In its June 2026 issue, the Iranian think tank Global Governance and Think Tank (GPTT) presented readers with condensed reflections from its executives and experts on various dimensions of the latest war against the US and Israel.
Titled “The MoU Era: Opportunity and Distrust,” the issue offers a window into how the recent war is being interpreted in contemporary Iranian writing.
A bureaucracy that breaks the mold
Among those featured in the think tank’s June issue is Majid Afshani, an adviser to GPTT’s International Affairs Department, Afshani examines Iran’s use of social media throughout the war and the subsequent ceasefire process.
He draws attention to a phenomenon that caught the eye of numerous expert observers worldwide, as well as ordinary onlookers: “Iran’s unusually effective performance in the recent war of narratives across social media platforms.”
Afshani considers how what he describes as a “typically rigid bureaucratic structure”, the Iranian diplomatic apparatus, managed to move beyond its customary patterns.
He elaborates as follows:
Humor, satire, even parody
“Iran’s diplomatic apparatus adopted unprecedented communication initiatives that together attracted nearly two billion views across social media. This campaign was significant enough that the US Secretary of State reportedly issued a wartime cable instructing American embassies around the world to cooperate with the Army’s psychological operations unit in responding to Iran’s public relations efforts.”
Afshani argues that Iran’s social media success stemmed from its adoption of a markedly different communications strategy. He characterizes this approach as involving “a more accurate understanding of audience psychology”, “fluency in social media culture”, and “the use of asymmetric methods in the narrative battlefield”.
He writes that the official accounts of Iranian embassies, in particular, responded to Trump’s media campaign with “humor, satire, and even parody.” By choosing a tone rarely associated with conventional diplomatic language, they succeeded in outmaneuvering the US in the realm of words and style, just as Iran had done on the battlefield.
Another contributor whose views appear in GPTT’s June issue is Ali Salehian, Director of GPTT’s International Affairs Department.
How did the “backwards Iranians” pull it off?
Salehian addresses another aspect of the war that has become a frequent subject of commentary and conversation among experts and ordinary people around the world: How did Iran manage to stand its ground against the combined power of the US and Israel?
The question becomes all the more significant when one recalls how many people, under the relentless propaganda barrage unleashed by the US and Israel at the outset of the war, confidently assumed that Iran would surrender with ease, that it was bound to lose, that the “backward mullahs lacked the intellectual capacity to devise a strategy”, and that a country governed according to theological principles could not possibly contend with the “rational” US-Israeli alliance.
A living historical civilization
Salehian maintains that the source of Iran’s resilience lies in its character as “a living historical civilization.” In his account, this quality allows Iran to extend “beyond the framework of the modern nation state” and sustain continuity across time.
The same question is explored in a book chapter co-authored by Ali Salehian and Dr. Seyed Mohammadsadegh Emamian, a co-founder of GPTT.
Their chapter appears in Resilient Statehood: Why and How Some Nations Maintained Long-Term Independence and Sovereignty, edited by Logan Cochrane and Alexandra Wilson and published by Springer in 2026. In it, the two GPTT researchers offer “a historical analysis of the causes and conditions that have enabled Iran to preserve its independence and avoid colonization over the past six centuries.”
The placard-writing movement
Mostafa Anvari, a visiting researcher at GPTT, turns to a phenomenon that emerged at public gatherings and demonstrations during the war that began with the US and Israeli attack of February 28, 2026. He calls it the “placard-writing movement.”
Anvari argues that this phenomenon became one of the most enduring expressions of popular participation.
He attributes the movement’s success to five interconnected mechanisms: “identity as the initial fuel”, “the emergence of a new social norm”, “people’s perception of agency and decisive role”, “the low friction psychological economy of participation”, and “a clear positive feedback loop”.
The phenomenon highlighted by Anvari sheds light on the bottom-up dimension of Iran’s resilience, driven by popular mobilization, alongside the top-down response organized through the state apparatus.
A Ministry of Prevention and Crisis Management
GPTT researcher Mahdi Sardari writes about a parliamentary proposal in Iran calling for the establishment of a “Ministry of Prevention and Crisis Management.”
The proposal, submitted to parliament in the aftermath of the war, appears to reflect an effort to equip Iran with a more effective capacity to respond to future “crises” confronting either the state or society.
Sardari, however, argues that such a ministry would do little good. In his assessment, legal, financial, and comparative analyses all indicate that establishing such a ministry in a postwar environment would not improve coordination. On the contrary, it would merely add another costly and cumbersome bureaucratic layer to the executive structure.
According to Sardari, the shortcomings in “crisis management” is not because of the absence of such a ministry, but from the lack of effective coordination backed by sufficient authority.
Critical Infrastructure Resilience
Another contributor featured in GPTT’s June 2026 issue is Amirhossein Zanbagh, a researcher serving on GPTT’s Regulatory Club.
Zanbagh examines lessons from Finland’s electricity transmission and distribution system and their relevance for Iran.
During the war Donald Trump threatened Iran with the words: “The strongest and most powerful military by far in the world (…) hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!”
In mid-July, when the ceasefire started by the Memorandum of Understanding appeared to be on the verge of unraveling once again, the US renewed its threat to strike Iran’s power stations. Iran’s electricity transmission and distribution system is therefore of critical importance.
Zanbagh takes the Finnish case as his point of departure. As he notes, the Tapani storm of December 2011 revealed that Finland’s electricity grid, though reliable under ordinary conditions, exposed its hidden weakness in the face of severe and multidimensional shocks. Around 570,000 people experienced power outages during the storm.
Resilience under “shocks”
For Zanbagh, the most important lesson here is that reliability under normal circumstances is not the same as resilience under conditions of major disruption.
He also reviews the measures Finland adopted following the Tapani storm. The country launched reforms to its electricity regulatory framework. The most significant step was the 2013 reform of the Electricity Market Act, which introduced quantitative and legally binding resilience targets. Distribution companies were required to draw up investment plans for meeting these targets and submit them to Finland’s energy regulator every two years. The regulator was also charged with monitoring operators’ progress toward both interim and final objectives.
In the aftermath of the war, how to prepare for new “shocks” is one of the main issues on Iran’s agenda.