Iran against the Globalist Order
A lesson in resilience for the multipolar age
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.
I lived with a Persian guy, who was both a hero in the Iran/Iraq war and the son of a judge, and he told me that when Khomeini came into power everyone believed that he was going to restore Iran's position in the world. He told me that within a year, the people knew that they had been fooled,but by then it was too late to do anything about it. Khomeini was firmly in control.
Zoroastrianism was once the accepted religion and now they were Muslim without any democratic process. Theocracy does not work.
I learned so much about the culture and his upbringing. His grandfather was a Khan and had his own territory to grow opium. He was like a leader in a serfdom. All that changed after opium cultivation was outlawed.
I was surprised to find that a great deal of the male population smoked opium regularly. Even though it was illegal, opium growing went underground and it is a cheap habit but highly addictive. He went on to tell me about camel caravans smuggling opium still exist, with bribery used to ascertain where the patrols whereabouts were.
The people long to return to the days when the people were very westernized, especially the woman, in spite of being a CIA asset.
Not sure how their country will evolve in the ever complex political environment they currently find themselves in.
I strongly agree with your framing here. Lavrov is absolutely right to call out the sanctions regime for what it is - an instrument of coercion rather than a tool of law. What stands out in Iran’s case is how decades of external pressure have unintentionally produced the very opposite of what the West intended. Instead of collapse, Iran has cultivated a unique form of sovereignty built on resilience, self-reliance, and new alignments with non-Western powers.
One additional point worth noting is that sanctions are not just about weakening a state. They are also about signaling to other “difficult” countries what the costs of independence will be. Yet Iran, much like Russia today, has demonstrated that when a civilization is rooted deeply enough, it can withstand those costs and even emerge stronger. That is why, as I argued in my earlier piece “The Fortress States: Why the West Cannot Topple Russia and Iran”, both countries embody a model of resistance that goes beyond geopolitics. They show how sovereignty can be defended in an era of financial warfare and technological siege.
In this sense, Iran is not only a regional power but a living example of what a multipolar order actually looks like in practice. Its endurance under siege proves that the “grip on the throat” can be broken and that lesson will not be lost on others who seek to preserve their independence.