Beyond Mines, Beyond Minds: Iran Has a Developmental Problem

For an AI generated translationn in Hebrew and Portuguese see https://nancyharteveltkobrin.substack.com/p/beyond-mines-beyond-minds-iran-has?r=89j80&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.

Military force can clear mines. It cannot change minds. But the real problem is deeper: what if the mindset itself is developmental—and policy has been missing that entirely?

Clifford May’s recent essays, including “The U.S. Military Can Clear Mines, But Not Minds” and his analysis of Iran’s enduring ideological ambitions, make an important and necessary point: military force, however effective tactically, cannot transform the ideological commitments of the Iranian regime. On this, he is right.

But the argument needs to go further.

If military power cannot change minds, then the question is not only what it cannot do—but what must be done instead.

What is required is a shift from a purely military or diplomatic framework to a psychological strategy—one that recognizes we are not dealing with a conventional actor guided by cost-benefit logic. As May rightly emphasizes, the regime’s ambitions are not transactional. They are ideological, enduring, and resistant to pressure. But even this does not go far enough. The regime operates within a closed system that absorbs pressure, reinterprets defeat as victory, and thrives on confrontation.

This has several implications.

First, deterrence must be paired with psychological containment. Not every response should validate the regime’s need for external enemies or reinforce its narrative of persecution and martyrdom. Strength is necessary—but so is precision in how that strength is received and used internally.

For example, highly visible, symbolic escalations—public threats of regime destruction, or actions framed in absolute, existential terms—can actually reinforce the regime’s internal narrative of siege and justify further consolidation of power. A more effective approach is calibrated, targeted pressure that limits capabilities—without feeding the psychological structure that depends on external threat for its cohesion.

Classical strategists such as Sun Tzu and Clausewitz understood war in terms of deception, force, and political will. What they did not have access to—and could not have had—were the insights of early childhood development and modern neuroscience. We now know that under conditions of developmental failure—especially in environments structured around shame (i.e., shame-honor cultures)—systems can organize around primitive mental states that are not responsive to deterrence in conventional ways. To ignore this is to continue applying 19th-century frameworks to 21st-century problems.

Second, the West must stop treating negotiation as if it were engaging a normal rational actor. Concessions are not read as goodwill; they are internalized as confirmation of strength. Any diplomatic framework must therefore be strictly behavioral, incremental, and conditional.

Third, and most neglected, is the need for a counter-ideological space. One does not defeat a totalizing worldview with silence or technocratic language. There must be a competing moral and psychological narrative—one that speaks to dignity, individuality, freedom, and complexity beyond rigid binaries.

Fourth, attention must turn inward—to Iranian society itself. The regime is not monolithic. It sits atop a population marked by generational divides, gender resistance, and deep internal tensions. Supporting plurality, communication, and the visibility of difference is not peripheral; it is central.

These are not quick solutions. They are long-term pressures applied not only to behavior, but to meaning.

And yet, even this is not enough.

Because what May’s argument still leaves unaddressed is the deeper question: what kind of mind is being governed—and from where does it derive its structure?

The problem is not only ideological. It is developmental.

The patterns we see—splitting the world into absolute good and evil, fusing identity with authority, externalizing internal conflict into violence—are not merely political strategies. They reflect what, in psychoanalytic terms, can be understood as primitive mental states: formations rooted in early failures of trust, mirroring, and differentiation.

In such a structure, the self cannot stabilize internally and must instead attach to an omnipotent authority, with the group being more important than the person. Ambiguity becomes intolerable. Complexity collapses into binaries. Violence becomes a way of managing unmentalized internal states.

If this is the case—and I believe it is—then policy that ignores this developmental dimension will continue to misread both the resilience and the rigidity of the system it confronts.

Military force can clear mines.Psychological strategy can begin to address minds.

But neither will be sufficient unless we also understand—and slowly, patiently work against—the conditions that sustain developmental arrest at the level of both leadership and the broader system that contains it.

Only then do we begin to see the contours of a strategy that is not merely reactive, but truly transformative.