Westoxification is the wrong diagnosis for Iran
Westoxification will fail in Iran because Iranians are not asking to be remade in someone else’s image. What they want is dignity, competence, and a life that works on its own terms.
The current unrest is not a cultural referendum on Western values. It is a reaction to economic suffocation, political exclusion, and institutions that demand loyalty while failing at basic governance.
From the outside, this gets misread on purpose or out of habit.
Protest is interpreted as aspiration for a Western template, because that story flatters the idea that liberal values are universally desired in the same form. Economic anger becomes ideological longing. Local grievances are reframed as pro-West sentiment, allowing foreign actors to imagine themselves as midwives of progress rather than accelerants of instability.
The reality is more mechanical than philosophical. Iran’s problem is not identity. It is incoherence.
An economy that punishes effort. Public services that decay while power concentrates. A political system that insists on moral certainty without delivering material reliability. Dropping Western-style institutions into that environment does not solve these failures. Without legitimacy, those institutions feel cosmetic. They sharpen distrust and make governance look performative rather than responsive.
This is the central contradiction in the U.S. approach.
External pressure is treated as leverage when, in practice, it collapses internal reform space. It ties domestic change to foreign agendas and hands the state an easy tool for delegitimization. People end up trapped between an unaccountable government and an external narrative that speaks over them instead of to them.
If the goal is stability and real change rather than symbolic victories, the path is uncomfortable and unsexy.
Economic stabilization is tied to local priorities, which reimagines services that shape daily life. Political space that carries internal legitimacy. Reform narratives rooted in Iranian history and identity. International support that amplifies local agency rather than overrides it.
Iran does not need imported blueprints. It requires coherent governance that earns consent by working.