Just hours after the U.S. bombed three nuclear sites in Iran on Sunday, President Masoud Pezeshkian joined thousands of anti-American protesters in Tehran’s Enghelab Square. Enghelab means “revolution” in Farsi. The angry crowd waved placards vowing that they were “ready for the big battle” and calling for “revenge, revenge.” One poster depicted President Donald Trump as a snarling vampire. The Iranian regime has long been able to mobilize its base for propaganda purposes and social-media imagery. But, after ten days of barrages by the American and Israeli militaries, the more telling banners made plaintive and prideful statements. “Iran is our homeland,” one declared. “Its soil is our honor. And its flag is our shroud.”
Late on Monday, President Trump said on Truth Social that Iran and Israel had “fully agreed” to a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE.” But the outcome of this war may be shaped more by Iran’s culture and politics than by the military prowess of its opponents. Iran’s controversial nuclear program is only part of a larger conundrum. Can the U.S. and Israel coexist with the Islamic Republic at all after forty-six years of fraught enmity? And will the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Islamic theocracy survive politically after the military onslaughts?
Trump had already called for an end to hostilities, and renewed negotiations with Tehran, following the unprecedented deployment of U.S. stealth aircraft and bunker-busting bombs over the weekend. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” he said, in a televised address. In a subsequent briefing at the Pentagon, his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, told reporters that Operation Midnight Hammer, which lasted a mere twenty-five minutes, “has not been about regime change.” But, by Sunday afternoon, Trump posted, on Truth Social, “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
Israel has been even more explicit. Its Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said that Khamenei is a “modern Hitler” and “cannot continue to exist.” On Monday, Israel struck two of the biggest symbols of Iranian repression: the entryway of the infamous Evin Prison, where thousands of dissidents have been held, and the headquarters of the Basij, the paramilitary wing of the Revolutionary Guard, which is used to crack down on opposition. It also hit other internal security sites. In a statement, the Israeli Defense Forces said that the facilities have been responsible “for homeland defense, suppressing threats, and maintaining regime stability.”
Trump’s ceasefire announcement followed Iran’s anticipated response to the U.S. strikes: short- and medium-range missile barrages on Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, the largest American military installation in the region. The Supreme National Security Council, the chief decision-making body in Tehran, which includes political and military leaders, said in a statement that it had fired the same number of missiles that the U.S. used over the weekend. The response mirrored Iran’s retaliation, in 2020, after the U.S. killed General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. It fired missiles on U.S. forces at the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq. Hostilities de-escalated after that. This time, Tehran reportedly sent warning of its strike in advance. Several American warplanes and ships had already been moved last week.
I suspect that millions of Iranians would not miss Khamenei, an accidental leader who stepped into top jobs only after others died unexpectedly. He was a mid-level cleric when he became President, in 1981; a terror attack had killed his predecessor. Six years later, I had breakfast with him, in an ornate room at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York. It was during his only trip to the West, when he spoke at the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly. In our meeting, he lacked charisma, worldliness, and intellectual depth. He mumbled his way through inflammatory rhetoric as a member of his Revolutionary Guard team bent over to cut up his breakfast meat. (He lost the use of his right arm in 1981, after a bomb hidden in a tape recorder went off as he spoke at a mosque in Tehran. His hand dangles at his side.) In 1989, he stepped in after the revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died suddenly, with no heir apparent. Khamenei had a limited independent political base, so he tapped into the Iranian military. They have empowered each other ever since.
The fate of the Islamic Republic is not necessarily dependent on the fate of its ruling Ayatollah. “Khamenei as a leader may not survive this war—either because he is literally taken out of the scene through an assassination or because the war ends with such a disastrous outcome for the country that he will be forced to step down,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Khamenei now faces only bad options. He will, however, avoid unconditional surrender at all costs. He would “likely prefer being taken down as a martyr rather than going down in history as the Iranian leader who capitulated with a gun to his head,” Geranmayeh said.
The majority of Iranians are Shiite. The sect emerged in the seventh century, after the Prophet Muhammad died, during a political dispute over leadership with mainstream Sunnis. Shiism preaches that it is better to die fighting for justice than to live with injustice. Imam Hussein, an early Shiite leader, fought Sunnis in the Umayyad dynasty, even though he had only a few dozen fighters and knew they were grossly outnumbered and bound to die. Martyrdom remains central to devout Shia. I’ve travelled in Iran for decades, and I think it is among the most secular countries in the Middle East. Yet the history of the faith and its traditions still define the culture and the mind-sets of many. Iranians are also religious and ethnic minorities in the wider world, and that has bred existential fears of foreign conquest.
“Shiism is a culture of resistance,” Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former member of Iran’s parliament, told me. Elected in 2000 at the age of thirty-two, she was the youngest female lawmaker in the revolution’s history. She was barred from running a second time, in 2004, after accusing the regime of torturing political prisoners and manipulating elections. She left Tehran a year later and now lives in Massachusetts. Iranians “are basically against authoritarianism, and they don’t like what’s going on in the country,” she told me. But Haghighatjoo doesn’t see the regime abruptly collapsing. Khamenei could easily be replaced, she said. Article 111 of Iran’s constitution, which is modelled on French and Belgian law, calls for a troika—made up of the President, the judiciary chief, and a cleric from the Guardian Council—to assume the duties of the leader if he is incapacitated or dismissed. An eighty-eight-man Assembly of Experts, which is democratically elected every eight years, would then select a new one.
After almost half a century, the Islamic Republic has deeply entrenched institutions—and intense rivalries among its executive, legislative, judicial, military, and intelligence branches. But they all crave survival despite their bickering, John Limbert, one of fifty-two diplomats held hostage after the U.S. Embassy was seized, in 1979, told me. “They love power. They’ve kept it. They’ve kept other people out of it,” he said. “For better or worse, they’ve built a system that is resilient. There’s a cadre, a men’s club” that includes the first generation of revolutionaries or their acolytes. For most of the past twenty-five hundred years, Limbert noted, Iran has been led by dictators—“some bad, some terrible. Some with crowns, some with turbans, some with military uniforms.” And, if regime change does happen, he cautioned, “Why should we assume it’s for the better? People assumed that in 1979. ‘Let’s get rid of the shah and everything will be better.’ ”
Since the Revolution, the Islamic Republic has managed to endure punishing blows by enemies, both foreign and domestic. In 1981, the young regime survived two massive bombings by the Mujahideen-e Khalq, or Warriors of the People, which killed a President, a Prime Minister, a judiciary chief, twenty-seven members of parliament, and dozens of other officials. After Iraq’s then President, Saddam Hussein, invaded in 1980, Iran held out for eight years, even as the Reagan Administration fed Baghdad intelligence that it used to kill tens of thousands of Iranian troops with chemical weapons. Iran reluctantly agreed to a U.N. ceasefire, in 1988, but the regime got its revenge by supporting and arming Shiite opposition groups that are now major players in post-Saddam Iraq. Iran has survived, albeit with growing difficulty, more than fifteen hundred U.S. sanctions, which have reportedly cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue. And it has managed to suppress sporadic nationwide protests—the student uprising in 1999, the Green Movement after the Presidential election in 2009, economic protests over price hikes since 2017, and the “woman, life, freedom” movement in 2022. “Death to the dictator” has been a common chant in all of them.
In the past, Iran’s upheavals have been presaged by visible indicators, Shaul Bakhash, a Harvard-educated former editor in Iran, and the author of “The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution,” told me. They have included huge ongoing street protests. Bazaars have closed down “not because of disorder but as a protest,” Bakhash said. Critical sectors, notably the oil industry and the civil service, have gone on strike. “We don’t see any of these elements right now,” he said. And even in the current dire circumstances, Bakhash added, “The individuals who might lead an opposition have not spoken up.”
And yet, long term, the status quo may not be acceptable, either, Geranmayeh said. If the regime emerges from the war with a diplomatic off-ramp, it will have to overhaul the social contract, which for two decades after the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has provided Iranians with security, in exchange for restricted political, social, and economic rights. The stunning scope of the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes over the past ten days proves that the theocracy can no longer deliver the protection it promises.
Utopian, religious, and ideological revolutions have only so much staying power if they fail to meet their absolutist goals and their publics’ lofty expectations. The Soviet Union could not sustain Communist rule in a world rapidly becoming politically and economically globalized. South Africa could not endure the isolation or the costs of apartheid, which required separate and segregated housing, schooling, health care, and infrastructure for three different races.
All aspects of life in Iran are now growing worse, Mohammad Taghi Karroubi, a lawyer and the son of the former speaker of parliament Mehdi Karroubi, told me. In 2009, his father, a cleric, ran for the Presidency, as did the former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, to defeat the hard-line incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The two opposition candidates lost in a vote widely viewed as fraudulent. Wearing green sashes, the two men led the Green Movement, when millions protested for some six months. Both men were placed under house arrest for almost fifteen years. “People will go to the streets again in the future,” Karroubi said, during a WhatsApp conversation from London. For now, though, they “prefer to be silent” because of the U.S. and Israeli aggression. “The day after the aggression,” he said, “they will start to talk. They will start to criticize the system.” ♦
This article has been updated to include news developments.
