Comment by alephnerd

The whole point of the Islamic Revolution was to export it.

Khomeinei preached that Shia and Sunni is an arbitrary divide and that the ummah needed to be unified and guided by clerics (who just so happened to be Shia) and to purge decadent Western culture back to an idealized norm of the Imam Husayn.

In action, it meant funding insurgencies and revolutionary corps out of a mix of idealism and raw power projection, and those organs used to protect the revolution ended up taking over the entire state and economy for their own economic benefit.

Imagine if the Red Guard and the Gang of Four weren't purged in China in 1976 and the footsoldiers of the Red Guard became actual leaders - that is what Iran is today.

And like China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, it alienated all of it's neighbors.

Westerners who dislike Israel or even the US think Iran would ally with them, but the entire regime views Westerners irrespective of political leaning with disdain. An undercurrent of the Iranian revolution was also Iranian nationalism and the view that Iran is a civilization state, and that the west and westerners are culture-less, decadent, loose, and immoral and that the entirety of western culture needs to be burnt to the ground (Gharbzadegi).