On February 28, 2026, Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, addressed an emergency session of the Security Council following joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian territory. He condemned the strikes as "manifest aggression." He invoked the UN Charter and spoke of civilian casualties, of sovereignty violated, of international law trampled. He accused Washington and Tel Aviv of pursuing regime change and distorting facts before the international community. To be clear from the onset, this essay takes no position on the merits of those strikes. Whether they were justified, proportionate, or strategically sound is a separate question — one worth asking, but not the one being asked here.
What this essay examines is not what Iravani said, but why he said it in those precise terms, and why that distinction matters. It was a masterful performance. And it was entirely deliberate. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not confused about its values. It does not secretly admire the liberal international order it invokes at the Security Council podium. It has spent forty years building a parallel order — one in which women are executed for removing a headscarf, dissidents are hanged in public, minorities are systematically persecuted, and proxies are funded across the region to destabilise the very states whose sovereignty Iran claims, at the UN, to hold sacred. What Iravani demonstrated on February 28 was not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. Hypocrisy implies a gap between professed belief and practice. Iran does not profess these beliefs. It borrows them. Selectively, strategically, and with considerable sophistication. The UN Charter is invoked when Iran needs a shield. The language of anti-imperialism is deployed when Iran needs sympathy. The vocabulary of victimhood is produced when Iran needs to neutralise its critics. And then, when the session ends and the cameras leave, the apparatus of repression resumes its work — business as usual.
This is not contradiction. It is strategy. The Western academics and commentators who have built careers framing Iran as a victim of Western imperialism are not, in the main, naive. They are operating within an intellectual tradition — post-colonial theory, structural critique of Western hegemony, the long shadow of Iraq and Afghanistan — that has genuine historical grievances at its root. The West has intervened, destabilised, and exploited the region. This is not in dispute.
But a tradition with legitimate historical roots can still arrive at conclusions that are morally incoherent. And the conclusion that the Islamic Republic of Iran — this specific regime, with this specific record — deserves defence on the basis of Western liberal values is precisely that. You cannot defend a regime using values it explicitly rejects. Iran cannot have the cake and eat it too. The Islamic Republic was not founded on a misunderstanding of liberal democracy. It was founded in explicit opposition to it. Its constitution subordinates every right — of speech, of assembly, of conscience — to the authority of the Supreme Leader and the principles of the Islamic Revolution. When women pour into the streets demanding the right to exist on their own terms, this regime does not hesitate. It does not negotiate. It kills them. To invoke Western values in defence of this regime is not nuance. It is incoherence. It takes the language built to protect the individual from the state and uses it to protect a state from accountability for what it does to individuals. The Western academic who makes this argument is not defending Iranian people. They are defending the Iranian government — and doing so in the name of values the Iranian government would imprison them for holding.
This is a self-feeding trap for the West. In engaging with Iran, the West has two paths: suspend its own moral standards or be crippled by them. Either way, the positioning is weak vis-à-vis Iran.
Western players are held to Western rules precisely because they are constituted by Western values. Democratic governments derive their legitimacy from those values. Their citizens vote on the basis of them. Their institutions are built to enforce them. Their leaders are elected, challenged, removed, and prosecuted under frameworks that those values produced. To suggest that the West should suspend this accountability in the name of engagement with Iran is not pragmatism. It is Machiavellianism dressed as nuance — and it corrodes the very foundation on which Western political legitimacy rests.
Iran operates under no such framework. It does not claim to. The Islamic Republic has never sought legitimacy from the liberal international order — only tactical advantage from it. The moral compass guiding it is Machiavellian par excellence, assessing strategy solely by its conduciveness to the Faqih ideology and agenda — and nothing else. This asymmetry is at the root of the problem. When two parties operate under fundamentally different frameworks, the only possible basis for engagement is not values but leverage. These are the questions raised: Were all leverage points exhausted before the first missile was fired? Was any ground ceded through tactical miscalculation in the years prior? And when the dust settles, what will the positions look like — and whose hand will be stronger?