By HS Wong
For over a century, the Pasteur Institute of Iran stood as a testament to what international scientific cooperation could achieve and to the possibilities of national self-determination outside Western tutelage. Established in 1920 in partnership with the famed Institut Pasteur in Paris, it was Iran’s premier center for infectious disease research, vaccine production, and public health. From eradicating smallpox to manufacturing hepatitis vaccines, the institute saved countless lives and trained generations of Iranian scientists. It was proof that Iran could build world-class institutions on its own terms, drawing upon the depth and richness of a civilization that predated European ascendancy by millennia.
On April 2, 2026, American and Israeli warplanes reduced much of it to rubble.
The airstrike, one of at least twenty verified attacks on Iran’s healthcare system since March 2026, destroyed laboratory equipment and several buildings at the Middle East’s oldest and most prestigious biomedical research center. The World Health Organization confirmed the institute could “no longer continue delivering health services.” Iranian officials called it a “barbaric assault on basic human core values” and a “crime against humanity.” Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv claimed responsibility.
This was not an accident of war. It was the violent expression of a worldview that sees Iran through the lens of threat and subordination. A lens ground and polished over centuries of colonial domination.
Earlier this year, American Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a telling glimpse into this mindset when he invoked Europe’s “glorious past” of colonial conquest. Perhaps not in those precise words, but in the unmistakable celebration of imperial achievement over subject peoples. To the Global South, such rhetoric does not read as historical reflection. It reads as an admission that Western powers still understand their relationship to the non-Western world through hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, of civilized and backward, of those destined to rule and those destined to obey.
Edward Said in his Orientalism illuminated this phenomenon – the construction of the “East” as fundamentally different, inherently threatening, and perpetually in need of Western management. The Orientalist framework does not see Iranian scientific achievement as evidence of capability, creativity, or contribution to human knowledge. It sees only potential danger, latent duplicity, the perpetual suspicion that beneath the surface of any Iranian institution lies something hidden, something sinister, something that must be uncovered and controlled by Western power.
The Pasteur Institute existed for a century in plain sight, its work transparent, its collaborations international, its publications peer-reviewed. Yet in the Orientalist imagination, this visibility meant nothing. The institute could never be merely what it was – a public health institution – because Iran can never be merely what it is. A nation with its own history, its own intellectual traditions, its own legitimate aspirations. It must always be something else. A puzzle to be solved, a threat to be contained, a civilization to be managed by those who presume themselves superior.
This reflects a colonial hangover that persists long after formal empires have dissolved in many regions. Although direct British political influence in Tehran has long since ended, patterns of unequal power in global scientific and security governance remain. Many Western states continue to play a significant role in determining which countries may access sensitive technologies, develop advanced scientific capacity, or operate outside extensive surveillance and export control regimes. The “dual-use” framework applied to the Pasteur Institute operates within this broader security logic, in which scientific capability in countries such as Iran is often treated with heightened scrutiny, while similar capabilities in Western states are more readily normalized as legitimate and necessary.
The hypocrisy is structural. In the 1990s, the international community sought to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) with a verification protocol that would allow independent inspections of laboratories worldwide. The United States single-handedly torpedoed the effort. Washington’s excuse was that inspections might expose sensitive biodefense secrets; in this way, preserving a system of unequal accountability. Western powers would remain free from intrusive oversight while reserving the right to cast suspicion on others.
This asymmetry reproduces the colonial relationship. The hegemon claims exemption from the rules it imposes on the periphery. It demands transparency from subordinate states while shrouding its own activities in secrecy. It speaks of universal norms while practicing selective enforcement against those who challenge its dominance. And it cannot perceive its own double standards because the Orientalist lens renders Western actions inherently reasonable and Eastern responses inherently suspect. When suspicion proved insufficient to contain Iran’s scientific development, the imperial powers resorted to direct destruction.
The April 2026 strike came alongside attacks on the Tofigh Daru pharmaceutical company, one of Iran’s largest producers of cancer treatment drugs, and the Delaram Sina Psychiatric Hospital. The pattern is similar. First criminalize civilian infrastructure through rhetoric that questions the target’s right to exist outside Western control, then destroy it through military action, all while maintaining the moral language of “security” and “nonproliferation.”
This is how imperialism adapts to the modern era. Where nineteenth-century colonial powers seized territory and extracted raw materials, their successors seek to control technological development and scientific capacity. The Pasteur Institute was targeted not because it threatened anyone, but because it demonstrated that Iran could operate at the frontiers of biomedical research without Western permission. Such independence is intolerable to powers accustomed to dictating the terms of development in the Global South. Powers who cannot see the depth and richness of Iranian civilization because their Orientalist worldview permits them to see only deficiency or danger.
The destruction of the institute also serves as a clear lesson familiar to historians of empire: it shows that resistance to Western demands will be punished, and that the cost of independence will be made extremely high. The message is directed not only at Tehran but at any state contemplating independent scientific or technological programs that might challenge Western monopolies. The Rubio-esque celebration of colonial “glory” lurks behind this ‘lesson’ – the assumption that world order requires civilizational hierarchy, that scientific progress must remain a Western prerogative, that the Global South must accept subordinate positions or face violent correction.
The broader pattern is clear across the imperial system. Western powers invoke international law and multilateral institutions when these serve their interests, then disregard or undermine them when they constrain imperial prerogative. The United States rejects the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over its own personnel while demanding accountability for others. It abandons arms control treaties when they become inconvenient, then accuses rival states of undermining global security. It speaks of a “rules-based order” while reserving the right to violate those rules with impunity.
These actions show what the Orientalist framework hides: the West’s inability to treat other civilizations as equals or to see Iranian scientific achievements as anything other than a threat or imitation. The Pasteur Institute collaborated with the Institut Pasteur in Paris for a century, yet this cooperation meant nothing when imperial imperatives demanded destruction. The West cannot see such collaboration as legitimate partnership because it cannot see Iran as a legitimate partner – only as a subject to be managed, a civilization to be contained, an Oriental “other” whose independent capabilities must always be suspect.
This dynamic is not unique to Iran but reflects a broader pattern. The same imperial logic has shaped Western responses to other centers of technological development, including China’s semiconductor industry, which has been constrained through export controls and supply chain restrictions. Different methods were used, but the same underlying purpose was evident. Whether through military force or bureaucratic limitation, the message remains consistent: technological capacity in the Global South is acceptable only in subordinate forms, and genuine independence will be met with containment or destruction.
If the United States and its allies were genuinely concerned about biological weapons risks, they would not have sabotaged verification efforts. They would not maintain secret biodefense programs while demanding openness from others. They would not destroy vaccine laboratories while claiming to protect global health security. Their actions reveal that “nonproliferation” has become a mechanism for preserving Western technological supremacy, not preventing the spread of weapons. And that this supremacy is understood as a civilizational right, a colonial inheritance they cannot relinquish.
The ruins of the Pasteur Institute testify to the persistence of Orientalism in Western policy. The institute was built through international cooperation and contributed to global public health. It also drew upon Iranian intellectual traditions that stretch back to Avicenna and the medieval translation movements, and ultimately to the foundations of modern medicine. Despite this history, it has been dismantled by powers that see it only as having “dual-use” potential and as a hidden threat.
The Pasteur Institute of Iran deserved to be judged by its contributions to human health, not by the suspicions of powers trapped in colonial mindsets. These powers often cannot even recognize those mindsets.
Its destruction shows that the real danger to global security does not lie in Tehran’s vaccine laboratories. Instead, it lies in the belief that technological power should remain a Western monopoly. It also lies in an Orientalist tunnel-vision that prevents the West from seeing its own actions as violent, treating them instead as necessary management of an “inferior” and “threatening” civilization.
Until the international community confronts the colonial logic that grants some states unchecked military sovereignty while denying others the right to scientific self-determination, institutions like the Pasteur Institute will continue to be targets. They are not attacked because they threaten peace, but because they represent the possibility of a world no longer structured around Western dominance. To the imperial imagination, that possibility is more unsettling than any weapon.
HS Wong is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Movement for a Just World.
11 April 2026
Note:
This article is written with a.i. assisted refinements.