Candauda Arachchige Saliya
This report investigates how the United States’ strategic double standards in foreign policy, nuclear exceptionalism, selective human rights enforcement, and arms partnerships with authoritarian regimes, and Iran’s theocratic Velayat-e Faqih governance model, unelected supreme leadership, systematic women’s rights violations, and violent repression of the 2022 uprising, function as mutually reinforcing systems of geopolitical hypocrisy. The central research question examines how both governments sustain domestic power and regional instability through their antagonism, each weaponizing the other’s violations to legitimize its own exceptionalism. Accordingly, this report aims to document and critique these parallel hypocrisies, demonstrate their interdependent dynamics, and provide conceptual grounding for consistent international accountability mechanisms that transcend geopolitical convenience. Employing a qualitative desk research methodology drawing on peer-reviewed literature, policy documents, and official data, the report interrogates Washington’s selective application of democratic norms, nuclear exceptionalism favouring allies, and complicity in humanitarian crises through strategic arms partnerships. Simultaneously, it documents Iran’s Velayat-e Faqih governance model, the systematic legal dismantling of women’s rights since 1979, violent suppression of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ stranglehold over state and economy. The report further argues that both governments sustain their power through mutual antagonism, while their respective populations bear the consequent costs. Findings underscore the urgent need for principled, consistent international accountability mechanisms transcending geopolitical convenience.