One regime speaks in the language of religion, the other in secular power, but when an ideology rejects a nation’s right to exist, diplomacy may delay conflict, not prevent it. And Ukrainians know it.
The hostility of the Islamic Republic of Iran toward Israel is not framed in Tehran as a conventional geopolitical dispute. It is deeply rooted in an eschatological interpretation of Shia Islam – within this worldview, Israel is not merely a rival state but a theological provocation: a Jewish sovereign presence on land the Shia Islam regards as an Islamic trust, is historically invalid.
That is why the tension between Shia Islam and the Jewish state was metaphysical long before it became strategically geopolitical. In Shia thought, the conflict is cast as a Messianic War, one that faithful adherents are religiously compelled to engage in against the Jewish people.
That kind of framing has a secular cousin in today’s Russia. Under Vladimir Putin, the doctrine of “Russkiy Mir,” or the Russian World, asserts that there is no Ukrainian nation as Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” separated artificially by hostile forces. Where Tehran invokes sacred destiny, Moscow invokes a distorted history. Where one speaks of divine order, the other of “civilizational unity.”
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The parallels are not perfect, but they are revealing. In both systems, the adversary’s political existence is treated as an error to be corrected.
Once a conflict is framed that way, pragmatism is pushed aside. If the other side’s sovereignty is illegitimate, compromise is impossible. War is recast as “restoring” a lost, “rightful order.” “Destiny” trumps cost-benefit analysis.
This clarifies both the Kremlin’s stubborn approach to terms of ‘peace’ and the Ayatollahs’ push to develop nuclear capabilities.
For hardline clerics in Tehran, eliminating Israel has often been couched in apocalyptic language. Whether every official shares that theological intensity is beside the point. The regime’s ideology frames the destruction of Israel not as an act of aggression, but as a sense of destiny being fulfilled. In such a context, a nuclear capability is not merely a deterrent; it is the means for pursuing maximalist aims.
That is the backdrop against which the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed in 2015. The deal promised sanctions relief for the Iranian regime in exchange for strict limits on uranium enrichment and intrusive inspections. It was supposed to bring Iran’s nuclear program under international scrutiny. Critics countered that it addressed declared facilities while the regime’s underlying intentions remained unchanged.
The result was that the Ayatollahs never obeyed the agreement. They made JCPOA into a charade.
Roughly $100 billion in previously frozen assets became accessible to Tehran after the agreement was signed. The expectation in Western capitals was that economic reintegration would moderate behavior. Instead, Iran financed regional proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi movement. More troubling, according to the intelligence assessments, the regime did not obey the agreement.
Both the US and Israel’s intelligence were pointing to evidence of two parallel nuclear programs the regime ran — one declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency and opened to its inspectors, another embedded within military structures and concealed.
And while the IAEA was able to certify compliance at declared and inspected sites, it also harbored suspicions about possible undeclared activities elsewhere. This is why after the US and Israel bombed some facilities in Iran, IAEA could not verify whether all were disabled, because the IAEA was never certain how many sites actually existed in the first place.
Given Iran’s open noncompliance, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the accord in 2018 and reimposed sweeping sanctions. His administration argued that economic pressure was the only language authoritarian regimes truly heed short of military force.
But what is clear is that ideology shapes risk tolerance. A regime animated by historical grievance or religious teleology may accept isolation, sanctions, even exorbitant battlefield losses in pursuit of what it considers rectification. That is as true in Moscow’s war against Ukraine as it is in Tehran’s confrontation with Israel.
Conflicts rooted in negotiable interests can be bargained down. Conflicts rooted in identity and destiny are far harder to defuse. If one side believes that history — or heaven — requires the undoing of another nation, diplomacy becomes a holding action rather than a solution.
Ultimately, the real problem lies in the narratives that justify such pursuits. As long as those narratives hold sway, treaties and agreements can do little more than delay an inevitable reckoning.
Ukrainians understand that the real end of the Russian aggression would come with defeating Russian military power, just as Israelis recognize that only containing the Iranian military threat can reduce the risk of existential conflict.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
Anna Magdalena Wielopolska, former Polish journalist of “Rzeczpospolita,” Ph.D. in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently leading a counteroffensive against Russian propaganda in social media
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