In 1979, by the time many democracies were maturing from their infancy stage, Iran  still had one major task unfinished: to overthrow a king and reinvent its identity. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers toppled the Pahlavi monarchy and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, an experiment in theocratic governance that fused religious clerics with absolute political power. Illustration by The Geostrata What began as a wave of “neither East nor West, only Islam” id

In his seminal work On War, a renowned war strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, quotes, “ War is thus more than a mere chameleon, because...