What did save Iran after 12 days of Israeli total control of its airspace, which facilitated an extraordinary onslaught on Iran’s Islamic Republic that hit its nuclear programme, destroyed many of its symbols of government, and decapitated its military hierarchy? Suppose you ask Fayyaz Zahed, an Iranian reformist political analyst. In that case, he answers that “it was not the regime’s delusional ideology, but Iran’s ancient history, and the experience of surviving invasions by Alexander the Great, the Mongols, and the Arabs.”
Similar to China’s case, Iran’s rich history and imperial legacy have shaped its self-perception as the center of the civilized world — a nation destined for greatness — and informed its policies in the Middle East and beyond. The arc of Iran’s history spread from centuries of imperial grandeur in antiquity to the moment when the empire faced a new power rising in the south, Islam, thus marking the beginning of a Persian decline and eventual collapse in the 19th century under the imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Russia. Past greatness has made the dire memories of encroachment by foreign powers in the contemporary era an Iranian version of China’s “Century of Humiliation.”
Hence, like China, Iran’s modern history has been a struggle for status befitting a great power, marked by a vigilant jealousy of its sovereignty. A non-Arab country in an Arab region, unique also for being the only state in the Muslim universe having Shia as a state religion, Iran’s external relationship needs to be understood against its self-perceived exceptionalism. Closer to our time, the consequential meaning of the British-American coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 laid the groundwork for popular anti-Western sentiment that grew throughout the 1970s, ultimately leading to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Since then, there has been a tendency in the West to see Iran as a monolith of Ayatollahs and radicals bent on destroying Israel, for which they need the nuclear bomb. In such a scenario, Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s Churchill, fighting heroically to save his people from imminent annihilation. This, I am afraid, is an utterly simplistic, even false, reading of a far more complex reality. Iran is a richly diverse society, and so is its political class. The division between reformists and fundamentalists within the political system is a genuine one. The Iranian reformists, first among them the current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and his entire team, want to rein in the nuclear project, reach an accommodation with the West, and bring an end to the sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. It is there that they perceive the threat to the regime’s survival.
The drive to nuclear status has been an obsession of the Ayatollahs, their most potent symbol, and the insurance for regime survival, the ultimate protective shield of the Islamic revolution against its challengers in the region and beyond. North Korea is their proof. Although the nuclear program has never delivered a bomb, and only scant energy at astronomical cost, it has been the mullahs’ most potent nationalist symbol. Securing the regime’s survival is the objective, not annihilating Israel, which is far more likely to be destroyed at the end of a long war of attrition, for which the Iranians created and lavishly financed the ring of proxies surrounding the Jewish state, than under a mushroom cloud.
If it wanted a nuclear bomb, Iran could have produced it long ago. Iran’s scientific and technological excellence, supported by a rich human capital, makes it far better positioned than North Korea and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, to join the nuclear club. If Iran doesn’t yet have the bomb, it is because it has not yet made the political decision to produce it. This war may have settled the debate inside Iran’s political class in favour of the bomb. Iran’s now demonstrated vulnerability is proof of its need for a nuclear bomb, like North Korea’s, to protect itself.
In other words, Netanyahu will go down in history not as Israel’s Churchill, as he presumes to be, but as the father of the Iranian atom bomb. He has twice torpedoed a diplomatic solution that the Iranians always wanted, first when he convinced Donald Trump in 2018 to withdraw from Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement, whose provisions the Iranians fulfilled to the letter, and now by starting a war in the middle of a negotiating process over a new nuclear deal.
Moreover, since the end of the Iran War, Netanyahu and his friend in the White House, Donald Trump, are engaged in a campaign of deception that obscures the picture. U.S. intelligence knows better than its own president. Neither Iran’s nuclear programme nor its ballistic missile threat has been obliterated; possibly the atomic project was postponed by only a few months. The Iranians have taken away from the Fordow site more than 400 kilograms of enriched uranium to 60% which can be enriched to 90% in a matter of days, enough to produce 10 warheads. There are undamaged centrifuges, there are enough scientists, and there are unknown sites. Iran has already stopped any watchdog from monitoring its nuclear activities, and it will not be a surprise if it decides to abandon the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty).
Still, this war is a moment of reckoning for the Islamic Republic, as its hollow empire has been diminished by Israel’s breaking of its entire proxy system. Sunni Pan-Arabism has been a fiction, and Shiite Islam was supposed to supplant it as the voice of the masses. Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution, and his current successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, positioned themselves as the Frantz Fanons of our age who would redeem the wretched of the earth.
But, instead of redemption, what Israel’s combat pilots found lying under the skies of Tehran was an unpopular and repressive Iranian regime that has spent billions of dollars on a nuclear program and on projecting the Islamic Revolution through armed regional proxies, while presiding over a domestic economic disaster and stifling paralysis. Iran’s gross domestic product, or total output, has fallen 45% since 2012. Crippling international sanctions over the nuclear program contributed to this downward spiral, but so did corruption, a bungled privatization program and bloated state companies.
The regime, remote from a youthful and aspirational society, looks sclerotic to many, and its religious leadership is now up against the wall. “The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. If we pursue the Chinese simile, China’s political stability requires, according to Xi Jinping, an “overall structure of values,” a structure that in Iran relies on a minority of the people and a corrupt, to the bone, nomenclature that pervades them.
In rethinking its post-war strategy, Iran does not have too many friends to rely on. Its “allies” were a disappointment. Russia is entangled in the Ukrainian quagmire, China is happy seeing the United States consumed by the forever wars of the Middle East, Syria is now negotiating a peace deal with Israel, and Iran’s proxies have all been diminished by Israel.
Still, recent history shows that Iran has always been capable of adapting its policies to its weaknesses. In 1988, to save the regime from destruction, it accepted a dishonoured end to its war with Iraq. In 2003, following the U.S. invasion that had toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iran’s nemesis, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq, the Ayatollahs were willing to reach a Grand Bargain with the American Satan, giving up their entire nuclear programme and dismantling their regional system of proxies.
Alas, the radicals in Tehran proved to be far more rational than the Americans. The answer to Iran’s demarche came from then vice president Dick Cheney. “We do not negotiate with evil,” he said. This is a poignant lesson in the power of stupidity in history. Iran is not in a dissimilar condition these days. It is willing to negotiate with the U.S. a nuclear deal in exchange for shielding the regime from an American or Israeli attack. This is not about a final peace settlement; it is about buying time while the regime regroups and revises its strategy to adapt it to the changing conditions.
Iran’s clash with Israel, a peer competitor for regional supremacy and a bitter theological enemy, is a conflict between two existentially vulnerable powers. This, I would argue, is a typical Thucydides Trap, which Israel would like to see usher in a definite showdown. Israel’s zero-sum game strategy is driven by its Holocaustic fears and unrealistic aspirations to uncontested hegemony. Iran’s idea of the destruction of Israel stems from a Shiite eschatological belief in the return of the last Islamic messiah, Imam Mahdi, amid an Armageddon that the destruction of Israel will trigger.
If history has any lesson in it for Iran, it is that Shi‘ism should avoid falling into the same delusional trap of destroying Israel that had doomed Sunni pan-Arabism. By pouring its energy and resources into a war of annihilation against Israel, it would jeopardize its primary objective: regime survival. Like Xi Jinping, Supreme Leader Khamenei is haunted by the memory of the fall of the Soviet Union. The lessons they both drew are similar: stick to the fundamentals of the regime, only that China is a global power, and Iran is a diminished, decimated power at war with Big Satan standing behind the Little Satan.
But Iran is not alone in letting illusory ambitions cloud its judgment. If Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear program, it certainly cannot achieve total victory over Iran’s regime. The idea of toppling the Iranian regime through a bombing campaign, a design that Netanyahu had clearly set as an objective, was a delusion, a total lack of historical culture. Both Donald Trump’s call for Iran’s “total surrender” and Netanyahu’s drive for regime change through a bombing campaign were delusions, a total lack of historical culture. The Allies’ call for Germany’s “unconditional surrender” in World War II was what kept the Nazi regime to fight to the bitter end. And, regime change requires, as in Iraq, boots on the ground, which in this case would be suicidal to the invaders. In Iran, there are now signs of a patriotic surge even among opponents of the regime who have spent time in prison.
It is, then, not just Iran: none of Israel’s security challenges can be overcome through “total victory.” The Islamic Republic is humiliated and not in a place it’s ever been before, but it could still stay alive long enough to exhaust Israel in a war of attrition and get the United States entangled in a conflict it does not want. No matter how many bombs Netanyahu drops, diplomacy will remain the only answer. Nor could Israel hope for the tacit complicity the Arab states demonstrated in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. While these countries have no love for Iran, they have a vested interest in regional stability, primarily as they work to diversify their economies. The risk would always remain that a cornered Iran might even attack the Gulf states directly, hitting their oil installations or disrupting transport lanes in the Persian Gulf. These countries want a nuclear deal, not a regional conflagration.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military hubris is becoming inadmissible to its Arab moderate allies. They wanted Israel as an equal partner in a regional peace, not as a new hegemon. Wisely, the Gulf states have in recent years reached out to Iran in quest of stability that would allow them to focus on their economies. Now they are in for years of uncertainty that can adversely affect their grand economic plans and the confidence of foreign investors.
The Middle East is at the threshold of a new chapter that calls for visionary leadership that is capable of thinking in grand diplomatic terms. This means bringing the war in Gaza to an end, opening a political horizon to the Palestinian nation, and extending the Abraham Peace Accords to Syria and Saudi Arabia. But if a new Middle East is what we want to build, Israel needs to assume the diplomatic wisdom that the Gulf States have shown in their rapprochement with Iran. An Israeli-Arab peace should not be a confrontational enterprise against Iran. It must be a step toward integrating Iran into a broader system of peace and security in the region. Iran’s rivals in the Middle East should not take its humiliation as the last destination of the historical process. Iran is a great nation with a formidable history and an extraordinary capacity for resurgence. It is up to its neighbours, Israelis and Arabs, to make it so that this would be a benign, rather than a malignant, comeback.
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