Buchan traces the Iranian regime's hostility to the present world order to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the Islamist revolution that created the Islamic Republic in 1979. Buchan writes: "None but God, Khomeini wrote, may rule on earth, and the world has in the Koran and the Traditions (hadith) all the law it needs. There is no place for legislation, assemblies or elections." In other words, such American concepts as a "government of the people by the people for the people" based on man-made constitutions and the rule of man-made law have no place in the ideal world order the ayatollah hoped to create.

Buchan is careful to remain agnostic about the possibility of war with Iran. However, his analysis depicts a regime that will not stop unless it hits something hard on its path. In the late 1980s and after Khomeini's death in 1989 hopes that the Islamic Republic might imitate Communist China and abandon adventurism in foreign policy in exchange for a place in the Western-dominated global system created some excitement among Iran-watchers. However, over the decades that followed it became increasingly clear that, even if its leaders wanted it, the Islamic Republic couldn't imitate Communist China. Communism is a secular ideology and Communist China was behaving like a nation state concerned with concrete issues such as national security, recognition, trade, economic cooperation and technological exchange. The Islamic Republic, however, behaves not as a nation state concerned with issues of interest to nation states, but as a cause, propagating and pursuing a messianic dream.

Every February in Tehran, the Islamic Republic hosts two international conferences under the titles "A World Without America" and "A World Without Israel". Dozens of papers are delivered and many more speeches are made at the two conferences that attract anti-American and anti-Semitic "thinkers" from across the globe, including the US and Israel. However, the talk is not of economic development, something Iran badly needs, or even cultural exchanges. The focus is on "the sacred cause": the destruction of the American "Great Satan" and, as the first step in that direction, the elimination of Israel. Would the Islamic Republic use a putative nuclear arsenal to further its "sacred cause"? Again Buchan is agnostic and, perhaps, has to be. But who could be absolutely sure that it would not?