Ali Larijani, whom the Israelis assassinated on Tuesday, was a ruthless propagandist who broadcast the “confessions” of dissidents broken by torture, and an apparatchik whose National Security Council oversaw the slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters in January. Yet his long membership of Iran’s ruling clique at least gave him insight into the country’s external enemies. At a pro-regime rally shortly before his death, he observed that “Trump’s problem is that he doesn’t understand that… the more pressure he applies, the stronger the [Iranian] people become.”

For nations driven by patriotism, religion or both — Iran, the Palestinians, Ukraine, Russia, Israel — capitulation becomes more unthinkable the longer the casualty list. In this, the Iranian regime has form. Drawing on its experience of fighting Iraq in the Eighties, when the Islamic Republic was a production line of commanders going fearlessly to their deaths — recall one-armed Hossein Kharrazi, who was killed while diverting a subordinate away from enemy fire, and is remembered by his men for his valor and self-sacrifice — the state replaces fallen generals and politicians quickly and without fuss.

So far, at least 1,500 Iranians have been killed, including hundreds of civilians; much infrastructure has been destroyed. Now Trump is openly contemplating an invasion of the island of Kharg, off Iran’s southern coast, from where the country’s oil is dispatched to China and other more clandestine markets, while the CIA has been encouraging a rebellion among the Kurds in the country’s western provinces.

All the while, Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s new supreme leader, who lost his wife, son and perhaps a leg in the attack that also killed his father and predecessor, Ali, promises a life without security for the regime’s enemies, both “domestic and foreign.” His Islamic Republic, a pariah state, tells the world’s most powerful military: bring it on.

That Iran derives strength from adversity and prefers heroic defeat to ungentlemanly victory derives in part from the foundation epic of Shia Islam. In 680, the Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, along with a tiny band of followers, was put to the sword by the powerful caliph, Yazid of Damascus, in what is now southern Iraq. Iran’s sectarian identity works in tandem with cultural exceptionalism. The Persian language emerged from the Arab invasions of the 630s energized and expanded, becoming a tool fit for the works of beauty that Persian poets went on to compose.

Similarly, Islamic beliefs and Persian forms merged to create a new aesthetic, visible in cities like Isfahan and Tabriz, and which spread as far as Central Asia and India. No one, then, has ever accused Iran of suffering from an inferiority complex. Or, for that matter, of excessive deference towards the parvenu Arabs of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs, in the words of an old bit of doggerel, grubbing around for lizards while the Persians sip chilled water.

Since the war began, Iran’s drones and missiles have exacted a death toll of fewer than 50 on the far side of the Gulf, but put the regimes in question, to say nothing of world oil markets, into a tailspin all the same. As for the people of Beirut, bombarded by Israel while calmly receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees from Benjamin Netanyahu’s furious assault on south Lebanon (itself prompted by Hezbollah’s feeble strikes on Israel following the elder Khamenei’s assassination), they poke fun at their neighbors in the Gulf for gathering up their dishdashas and running for the basement at the first sound of tinkling glass.

Many ordinary Muslims thrill to the spectacle of plucky Iran refusing to bow to the oppressors of the Palestinians. Pro-Iran demonstrations were held in Iraq and Pakistan following Khamenei’s assassination, the latter costing at least 22 lives, while, on 11 March, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a majority-Sunni country, pledged solidarity with Shia Iran. “We have but one religion,” he declared in parliament, “and that is Islam.”

Between US and Israeli attacks on military installations, gas fields, and the odd school, Iranian life goes on. Notwithstanding the danger and inconvenience, families convened yesterday to celebrate the Persian New Year, pride of place in homes being given to seven auspicious items (garlic; apple; a brown pudding with a base of wheat sprouts; sumac; the powdery fruit of the jujube-tree; vinegar; and coins), even if the traditional feast of herb rice and Caspian carp (beware: the tiny bones have a habit of lodging in the windpipe) has long been abandoned in favor of more affordable fare.

Yesterday I got through to Ali Dehbashi. An editor and literary doyen living in Tehran, I’d called to wish him Happy New Year. Dehbashi told me that his son Shahab had had a narrow escape that morning, when a house three doors down was obliterated in an Israeli airstrike. The target was Ali Muhammad Naini, the Revolutionary Guards spokesman: not that Shahab had any idea they were neighbors. His father is a pigeon fancier, but when I asked after the birds, Dehbashi told me that two pigeons and a canary had dropped dead from shock at the racket produced by Israel’s war machine. Having the misfortune to live on Palestine Square — which boasts a clock counting down the days to Israel’s longed-for destruction — he went on with typical understatement, “I suppose one is in the firing line.”

At the outset of the fighting, Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government” as soon as the dust had settled, for “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Since then, in one of those cognitive exercises he lets us observe, like a child showing off his ability to join one bit of playdough to another, he has changed his mind. The President now deems a popular uprising unlikely because the security forces “have people in the streets… machine-gunning people down if they want to protest.” A few inquiries beforehand would have saved him from any misapprehension on this score and the world a lot of pain.

The irony of Trump and Netanyahu’s war of liberation is that it has silenced those opponents of the Islamic Republic who continued to agitate for freedom even after January’s massacre. Many had urged Trump to bomb the country to oblivion, placing their hopes in a restoration of the monarchy under Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah. Now, three weeks into this conflict of unexpected intensity, the true sentiments of the majority are hidden behind an intermittent internet blackout. Treat with caution the prognostications of Iran specialists in the US who haven’t seen the country in decades.

That said, the longer the pounding goes on, the more schools are hit and the more damage is done to buildings of national importance — it’s the meticulously cut mirror pieces adhering to the muqarnas, or stalactite squinch, that fall like dandruff when a bomb slams into the barracks a block away — the greater the likelihood that feelings towards the aggressors will cool.

The authorities are taking no chances. The national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, has warned that should “scum, spies and hirelings”, his catch-all for pro-democracy protesters, return to the streets on the advice of Trump, Netanyahu or Pahlavi, they “will be treated as the enemy… our boys have their fingers on the trigger, defending their revolution, protecting their people and their country.” On Wednesday, three young men were executed for killing policemen in the January unrest.

For all his disagreeable qualities, Larijani’s removal has robbed Iran of an experienced negotiator who might have helped bring the war to an end before the country turns entirely to ashes — one of the reasons, it has been suggested, why Netanyahu targeted him. At present, peace suits neither the Israeli Prime Minister, who on Thursday said that the war would continue “as long as is necessary”, nor those Revolutionary Guardsmen for whom the current hostilities are an opportunity to militarize the Islamic Republic.

In all this, the hardliners may have an ally in Mojtaba Khamenei. His meager credentials as a Shia theologian are far from commensurate with the almost pontifical office, the guardianship of the jurist, which he lately inherited. The new supreme leader owes his elevation to the Guard. Assuming he stays alive — the attack that killed the father is thought to have left the son with life-threatening injuries — the clerical character of the Islamic Republic will fade and it will more closely resemble a uniformed dictatorship with a nationalist character.

Not a day passes without an official warning of threats to the country’s territorial integrity: code for foreign-funded agitations among the country’s Kurdish, Baluch and Arab minorities. But Iran isn’t in danger of falling apart. It isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq, modern confections of mutually antagonistic groups. Rather, it has a natural coherence based on the supremacy of the Persian language; its geographically logical homeland on the Persian plateau, ringed by seas and mountains; and the Shia Islam to which most Iranians adhere.

For centuries, indeed, these strengths have enabled Iran to survive invasions, violent changes of dynasty, famines, tribal uprisings, regicides and years of meddling by imperial Britain and Russia — not to mention the 1979 revolution itself. They will offset the centrifugal forces that Trump seems intent on stimulating. For the true danger to Iran is not disintegration, but implosion.

When Trump and Netanyahu decide that they have had enough, Khamenei and his friends in the Guard will have to deal with the same rotten institutions and ruined economy, the same seething anger and desire for change, that brought the people onto the streets in January — with the difference now that any chance of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation has been foreclosed while Israel will continue to bomb the country and sabotage its institutions on a rolling basis. In the meantime, the “scum, spies and hirelings” haven’t gone away, and they have even less to lose. The police chief shouldn’t book any holidays.

Iran is experiencing the most evil days in its modern history. To mark an earlier catastrophe, the Anglo-American coup d’etat that ejected the country’s legitimate prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, in 1953, ushering in a quarter of a century of monarchical despotism, the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales composed the following lines which an Iranian friend of mine recently found himself reaching for.

“My house has caught fire, a soul-burning fire,
This fire burns in all directions,
Burning the curtains, the rugs, warp with weft,
I run aimlessly, crying, in the flames of the smoke-laden fire,
And amid my bitter laughter,
And the lamentation of my mirthless tears,
From a burning core,
I scream…”

Jews have lived on the Iranian plateau for more than 2,600 years, constituting one of the oldest continuously existing religious communities in the world. The Babylonian monarch Nebuchadnezzar II brought them there by force after he destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon in 586 BC. This exile, known as the Babylonian Captivity, lasted until 536, when Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. (See the Book of Ezra.) Some chose to remain in the regions of modern-day Iraq and Iran. And these Mesopotamian Jewish communities of late antiquity were not idle. Their rabbinic academies produced the nearly two-million-word Babylonian Talmud, the crowning intellectual achievement of Jewish thought to this day.

The Book of Esther is set during the reign of the Persian despot Ahasuerus (better known as Xerxes), who in 480 BC led his massive invading army to epic defeat at the hands of the Athenian-led Greek cities. Read aloud on Purim, and celebrated in a carnivalesque atmosphere of mime and mimicry, the story of Esther expresses diaspora Judaism’s great wish: to triumph over neighbors who would annihilate them, but in such a way as to make them friends. This is the accomplishment of young Esther and her uncle Mordechai, who lived under Ahasuerus’ reign. On Mordechai’s advice, Esther conceals her Jewish identity, becomes Ahasuerus’s queen and cleverly maneuvers him into executing Haman, a Persian Heinrich Himmler. Mordechai then takes Haman’s place as prime minister. Something like this has in fact been the general strategy for Jewish survival in the diaspora: benefit the ruler (as Joseph did Pharaoh), enter the ranks of the elite, and use economic and political power to protect the Jewish community. But as the fate of European and Middle Eastern Jewry showed in the mid-20th century, this strategy, called shtadlanut (“intercession”) in Yiddish, entails considerable risks, and seems to have outlived its usefulness.

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The reality of Jewish life in Persia has been neither as perilous nor as glorious as in the Book of Esther. Until the arrival of Islam in the seventh century made them second-class citizens distinguished from Muslims by special clothes and yellow patches, Jews “participated freely”, as the historian Houman Sarshar notes, “in every sphere of society, from the army to the courts”. Subjected to further economic, social, and physical restrictions after the ascendancy of Shi’ite Islam in the 16th century, they regained their ancient freedoms in 1906, when Iran adopted a new constitution. Iranian Jewry enjoyed a golden age under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a Westernizing ruler who became Shah in 1941 and later extended de facto recognition to the new state of Israel. When political turmoil forced Pahlavi into exile in 1953, an Iranian Jewish merchant issued him a blank check drawn on a Swiss bank account. Jews subsequently assumed leadership roles in key Iranian industries.

But history is full of ironies, and one long in the making finally caught up with the people of Iran. The Greek victory over Xerxes in the Second Persian War saved Athenian democracy, and thereby the West, from perishing in its infancy, but the equally despotic Ayatollah Khomeini used Greek philosophy to defeat Western values when he established the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1979 revolution. The medieval Shi’ite thinker Alfarabi argued for an Islamic version of Callipolis, the city ruled by philosopher-kings in Plato’s Republic, that would be ruled by a Muslim prophet and lawgiver who was also a philosopher. A millennium later, Khomeini looked to the Republic in founding his totalitarian theocracy, in which power is concentrated in a Supreme Leader and a Council of Guardians composed of clerics.

The Shah had grown increasingly authoritarian and repressive in the Seventies, and Iranian Jews supported the revolution in the hope of a more progressive government. Instead, the Ayatollah exacted a heavy price for their policy of shtadlanut. The new regime almost immediately charged Habib Elghanian, a wealthy businessman and president of the Tehran Jewish Society, with corruption, Zionism, and contacts with Israel. He was executed and his family’s property was confiscated by the state. Most Jews subsequently fled Iran, and the community, which numbered 100,000 under the Shah, now has perhaps 9,000 members.

It’s hard to know what the Jews of Iran are thinking right now, because the regime monitors their communications with the outside world, strictly prohibits direct contact with Israel, and treats Zionism as a serious crime that can be punishable by death. Little wonder that they “dodge questions”, “talk in code”, and use fake names on social media; that they participate in Al-Quds Day rallies expressing solidarity with Palestinians; and that, when Israel and the United States bombed Iran last year, the Jewish communities of Tehran and Isfahan issued public statements condemning the “Zionist regime’s” brutal aggression. There’s no doubt that Iranian Jews feel great pressure to make such declarations. But after the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023 unleashed a worldwide wave of anti-Israel sentiment and Jew-hatred, diaspora Jews in general, who are increasingly suspected and accused of having more loyalty to Israel than to their home countries, have felt a similar (if less intense) social pressure to denounce Zionism. This is a cruel predicament, for that very pressure underscores why the existence of Israel — the ultimate guarantor of Jewish safety in the post-Holocaust, post-Soviet world — is so necessary.

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Why haven’t the remaining Jews of Iran left for greener pastures? For one thing, Iran has historically restricted Jewish families from emigrating together. It’s also unclear whether her Jewish communities know enough about the situation of Jews in other countries to make a realistic assessment of their alternatives. Then, too, it’s very difficult to give up one’s home, business, and way of life in order to become a stranger in a strange land, compelled to learn another language. Finally, Iranian Jews, including those who left after 1979, feel a strong and genuine attachment to the land where their ancestors have lived for millennia. Some even believe that, if the Americans succeed in toppling the regime, they might be safer in Iran than anywhere else, even Israel.

The Jews of Iran are surely anxious about the current war, and they’re by no means alone. Between 40,000 and 50,000 Persian or Tehrani Jews live in Los Angeles, and they are currently experiencing a “mix of jubilation and dread” as events unfold in the Middle East. One member of the community expressed a fear that many American Jews are feeling: “If this war doesn’t have a positive end result, it will only further increase the resentment that Americans have of Israel. And that is not good for Israel. It is not good for American Jews.” Nor would it be good for any of the world’s other Jewish communities, to say nothing of the beleaguered Iranian people, who have repeatedly shown great courage in opposing a malignant ideological tyranny. This year, it’s not just the Jews whose hopes of safety are reflected in the story of Purim.

As the Metropolitan Police quickly discovered, the headscarf-grabber was Bahar Mahroo, a social media personality and controversial member of the Persian diaspora. The day of Iran’s presidential election, she and other foes of the ayatollah prowled the streets around the embassy, assaulting or otherwise abusing those compatriots casting their votes in what the opposition see as an illegal regime’s “circus” election. “You voting is the same as dipping your finger in the blood of the youths of our homeland!” proclaimed one member of the so-called “Embarrassment Campaign” as he castigated a young lady carrying a Gail’s cup.

This farce epitomises the hopelessness of Iran’s exiled opposition. “Embarrassment” stunts remain in vogue, and animate dinner-table conversations for days. But ask an activist what they really achieve and they’d be hard-pressed to answer. Split into an array of factions, the diaspora harbours several distinct visions for the future. Glossing over their foreign homes, they patronisingly tell compatriots how they should behave, even as they unceasingly bicker among themselves. Yet most of what they actually do is unpleasant, unedifying — and ultimately pointless. 

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Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been challenged by a constellation of dissident groups. Indulged by wealthy funders, all keen to bring the ayatollah down, forecasts of the regime’s imminent collapse ceaselessly flow from Persian-language TV networks in London and Los Angeles. That the status quo is untenable is, after all, a foregone conclusion. There is no doubt about the Islamic Republic’s undemocratic nature, its gender apartheid, its muzzled press, or its aggressive support for Shi’a nationalism at home and militant proxies abroad. 

Yet if many overseas Iranians agree that the ayatollahs must go, why have they utterly failed to accelerate the ousting of the clerics in Tehran? The answer partly lies in their own internal divisions. For if the expats are united in loathing the Islamic Republic, they violently disagree on what should come next. 

Consider, for instance, the pro-monarchy camp. Straddling a range of ideological and cultural backgrounds — from atheists and liberal Muslims to alienated supporters of the Islamic Republic — they harbour nostalgic visions of reinstating the deposed Pahlavi dynasty. Their attention typically focuses on Reza Pahlavi, who currently lives in Virginia but is imagined to someday return to Iran and reclaim his father’s throne. From there, the royalists hope to recover the glories of ancient Persia. Drawing on documents such as the Cyrus Cylinder, a cuneiform legal tablet from the 6th century BC, they envision an Iran of universal human rights and joyous festive rituals. That’s echoed by praise for Zoroastar, the ancient prophet and founder of Iran’s traditional pre-Islamic faith.

Their exaggerated use of Zoroastrian symbols obviously doesn’t necessarily mean the monarchists subscribe to the triple tenets of “good thoughts, good words and good deeds” laid out by Zoroaster. Nor does it mean that they particularly care about spirituality in general. Rather, such iconography appeals to them as symbols of Persia’s glorious past. It goes without saying, of course, that these conceptions are utterly eclipsed by the realities of modern Iran, a country of 85 million people wobbling between Shi’ite conservatism and the rising secular thirst for modernity. It hardly helps, moreover, that many royalists haven’t returned to their native land in decades, leaving them physically as well as psychologically unmoored from the Iran of today.

Not that they’re the only ones to harbour fantastical ideas about the country. There remains, after all, a liberal opposition to the Islamic Republic. They envision a replica of French democracy being built in Iran. Their unofficial chieftains are social media influencers, artists and exiled athletes. One example is Masih Alinejad, a celebrated activist who’s spoken everywhere from the World Economic Forum to the Munich Security Conference. There’s also Hamed Esmaeilion, who lost his wife and nine-year-old daughter when the Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukraine International Airlines plane in January 2020, killing 176 passengers. His quest for justice propelled him to fame. 

That’s complemented by more marginal groups. Blending Islamism and Marxism, and led by Maryam Rajavi, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) is perhaps the most disciplined example. Then there are those unaffiliated and apolitical Iranians who yet dream of a rejuvenated nation. That surely includes some who voted in the 2024 election who nonetheless hope that home-grown reform, supplanting an indefinitely delayed promise of regime change, can boost their country’s fortunes.

Taken together, then, the Iranian diaspora hardly knows what it wants. And if that makes concerted action difficult, the would-be revolutionaries are also split on strategy. Some, including the more nuanced academics and journalists rejecting opposition militancy, believe it’s only through splits in the regime’s top brass that change can finally come. Others back the idea of rebellion from below. Still others, notably Alinejad and anchors on the popular London-based Iran International TV, support sanctions and military action by the US and Israel. It’s surely no accident that, when officers began inquiries over the headscarf-snatching incident, Bahar Mahroo announced on X that she was leaving Britain — and flying to Tel Aviv. 

If the diaspora were adept at grassroots campaigning, these strategic disagreements might not matter. As it is, and as events in London so vividly show, many of them are remarkably skilled at securing bad press. Waving monarchist flags — emblazoned with a golden lion — they targeted polling stations across 90 different embassies. And though Pahlavi himself initially backed the action, much of the resulting conduct was anything but regal. Berating older voters with megaphones, activists told them to “plunge into their graves”. Elsewhere, women were scorned as prostitutes. 

Once you recall that some liberals also engaged in “delegitimisation” of the recent elections, you might imagine these people receive short shrift from the outside world.

But in fact, some corners of the Iranian diaspora have been feted over the years. After Mahsa Amini’s murder at the hands of Tehran’s morality police, for instance, Alinejad had a flashy European gig that involved one-on-one audiences with Emmanuel Macron and then-Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Nazanin Boniadi, an actress and activist, shared a platform with the US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the UN, after a private meeting with Kamala Harris at the White House. That’s shadowed by appointments at neocon think tanks: over recent years, Reza Pahlavi has visited both the Hudson Institute and the Henry Jackson Society. 

More radical actors have also enjoyed their time in the sun. Despite its former designation as a terrorist organisation — and the fact that it’s sometimes dismissed as a cult — MEK is now being touted as a reliable alternative to the Islamic Republic. Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo have both visited MEK camps in Albania and France, as have the former premiers of Canada, Denmark and Italy. Even Liz Truss found the time. Delivering speeches about the so-called “saviours” of Iran, the dignitaries have reportedly managed to bring tears to the eyes of MEK’s lieutenants, albeit in return for staggering fees.

How can such sentimentalism be explained? One factor is surely the brutality of the Islamic Republic: with the internal opposition demoralised, it makes sense that the ayatollah’s enemies should be desperate for champions abroad. It helps, too, that some campaigners are more sophisticated than Bahar Mahroo. Soon after her death, Amini was movingly commemorated at events from New York to Istanbul. In Berlin, Esmaeilion assembled some 80,000 people, all chanting for Iran. Even MEK boasts a reasonably efficient propaganda machine. Given its bloody history of extrajudicial killings, the group can’t hope for much sympathy beyond its cadres of celibate fighters. But its online operations have sometimes proved impactful, thanks largely to a dynamic troll farm that plants stories by fake journalists.

Not that any of this can hide the diaspora’s ultimate failure. They may be received in the State Department and the Foreign Office. But almost five decades on from the Shah’s overthrow, the Islamic Republic endures. That’s even as Western officials remain far happier liaising with the theocracy in Tehran than with unreliable subversives abroad. As memories of the pre-1979 world fade, meanwhile, you get the sense that the expatriate conversation is becoming ever more parochial. For many so-called activists, politics starts and ends online, where they’re engaged in interminable arguments about which hypothetical leader is more righteous, or which of their rivals is actually a plant of the Revolutionary Guard. 

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All the while, the opposition’s figureheads enjoy what attention they can grab, visiting extravagant diplomatic banquets and speaking at K Street forums. But while they may once have been lauded for their courage and integrity, this rush to win awards and secure civil society funding feels increasingly hollow. Certainly, the rise of egos such as Masih Alinejad hasn’t struck a chord with ordinary Iranians. Though she certainly has charisma, Alinejad now claims to have marshalled the protests as a “leader” — and has even suggested she needs constant media attention to stay safe.

Despite enjoying the spectacle of a vocal partisan standing up to theocracy, Iranians instead wish the expat elite would put down their smartphones, leave their Brooklyn or Westwood Village bubbles, and help them overcome practical hardships. The exiles could, for instance, pressure foreign governments to provide Iranians with more accessible migration routes. They could encourage them to develop new satellite and digital communication options, allowing their compatriots to overcome internet censorship at home. They could also stress that certain sanctions might be eased intelligently, and that allowing basic international transactions can help freelancers and start-ups.

If nothing else, you got a sense of these frustrations back in June. In one London encounter, an activist lifted his camera to film a group of academics and writers strolling down the street to vote. Focusing on a straggler, trailing slowly behind, the cameraman informed him he was legitimising the Islamic Republic by voting in its “charade” of an election. But as the man was quick to point out, the election offered a choice, and voting against one didn’t mean he backed the system generally. “Damn the Islamic Republic!” he angrily rejoined, referring to hardline candidate Saeed Jalili. “The Taliban are coming, my dear!”

Like Russia and China, Iran is directed by an authoritarian and seemingly bellicose regime with some strong anti-Western interests. For now, that regime shows no serious signs of losing power internally. This is despite a series of recent threats to its authority: Iranian women protesting the violence of the state-sanctioned Islamic morality police; the American assassination of Iran’s talented and nefarious expert in warfare on foreign soil, General Qasem Soleimani; the humiliating and avoidable death of the President during a helicopter crash; and the impending demise of the 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Iran has been brutalised and woefully governed in recent years. Faced with moral, political, economic as well as ecological issues, Iran might appear to be floundering. The question is now: will one of the great civilisations of world history fall victim to its deep-seated internal crises or will it remain immovable and intransigeant? As the state begins to crumble, will Iran resist collapse?

The nation has endured against the odds before. More than any other region which succumbed to the Islamic conquests of Late Antiquity, Persia preserved a strong sense of its civilisational identity under the banners of the Caliphate.

Dualism has always been the key to Iran’s identity. The Zoroastrian religion of ancient Iran is renowned for its supposed cosmic dualism, positing a battle between good and evil in which the former is eventually triumphant. Iranian self-understanding has also been shaped by how Persian poets of the early Islamic era blended pre-Islamic Iranian histories and mythologies into their masterpieces. The 10th-century Abolqasem Ferdowsi preserved legendary stories of old Persian kings, and voiced nostalgic dismay that the minbar (a mosque’s pulpit) should have become as exalted as the Persian throne. Islam and Persian civilisation ended up existing in a creative tension that is peculiarly Iranian.

Modern Iran is in some respects similarly dualistic, possessing both what Westerners would recognise as the ordinary instruments of secular republican government and an Islamist constitutional superstructure. A President, parliament, and more or less modern state apparatus coexists with a Supreme Leader, a clerical Guardian Council which “supervises” elections and can veto legislation, and a legal system incorporating sharia. This dualism is by design, realising the Islamic Republic’s legal-theological ideal of the velayat-e faqih or guardianship of the Islamic jurist. Described by Ayatollah Khomeini as “one of the most important obligations” of the Iranian people and “more necessary even than prayer and fasting”, this hyper-politicisation of Shia Islam was a hallmark of his rule. While this ideology guarantees the Islamic character of the state, it is less traditionally Islamic than one might expect. Rather, as one academic analyst of Iran’s constitutional order observes, it “reinvents the [Shi’ite] tradition in response to the postcolonial crisis of Muslim-majority contexts”. The Islamic Republic’s construction of a velayat-e faqih deep state is best understood, then, as a strange fusion of Shia Islam and 20th-century revolutionary politics.

Can Iran’s unique hybrid system survive? Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian History at the University of St Andrews, describes the socio-theological hold of radical Shi’ite Islam over the Iranian population as the Islamic Republic’s “moral problem”. He estimates that as many as five to six million Iranian women now refuse to wear the veil, and as many as two or three times that number tacitly support their rebellion. This is a significant challenge to the regime’s Islamic authority. Stories of elite corruption and the brutal and sexualised repression of female protestors are hardly an advert for the moral probity of the Islamic Republic’s guardians. There must be some in Tehran who worry that the theological and political ruling class is burning through its reserves of moral-religious capital.

Ansari nevertheless warns against Western liberals being too cynical about the regime’s commitment to a particular reading of Shia Islam. The people running Iran are, by and large, “true believers”. This makes for a tense, brittle situation, in which there is a real risk of religiously inflected protests boiling over into much more serious civil strife.

Meanwhile, a succession crisis also torments Iran. Despite lacking the more invigorating charisma of his predecessor Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei has been a stabilising influence on the Islamic Republic. His death will be a moment of trial for the regime. Ansari suspects that a viable succession plan will already have been worked out. For the Islamic Republic’s elites, the show must go on. Until his untimely death, some commentators considered the late President Raisi a likely choice. Now the preeminent candidate is the present Supreme Leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is thought to have commanded the Basij, the volunteer paramilitary wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Such political instability is not helped by the mixed economic situation. A consensus hasn’t yet been reached on the effectiveness of US sanctions. But as in Russia, sanctions don’t appear to have been particularly punishing, with possible benefits such as forcing pragmatic moves towards economic autarky. Ansari, however, questions whether the issue is instead that the West has only half-heartedly enforced economic measures against Iran. For him, sanctions against Iran seem designed to send signals to foreign and domestic audiences rather than to break the country’s productive capabilities and bleed the Islamic Republic’s wealth. 

Yet Iran’s economy isn’t as robust as the country’s defenders might have it. Despite Iran possessing a significant share of the Persian Gulf’s oil resources, Ansari argues that the Revolution’s leaders made a major error in adopting a flimsy version of the Shah’s planned energy policies at the end of the Seventies. These were drawn up when Iran had a population of some 30 million; now estimates hover at around 90 million. 

Some sectors of the Iranian economy are faring worse than others. Iran’s aviation industry, once an unparalleled success in the Gulf, has been hit hard by Western sanctions and chronic mismanagement. Sanctions have made it highly difficult to acquire key parts for maintenance of an ageing fleet of aircraft. There has been some suggestion that this may have been a factor in the helicopter crash which killed President Raisi. The Iranian automotive industry is in a similarly depressing shape. Cars produced in the Seventies, in the last years of the Shah’s rule, sell for higher prices than far more recent models. Iranian drivers don’t seem to have great faith in automobiles produced in the Islamic Republic.

On top of this, the Islamic Republic also currently faces a severe ecological crisis. Indeed, Ansari thinks this might be the most dangerous challenge to the Islamic Republic: it is currently stumbling blindly into a ruinous ecological catastrophe.

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Due to a combination of climate change, corrupt mismanagement of Iran’s water resources and infrastructure, and an unsustainable reliance on pistachio farming as a cash crop, Iran is drying up. The north of the country is, Ansari says, more or less holding up, but his prognosis for southern Iran is much grimmer. He thinks some Western analysts are underpricing the potential for a devastating — perhaps irreversible — collapse in Iran’s ability to provide water to its farmers.

Startling comparisons can be made to the destruction of the Aral Sea: the most infamous example of an authoritarian state doing irreversible environmental damage in Central Asia. From the Sixties, short-termist and overambitious irrigation programmes in the Soviet Central Asian republics steadily drained the sea, which has now all but disappeared. There too, poor government was exacerbated by a foolish overreliance on a cash crop, Uzbek cotton for the Soviets.  

These four issues don’t bode well for Iran’s future. But Westerners would be unwise to expect changes for the better. In the face of popular protest, the Revolutionary Guard Corps will most likely defend the regime and its own substantial political and economic interests. Iran’s ruling class would likely resort to using the Corps to rule by martial law if necessary.

But perhaps that won’t be necessary. For now, Iran seems socially resilient. Ansari wonders whether Iran in the second quarter of the 21st century will resemble the country as it was in the early 20th century: a weak state with unstable institutions, but a cohesive nation with a strong civilisational identity. Those traits of national stoicism and an uncanny ability to manage tensions suggest an Iranian ability to weather coming storms without collapse.

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There seems little immediate hope of a major liberalisation in Iran. The country’s middle class is somewhat politically significant but numerically small. Iranian critics of the Islamic Republic are often intensely patriotic, and suspicious of Western intentions towards their nation. Even the more liberal dissidents, who hope that Iran will enjoy a more Western and democratic future, are somewhat demoralised by the current state of the West: its internal divisions, its decadence, its indecision. 

I am told that those who might once have looked to America for inspiration have been horrified by the subversive zealotry on display in the radicalised student protests on American college campuses. Iranian moderates remember with grim apprehension where a toxic cocktail of revolutionary politics, student protest and Islamist fervour can lead an unsuspecting country.

To some extent, managing the Iran problem will require both a recovery of American backbone and a careful self-discipline to avoid needless escalation with a regime which isn’t afraid to choose violence. There is a danger of Western bluster being counterproductive: announcing sanctions and failing to enforce them can send extremely unhelpful signals. Targeted assassinations, such as that of Soleimani, are certainly risky; killing Soleimani in Iraq, however, was a wiser choice than striking Iranian soil.

America’s task is to forcefully contain Iran without being drawn into an unwinnable regional conflict. The enforcement of clear red lines is a necessity, though it seems unlikely that we will see this from the present White House. In fact, the radical politicisation of junior US civil servants and the personal unpredictability of both candidates in the 2024 election make it hard to see how Iran should be expected to reliably read the signals it receives from Washington. After all, deterrence requires the opposition to understand the cost of bad behaviour.

The more you learn about Iran, the more it feels like a perennial civilisation, stuck in endless cycles of violent tragedy, as permanent and immovable as the towering Zagros mountains. It is hard to avoid feeling cynical and pessimistic about the medium-term future of this civilisation-state. In the words of the 19th-century statesman Lord Salisbury, “whatever happens [in Iran] will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible”.

Herodotus’ high estimation of the debt owed by Greece to the Athenians rested on his interpretation of the epic events of the year that we commemorate as 480 BC. 2,500 years ago this summer, the King of Persia crossed the Hellespont at the head of a massive army and fleet. Xerxes ruled the largest empire that the world had ever seen, and the resources available to him seemed so stupefying to the Greeks as to appear effectively limitless. Many, convinced that they had no prospect of resisting such an adversary, scrambled to collaborate.

Only a few cities, headed by Athens and the peerless warrior-state of Sparta, refused to surrender. At Thermopylae, a pass to the north of Athens, a Greek holding-force led by a Spartan king was dislodged after three days’ brutal fighting, and the Spartan king killed. Athens fell soon afterwards. The Acropolis was stormed and burned. But then, in the waters off a nearby island called Salamis, the Greek fleet won an unexpected victory. The following summer, an alliance of various Greek cities routed the Persian land forces. The liberty of mainland Greece was definitively secured. To the Greeks themselves it seemed a barely believable triumph: the most astounding victory of all time.

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Who, though, had best earned the bragging rights? Since it was the Athenians who had provided by far the largest contingent of ships at Salamis, and it was Salamis that had proved the decisive engagement, no one could really deny that their role in defeating the Persian invasion had been a significant one. Nevertheless, over the course of the decades that followed, patience with the notion loudly trumpeted by the Athenians that Greece owed them her freedom came to wear very thin. Athenian triumphalism proved as wearying to other Greeks as English chants about the Second World War tend to be today to continental football fans. Nor was boasting all the Athenians did to make themselves unpopular. Cities liberated from Persian rule in the wake of Xerxes’ defeat increasingly found themselves the victims of an Athenian extortion racket. Sparta, the city that alongside Athens had led the resistance to the Persian invasion, grew ever more alarmed. Relations between the erstwhile allies fell apart. In 431, cold war exploded into open conflict — destined to rage for decades to come. The whole Greek world was made to bleed. Such was the background against which Herodotus wrote his history.

So it was, painfully conscious of making a case that was bound to infuriate many, he invented alternative history. Suppose, he pondered, that the Athenians had refused to fight Xerxes. Suppose instead that they had set sail in their fleet for some distant land, or had actively collaborated.

Both options had certainly been open to them. The Persian king had gone to considerable efforts to win them over to his side. His terms had been generous in the extreme. The Athenians might well have succumbed to temptation. In that event, so Herodotus argued, the fight for Greek liberty would have been doomed. Sparta’s allies would have surrendered. The Spartans themselves might have done the same. Alternatively — following the example set by their compatriots at Thermopylae — they might have opted to stand alone, and then, “after displays of prodigious valour, gone down in a blaze of glory.” Either way, the King of Kings would have succeeded in adding a further satrapy to his immense dominion. Greece would have ceased to be free.

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That this in turn would have had implications for the entire world was something that Herodotus never doubted. Indeed, it was precisely his conviction that the great war between the Greeks and the Persians had also been a global war that first inspired him to embark on his masterwork — and which led him, in the course of writing it, to range in his subject matter as far afield as Ethiopia and India. Many historians since have concurred with him that the Greek victory over the Persian invasion force was indeed one of the key turning points in world history.

If Salamis has been enshrined as a particularly decisive moment, then so too has the victory won by the Athenians 10 years earlier, when a Persian expeditionary force sent to burn their city and transport the survivors into slavery had been defeated on the plain of Marathon. John Stuart Mill famously claimed that the battle, “even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.”

Unsurprisingly, then, timelines in which Athens is wiped from the face of the earth have long been a popular feature of alternative history. Mill himself imagined one in which Britons and Saxons continued to wander like savages in woods. Others — drawing on a counterfactual proposed by Livy, in which Alexander the Great was imagined confronting Rome — have portrayed a Mediterranean fought over by Persian kings and Roman consuls. Others yet portray a world converted to Zoroastrianism, or without democracy, or in which Christianity and Islam were never born. All these various alternative histories, despite running in a bewildering array of directions, bear witness to the same founding conviction: that a war in which the Persians had succeeded in conquering Greece would have echoed in eternity.

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Perhaps — or perhaps not. Conjecture on such a theme can hardly help but shade into fantasy. In sombre truth, we know far too little about what did actually happen in the Persian Wars to speculate — except on the most tentative basis — about what failed to happen. This is why Herodotus’ own attempt at a counterfactual is so valuable. While it tells us nothing about the possible impact of a Greek defeat on Rome or Christianity or the Anglo-Saxons, it does provide us with a near-contemporary perspective on how the Persians might have won.

Herodotus’ alternative history is one in which a new Athens is founded far distant from the soil of Attica, perhaps in Sicily or Italy, or else endures in pampered slavery, as a client of the King of the Kings. The Spartans, humbled or destroyed, can no longer continue with the merciless exploitation of their neighbours that had been the foundation of their pre-eminence. The Persian monarchy, brilliantly subtle as it was in the exploitation of its subjects’ rivalries, would doubtless have made sure to grant patronage to cities long resentful of Athenian and Spartan greatness. Perhaps, over the course of the century that followed Xerxes’ victory, Greece would have experienced an unprecedented period of peace. Or perhaps, resentful of barbarian rule, and seeking to take advantage of their distance from the Persian centre of power, the Greeks would have risen in revolt, bringing yet further war to their cities, and suffering on a scale greater even than they were to endure as the result of the great war between Athens and Sparta. It is impossible to know. The path not travelled is a path inevitably lost to oblivion.

For all that, though, the value of Herodotus’ counter-factual does not lie merely in its elucidation of the role played by the Athenian fleet in the ultimate victory of the Greeks. It also focuses for us a question that can risk otherwise, perhaps, remaining obscured. What was it, precisely, that made Athens Athens? Would an Athenian demos that had transplanted itself to foreign soil or submitted to barbarian rule still have ranked as an Athenian demos at all? To what extent were the achievements of the restless, turbulent and self-confident democracy of the fifth century BC dependent on its successful defiance of the most powerful ruler on the face of the earth? “Only the gods did more.” Such was Herodotus’ judgement on the record of the Athenians in the Persian wars. We might be tempted to brush such a comment aside as a mere platitude — but that would be a mistake.

Athenian democracy was founded neither on a secular model of governance nor on any abstract understanding of individual rights. Both concepts, as distinctive products of Christian civilisation, would have meant precisely nothing to an ancient Greek. What sustained Athenian democracy instead was — in the words of Greg Anderson — “a primordial cosmic ecology of gods, land, and people.” This is why to imagine an Athens transplanted from Attic soil to some distant land or under the imperious sway of a satrap is to imagine a city very different from the one that emerged triumphant from the epic ordeal of the Persian invasion. Its democracy would, perhaps, have continued to function; but it would not have been the democracy that provided a stage for the tragedies of Aeschylus, the comedies of Aristophanes, the philosophy of Socrates. Nor, indeed, for the history of Thucydides.

Perhaps Herodotus himself, born a subject of the King of Kings though he was, might never have been inspired to write about “the glory of those exploits which served to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect” had the Athenians themselves ended up subject to Persian rule. His counter-factual, then, implies a truly disorienting possibility: a world in which history — and counter-factuals — never came to exist.