Over the past several days, Iran’s military has been in the news regularly.
From unveiling its largest military vessel, conducting large scale military exercises to displaying a vast number of sophisticated military drones have all made headlines.
Tehran’s conventional power will contribute to regional peace and stability as it undoubtedly serves as a strong deterrent against war.
Since 1979, political-military doctrine of NATO regimes and their regional surrogates revolved around finding ways to destabilize Iran and overthrow its Islamic system.
Part of the Western strategy was to subvert Iran internally at the political, ethnic and economic levels to a degree which would make a conventional military attack on Iran a viable endeavor.
Iran’s determined and principled socio-political regional policies coupled with its ability to build a resilient domestic military industrial infrastructure have neutralized the West’s subversive designs.
The reality is that no matter how much the NATO regimes are able to destabilize Iran internally, in the face of external threats, Iranians will always come together.
At the practical level, the Iranian society has demonstrated a great deal of social and ideological cohesion.
Pro-government rallies always dwarf anti-government seditionist crowds by millions.
Thus, internal destabilization agenda of the West has not achieved the desired results.
This makes an external military aggression against Iran virtually impossible.
With the amount of hardware and military cadre Iran possesses, it can inflict significant damage on any aggressor, a reality even Iran’s detractors admit.
In 2002, the Pentagon conducted an expensive wargame called the ‘Millennium Challenge’ designed to simulate what war with Iran would be like: the US lost badly.
In the 1980s Iran was far weaker economically, politically and militarily than it is now.
A year after the Islamic Revolution, the West initiated a proxy war against Islamic Iran through Saddam Hussein by backing him financially, politically and militarily.
This is fully documented.
What is less well known is that the Soviet Union sold more weapons to Saddam than any other country (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).
It shows that both camps considered Islamic Iran to be dangerous in order to break the Cold War convention of backing opposing sides in a conflict.
Yet today, Iran is far more powerful than it ever was.
Since the US has depleted much of its soft-power appeal over the past decade, its hard-power presence in the region has also been significantly reduced.
From being forced to negotiate a withdrawal from Afghanistan with the lightly-armed Taliban to suffering defeat in its proxy war in Syria, US military power is no longer daunting.
Coupled with myriad political problems like reduced alignment with Turkey and a bad working relationship with the Saudis, the US is in no position to launch a direct military assault on Iran.
Essentially a conventional war against Iran is out of the question.
The primary front Iran’s opponents are focusing on is the ideological and cultural angle.
However, in this realm while Western regimes have certain advantages, overall, the playing field is much more even than it was a decade ago.
Iran’s scientific, entertainment and educational achievements clearly demonstrate this.