Iran remains acutely sensitive to the devastating impact of foreign interventions in the modern era and takes such interventions as an affront to its civilizational standing. This sense of subjugation has created its own psychodynamics which has made the mission of ensuring national sovereignty its leadership's top priority. Having lost much of its territorial reach into South Asia, the Caucasus and Mesopotamia following confrontations with the forces of Tsarist Russian and the Ottoman empire over previous centuries, securing political independence and territorial sovereignty became the first goal of Iran's post-Qajar rulers from early twentieth century.

For much of the period following the fall of the Safavid dynasty in 1736, Persia found itself in a geopolitical struggle to protect the empire's independence and vast territory from emerging European and Asian imperial powers. The modern state of Iran was finally established early twentieth century, largely by the efforts of Reza Shah Pahlavi, but the country's past was never neglected. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the second Pahlavi monarch, Mohammad Reza, found the will, the political space, and finally the means to develop and articulate a vision for the country – to become a ‘great civilization’ with a strong voice again. Bolstered by the close partnership with the West, notably the United States, and the role of a regional linchpin against the Soviet Union (Communism), the Shah initiated a series of domestic reforms in 1961, known as the White Revolution, to modernize Iranian society and state. Building on this and emboldened by rapid increases in oil prices from 1972, the monarchy began the rapid march towards the said ‘Great Civilization’ and major power status. The building blocks of Iran's grand strategy, the march towards the ‘Great Civilization’, were the direct control of the state by the monarch, maximization of oil revenues, a close military partnership with the United States, and an industrial and technical base able to sustain an emerging ‘Asian tiger’ to equal Japan on the world stage.