Still, if Seyyed Ali Khamenei had choreographed his own death, he could scarcely have designed a more potent political end. After all, he was not merely Iran’s head of state: he was a religious symbol for Shi’ites worldwide. His assassination — by US-Israeli bombs during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, while fasting and overseeing wartime resistance planning — instantly transcended geopolitics and entered the realm of sacred myth. For supporters of the Islamic Republic, the symbolism is nothing short of miraculous, and among the Shiite population worldwide, it instantly resonates within their collective memory.

Most fundamentally, Khamenei’s death during Ramadan evokes the assassination of Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shi’ism and a central figure in the sect’s political theology. Delivered by a poisoned sword during prayers in Ramadan, Ali’s death was the climax of the first Islamic Civil War — the First Fitna — and was viewed by the Shia as deep-seated political conspiracy that led to regime change and the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate. Over nearly four decades in power, Khamenei — a “Sayyid”, or direct descendant of Ali — had carefully cultivated his public persona on this symbolic (and literal) lineage, presenting himself as a custodian of revolutionary piety and personification of resistance. The manner of his death instantly apotheosized that cultivated mythology into something far more transcendent: martyrdom.

With the Ayatollah’s death as powerful as the killing of the Pope during Easter, Khamenei was elevated overnight to the status of Imam-e Shahid — the “martyred saint.” That symbolism matters far more than many Western strategists appear to understand. In Shiite political theology, martyrdom is not loss but transfiguration. It converts political defeat into moral victory and transforms fallen leaders into sources of enduring mobilization. The assassination has therefore not merely removed a leader; it has mythologized him among his followers. And myth, in revolutionary regimes, is a fount of power and renewal. 

Khamenei’s assassination has already proved a mobilizing force for his millions of followers. Unmoored from the cultural and religious intricacies of the Middle East, the US and Israel wagered that killing the Supreme Leader would expose the fragility of the regime in Tehran and weaken political resolve across the Islamic Republic, causing defections and perhaps even a popular domestic uprising. Instead, his death has rallied the regime’s active supporters — perhaps a quarter of Iran’s 93 million people — while fomenting strong anti-American sentiment and open revolt among Shi’a from Bahrain and Iraq to Pakistan and Kashmir. 

In life, Khamenei was an ardent ideologue whose leadership left Iran isolated and crisis-ridden. One of the last surviving leaders of the 1979 Revolution, he believed it was his divine mandate to preserve the Islamic Republic’s ideological purity: Islamic conservatism, anti-imperialism, self-reliance, and resistance. He systematically conflated Iranian national sovereignty with revolutionary ideology, often sacrificing pragmatic flexibility in service of doctrinal continuity, compromising only when the regime’s survival was at stake. A notable example occurred in 2013, when Khamenei, a stubborn critic of negotiations with the United States, greenlit the talks that led to the Obama nuclear deal, calling it “heroic flexibility”.

As Iran’s relative power declined, sanctions tightened, and domestic legitimacy sank, he leaned ever more heavily into narratives of resistance and victimhood, drawing heavily on Shi’ite mythology — especially Imam Hussain’s martyrdom in the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, at the hands of the more powerful Umayyad Caliph Yazid. In this way, Khamenei framed Iran as the righteous victim of unjust global powers, especially the United States and Israel, whom he labeled the “hegemonic order”. 

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Crisis and conflict management became inevitable aspects of Khamenei’s governance style. He steered the country from one crisis to the next, ruling not in spite of emergencies but through them. But government-by-crisis had a paradoxical effect. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic evolved from a crude revolutionary state into a highly resilient political system. In close partnership with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — with which he forged deep bonds during the Iran-Iraq War — he oversaw the transformation of the regime into a decentralized, hyper-institutionalized, horizontally organized state with multiple redundancies, overlapping factions, and a pervasive security apparatus. The IRGC branches and offshoots expanded into the civilian space, while religious foundations and quasi-governmental trusts (or Bonyads), mushroomed to create a parallel economy to evade US and international sanctions. The system wasn’t designed for efficiency, but to guarantee survival under relentless domestic and foreign pressure.

Over time, this architecture produced a modern total state capable of absorbing shocks that would shatter other regimes. Power in Iran is disaggregated across clerical bodies, security institutions, economic conglomerates, and parallel chains of command. The Islamic Republic is neither a monolith nor personality-driven. The regime treats individuals — leaders included — as expendable in service of its long-term survival. Indeed, the system is expressly designed to absorb loss, from wartime commanders in the Eighties to nuclear scientists and generals killed by Mossad. Succession mechanisms are embedded in the structure itself.

This structural nature is what Trump and Netanyahu overlook, leading to severe miscalculation. The US-Israeli strike was conceived as a classic decapitation blow: remove the Supreme Leader, showcase the state’s weakness, and trigger either elite fracture or popular revolt. Yet this logic reflects a profound misreading of the Islamic Republic. Buoyed by his success in securing regime compliance in Venezuela by removing Nicolás Maduro, Trump may have become overconfident and overplayed his hand in Iran. Its tactical and intelligence achievements notwithstanding, the decapitation has failed to produce any strategic objectives. Quasi-totalitarian Iran is not Saddam’s Iraq in 2003, or Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, or even Chavist Venezuela under Maduro. 

Under its Islamist and revolutionary garb, Iran is a civilizational state with deep institutional continuity stretching back millennia and a sizable industrial base. It represents a cultural domain shaped by its geography and historical pedigree that goes beyond the Western nation-state model. What’s more, the current regime itself has been forged in decades of war, sanctions, and internal upheaval. Indeed, Iran belongs to an entirely different category of state: a middle power with regional heft and structural resilience.

As such, the systematic destruction of domestic opposition, compounded by hybrid wars and economic sanctions that hollowed out the middle class and tied economic survival to the state, made organic regime change increasingly unlikely absent elite fragmentation and the defection of the security forces. And absent a large-scale ground invasion, an external air campaign was always unlikely to produce systemic collapse — particularly given the dysfunction of the Iranian opposition and their lack of organization inside Iran.

In this light, Khamenei’s martyrdom offers Tehran a rare strategic windfall, serving as a powerful engine of political solidarity by reenergizing the familiar trope of the “righteous victim”: thus overshadowing the regime’s wider legitimacy crisis. In that sense, Khamenei’s death may ultimately strengthen the ideological core of the Islamic Republic more than his decades-long rule ever did. Despite being despised by millions of Iranians who hold him personally responsible for the death of thousands of protestors last month, millions of Khamenei’s own supporters are already occupying the streets in mourning across the country. What the embattled leader struggled to achieve in life — renewed revolutionary fervor — he may now accomplish in death. The regime now possesses a renewed reservoir of spiritual capital — a unifying narrative capable of sustaining elite cohesion through a fraught succession.

That succession is unlikely to produce moderation. If anything, the structural incentives point in the opposite direction. Leadership transitions during conflict, amid national trauma and the fog of war, tend to empower security-first factions with a more nationalist bent. In Iran’s case, the likely outcome is a successor more tightly aligned with the IRGC — the country’s real center of power — and less constrained by Khamenei’s more cautious and restrained approach to geopolitics. More Western-aligned, reformist factions, already marginalized, will hardly resonate in an atmosphere suffused with martyrdom and a siege mentality against what the Iranians view as unprovoked Western aggression.

Ironically, Khamenei himself may have also been a moderating force in at least one crucial domain: nuclear weaponization. Despite his revolutionary zeal and ardent support for Iran’s right to (peaceful) nuclear sovereignty, he maintained a religious prohibition — a fatwa — against the bomb. Guided by the IRGC and Iran’s more realist security establishment, his successor is unlikely to adhere to Khamenei’s theological or ideological qualms. Watching a Supreme Leader assassinated by foreign powers will inevitably encourage nuclear deterrence as the ultimate insurance policy. Indeed, the CIA had already concluded as much before the strike. If anything, then, the killing may accelerate the very nuclear option it sought to prevent. 

This very possibility reveals how Washington suffers from strategic myopia and a lack of endgame in Iran. Instead of coercing surrender, military pressure may radicalize Iranian elites while narrowing the space for diplomacy. Rather than empowering moderates who would engage the US, it validates the worldview of hardliners who have long argued that compromise invites aggression. The upshot is a hardened security state, narrowing the already limited space for internal pluralism. Instead of instigating regime collapse in Iran, the conflict risks producing the opposite dynamic: an escalation trap with no easy off-ramps.

There are other risks too. The opening days of the conflict have already seen the conflict expand, drawing in Iranian proxies and exposing vulnerabilities among American partners in the Persian Gulf. A mission conceived as a decisive blow could metastasize into another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict — precisely the kind of protracted entanglement successive American administrations have pledged to avoid. While a full-on invasion is unlikely and would be a political suicide for the GOP, the war could still escalate and fester as a quagmire Washington can’t soon escape: risking US blood and treasure and a broken global economy for Israel‘s regional ambitions, without any upside for the United States.

Such a scenario carries wider strategic implications. In an increasingly multi-nodal world, prolonged regional wars impose real opportunity costs. They drain resources, strain stockpiles, and divert attention from higher-order geopolitical interests. For a United States confronted with the end of the unipolar moment, another forever war in the Middle East — even absent US troops on the ground — risks accelerating America’s relative decline instead of strengthening its great power status. Given the already transregional and escalatory nature of the war, Iran could easily become the conflict that completes the “rupture” in the rules-based order.  

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None of this means the Islamic Republic is invulnerable. It faces deep structural challenges: economic stagnation, demographic pressures, and periodic explosions of domestic unrest. Its population is deeply polarized, and Islamism itself appears an exhausted ideology even within the regime’s own rank and file. But external decapitation strikes are poorly suited to exploiting those vulnerabilities. On the contrary, they consolidate regimes by supplying precisely what they lack in times of internal strain: a unifying external enemy and a mobilizing myth. 

Ironically, Khamenei’s assassination has handed the Islamic Republic both. It has replenished the regime’s symbolic and spiritual reserves, reinforced elite cohesion, and justified a more hardline security trajectory. In trying to eliminate the man, Washington may have strengthened the system in Tehran.

For a Trump administration that claims to practice hard-nosed realism, this represents a striking miscalculation. It reflects a failure to grasp both the civilizational depth of Iran and the adaptive endurance of the Islamic Republic. Iran is neither a brittle petro-state nor a hollowed-out personal dictatorship waiting to fall. It is a historical power with institutional durability and real material strength. Here, the US-Israeli tactical brilliance — precision strikes, intelligence coups, targeted assassinations — could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory that does not automatically translate into strategic success. 

Amid war, destruction, and political discontent, the Islamic Republic will likely endure — less flexible, more defiant, and newly consecrated by the blood of its fallen leader.

The brave investor was Ali Ansari, a fervent supporter of Ayatollah Khamenei’s dictatorship and proud owner of a £33-million London mansion. He did not have to strive hard to obtain bank loans from the Ayandeh bank, which he fully owned and which offered high interest rates to attract deposits. Because everyone knew that Ansari was close to the regime, depositors were sure that they would be repaid and they were quite right. When the bank, whose largest client was Ansari himself, collapsed in October 2025, it was taken over by the long-established state-owned Melli bank, which immediately paid back the depositors with banknotes printed by Iran’s central bank.

But it was all too much for Tehran’s Bazaar merchants who could not unsee the obvious corruption at the heart of the regime that the Ayandeh bank scandal had exposed. To compound matters, the bank’s depositors were repaid with freshly printed banknotes that could only produce more inflation, on top of all the ocean of money printed for the Revolutionary Guards and their now-defeated Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi appendages.

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Traditionally religious, the Bazaaris continued to support the regime until its costly non-stop extremism finally resulted in direct warfare with Israel itself. The 12 days and nights of unresisted Israel air strikes from 13 to 25 June 2025 destroyed nuclear sites and army bases, as well as the regime’s military reputation. Even before Donald Trump’s B-2 bombers delivered their 14 heavy bombs on multi-billion-dollar nuclear installations as the final blow, the ever-boastful Revolutionary Guards had been exposed as incompetent buffoons who could not even protect their top generals and nuclear engineers from assassination in their own homes.

When the value of Iran’s rial collapsed, falling below one million to the dollar by October, the Bazaaris could no longer restock anything at all, imported or not, thanks to the ever-rising prices. They closed down on 28 December, announcing a strike and triggering protests that have since spread nationwide. Unable to find food, would-be shoppers were the first to demonstrate, quickly attracting others to generate increasingly large protests.

On 8 January this year, Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah, called on Iranian city-dwellers to go out to “conquer and control the centers of the cities”, specifying an 8pm start time. When many thousands heeded his call, Reza acquired instant credibility with the Washington officials and Arab rulers who had long ignored his claim that he could summon Iranians at large to challenge the Ayatollah regime. That Trump scoffed at the claim even after the mass demonstration is a curious error prompted by the isolationists lurking in the White House, who are contradicted by the photos and films of tens of thousands marching under the Iranian royal flag. Reza also appealed to the Artesh, the regular army, to assert itself. Long overshadowed by the much better-funded but now discredited Revolutionary Guard, its 300,000 men could step in and take over — if, and only if, the Revolutionary Guards are first targeted by the US.

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That is how a Trump air strike could change the course of events. Its targets are obvious: the two headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran, the Nasser-e and Quds-e, each housed in buildings well separated from civilian housing; and their equally distinctive buildings in Iran’s other cities starting with Mashad, Isfahan, and Shiraz.

The argument for the air strike is that it could bring down the now hated regime, but also that it would make Trump a man of his word. He distinctly threatened attacks if the regime started killing people, as it has done on the scale of thousands, with more deaths every day. As of now, however, Trump says that the regime assured him that there would be no more executions, to the great joy of J.D. Vance and his fellow isolationists.

The latter’s argument is that things could go wrong even if the US action is confined to several air strikes in the course of a single day. That is, of course, perfectly true of any military action — but it did not happen on 22 June last year when the nuclear targets were destroyed without incident. Nor did it happen when Mr and Mrs Maduro were lifted out of Caracas without any American being bruised in the process.

In addition to Vance and his cohort, our beloved Saudi friends are also very much opposed to any US intervention that might release 90 million Iranians from the cage of the clerical dictatorship. However hostile they are to today’s regime — which has attacked them more than once with missiles that burned oil installations — the Saudi monarchy and the lesser princedoms would be far more threatened by their close proximity to an exuberantly democratic Iran, which would be further liberalized socially and culturally by a flood of returning exiles from Hollywood, Stockholm and all points in between.

For others around Trump with darker thoughts, there is another reason to oppose any US action against the murderous Ayatollah regime. In addition to the Iranians and uncounted Yemenis, Iraqis, Syrians and key US interests right across the Middle East, Israel might also benefit from the demise of its most persistent enemy. That is reason enough for Tucker Carlson, and other vocal critics of Israel, to oppose any military action against the failed and murderous regime.

So once again it is up to Trump and his super-loyal and highly effective Secretary of State, Marco Rubio — the same one who argued that Maduro could be removed swiftly and cleanly. Luckily, Rubio paid no attention to Tucker Carlson’s predictions about Iran last year. So much for a war that “would kill thousands of Americans” and “which we would lose”.

Since the strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, Donald Trump has begun publicly toying with the idea of regime change. The idea defies the calamitous and consistent record of failure of the West’s Middle East interventions. And even if the neoconservative fever dreams of remaking Iran into a Jeffersonian democracy somehow come true, such an outcome will not, in the long run, fundamentally correct the fading position of the United States. Nor will it provide increased overall long-term opportunities for the Israeli state to endlessly expand its influence. Any removal of Iran from the regional chessboard will create a power vacuum that is, at best, temporary.

It was only last month that, while addressing a crowd in Riyadh, Trump renounced the missionary non-government organizations and liberal internationalists whose promises — that non-Western societies can be refashioned by the West — have brought so much ruin. Trump’s welcome invocation of realism now seems to have been forgotten — just as realism becomes more necessary than ever.

The unspoken context, one that the White House would do well to heed, is that Middle Eastern countries have become wealthier and more powerful over recent years. Like China and other rivals, these countries have each chipped away at American hegemony. The US economy has grown, but these countries have grown faster. Once dominated in singular fashion by the United States, the world is now becoming polycentric. This is as true in the Middle East as in other parts of the world, such as South and East Asia, where it is increasingly clear that multipolarity reigns.

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What this means is that any power vacuum will be filled with local actors before the great powers arrive. An immediate neighbor can be a permanent presence in a way a distant power never could. The local power maintains an advantage both in morale and logistics and therefore can outlast outside forces. In international relations this is often referred to as “escalation dominance”, and it often occurs in places like Ukraine, where Russia will always be more committed to its near-abroad than the United States could be for Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, escalation dominance will be held by those nearer to Iran than the US.

Should the Iranian regime become critically weakened, the true victor would be Turkey. Turkey has much to gain from present tensions. It is strongly committed to pursuing its regional self-interest; it has a large domestic military-industrial complex to satisfy; and its large economy gives it much to gain from trade with neighbors such as Iran. Turkey’s only disadvantage compared with Israel is its lack of nuclear deterrent, but Middle Eastern powers, having just seen the consequences of not having a nuclear deterrent, will now become even more interested in acquiring one. While Iran and Israel damage and discredit each other regionally, Turkey is perfectly positioned to pick up the pieces as both a diplomatic arbiter and as the largest state in immediate proximity to Iran.

A naive faith common among many North Americans and Europeans today is that alliance networks hold some kind of ideological and cultural power that can turn members into perpetual friends. History decisively disproves this. Take the example of democratic Greek city states warring with each other; or the revolutionary republics of the Enlightenment (France and the United States) cutting their alliance almost immediately over divergent interests; or the British and American role in toppling nascent democratic rule in Iran itself in 1953. Alliances are temporary and ultimately interest based. Neither Turkey’s status in NATO, nor its close partnership with Azerbaijan, a state with a tight military relationship with Israel, would provide meaningful stumbling blocks to a growing security competition between Ankara and Tel Aviv. Iran, after all, won the American-led Iraq War; why shouldn’t Turkey win the Israeli-Iranian one? Israel lacks the capability to occupy all these nations and handle an ever-growing number of proxies that could facilitate endless expansion.

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If the Iranian government falls, many Arab states will attempt to maximize their own autonomy against both Turkey and Israel. Some will seek the protection of one against the other, intensifying the rivalry of two powers whose previously buried hostility no longer has a common foe to keep it in check. Long-lasting orders of peace exist elsewhere, in forms such as the “postwar order” of Europe, but this was made possible by overwhelming American (and Soviet) power. Such a dynamic that does not exist in the Middle East today, which lacks the conditions for any order of regional hegemony. Should Iranian society fracture among ethnic or regional lines, this competition will only be heightened. And Israel’s distance from Iran means its strategic operations would most likely be operating at a relative disadvantage in a competition between Turkey, some Arab states, and perhaps Pakistan and Russia. Azerbaijan might even attempt to increase its control over the Azeri-majority northwest of the country. Armenia, likewise, would lose its only reliable foreign backer and have to draw closer to Moscow as a necessity.

It is possible, albeit very improbable, that the unlikely dreams of the regime-change advocates come to pass. Iran, in this scenario, is able to draw upon its internal cultural cohesion and its general populace’s disdain for its theocratic elite, thus making a successful transition to a new and less fanatical state. But this will not change the long-term calculation of multipolar power diffusion. Iranian civilization and statehood predate the 1979 revolution, the rise of European global power, and even Islam itself. Iran is ultimately a regionally-anchored civilizational power made up of the shared cultural experiences of a proud and influential people. Whether it is governed by a theocracy, monarchy, democracy, or any other form of government, that will not change so long as there exists a state strong enough to keep the Iranian plateau secure. And this new state, eventually, will be a regional power again. The current Iranian government’s monomaniacal Israel fixation may disappear, but its interests will not. Even if many in the populace celebrate the fall of the government, the real and obvious danger of Israeli influence undermining the sovereignty of Iran will be apparent for all to see. Such a state will do its utmost to ensure a similar decapitation strike will not occur again. As a result, this state will seek to project regional power and perhaps even revive its nuclear program.

This prospective Iranian state would be less ideological than its existing incarnation and more national interest-based. This more secular Iran would be freed from ideological commitments such as those to Palestinian liberation or the bringing forth of the “Hidden Imam”, a figure promised in the apocalyptic eschatology of some strains of Shi’ism. If anything, a secular Iran would be more capable of building alliance networks, garnering foreign sympathy, and deftly navigating the waters of diplomacy and development in such a way as to prevent the ever-frustrated US-Israeli quest for hegemony. Without a theocratic Shia Iran to hold as bogeyman, Israel and the US would find that the other regional states would pivot their foreign policy accordingly, adjusting towards a balance of power to counteract Israeli ambition. With less archaic and ideological posturing, the Middle East would be a region of hard-nosed realism.

Trends may come and go, but security competition remains eternal. Iran remains a country that sits at a vital junction in the Eurasian landmass. It arguably holds a balance of power that keeps the region out of singular great power control. It may or may not be unwise in the short term to topple such a government. But Iranian civilization will surely outlive this regime just as it outlived the others that have ruled it before. And Iran, in any form, will always act to prevent any form of hegemony over its near-abroad.

Tel Aviv and Washington can try all they like to upset this dynamic, but their efforts are unlikely to pay long-term benefits. Israel, in the end, is going to have to take its place as just one of the regional nodes of influence rather than as a singular domineering force. The United States, likewise, must restrain its ambitions in the region. The era of global crusades is over. For the West, the project of the future is to accommodate the new regionalism and the failure of American-imposed globalization.