By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Iran Today

After years of condemnations, sanctions, and small-scale attacks, in late February, the United States and Israel finally launched a large-scale war on Iran. In the time since, U.S. and Israeli forces have assassinated Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, along with many other senior officials and destroyed many of the country’s military installations, government buildings, airports, energy facilities, and civilian infrastructure. Now, three weeks into the campaign, U.S. and Israeli leaders are persistently predicting that Iran is on the verge of military defeat and that its regime will come out of the war either significantly weakened or swept aside.

Washington and Israel are right that their bombs have wreaked havoc on Iran’s military capabilities. But if they believe that Tehran is about to keel over, they are probably mistaken. The Islamic Republic has maintained remarkable cohesion since the attacks started. Its command-and-control system remains intact, even though it has lost many leaders. It has retained enough firepower to launch missile strikes against U.S. bases, Israel, and various Persian Gulf Arab countries. And it swiftly named the elder Khamenei’s hard-line son Mojtaba as its new supreme leader.

This resilience should not come as a surprise. For more than two decades - since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and especially since the 12-day war last June - Tehran has been preparing for a large U.S. attack and signaling that it would respond with fury. It based its strategy on a plan to cause maximum chaos in hopes of restoring deterrence, which is exactly what it has done.

Iran is also using the war to bolster its domestic position. Before the bombings began, the regime had grown deeply unpopular at home and was subject to repeated mass protests that it could suppress only with increasing repression. But beyond providing further justification for a more brutal crackdown, the war with Washington affords it a potential new source of legitimacy. The conflict has allowed Iran’s leaders to argue that they are bravely standing up to foreign invaders. It is fostering a sense of cohesion akin to the one that took root after the Iran-Iraq War. The bombings, after all, are killing both military personnel and civilians, generating a culture of martyrdom that is sweeping across Iranian cities.

How this scenario unfolds remains uncertain. The Islamic Republic was facing serious internal resistance before the war began - so much so that many Iranians welcomed outside intervention. Even if Tehran gets a bounce in support now, the destruction Iran has incurred will only compound its governance challenges. And the United States could ultimately decide to launch a ground invasion and carry out regime change itself.

But Iranian officials, at least, see an upside to the bombings. To them, the war with the United States and Israel is an opportunity - not just a hazard.

 

Bark and Bite

Over the course of the last decade, many U.S. officials came to a fateful conclusion about the Islamic Republic: for all its fiery rhetoric, it was, in reality, weak and cautious. Iranian officials, after all, had absorbed blow after blow without doing much in response. When Israel spent years assassinating Iranian officers in Syria and targeting nuclear scientists, the country’s leaders did nothing except condemn the deaths. After Israel attacked the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus in April 2024, Tehran launched a barrage of drones and ballistic missiles at Israeli territory, but almost all of its projectiles were intercepted. In July of that year, Iranian leaders remained almost entirely silent after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Iran sent another volley at Israel after Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. But this attack was also mostly neutralized. And Iran refrained from meaningful retaliation after Washington bombed the Iranian nuclear program in June 2025. Eventually, even the Islamic Republic’s allies began doubting whether Tehran was willing to fight against its enemies - particularly given that Iran sometimes telegraphed its attacks in advance through intermediaries.

The Islamic Republic’s choices reflected a persistent dilemma in Iranian strategy. Tehran needed to demonstrate to its regional allies that it was a credible partner, not one that expected its Arab allies to bear the costs of confronting Israel while Iran itself stayed on the sidelines. But it simultaneously had to avoid steps that might provoke a direct Israeli attack on its territory, particularly at a time when much of the Iranian public was skeptical of the regime and its regional policies.

As a result, actions taken to solve one problem often created another. Iranian strikes against Israel were intended less to deter Israel than to reassure regional allies. Their largely performative character helped temporarily reassure those partners, but that same performative quality reinforced adversaries’ perceptions that Iran was weak and incapable of inflicting serious damage. This is partly why Washington and Israel repeatedly chose to attack even when Tehran was open to nuclear talks. (The June bombing of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, for example, took place in the middle of negotiations.) In time, Iranian officials determined that the government had to respond to future attacks with much more aggression. Otherwise, Washington and Israel would not stop harming Iran unless the government completely capitulated.

Tehran thus shifted its military strategy away from a doctrine of forward defense - or confronting its adversaries via proxies and beyond its borders - and toward one geared toward raw offense. It planned to retaliate against attackers using a mix of conventional and unconventional capabilities. Rather than pursuing slow escalation and limited responses, Iran decided that if it were attacked, it would escalate rapidly and expand the conflict beyond Israel to the entire Middle East, to inflict pain on the global economy.

Tehran didn’t make this shift a secret. Before his assassination, Khamenei repeatedly and publicly warned that U.S. “miscalculations” about Iran’s weakness needed to be corrected. He called for military exercises and demonstrations of strength intended to establish deterrence. In late 2025, Iranian officials also asserted that the country had used only 20 percent of its capabilities during the June war and hinted that Tehran was prepared to tap additional strategic capabilities in the next round of conflict - specifically referring to the Persian Gulf as a potential theater of escalation. Naval forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iran’s regular navy began preparing for a range of operations in the Gulf, conducting exercises that signaled that Tehran was developing contingency plans to close the Strait of Hormuz if fighting resumed.

At the same time, some Iranian officials implicitly criticized Hezbollah for responding to Israel’s 2024 assault by striking only a few kilometers into Israeli territory rather than 100 kilometers, suggesting that Iran itself intended to escalate much more aggressively from the outset during any future conflict. Yet despite these signals - and to Tehran’s consternation - the United States and Israel continued to see Iran as cautious, weak, and easy to attack.

The result is the current conflict. The two countries struck Iran in February using more firepower than ever. Tehran, in turn, responded by continuously firing thousands of missiles and drones at targets throughout the Middle East. It has closed the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil prices around the world to skyrocket. And it has threatened to coordinate with its Houthi allies in Yemen to disrupt traffic through the Bab el Mandeb Strait between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, which would throw even more supply chains into chaos. The outcome could be a worldwide economic crisis. Iranian leaders perceive the conflict as one in which few rules apply. In Tehran’s view, U.S. and Israeli actions such as the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader - carried out during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan - have rendered nearly every target fair game.

At the funeral of Iranian security chief Ali Larijani, Tehran, March 2026

 

A Familiar Pattern

Iranian leaders believe that fighting back hard will ultimately protect the country from the United States and Israel by teaching both states that striking the Islamic Republic has meaningful consequences. But they also think the war will shore up the regime at home. Iran’s last war, after all, helped its leaders consolidate power. When the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, the country was engulfed in postrevolutionary upheaval - the Islamic Republic had been established just a year earlier - and internal factional conflict. Saddam thus expected a swift victory against a weakened and divided adversary. What he did not anticipate was that the Iranian leadership might welcome the invasion precisely because of those internal divisions - as it did. According to Iran’s first postrevolutionary president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, when the war began, then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini told officials that Iran’s victory would lead to the “complete consolidation” of the Islamic Republic against its internal opponents.

Khomeini proved partially correct. Although Iran did not win the war - it lasted eight years and ended in a cease-fire - the conflict shocked Iranian society, unleashing new emotions, identities, and forms of mobilization that ultimately strengthened the revolutionary government. The Islamic Republic used Shiite symbolism and the ostensible martyrdom of soldiers and civilians to portray the regime as a defender of the country and a protector of a popular revolution, spurring a rally-around-the-flag effect. Hundreds of thousands of young Iranians opted to enlist in the military. In fact, the war did such a good job at helping the regime consolidate power that it attempted to invade Iraq after successfully expelling Saddam’s forces rather than declare victory and call it quits. That offense failed, but the domestic support lasted. In trying to break up the Islamic Republic, Saddam inadvertently entrenched it.

Today’s conflict could follow the same pattern - or at least that is what the Islamic Republic’s leaders appear to believe. Like Iraq, the United States and Israel appear to have seen Iran’s internal tensions as an opportunity to weaken or topple the government: Washington began its military buildup in response to the recent protests. Like Khomeini, Khamenei might have interpreted the buildup and coming attack as a pathway to strengthen the Islamic Republic. For years and well before the bombings began, Khamenei frequently invoked memories of the Iran-Iraq War to illustrate how wartime experiences would make individuals more spiritual - and thus more supportive of Iran’s theocratic government.

And over the last few weeks, the government has mobilized large numbers of Iranians. It has, for example, successfully encouraged sizable crowds to gather in major squares across Iranian cities in support of the state. These citizens by no means speak for all Iranians; it is likely that a large majority prefer a secular government - particularly if a peaceful path to such a transition were available. But the regime believes that popular resentment of its protest suppression is being eclipsed by admiration for the sacrifices of wartime martyrs, such as the nearly 200 children and teachers who were killed when a U.S. missile struck an Iranian girls’ school. One trauma, in other words, is being replaced by another.

The Islamic Republic also believes the war could help consolidate support for the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, much as the Iran-Iraq War helped empower his father. Ali Khamenei was a relatively minor political figure when that conflict began, but the death of many other Iranian leaders meant that just one year into the Iraqi invasion, he was elected president. During the war, he and other Islamist clerics marginalized rivals while helping expand the IRGC from a small, loosely organized force into a central pillar of the state. Khamenei also raised his public profile by presenting himself as a wartime leader, regularly visiting the front and delivering speeches to mobilize both fighters and the broader population.

When the conflict ended and Khomeini died, elites thus chose him to be the supreme leader. A similar dynamic already appears to be unfolding with Mojtaba. For years, the younger Khamenei remained behind the scenes. Many Iranians barely know what he looks like or what his voice sounds like. But in a moment of crisis, when experienced leaders have been killed, and the regime is prioritizing loyalty and cohesion over formal credentials, Mojtaba’s close ties to the security apparatus - particularly the IRGC - appear to have become an asset. Even as reports suggest that he has been injured and has not appeared publicly at pro-Islamic Republic demonstrations, people have pledged allegiance to him. The war, in other words, may be helping transform a largely opaque figure into a symbol of continuity and resistance.

 

The Two Wars

It is, of course, unclear if Iran’s strategy will prove effective. The United States and Israel remain unbowed by the rising costs of the war, at least so far. The millions of Iranians who hated the regime before the war began may blame the Islamic Republic as much as the United States and Israel for the bombings. But the pain from the conflict has just started. As images emerge of dead Iranian civilians and soldiers and devastated infrastructure, the public may grow increasingly furious at foreign attackers and fearful that the conflict will lead to state collapse instead of regime change. If so, they may indeed focus less on the regime’s recent brutality and massacre of protesters.

But what is clear is this: Iran is fighting a fundamentally different kind of war than its adversaries. The United States and Israel are attempting to weaken the state from above via decapitation strikes and destruction of the country’s infrastructure. But the Islamic Republic is working from below, mobilizing supporters and reshaping public sentiment through wartime nationalism. It wants to defeat its enemies on the battlefield. But it is just as focused on consolidating its position at home.

 

 

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