By Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr
At the outset of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in February 2026, the Islamic Republic appeared battered and weakened. Large-scale bombing had destroyed industry and infrastructure, and a U.S. naval blockade had devastated an already ailing economy. In early March, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” Several weeks later, he declared “total and complete victory.”
Three months in, however, the picture looks quite different. Iran retains its military and industrial capacity, and despite Trump’s call for Iranians to topple the regime, no popular uprising is in the offing. The war’s initial aim—to deliver a death blow to the Islamic Republic—has proved unattainable.
Rather than breaking Iran, the crucible of war has transformed it in unanticipated ways. To survive and establish new strategic advantages, the Islamic Republic had to adapt and innovate, changing how it waged war, ran the state, and managed society. And it had to do so with unprecedented speed. Tehran is now confident in what it has achieved and determined to consolidate those gains at home and abroad. The war has given rise to a new Iran, one that will reshape the Middle East and influence the course of geopolitics for years to come.
A QUIET SUCCESSION
Sensing that the Iranian regime was weakened by Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025 and a popular uprising in January 2026, Israel and the United States launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28. They expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.
Many Western observers view the new leadership that emerged during the war, which is dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as more ideologically hard-line and hawkish toward the United States and Israel. But that’s not quite right. What truly distinguishes it is subtler and more consequential. Observers outside Iran focus on the handful of top leaders such as Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader; Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament; and Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the IRGC. More important, however, is the transformation in the ranks below them: a new generation of IRGC commanders and civilian security officials who came of age after the 1979 revolution. They now hold key decision-making positions, and their nationalistic outlook on statecraft and security is redefining the Islamic Republic.
The worldviews of the founding generation of the revolution, including former leaders Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, were forged by their long opposition to the U.S.-backed rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and years spent in the shah’s prisons or in exile. Those at the helm today, Iran’s second generation of revolutionaries, including Mojtaba Khamenei, Ghalibaf, and Vahidi, were teenagers and young adults during the Iran-Iraq War. Their worldview was hardened in the trenches of the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Those in the new managerial class of Iran’s political and armed forces, the third generation of the revolution, know nothing but postrevolutionary Iran. The members of this officer class of the armed forces and the IRGC, along with their affiliated security institutions, adopted a structured, technocratic culture and a strategic outlook built around national defense, not revolutionary ideology. And they govern with the confidence of leaders who believe they have successfully defended Iran in two wars against militarily superior powers (last year’s 12-day war and this year’s far larger conflict), achieving something the revolution had only promised: a genuine weakening of American power in the Middle East.
The previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the February war, was the product of the intellectual and political currents of pre-revolutionary Iran in the Pahlavi era. His political education had been honed by debate with secular nationalists, leftists, and liberals who shared his goals of toppling the monarchy and standing up to Western imperialism. Once in power, the revolution’s leaders imposed their ideology on Iran, but they never overcame the insecurity inherent in asserting the right to rule over a society that would not wholly submit.
The new generation knows none of this firsthand. Most of them were children at the founding of the Islamic Republic and were raised believing in its right to rule. These men did not fight their way to power; they came of age inside the institutions of power, taking their legitimacy as given. The insecurity that marked the founding generation—the constant need to prove that the revolution was real, its claims serious, the old elite truly defeated—is largely absent. They are not defending a revolution. They are administering a state.
This psychological distinction has enormous practical implications. When Ali Khamenei’s generation confronted the world—in hostage negotiations, nuclear talks, regional confrontations—there was always an undercurrent of grievance, a voice rising in the rhetoric of historical injustice and Islamic vindication. It was powerful and real, but a strategic liability. It made them predictable, defensive, and prone to conflating the defense of their ideology with the defense of Iran’s national interests, which did not always neatly align.
The new generation has separated revolution from statecraft. At home and abroad, it neither espouses revolutionary grandiosity nor advocates revolutionary activism. The new leaders are establishment actors: pragmatic, hardened nationalists operating with a clear-eyed assessment of Iran’s capabilities and vulnerabilities. Unlike their predecessors, they can exercise strategic patience and act decisively. They look at Iran’s weaknesses frequently and publicly—something the founding generation was too insecure to do honestly—and they treat them as problems to be solved. That instinct drove the changes Tehran made between the two wars.
BATTLE HARDENED
Before the U.S.-Israeli attack in June 2025, Iran’s rulers had assumed they could indefinitely sustain a no-war, no-peace standoff with the United States and Israel. They were proved wrong, and the reckoning with that complacency began the moment the 12-day war ended. The new IRGC leadership expected the June cease-fire to collapse and another war to follow, possibly with the United States involved from the start. Iran’s universities, research institutions, think tanks, and government bodies began hosting debates about lessons learned and changes required. More institutional change took place in those eight months than in the previous ten years combined. Many executive decisions on trade, agriculture, and management of economic and social services were decentralized from Tehran to provincial capitals. And the organizations overseeing propaganda, communication with domestic audiences, and information dissemination abroad underwent a generational overhaul. Institutional lethargy had long defined the Islamic Republic’s bureaucracy; now it gave way to the imperative of rapid adaptation. In the process, the technocratic decision-makers took charge.
After Khamenei was killed in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike, the succession of his son Mojtaba was swift and remarkably orderly. The new generation that had emerged from the June 2025 war chose him in part because he had long championed them. Mojtaba was a member of the IRGC and fought in the Iran-Iraq War before entering the seminary to become a cleric. He later served at his father’s side, overseeing the IRGC’s transformation and the rise of its future leadership. Mojtaba’s ascent confirmed and accelerated the generational transformation, producing not the institutional collapse Washington expected but its opposite.
The manner in which the elder Khamenei was killed, at his home rather than in a bunker, mattered enormously. The new leaders immediately framed his death as martyrdom, and that framing worked. Rather than demoralizing the system, Khamenei’s assassination gave the new generation of leaders direction and purpose; their first act was to mobilize the Islamic Republic’s rank and file around his death. That messaging also drew a larger segment of Iranian society to rally around the flag.
“The new generation has separated revolution from statecraft.”
Iran’s conduct of the subsequent war reflected the new generation’s technocratic approach. The Islamic Republic had long operated through a chaotic maze of competing power centers, which produced unending internal debate and sclerotic inertia. But between the two wars, that chaos gave way to organizational discipline and resilience. A new Supreme Defense Council—led by the IRGC generals Abdolrahim Mousavi, Mohammad Pakpour, and Ali Shamkhani—was created to expedite military changes. Ghalibaf, a former IRGC general who became speaker of parliament in 2020, and Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, performed parallel roles in the civilian and economic bureaucracy, working through government ministries and municipal authorities. Veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, these men had learned to manage against insurmountable odds on the frontlines. Facing Iran’s biggest challenge since the 1980s, the revolution’s founding generation moved swiftly to reorganize statecraft around war. These older leaders oversaw the transition to the new generation, which quickly reorganized the scattered nodes of power into a coherent decision-making structure that could survive the loss of any single leader.
Iran’s armed forces were reorganized into a web of operational commands resembling a guerrilla force more than a conventional military, with authority concentrated among like-minded cohorts rather than distributed among various factions. Larijani, Mousavi, Pakpour, and Shamkhani were all killed in subsequent Israeli strikes, but the resilience they had helped build was not diminished.
On the battlefield, Iran’s armed forces applied the lessons of the June 2025 war with precision. They responded to the U.S.-Israeli assault that began in February 2026 with systematic salvos of missiles and drones designed to deplete U.S. and Israeli interceptor stockpiles across the region. They had concluded that their adversaries expected to destroy Iran’s missile capability quickly and were not prepared for a prolonged campaign. During the 2025 war, Israel had targeted the entrances to Iran’s “missile cities,” effectively sealing them and forcing Iran to launch mainly from eastern regions beyond Israel’s reach. Iran responded by dispersing its missile launchers across its vast geography and embedding engineers inside the missile cities, alongside military personnel, to repair damaged launchers and entrances in real time. This enabled Iran to continue firing longer than Israel and the United States had expected.
The IRGC also deployed cheap drones to overwhelm U.S. radar systems and military positions across the Persian Gulf and Israel, impeding the bombing campaign and opening missile routes to targets all over the region. Drawing on the logic of asymmetric warfare—and on the experience of using human-wave attacks to overwhelm Iraqi positions in the 1980s—Iran dispatched swarms of Shahed drones. These cheap, expendable weapons degraded the air defenses protecting U.S. bases, as well as those of Washington’s Arab allies, and opened corridors for precision missiles to strike high-value targets. The Iranian military had learned not just to absorb punishment but also to win strategic advantage by frustrating its adversaries’ war aims.
A NEW BALANCE OF POWER
The most significant victory for the new generation of leaders is simply that their strategy worked. The state survived decapitation. It withstood the punishing U.S. and Israeli bombardment, asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz, and faced down a U.S. naval blockade. In the process, it expanded the battlefield into the Persian Gulf, inflicting heavy damage on 16 U.S. bases and rendering several inoperable. In March, Iraqi militias compelled the United States to abandon Camp Victory, a major U.S. military installation in Baghdad that U.S. forces had occupied since 2003.
Iranian attacks also created a crisis of confidence among the Gulf states. The United States had brought war to their cities and vital infrastructure and failed to protect them. Their economies became collateral damage. The breach of trust between Gulf capitals and Washington will outlast the immediate conflict. It remains an open question how many U.S. bases will be rebuilt and whether the United States or its Arab allies will see much use in them against an Iran that has shown it can control the Strait of Hormuz.
By closing the strait and targeting energy infrastructure, Iran imposed significant costs on global energy markets and trade. That offensive—combining drone swarms, a “mosquito fleet” of fast boats, and the threat of mines—demonstrated a capability that Washington had long dismissed. Tehran regards the resulting stalemate as a new balance of power. The U.S. naval blockade has squeezed Iran’s economy, but at the cost of laying bare the strategic importance of Iran’s grip on the strait. By shifting from air war to naval blockade, the United States in effect admitted that Iran had changed the battlefield on which the conflict would unfold.
The Strait of Hormuz as seen from Musandam, Oman, June 2026Reuters
Trump embraced the naval blockade as the silver bullet that would win the war, but it only put more pressure on the global economy. The stalemate implied greater strategic parity, which the Iranian leadership underscored by saying that the war would end only when the United States and Iran lifted their chokeholds on the Persian Gulf. Going forward, control of the strait, an undeniably vital global economic chokepoint, will serve Tehran as an economic lever and a deterrent against future attacks. For Iran’s leaders, that newly realized power partly offsets costs it has incurred during the war, including the degradation of its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, and other setbacks it has endured in recent years, such as the loss of Syria as a strategic corridor after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which had been Iran’s staunchest ally in the Arab world.
In Tehran’s view, the United States’ decades-long containment of Iran has come to an end. The new regional order will be defined less by American primacy than by multipolarity, with China an increasingly central player and Iran an integral rather than a marginal actor. Tehran intends to lock in these gains in any agreement that concludes the war. Its insistence on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and collecting tolls from passing ships, and its preconditions for talks—a cease-fire in Lebanon and an end to the U.S. naval blockade—reflect the leadership’s belief that the war has shifted the balance of power in its favor. Iran’s new rulers are negotiating accordingly.
STATECRAFT OVER IDEOLOGY
Iran secured these strategic gains by applying the lessons of the 12-day war with surprising swiftness. In June 2025, Iran found itself fighting war on Israel’s terms. This time, it was determined to fight on its own. Beyond the reorganization of the Iranian military, several specific developments stand out. One was Tehran’s assault on information infrastructure. Iranian commanders understood early that they could not match U.S. and Israeli advantages in satellite intelligence, precision strikes, and integrated air defense. What they could do was frustrate U.S. and Israeli battlefield decision-making by creating gaps between what sensors observed and what commanders interpreted. Strikes on U.S. radar installations across the Persian Gulf degraded the early warning and targeting infrastructure underpinning U.S. and Israeli air operations in the region. Iran worked systematically to erode the adversary’s technological edge rather than confront it directly.
Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz was another major development. Closing the strait had long been discussed in Tehran as a practical option—and long dismissed in Washington on the grounds that it would hurt Iran’s own exports. Besides, U.S. officials reasoned, the United States’ naval power could destroy Iran’s surface fleet at the outset of the war, effectively removing Tehran’s capability to close the strait. Iran proved all these assumptions wrong. For over four decades, Iran’s military doctrine had centered on asymmetric warfare designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of U.S. and Israeli conventional forces. It did not need a traditional navy to close the strait. Using drones, fast boats, and the threat of mines, it exercised control over the strait—calibrating pressure methodically, sustaining it for weeks, and avoiding the full confrontation it was not prepared to win.
The Strait of Hormuz is now understood by all parties as an Iranian asset rather than an open sea-lane backed by an American guarantee. “Sanctions relief is not important for us anymore because we know it won’t come, and even if it comes it won’t be long-lasting,” one Iranian analyst told us. “We’re not making the same mistakes as before. Now managing Hormuz is the key.” This represents a fundamental reorientation of Iran’s economic strategy—away from pursuing reintegration into the Western-led financial system, which the new generation considers unattainable, and toward leveraging Iran’s command of critical geography.
“Tehran regards the stalemate as a new balance of power.“
The war has also compelled Tehran to deepen its tactical alignment with China, building something closer to a strategic partnership. The Iranian leadership has concluded that there is no path to normalization with the United States but that it cannot face U.S. and Israeli pressure alone. Beijing, Tehran believes, sees a resilient Iran as a worthy and proven ally. “Our Chinese friends believe that Iran’s international position has improved since the war began,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in May after meeting his Chinese counterpart in Beijing. “A new era of cooperation between Iran and China lies ahead.” Faced with the eventual task of rebuilding after the war, Iranian leaders are more open than ever to considering China as their primary external partner for reconstruction and economic recovery.
Tehran’s communications campaign during the war marked another break with the past. The Iranian government’s messaging through media and diplomatic channels demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of global audiences. Iranian embassies posted and shared viral content on social media, including animated music videos featuring Lego figures, that drove public conversation far beyond the Middle East. Iran’s framing of the war reached, and persuaded, audiences in the Arab world, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and even in the United States and Europe. Iran’s strategic communication reflects the same technocratic dexterity that has characterized the military campaign.
Finally, Iranian leaders have come to understand that economic malaise is the greatest threat to their political stability. The lesson they drew from recent nationwide protests is that economic grievance acts as a force multiplier for the opposition. No sooner had the cease-fire been announced in April than the government moved ahead with an economic reform package, ending a number of subsidies and politically protected programs, a move that the leadership justified as necessary for managing the economic fallout of the war. The rush to publicize infrastructure reconstruction projects—bridges, railways, hospitals—signals that the government is moving toward a new social contract, one that will rest on demonstrated competence rather than ideology. The IRGC has made a public show of its technocratic capabilities on the battlefield. Whether it can bring the same efficiency to managing the economy is the question Iran’s new leaders are now asking themselves.
THE NATIONALIST TURN
In the aftermath of the mass uprisings and the subsequent massacre of protesters in January 2026, Iranians appeared united against the regime. The country’s politics were defined then by the rupture between a restless population tired of isolation and the deepening pain of U.S. economic sanctions and an increasingly unpopular and embattled government. The war has complicated that picture.
The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy, and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger toward the regime has not disappeared. The grief, frustration, and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian Empire in the fourth century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the seventh century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.
Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains to protect power plants, and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.
According to a Bloomberg analysis, two-thirds of the targets struck in Tehran before the cease-fire were residential, commercial, and other civilian buildings. In interview after interview, Iranians described explosions that reverberated through their bodies night and day, leaving deep psychological wounds. To them, the Iranian armed forces were no longer the oppressors but the defenders. A chant heard at rallies across Iran to cheer on Iran’s missile and drone strikes captured the shift in mood: “Strike, for you strike so well.” As the Iranian philosopher and dissident Mohammad Mehdi Ardebili said in Tehran during the fifth week of the war: “In this moment in time, the Islamic Republic and Iran are one and the same. If the Islamic Republic falls, Iran falls.”
The sentiment extended to how the war was managed at home. Iranians noted, sometimes with surprise, that after weeks of bombardment and a naval blockade, there were no food or fuel shortages, and daily life continued largely uninterrupted. “Besides the bombs, it didn’t feel like we were at war,” one Tehran resident told us. “If the Islamic Republic can always manage society this efficiently, we wouldn’t have the number of complaints we usually have about them.” Such observations are not endorsements, but they do reflect a change in how Iranians view their leaders.
The government’s Internet shutdowns intensified this dynamic. When the government cut off outside information as a defense against U.S. and Israeli intelligence operations, Iranians were unhappy but had little choice but to turn to the domestic intranet and media. The blackout eliminated diaspora media and social media directed at mobilizing dissent, producing a different kind of national conversation. New and more complex perspectives took root, including about the IRGC, the security threats facing Iran, and what the country has built and must defend. “I always ignored or dismissed what the Revolutionary Guards or the governing system had to say about Israel or the United States,” said a longtime civil society organizer who had been repeatedly interrogated for their activism. “But these past few weeks, I only have access to internal Iranian messaging apps and news apps, and we’ve had to consider their positions and see the reality of being attacked on a daily basis.” A university professor told us: “The country has entered a national war, and a new identity is being forged.”
“ARE YOU IRANIAN ENOUGH?”
The Islamic Republic has always sought a social contract with its population, but the terms have shifted dramatically across its history. In the early years, that compact was based on revolutionary transformation and the redistribution of wealth. In the 1990s, it shifted to economic growth and limited social openings in exchange for political quiescence. Two decades ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad channeled oil revenues to the poor in exchange for loyalty to official ideology. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, promised economic growth through a nuclear deal and sanctions relief. All these efforts failed to create a stable relationship between state and society, to varying degrees and for different reasons.
What is now on offer is a nationalist-technocratic bargain, in which state legitimacy rests on a demonstrated ability to defend the country and rebuild it. The terms are national, not Islamic. State media is producing content that normalizes images of women with and without the hijab standing side by side, frames Iranian identity as cultural rather than purely religious, and reaches toward the parts of society that had most thoroughly rejected the Islamic Republic, such as the youth and the urban middle class.
This is not liberalization; in fact, the regime continues to crack down hard on political dissent. But the state now acknowledges that it needs a social base far larger than Islamic ideology alone can provide. Increasingly, the Islamic Republic looks less like a theocracy and more like a right-wing nationalist authoritarian state. Islamic ideology persists, but it is subordinated to the imperative of national cohesion. The test of political fealty is no longer “Are you Islamic enough?” but “Are you Iranian enough?” The mosque is still present, but the dominant political symbol on necklaces and lapel pins, worn by the young and old, is now the country’s map. Government rallies for the defense of the homeland are drawing even critics of the regime, some of whom paid a heavy price for their dissent in the past. These gatherings have become focal points for a nationalism centered on preserving Iranian civilization and celebrating survival with dignity in the face of overwhelming force.
The leadership understands that this is a unique and potentially fleeting moment. The same society that protected the power plants will return to its grievances once the immediate threat recedes. The Iranian people’s anger over repression, economic mismanagement, and mistreatment of women and minorities has been subordinated by war, not dissolved. The state’s concessions on social issues—the de facto relaxation of hijab enforcement, tolerance of concerts and women driving motorcycles—represent an attempt to make wartime unity durable before the political tide turns. Whether they are sufficient to fundamentally alter the relationship between state and society remains to be seen.
“Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it.”
For Iran’s rulers, addressing economic grievances will be essential once the war ends. Washington assumes that Tehran remains interested in negotiating for sanctions relief. But the IRGC is not counting on diplomacy; it no longer believes the United States will ever lift sanctions. Rather, it seeks a deal that ends the war, consolidates Iran’s gains, and paves the way for economic dividends from taxing maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
Washington interprets this new posture as obduracy born of ideological rigidity and factional rivalry in Tehran. “Unfortunately, the hard-liners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April. “Our negotiators aren’t just negotiating with Iranians,” he added. “Those Iranians then have to negotiate with other Iranians in order to figure out what they can agree to, what they can offer, what they’re willing to do, even who they’re willing to meet with.” Vice President JD Vance echoed the sentiment in May. “Maybe the Iranians themselves aren’t quite clear in what direction they want to go,” he said. “They also are just a fractured country.”
Rubio and Vance are wrong. Tehran’s defiant approach reflects neither ideological rigidity nor factional infighting. Instead, it demonstrates Iran’s newfound confidence and the lessons learned from the war and previous rounds of talks. The country’s leaders understand that the United States is seeking to get from talks what it could not achieve in war and that Washington is not interested in a deal but in Iran’s surrender. Twice before, last June and in February, talks with the United States were interrupted by U.S. and Israeli strikes. And after a collapse in talks in Islamabad on April 12, Washington immediately imposed a naval blockade, followed by another demand for Iran’s unconditional surrender. Iranian leaders already claim they have won the war. They are not prepared to forfeit the gains they have made or to return to the containment cage they occupied before the war. This self-confidence—rooted in the belief that the war has empowered Iran rather than weakened it—is informing their international outlook. It is also central to the legitimacy they seek at home. Their diplomatic endgame must reflect what Iran’s defiance won in the war.
THE MULTIFRONT DOCTRINE
Iran’s pronounced turn to nationalism at home does not mean that Tehran will abandon its regional allies. It will not fundamentally renegotiate relationships with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. But it will manage them with more strategic discipline and less ideological romanticism. The new Iranian leadership will not sacrifice Iran’s interests at the altar of revolutionary solidarity. These alliances will be deployed as part of a coherent regional strategy designed to sustain Iran’s strategic depth against sustained U.S. and Israeli pressure.
Iranian strategists have concluded that it was a mistake, during the war in Gaza, to allow Israel time to fight the different nodes of Tehran’s “axis of resistance” one by one. The U.S.-Israeli strikes over the past year followed directly from that failure of coordination. But in February, having learned its lesson, Iran quickly activated Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraqi militias simultaneously, creating a second front for Israel in Lebanon, expanding the war across the region, and compelling the United States to close Camp Victory in Iraq—which Tehran views as validation of its multifront doctrine.
Iranian commanders maintain their regional network not out of ideological desire to project power, but from the calculation that Iran cannot be fully sovereign as long as it faces military threats and economic strangulation by the United States and Israel. Iran’s insistence that negotiations with the United States are contingent on a cease-fire in Lebanon, and that a final agreement must end war on all fronts and reflect Iran’s strategic gains, illustrates this expansive view of regional defense. U.S. and Israeli policy, in Tehran’s analysis, aims at Israeli hegemony across the Middle East—a goal that requires a weak and broken Iran.
The axis of resistance, once dismissed by many Iranians as charity for an ideological cause, is now understood by a larger segment of the population as an instrument of national defense. Iran’s aim to prevent the United States from rebuilding its damaged radar installations in the Persian Gulf is another expression of the same logic—a deliberate effort to degrade the early warning infrastructure that has underpinned U.S. military dominance in waters Iran regards as its strategic backyard.
A NEW ISLAMIC REPUBLIC
The war has been a crucible, forging a new iteration of the Islamic Republic and the first major generational shift since its founding. Power no longer resides with the founders. The second generation now runs military and political affairs while the third and fourth direct communications and international outreach.
In its first years under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic was a revolutionary state: organized around ideological transformation, legitimized by the charismatic authority of the supreme leader and his claim to implement God’s will, and oriented in foreign policy toward exporting the revolution. After Khomeini’s death, in 1989, on through the reform era and the hard-line consolidation under Khamenei, the republic was a postrevolutionary state perpetually negotiating between its founding ideology and the demands of governance. The leadership managed an increasingly skeptical population through repression, patronage, and limited openings. It saw resistance to American influence as an anti-imperialist imperative, but it was still, above all, an Islamic republic, ruled by the founding generation and animated by its internal battles.
The republic born of the U.S.-Israeli wars is defined less by ideology than by nationalism, less by revolution than by statecraft, less by clerical charisma than by the confidence and technocratic ethos of a new officer class. In comparative terms, it resembles the military-led nationalist states of the twentieth century—Turkey under the later Kemalists, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser—in which ideology persisted but was subordinated to national interest and the imperatives of state power.
This turn away from dogma and toward pragmatic statecraft does not make the Islamic Republic more benign. Nationalist security states are often brutal to their own people and destabilizing to the international order. The emergent Islamic Republic will remain highly authoritarian. But the categories that Western analysts have often used to describe its various factions—hard-liners versus moderates, ideologues versus reformists—will be less accurate than ever. The priorities of the new Islamic Republic, and how it pursues them, will be shaped by the specific experiences of its two wars with Israel and the United States: the losses Iran sustained, the confidence its leadership gained, and the new social contract the fighting has made necessary and possible.
NARGES BAJOGHLI is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She is the author of Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic.
VALI NASR is Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History
Foreign Affairs July/August 2026, Published on June 3, 2026