until this war, Iran was framed by the US as little more than a corrupt and angry theocracy run by ageing clerics shouting slogans from the 1970s. But beneath this rhetoric sits a remarkably adaptive state apparatus. Iran has survived revolution, invasion, assassination campaigns, sanctions, cyber warfare and decades of economic strangulation. It has developed regional alliances, proxy networks, missile and drone capabilities and sophisticated information operations precisely because it understands it cannot compete conventionally with American military power. So it competes asymmetrically.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current conflict is informational. Iranian social media accounts have developed and grown a sophisticated understanding of meme culture, online discourse and political psychology. Lego-style rap videos mocking Trump with lines like “The President of the United States is a pedophile” are crude and propagandistic - but they are also strategically revealing.

This isn’t old-style state propaganda. It’s modern information warfare. Iran clearly understands something many analysts still underestimate: influence today is decentralised, cultural and algorithmic. Humour, humiliation and virality now matter alongside missiles and sanctions. These Iranian memes aren’t targeting domestic audiences. They’re attempting to penetrate and shape US and Western digital ecosystems directly. And they’re doing so with surprising sophistication.

This should not surprise us. Nations that survive prolonged external pressure often become highly adaptive communicators. Think Vietnam, Cuba and even Russia. Strategic resilience requires narrative resilience. But the US continues to underestimate adversaries it finds ideologically distasteful. We saw it in Vietnam, where the US convinced itself that peasant fighters would collapse under superior firepower. We saw it in Afghanistan, where two decades of occupation ended with the Taliban back in Kabul. We saw it in Iraq, where military victory produced strategic disaster. And now we may be seeing it again in Iran.

None of this means the Iranian regime is benevolent. It’s not. Iran’s government has an appalling human rights record. It suppresses dissent, restricts freedoms and imposes harsh punishments on its own people. Those realities matter and should not be minimised.

But analytical honesty also matters. A state can be repressive and resilient simultaneously. In fact, history suggests many durable states are.

The deeper problem here is American triumphalism - the belief that history naturally bends towards its preferences; that sanctions inevitably produce democratic uprisings; that populations under pressure will blame their own governments rather than foreign aggressors; and that military and economic dominance automatically translate into political victory.

Trump magnifies all of these tendencies. His worldview is deeply shaped by television logic: dominance must be performed publicly, humiliation equals strength, complexity is weakness, and every geopolitical confrontation is a personal contest of masculinity and ego. That may work in reality television. But it’s ineffective and extraordinarily dangerous in nuclear geopolitics.

Because globally, power is diffuse. Narratives matter. National identity matters. Digital influence matters. Strategic patience matters. Civilisational memory matters. And Iran understands all of this.

The Trump Regime is now discovering what it should have already known - that beginning wars is far easier than controlling their consequences. The Middle East is littered with the wreckage of strategic overconfidence. Iraq was supposed to produce democracy. Libya was supposed to produce stability. Afghanistan was supposed to produce liberation. Instead, they produced chaos, fragmentation and long shadows of human suffering.

The lesson should be obvious: never underestimate a society simply because you disagree with its government. Especially one that has spent millennia learning how to survive empires.

Iranian video trolling Trump.