Constantin von Hoffmeister shows how Iran, long “held by the throat” through sanctions and subversion, turned pressure into resilience and became a symbol of multipolar defiance.
The renewal of UN sanctions against Iran is legally null and void, declared Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly. As he emphasized, “It is formulated with the singular purpose of keeping our Iranian colleagues constantly by the throat, and not allowing them one step to the left or one step to the right.” His words cut to the heart of the matter. These sanctions are not tools of law but instruments of force. They are designed to deny an ancient civilization the freedom to decide its own fate.
Iran has long been a thorn in the side of the globalist order. For seventy years, external powers have sought to bend it, bribe it, or break it. They imposed embargoes, toppled leaders, and armed enemies. They funded propaganda and unleashed cyberattacks. They sought to turn oil wealth into a leash rather than a ladder. Yet each effort failed to bring submission. Instead, each pressure triggered greater resilience. Resistance became a permanent state of being, a form of sovereignty that no external decree could erase.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 remains the great turning point. It was meant to be a chapter of subjugation. Instead, it became an eruption of independence. The Shah, trained and armed by the West, was swept aside. Ayatollah Khomeini, visionary and resolute, took his place. The new republic declared itself free of foreign command and aligned with no empire but its own civilization. That single event reversed decades of schemes. What had been designed as an operation of control turned into the foundation of defiance.
Russian entrepreneur and traditionalist thinker Konstantin Malofeev captures this reversal in his study Empire:
In 1953, the CIA carried out Operation Ajax in Iran to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh, who had nationalized the oil industry. The budget for the operation was $1 million. In 1978, the Americans once again interfered in Iran’s internal affairs, this time to bind the Shah hand and foot, since he had dared to invest oil dollars not in the banks of Canaan but in the industrialization of the country…
However, in Iran the CIA suffered a catastrophic fiasco: the special operation to change the regime took an unexpected turn in the form of the Islamic Revolution, as a result of which the secular Shah was replaced by the radical Ayatollah Khomeini, who adopted a sharply hostile stance towards the Americans…
— Konstantin Malofeev, Империя. Настоящее и будущее. Книга третья (Empire: Present and Future, Book Three). Moscow, 2022, pp. 316–317.
The pressure to keep Iran “by the throat” has led, time and again, to outcomes the globalist powers did not anticipate.
Sanctions follow the same logic. They are billed as neutral instruments, technical responses to political disputes. In practice, they are tools of strangulation. They target not only state officials but ordinary citizens. They restrict medicine, industry, and commerce. They seek to exhaust a nation until its will collapses. Yet in Iran the opposite has taken place. The sanctions built networks of self-reliance. They deepened bonds with other non-Western powers. They hardened national resolve.
This is why Iran matters for the multipolar world. It shows that resistance is possible and that endurance creates strength. A nation that holds its ground for decades, against both military aggression and financial warfare, proves that sovereignty is not a relic of the past. It is a living principle that can defy the structures of global hegemony. In the long run, every sanction, every coup, and every interference becomes another lesson in resilience.
Lavrov’s words at the United Nations were more than a diplomatic protest. They were an acknowledgment that Iran’s survival under siege embodies the spirit of multipolarity. A world of sovereign civilizations cannot emerge through compromise with domination. It can only emerge when nations refuse to accept the grip on their throats. Iran has refused. That refusal makes it more than a regional power. It makes it a symbol.