By: Mohamed Hassan Xareed

The Quote That Sparked the Debate

In a recent panel discussion hosted by the independent news platform Zeteo, veteran Middle East journalist and analyst Rami Khouri offered a framing of Iran’s regional behavior that cuts sharply against the dominant narrative found in most Western coverage. Rather than describing Tehran purely as an aggressor destabilizing its neighborhood, Khouri situated Iran’s actions within a much longer historical arc — one defined by the region’s decades-long struggle to shake off foreign domination.

“[Iranians] are trying to end the colonial period.”

— Rami Khouri, journalist and Middle East analyst, on the Zeteo panel discussing major U.S. escalation against Iran

It is a provocative sentence, deliberately so. In seven words, Khouri reframes a conflict that is usually discussed in the vocabulary of nuclear proliferation, proxy militias, and sanctions regimes, and instead places it inside the vocabulary of decolonization — a lens more commonly applied to twentieth-century independence movements in Africa and South Asia than to twenty-first-century geopolitics in the Gulf.

Who Is Rami Khouri, and Why His Perspective Carries Weight

Rami Khouri is one of the most established English-language voices writing on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, known for decades of columns, editorial leadership at regional publications, and academic work bridging journalism and Middle East studies. His commentary is often distinguished by a willingness to challenge both Western foreign-policy assumptions and the failures of Arab governments themselves — a dual critique that shapes how he approaches a topic as charged as Iran’s role in the region.

That background matters here. Khouri is not arguing from a pro-Tehran political platform; he is applying a historical framework — colonialism and its long aftermath — to explain why Iran behaves the way it does, and why so much of the Arab world, in his view, has struggled to do the same.

Unpacking “The End of the Colonial Period”

To understand Khouri’s claim, it helps to recall what the “colonial period” actually meant for the Middle East. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Britain and France carved up the region through arrangements such as the Sykes-Picot framework, installing mandates, redrawing borders, and often propping up rulers who depended on Western patronage to stay in power. Iran, though never formally colonized in the way Iraq or Syria were, endured its own version of foreign interference — most notably the 1953 coup, orchestrated with British and American backing, which removed a democratically elected prime minister after he moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry.

Khouri’s argument, in this context, is that the 1979 revolution and everything that followed — Iran’s support for allied militias and governments across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, its nuclear program, its refusal to align with Western security architecture in the Gulf — should be read as a continuous project of asserting independent state sovereignty, rather than simply as destabilizing aggression. In his framing, Iran acts the way a formerly dominated power acts once it decides it will no longer take orders from external patrons.

Sovereignty in Contrast: Iran Versus the Wider Arab World

The second half of Khouri’s argument is arguably the sharper one: that Iran’s conduct throws into relief how many Arab states have not achieved the same degree of independent maneuver. Several Gulf and Levantine governments continue to host foreign military bases, rely heavily on Western arms sales, and coordinate closely with U.S. regional strategy — arrangements that, in Khouri’s view, resemble a continuation of colonial-era dependency rather than a clean break from it.

Seen through this lens, Iran’s willingness to defy Western pressure — even at enormous economic and human cost through sanctions — becomes, for Khouri, a demonstration of what full sovereignty looks like in practice: an insistence on setting one’s own foreign policy, military posture, and alliances without deferring to former colonial or contemporary superpowers.

The Other Side of the Argument

Khouri’s framing is compelling, but it is far from the only lens through which Iran’s regional role is understood, and it is worth laying out the strongest counterarguments fairly.

Critics — including many Arab governments, Israeli officials, and Western analysts — argue that Iran’s regional posture is better described as expansionist than anti-colonial. They point to Tehran’s financing and arming of non-state militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria as evidence of an effort to project power well beyond its own borders, often at the expense of the sovereignty of the very states in which those militias operate. From this vantage point, calling Iran’s conduct a rejection of colonialism inverts the picture: Iran, in this reading, is not ending foreign domination but exporting a new version of it into fractured neighboring states.

There is also a domestic counterpoint. Sovereignty, critics note, is not only about resisting external powers — it is also about a state’s relationship with its own people. Iran’s government has faced sustained internal protest movements over political repression, restrictions on women’s rights, and economic mismanagement, which some argue complicates any narrative that presents the Islamic Republic as a clean symbol of liberation. A state can resist foreign control abroad while still limiting the freedoms of its own citizens at home, and observers on this side of the debate argue that the “anti-colonial” framing risks obscuring that tension.

Finally, many regional commentators push back on the idea that Gulf and Arab states’ security cooperation with Western powers reflects lingering colonial dependency rather than sovereign choice. They argue that smaller and mid-sized states routinely form security alliances with larger powers as a rational strategy — not a surrender of independence — and that framing those alliances as neo-colonial understates the agency of the governments involved.

Why This Debate Matters Amid the Current U.S.–Iran Escalation

This exchange did not happen in a vacuum. It took place on a panel specifically convened to discuss what Zeteo described as major U.S. escalation against Iran — a reminder that how commentators frame Iran’s motivations has direct consequences for how audiences interpret the stakes of military confrontation. If Iran’s posture is understood primarily as anti-colonial self-assertion, then U.S. and allied military pressure can be framed as an extension of the same historical domination Khouri describes. If, instead, Iran’s posture is understood as expansionist or destabilizing, then that same pressure is framed as a defensive or corrective response to a regional threat.

Neither framing is neutral, and that is precisely why this kind of language matters. Words like “colonialism” and “sovereignty” are not just descriptive — they carry moral weight, and whoever successfully attaches them to a given actor gains a significant advantage in the broader battle for public opinion, both within the region and internationally.

Conclusion

Rami Khouri’s characterization of Iran as a state “trying to end the colonial period” is not a simple defense of Tehran’s foreign policy — it is an invitation to view a familiar geopolitical standoff through an unfamiliar historical frame. Whether one finds that frame persuasive likely depends on which piece of evidence carries more weight: Iran’s long history of resisting foreign intervention, or the costs its regional interventions have imposed on the sovereignty of its neighbors and the freedoms of its own citizens.

What is clear is that as U.S.–Iran tensions escalate, the language used to describe Iran’s behavior — liberation or aggression, sovereignty or expansion — will continue to shape how the conflict is understood far beyond the region itself. Engaging seriously with arguments like Khouri’s, alongside the strongest objections to them, is essential for anyone trying to understand the Middle East on its own terms rather than through a single inherited narrative.

Mohamed Hassan Mohamed (Xareed), an MBA graduate of distinguished merit, is a seasoned academic and lecturer whose expertise spans scientific economic management, business information systems, human development, and a range of interdisciplinary domains. His intellectual contributions—marked by a fusion of advanced scholarly inquiry and strategic analysis—primarily explore the intricate dynamics of geoeconomic competition and regional conflict across the Horn of Africa.

Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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