The Reckoning In Tehran

IN THE EARLY HOURS OF JUNE 13, when Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran targeting its nuclear and mis­sile facilities and wiping out its top military command, one social media post appeared on several Iranian handles belonging to both supporters and detractors of the Islamic Republic. The gist of the post was that over the last three millennia, Iran has seen state destruction five times and fought over 200 defensive wars and each time rose from the ashes of death. Iranian national exceptionalism is rooted in a sense of historical continuity, both in terms of sustaining a distinct cultural and religious identity and as a territorial unit that largely coincides with the Iranian plateau. In the face of the Israeli assault, collective awareness of Iran’s historical vulnerability as well as endurance infused Iranians with national solidarity and resolve.

It is well understood in Tehran and Tel Aviv that the recent cessation of hostilities is merely a ‘pause’ in what both sides see as an existential war. Iranian ruling elites are arguing that American and Israeli objectives are not limited to regime change in Tehran but to precipitate the “Syrianization” of Iran. If Iranians do not rally behind the Islamic Republic, they will invite complete destruction of Iran’s defensive capabilities and witness territorial fragmentation of the nation. But for most Iranians, there is no escaping the fact that it was the ideological predilection and contradic­tions of the Islamic Republic that put Iran in the crosshairs of its enemies.

Over the last two decades, Islamist hardliners justified Iran’s regional policies of supporting non-state actors and militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza under the rubric of resistance against the US and Israel and expansion of Iran’s strategic depth. This strategy allowed Iran to successfully weather the tide of US neoconservative military adventurism in the after­math of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At the height of the unipolar moment, the George W Bush administration saw an opportunity to use unparalleled US military power to dismantle the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’ comprising Iraq, Syria, Iran, and North Korea, countries purportedly pursuing weapons of mass destruction which they could pass on to their terrorist allies. To keep the US bogged down in Iraq, Iran supported Shia militancy to create “controlled chaos”. Iran intensified support for Hamas, which had formed a govern­ment in Gaza in 2006 and was under pressure from Washington to renounce its goal of violent destruction of Israel, driven by the strategic aim of developing striking capability against Israel to deter US and Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Similarly, Iran supported the transformation of Hezbollah, a Shiite militia which emerged in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon, into a well-or­ganised military and political force on Israel’s borders. Following the 34-day Hezbollah-Israel war in the summer of 2006, Iran helped Hezbollah expand its missile arsenal in quantity and quality. Syria, which acted as a conduit for Iranian armed shipments to Hezbollah, was the only state entity in what became the Iranian-led ‘axis of resistance’, a play on Washington’s designation of Iran as part of the ‘axis of evil’. Through the resistance axis, Tehran monopolised leadership of the Palestinian cause, projected power across the Arab world and commanded popularity on the Arab street. But Iran found itself isolated by its Arab neighbours who pushed back against Tehran’s Islamist geopolitics of propagating the sectarian discourse of the ‘Shia crescent’ in the region.

However, the most significant challenge to Iran’s Islamist geopolitics came from within Iranian society in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election of 2009. Hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had framed peaceful use of nuclear energy as an “indisputable national right” and rejected the US demand of “zero enrichment” of uranium despite military threats and crippling sanctions, was declared winner after defeating two prominent reformist candidates, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Iranians took to the streets in protest at the perceived failure of democracy at the hands of the clerically dominated Guardian Council which is responsible for supervising elections. Reeling under sanctions and military threats, they questioned the legitimacy of the Islamist geopolitics by asserting an Iranist, nation-centric geopolitical imagination. The popular cry of “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran” illustrated that a sizeable portion of the Iranian middle class prioritised economic well-being above costly geopolitical entanglements. In the next presidential elections in 2013, Hassan Rouhani rallied the disenchanted Iranian middle class when he famously declared that the “centrifuges should spin, but that people’s lives should run too.”

The Rouhani administration’s signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, with major world powers was seen as a significant step towards ending Iran’s revolutionary isolation on the global stage. As he supported the de-securitisation of Iran’s relations at the regional level, he also questioned the expansive role of the security state in the domain of politics, economy and culture. However, this process of internal negotiation of Iran’s future course was thwarted by US President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement and the launch of a sanctions-based “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran in 2018. Israel and several Gulf states, especially the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, had a shared grievance against the nuclear deal, which had an intrusive inspection regime but placed only temporary restric­tions on Iran’s nuclear programme while leaving its regional policies and missile programme unaddressed. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s defiant stance of “no war and no negotiations” with the US paved the way for political consoli­dation by hardliners committed to the politics of resistance.

As Israel intensified its covert campaign of sabotage of Iranian nuclear facilities and assassination of nuclear scientists, Iran incrementally scaled up nuclear activity by enriching uranium up to 60 per cent purity. Iran’s aim was to demonstrate the failure of the US ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and build negotiation leverage. It miscalculated that a nuclear threshold status would draw the US into serious negotiations while pro­viding protection against potential military attacks from the US and/or Israel. Emboldened by the US pressure campaign on Iran, the Israeli military leadership devised a counter to Iran’s strategy of deterrence through proxies. The ‘Octopus Doctrine’ called for rebalancing Israel’s national security resources from fighting Iran’s proxies to weakening the “primary enemy”, that is, Iran itself. Following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, Israel launched a devastating war aimed at eliminating the military and organisational capabilities of Hamas. At the same time, it escalated a campaign of targeted killings of the leadership of Hezbollah and commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) present in Syria and Lebanon.

Israeli air strikes on Iran’s consul­ate in Beirut in April 2024 signalled to Tehran that Iranian proxies no longer deterred Israel and that it was getting closer to launching a direct attack within Iran. The largely demonstra­tive Iranian missile strikes in April and in October last year underscored Tehran’s dilemma of restoring deterrence vis-à-vis Israel without provoking an all-out war with the US weighing in on the Israeli side.

The scale and manner of Israeli attacks on Iran, involving extensive intelligence operations with Iranian collaborators, have brought the ruling elites to the painful realisation that true strategic depth lies within national borders. An economically suffering and politically disaffected and disengaged population can pose a severe national security threat. It will be a mistake to see the rally effect observed during the war as resurgence of support for the Islamic Republic. Sooner or later, Iran’s restive population will demand a renewed social contract that places security first, but also demand more from the system, including civic freedoms. Tehran will have little choice but to engage with Washington to ensure the ceasefire holds. Until recently, Israeli military tac­tics against the threats posed by militias on its borders had been to use periodic force aimed at setting back enemy capabilities rather than conclusively defeating them.

In the absence of US-Iran diplomacy, Israel, boosted by its suc­cess in degrading Iranian air defences and depleting its missile arsenal, will be tempted to implement the strategy of “mow­ing the grass” in Iran. The Islamic Republic has long rejected Western coercive diplomacy as it sees the underlying demands as being tantamount to surrender. But at the current juncture it cannot simply rely solely on the revolutionary spirit of national­ist defiance. Iran’s tumultuous history of imperial incursions and popular revolutions is replete with instances where regimes fall when they fail to deliver on their role as the guarantor of security and a widely shared notion of national identity.

Ayatollah Ali KhameneidiplomacygeopoliticsIran-Israel conflictIslamic nationIslamic Republic