President Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement has stoked the tensions between the Iranian hardliners aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the more-moderate faction led by President Hassan Rouhani.

Where the more-moderate faction wants to salvage something of the nuclear agreement so that European investment continues to flow into their economy, the hardliners sense an opportunity to drive the west out of Iran entirely and thus ensure the purity of the revolution. Still, the central divergence between the two sides is the tension between modernity and revolutionary purity.