Imam Hossein University, the academic arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), recently convened its third ‘International Conference on the Decline of the United States’. Billed as an academic gathering, the event is in fact a ritual reaffirmation of a central article of faith within the Guard: that America’s era of dominance is over and that Iran’s Islamic Revolution stands among the forces hastening its fall. The conference’s official website quotes Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of cyclical US decline, before proclaiming that the 21st century marks the definitive collapse of western hegemony and the rise of a new Islamic-led world order.

This is not mere propaganda. It is a window into the IRGC’s political theology, a worldview in which anti-Americanism is not so much a geopolitical strategy as a doctrine of salvation. The Guards’ worldview divides humanity into two camps: the Axis of Domination led by the United States and its allies, and the Axis of Resistance led by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its revolutionary partners. In this Manichean cosmos, the United States is not simply a rival power, but the embodiment of corruption and impiety; the Islamic Republic’s survival and sanctity depend on its defeat. The confrontation between them is not a policy dispute but a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

IRGC indoctrination material portrays the United States as the architect of a world ‘domination system’ (nezam-e solteh-ye jahani): a global structure maintained through war, consumption, and cultural decay. The United States, therefore, cannot coexist peacefully with the Islamic Republic; it must either subvert it or be overthrown by it.

This worldview is frequently expressed by leading figures within the IRGC and the regime more broadly. Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a senior IRGC commander and advisor to the supreme leader, has described the conflict between the two states as ‘ideological and existential’. Hojjat al-Islam Ali Saidi, the Supreme Leader’s representative within the IRGC, defines the dispute in theological terms: ‘Our problem with America is ideological; it seeks to erase Islam from Iran.’ Within this worldview, any American engagement, from diplomatic outreach to people-to-people exchanges, appears as a Trojan Horse designed to corrupt Iran from within. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, has described America as the modern form of jahiliya – an Islamic term for barbarism – declaring that Islam is at permanent war with jahiliya.

IRGC strategists categorise Washington’s methods of regime change into four ‘wars’. ‘Hard war’ involves direct military confrontation, and includes what Tehran sees as the United States’ sponsorship of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, or the more recent 12-day war with Israel. ‘Semi-hard war’ includes economic sanctions and military intimidation, while ‘soft war’ encompasses western media influence, civil-society engagement, feminism, and cultural initiatives. Lastly, intelligence warfare encompasses espionage, cyber operations, and support for Iran’s so-called ‘reformists’. This typology transforms policy disagreements into metaphysical threat categories, rendering compromise impossible.

Within this moral universe, the notion of US decline serves a vital function. It validates the revolution’s endurance, and supplies meaning to economic hardship and international isolation. Since the 1990s, IRGC publications have routinely predicted the imminent collapse of Western imperialism, drawing parallels with the Soviet Union’s demise. Each American crisis, whether the 2008 financial crash, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement, the George Floyd protests of 2020, the Capitol riot of 2021, or the general atmosphere of partisan polarisation, is treated as empirical proof of a prophecy being fulfilled. Almost all IRGC commanders, including former Guard commander Hossein Salami – who was killed by Israel during the 12-day war – have claimed that the collapse of the United States is imminent.

The IRGC’s ‘Decline of the United States’ conference institutionalises this conviction. Its academic veneer – including citations from Huntington, references to multipolarity, and discussions of a ‘post-American order’ – give ideological dogma a scholarly gloss. The organisers, including Imam Hossein University (the Guards’ main academic arm) and the Expediency Council, framed the event as a scientific analysis. Yet the underlying message was fundamentally theological and ideological: America’s decline is divinely ordained, and Iran’s revolutionary steadfastness is both cause and confirmation of that decline.

Such initiatives also serve bureaucratic purposes. They signal fidelity to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s long-standing narrative that ‘the West is in moral and political decay’ and that ‘the 21st century will belong to Islam’. The IRGC thereby positions itself not only as Iran’s security guardian, but as custodian of a civilisational mission.

The 2025 conference marks the third international gathering organised by the IRGC on America’s decline. The series began in 2019, when Imam Hossein University launched a broad academic campaign with eight expert panels and dozens of pre-sessions at Iranian universities. This was part of a larger initiative to establish a think tank for studying the decline of the United States. Two years later, the 2021 ‘Post-American World’ conference deepened the theme, projecting a future in which the United States would no longer be the dominant global power. By 2023, the effort had expanded into the ‘First Elite Conference on Changing the International Order’, held in cooperation with Iran’s Foreign Ministry and attended by envoys from states including Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba and China.

This year’s meeting, ‘The Decline of America: The New Global Era’, explicitly links US decay to the rise of a ‘resistance front’ and calls for strategies to hasten that process. Its stated aim is to build a theoretical and institutional foundation for a post-western world order in which, as the organisers claim, ‘the Islamic Revolution of Iran has been one of the significant and influential factors in the decline of American hegemony’. Far from a routine academic gathering, the conference shows how the IRGC is turning anti-Americanism into a transnational intellectual project. It forms part of a sustained effort to recast the US-Iran conflict as the central axis of a new world order.

The idea of America’s decline is not simply discussed within the IRGC; it is systematically instilled through a vast programme of ideological-political training. Since its establishment in 1979, the Guards have invested heavily in shaping this worldview among their members. Ideological-Political training (IPT) forms the backbone of Guard education, fusing religious instruction with political indoctrination. Recruits study not only the regime’s guiding principle of velayat-e faqih (‘guardianship of the jurist’) and the centrality of Khomeini’s revolution but also the doctrine of American decline and the supposed moral collapse of Western civilisation.

Training intensifies with rank. Promotion depends less on technical competence than on proven ideological commitment. Officers are expected to demonstrate unwavering loyalty to the Supreme Leader and to be fluent in the regime’s ideological canon. Even family life is subject to scrutiny: clerics within the IRGC emphasise that a Guardsman whose spouse or children lack revolutionary zeal cannot adequately fulfill his duty.

This indoctrination extends well beyond the corps itself. The IRGC regularly organises short-term ideological courses for members of its volunteer domestic militia, the Basij Organisation, and seminary students. One recent example is a specialised training programme in ‘American Studies’ focused on the decline of the United States, hosted by the Shahid Sadr Research Institute at Imam Hossein University in cooperation with the Expediency Discernment Council. The summer course covers topics such as ‘the decline of American and Western civilisation’, ‘divine laws in the fall of tyrannical powers’, and ‘American culture and everyday life.’

Through such initiatives, the Guards are expanding their ‘Decline of America’ project from conferences into the classroom, transforming anti-Americanism into an academic discipline. The result is a social order defined as much by belief as by profession: an ideologically armed estate embedded within the state itself.

The Guards’ anti-Americanism, however, increasingly isolates them from the population they claim to represent. Surveys and anecdotal accounts show that most Iranians, especially younger generations, harbour far more favourable attitudes toward the United States than toward their own ruling elite. They admire American education, culture, and technology, and view engagement as a path to normalcy, not betrayal.

This divergence constitutes a ‘civil–military perceptions gap’. While society becomes more secular, pragmatic and pro-American, the IRGC grows more insular and dogmatic and anti-American. That gap helps explain the regime’s domestic fragility: any political movement advocating rapprochement with the United States threatens not just the Guard’s worldview but its institutional legitimacy. The IRGC has frequently warned that any engagement with America represents the ‘penetration’ of America into Iran. To the Guards, diplomacy equals infiltration; coexistence equals capitulation.

For policymakers in Washington and Europe, understanding this mindset is critical. The IRGC’s hostility toward the United States is not a bargaining posture that can be moderated through incentives or confidence-building measures; it is structural and self-perpetuating. The organisation’s political and economic power – which extends across defence industries, energy, construction, and telecommunications – relies on the continuation of confrontation. Normalisation of Iran-US relations would erode its very raison d’être and its privileged position within Iran’s power hierarchy.

This does not mean that all state institutions share this conviction. Some regime elites and the technocratic bureaucracy often favour pragmatic engagement with the US and the West. Yet the IRGC’s dominance over security, intelligence, and much of the economy gives it veto power over normalisation. Its ideological narrative justifies not only hostility toward the United States but also alliances with Russia and China, which are depicted as partners in constructing a ‘post-western’ world order. IRGC-affiliates have perhaps most vividly communicated this new global order as one that is centred on three poles: an Islamic pole led by Tehran, a Russo-Slavic pole led by Moscow, and Chinese-Confucian pole led by Beijing.

As a result, an American policy that treats the Islamic Republic’s anti-Americanism as a temporary symptom, curable by sanctions relief or diplomatic overtures, misreads the structure of the regime’s power. The Guards’ hostility is a fundamental feature, not an accident, of the regime’s design.

The IRGC’s focus on America’s decline exposes a deeper truth: the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary identity depends on having a moral enemy. Without the ‘Great Satan’, the story of resistance falls apart. Conferences like ‘The Decline of the United States’, therefore, serve as political rituals, reaffirming purpose during uncertain times.

For outside observers, the task is to distinguish between ideological theatre and strategic calculation. Iran’s leaders may adapt tactics, negotiate when expedient, or moderate rhetoric in times of crisis. But the IRGC’s theological hostility toward the United States endures as an organising principle. It will continue to shape Tehran’s decision-making, constrain its diplomacy, and sustain the conflict long after the rhetoric of ‘decline’ fades from academic websites.

In short, the Guards’ anti-Americanism is not a relic of 1979. Rather, it is the ideological architecture of Iran’s modern state, a doctrine that turns enmity into identity and converts prophecy into policy. In other words, the Islamic Republic’s leaders do not treat America’s decline as mere rhetoric for ‘domestic consumption’, as is often portrayed by Western policymakers or in mainstream media. Rather, they have built an entire intellectual, bureaucratic and policy infrastructure around the idea that the United States is a weakening power – one whose retreat from the Middle East and the world more broadly is both inevitable and can be exploited strategically. That the IRGC’s commitment to this ideological doctrine is genuine can be most clearly underscored by the fact that – despite incurring major direct US strikes on its nuclear facilities and suffering irreparable strategic losses to both its military commanders and arsenal – it is spending significant time, resources and capital to bring together commanders, officials and scholars to produce research and policy proposals on how Iran and its allies should position themselves for a post-American world.

This worldview also shapes Iran’s regional behaviour. The expansion of militia networks in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen relies on the assumption that the United States lacks the stamina for sustained confrontation and will eventually withdraw. Iranian commanders routinely describe these groups as the ‘infrastructure of a post-American Middle East’, and Iran’s high-risk missile and drone operations are justified on the belief that Washington is too divided, overstretched, or unwilling to escalate. In other words, the regime’s ideology of American decline enables real-world brinkmanship.

Ultimately, this doctrine, which is central to the DNA of the Islamic Republic – dominated as it is by the IRGC – makes reconciliation and normalisation with the US impossible. And, in the same light, it renders confrontation and conflict with Washington, in one form or another, inevitable. The Supreme Leader has framed US decline as both a divine promise and a strategic fact. Khamenei has transformed this idea into a doctrine, which has become a guiding principle for his cult of personality in determining the country’s military planning, diplomacy, and national security. In this way, the belief in American decline is not theological ornamentation or an ideological veneer. It is a lens through which the regime interprets the world and designs its policies, turning prophecy into strategy.