Oral TogaIn June 2025, Israel’s air strikes on Iran exposed not only physical infrastructure but also deeper structural flaws within Iran’s strategic decision-making apparatus.
The aggression — part of a broader pattern of extraterritorial military actions — once again demonstrated Tel Aviv’s willingness to escalate without regional consensus.
The conflict revealed widespread synchronisation failures, delayed reactions from command centres, and disrupted information flows, all symptoms of a state unprepared for a high-intensity strike.
While internal factors such as overlapping mandates among intelligence services, weak coordination between civilian and security institutions, and deepening inter-agency rivalries played a role, these operational issues point to a more fundamental underlying cause: Iran’s epistemic architecture, which remains closed, unidirectional, and ideologically constrained.
The shock Iran faced was rooted not just in military unpreparedness but in deeper epistemic blind spots.
Strategic thinking in a closed loop
Epistemic isolation can be defined as a state’s tendency to produce and evaluate knowledge exclusively within its own ideological, institutional, and cultural reference system, while systematically excluding external sources of information. The Islamic Republic of Iran has long embodied this model.
The regime engages with actors aligned with its ideological framework but avoids meaningful institutional interaction with global academic, strategic, or technological knowledge domains.
This condition undermines Iran’s ability to construct alternative scenarios, analyse adversary behaviour, and adapt strategically. In such an environment, where epistemic actors are neither diverse nor functionally integrated, strategic thinking becomes cyclical and self-referential.
In Iran’s case, this manifests in a persistent reliance on fixed assumptions and hardened interpretations of past experiences when assessing contemporary threats.
Whether it is a cyber attack, a protest movement, an economic disruption, or an intelligence leak, the immediate reaction often involves attributing responsibility to Israel or the United States, regardless of available evidence.
Iranian officials have even described the COVID-19 pandemic as a US–Israeli biological weapon, and portrayed platforms like TikTok as tools of Zionist influence. These reflexive responses illustrate how Iranian threat perception remains anchored in a narrow set of ideological and historical templates.
Internally, knowledge production is subject to strict ideological oversight. Universities, think tanks, media outlets, and expert communities are not permitted to operate independently. Analyses that diverge from the dominant ideological framework are systematically suppressed or marginalised.
This has allowed certain regime-aligned intellectual circles, including state-sponsored research institutes and loyalist academic networks, to monopolise the security discourse, which has gradually become indistinguishable from the state’s official threat perception.
As a result, intelligence processes become impermeable to alternative scenarios, critical perspectives, or independent epistemological approaches.
Security and foreign policy analysis is conducted by a narrow cohort selected primarily on the basis of political loyalty, leading to a strategic culture characterised by limited foresight and rigid decision-making structures.
Suppressing epistemic diversity in this way diminishes not only the intellectual dynamism of the system but also its capacity for strategic flexibility.
Iran's epistemic closure is not limited to theory or institutional culture; it extends to military practice. While Iran occasionally conducts limited bilateral exercises with select partners, the country does not participate (or cannot participate) in sustained, institutionalised multilateral military cooperation, thereby losing systematic opportunities to observe evolving combat doctrines, joint operational tactics, and emerging hybrid threat responses firsthand.
Such exercises are not mere displays of strength. They function as epistemic laboratories for adaptation, comparison, and learning.
By remaining absent, Iran continues to rehearse past models rooted in its internal revolutionary and war-era experiences. Doctrines such as “asymmetric defence,” “popular resistance,” and “ballistic deterrence,” inherited from the Iran–Iraq War, remain central to its strategic thinking.
Meanwhile, modern warfare has evolved into multi-domain operations supported by AI-based command systems, precision strike capabilities, and real-time information integration.
Lacking engagement with these innovations, Iran gradually loses strategic agility and tends to interpret contemporary security dynamics through outdated paradigms, making its responses increasingly predictable.
Iran’s external engagement strategy further reinforces this cognitive insularity.
Diplomatic dialogues, particularly with Western or rival states, are not approached as opportunities for mutual understanding or scenario testing. Instead, they often serve as platforms for projecting ideological narratives and cultivating regime legitimacy before a domestic audience. This posture limits not only high-level negotiations but also the informal information flows and observations that typically enrich strategic analysis.
The ability to accurately assess the intentions, perceptions, and vulnerabilities of opposing actors is weakened, as communication becomes one-directional and rhetorical. Consequently, strategic analysis becomes increasingly detached from shifting global realities and grounded more in predetermined ideological scripts.
A strategic cultural risk
One of the most consequential outcomes of this epistemic closure is the regime’s deliberate refusal to engage with thinkers, institutions, or knowledge frameworks that diverge from its own ideological alignment.
This applies not only to oppositional voices but also to potentially useful, non-hostile perspectives.
Academic cooperation, institutional exchange, and participation in global strategic forums are either tightly controlled or delegated to representatives who simply reinforce the system’s official narrative.
The Iranian political establishment believes that external strategic knowledge and analysis pose not only a managerial risk, but also an ideological infiltration threat. As a result, knowledge production and circulation are structured in a highly controlled and internally confined manner.
From the regime’s perspective, this approach constitutes a rational choice that aligns with its need for ideological coherence and systemic stability.
However, this selectivity traps Iran within a narrow epistemic universe limited to actors it deems friendly or aligned. In such an environment, exposure to doctrinal, technological, and strategic transformations occurring beyond its borders remains minimal.
A strategic culture lacking diversity and operating on filtered information will, in time, produce decision-making mechanisms that are closed, rigid, and increasingly vulnerable to strategic surprise.
The June 2025 conflict, therefore, must be seen not only as a test of Iran’s military preparedness, but also as a broader indicator of its declining capacity for strategic foresight.
The crisis revealed serious coordination failures, sluggish institutional responses, and an inability to prioritise threats under pressure. These problems cannot be explained solely by bureaucratic inefficiencies or intelligence disputes.
At its core, Iran’s epistemic isolation, characterised by a distrust of external knowledge and an overreliance on internal loyalty-based expertise, significantly undermined its ability to anticipate and adapt.
In the absence of a more open and integrative strategic mindset, the risk of future failures, potentially at even greater cost, remains unacceptably high.
