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 city, he said, could return to that former glory. A second “Big Bang” is possible, but some changes are needed. Playing a central part, he promised the crowd, would be crypto.

The Reform leader has been wooing the blockchain industry lately. Crypto might seem like an odd bedfellow for Reform given some of the party’s more nostalgic inclinations, but in Farage’s hands the industry becomes a throwback. Seemingly reminding him of his rip-roaring days on the floor of the London Metals Exchange, crypto allows him to talk about a sparkling vision of Britain as a financial hub once again.

This is not a jam and Jerusalem brand of nostalgia, but one of big hair and big phones and lunch at Sweetings. Crucially, this is a pre-Blair vision.

Farage has criticized the autonomy New Labour gave to both the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England. Shifting power to those bodies, he argues, has allowed politicians to distance themselves from the regulations that put more burdens onto business. “We have to go back to the more old-fashioned way,” he told the crypto crowd last month. That is, elected officials must make the decisions and face the consequences directly.

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For anyone familiar with the über-libertarian origins of crypto, increasing the involvement of central government may not sound particularly, well, punk. What you have to understand is that crypto is no longer the reserve of cypherpunks and Twitter anons; it is a thriving niche of the financial industry that employs just as many policy consultants and business development people as it does cracked hackers.

While there is certainly still an anarchic undercurrent, it is the “white collar crypto” contingent — both traditional finance firms adopting blockchain and crypto-native companies trying to stay on the straight and narrow — that would like to see politicians taking the sector more seriously.

Exact figures on the size of the UK’s crypto sector are hard to come by, and slightly depend on how you define the umbrella: everything from institutional investing in tokenized gold to Web3 gaming startups could be part of it. What we do know is that London has a leg-up on the rest of Europe, still just about benefiting from its reputation as the region’s financial center. A report from K33 Research found that there were around 13,000 people employed by the sector in the UK back in 2023, triple that of closest competitor Germany.

Farage has therefore spotted crypto as a small but potentially influential area in which he can own the conversation. He has little competition. Politicians from other parties seem unable to talk about crypto, perhaps terrified of its less salubrious associations with fraud and speculation.

This was not always the case. While they were still in power, some of the more technologically literate Conservatives made steps towards embracing the crypto sector. As Chancellor, Rishi Sunak embraced a series of since-abandoned projects (sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who remembers the shelved Royal Mint NFT) and made noises about making Britain a crypto hub. Matt Hancock was a blockchain advocate while he was a junior minister in DSIT and continued to be so long after it was fashionable. Bim Afolami made inroads with the industry during his brief stint as City Minister before being booted both out of government and out of his Hertfordshire seat last year.

The problem was that not much happened. At one point crypto was seen as a potential area in which the UK could have asserted its newfound independence from the EU, but instead it fell behind: the bloc became the first territory to pass legislation that was specifically designed for cryptocurrency, rather than regulating it under existing laws, in 2023. That regulatory certainty has threatened London’s position as the leading crypto location in the region, as companies plot expansion plans in the EU.

By last year’s election, crypto was fully off the agenda, and although the FCA is now finally plodding towards a regulatory regime for the sector, the new government has not staked out much ground here. That may partly be because it is already onto its third City Minister. In fairness Lucy Rigby, appointed in September, has already been out and about talking about tokenization and meeting the founder of crypto leader OXK in recent weeks, but we are yet to see a shift in government policy.

Farage, meanwhile, gets to claim he was an early advocate for crypto. In fact he has been known to say he was the first politician to back it — something I imagine several Tories would dispute if any of them were still in public life.

Some of Farage’s earliest statements on crypto were made while he was working with Southbank Investment Trust. Back in 2020, he helped launch their investment newsletter, contributing his thoughts on investment opportunities, including crypto.

But what really seems to have bolstered both his conviction about the crypto space and his position within it was that whole kerfuffle with Coutts. When Farage publicly challenged the closure of his account with the Natwest subsidiary in 2023, he faced sneers and skepticism. Yet the conclusion of the whole affair proved he had been justified, allowing him to fashion himself as a kind of martyr to debanking. The experience has given him some common ground with crypto bros.

Debanking is a major issue for founders, employees and even customers of crypto companies. In the UK, half of firms in crypto and Web3 have either been rejected from opening an account or had one closed. Banks often put these decisions down to their anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your customer (KYC) obligations. But some think the approach is heavy-handed, likely to catch those with a legitimate connection to crypto, or even those with only a passing association.

While Farage’s experience was different, debanking still gives him a common cause. Several crypto-adjacent issues also fit into Reform’s wider approach to civil liberties. The party has begun incorporating online freedoms into its platform, pledging to repeal the Online Safety Act and criticizing the police response to social media posts. A natural extension of that approach would be online financial freedom, allowing investors to put their money in whichever assets they please. Recent proposed limits on how much individuals can hold in stablecoins have provided a useful political wedge issue there.

Resistance to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) also goes hand in hand with the party’s opposition to digital ID. Issued and controlled by monetary authorities, CBDCs are unsurprisingly not always popular with crypto advocates. Farage even said at the Web3 conference that he would go to prison rather than be forced to use a CBDC. A brave stand, no doubt, though slightly undercut by the fact that the Bank of England has been cooling on plans for a digital pound and doesn’t look likely to introduce one anytime soon.

Perhaps none of this is surprising. Anyone who has followed the way Donald Trump has interacted with crypto will see a possible model for Farage. The crypto-rich became a lucrative source of donations to the campaign, and more recently to the White House’s new ballroom. Reform certainly seems conscious of a similar opportunity, having dedicated a page on its website pointing donors towards how to make a contribution using crypto.

Since taking office, Trump has continued to signal his favor for the industry. In March, for example, he issued an executive order to establish a Bitcoin federal reserve. Farage, for his part, says he has urged both the Bank of England and the Chancellor to use Bitcoin seized as part of criminal investigations to begin such a fund, saying it would help “further legitimize this space”.

Trump’s relationship with crypto, though, has raised eyebrows, not least when it comes to the dealings of his family’s own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Farage will need to tread carefully to avoid similar suspicion — speaking at crypto events has already become part of his portfolio of side hustles. Whether he actually owns any crypto-assets himself though is unclear — there is no obligation, currently, for MPs to declare their crypto holdings in the same way they might for shares. Then there’s his association with crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who previously donated to the Brexit Party and more recently paid for two of Farage’s trips to the States.

Whether you think Farage is a true Bitcoin believer or an opportunist though, he demonstrates a deeper understanding of crypto than the US President, a former skeptic who seems guided by his sons in his crypto endeavors. In shaping a political narrative around the industry, too, the two men have very different approaches. While both might connect this new technology to their reminiscences about a financial heyday, Farage recognizes the frustration of the industry and positions himself as an underdog alongside them, a martyr to the cause. In his telling, it’s more Passion of the Christ than Art of the Deal: just a way to make Britain a richer place, by bringing more well-paid jobs to London — if only Reeves would let them.

What exactly would that entail? Probably reining in the powers of both the Bank of England and FCA. But those expecting a bonfire of red tape and quangos may be disappointed. Farage isn’t totally anti-regulation, recognizing that it can help stimulate investment when the rules are clear. In a world where he wins the next election, the FCA’s new regime will likely already be in place. Barring any major objections, it seems unlikely he would change it, preferring stability and clarity for businesses.

Where he might look at changes would be on the consumer side. Regulation can be bad when it “protects idiots from themselves”, Farage said at the conference. Regulators often have to find a balance between allowing people freedom to do what they will with their money and preventing them from coming to harm. That has led in some situations to rather tight rules for ordinary investors: up until October, only professionals were permitted to invest in crypto-based exchange-traded notes (ETNS). It would not be surprising if a Farage administration tipped the scales in favor of consumer freedom rather than risk aversion.

The right approach to that depends on whether you think crypto should be seen as analogous to stocks and shares or more like a wager on the horses. Finding a way to legitimize some of the trading going on in grey zones could be beneficial, not least for the Treasury’s coffers: the FCA reckons some 12% of adults own some kind of crypto asset. But it could come at a cost of consumer protection if firms are not held to the same standards as other financial institutions.

None of this, though, is necessarily a game changer when it comes to elections. Crypto can be a way of opening conversations about individual liberties, or over-regulation, or business investment. But it doesn’t tend to be a primary issue for voters, nor was it the magic bullet for reaching male voters in the US elections that some thought it might be.

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Where it might make a difference is more broadly in the City’s buy-in to the Reform agenda. When I worked on a financial newspaper in 2017, it would have been hard to imagine Farage winning anyone round, so soon after Brexit. Now, he’s making speeches at Banking Hall and promising to appoint people with business experience as ministers, while bankers take meetings with his team behind closed doors. Crypto is just one item on an allegedly pro-business, pro-entrepreneur agenda, and also fits neatly into Farage’s stated desire to reward risk-takers.

People in the industry like to say that the crash that came after the collapse of FTX was actually a good thing, washing many of the bad actors and speculators out of the space. This is both true to some extent and difficult to take seriously, since those who have left always seem to be replaced by others. The excesses of the NFT boom have been exchanged for memecoins. Scams and hacks are still an everyday feature of the cryptosphere.

In this context, Farage’s retro-futuristic vision of a crypto-enabled “Big Bang” sounds risky. But it’s a calculated risk. Despite some of crypto’s crazier corners, the white-collar portion of the blockchain industry is increasingly professionalizing, having been embraced by a once-skeptical Wall Street. Major firms take pains to show that they are compliant with local laws and are preparing for massive IPOs. Respected technology and finance firms are incorporating stablecoins into their plans for the future.

Much as Farage might think of himself as a maverick, he is following a path that global regulators and governments have already cut. As crypto sells itself as a legitimate, wealth-generating sector, countries around the world are figuring out how to give it room to grow. In fact, the UK is already working to align its approach with the US on digital assets and other financial innovations. His pitch, then, is far more psychological, symbolic even. It’s about recognizing a group that has at times felt ignored or dismissed. Whether it’s based on fact or not, that can be a very effective message.