How Will the New Form of the Islamic Republic Reshape the Middle East?

At the beginning of the American-Israeli war on Iran in February 2026, the Islamic Republic appeared exhausted and weak. Large-scale bombardment had destroyed industry and infrastructure, while the American naval blockade pushed an already deteriorating economy into deeper crisis. In early March, US President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One: “We destroyed the entire empire of evil.” A few weeks later, he declared “total and complete victory”.

Three months later, however, the picture looks entirely different. Iran still retains its military and industrial capabilities. Despite Trump’s call for Iranians to overthrow the regime, no popular uprising appears to be on the horizon. The original aim of the war, delivering a decisive blow to the Islamic Republic, has proven unattainable.

Instead of breaking Iran, the ordeal of war produced unexpected transformations. In order to survive and secure new strategic advantages, the Islamic Republic had to adapt, innovate, change the way it fights, manage the state differently, and reshape its relationship with society. It had to do all of this at unprecedented speed.

Tehran is now confident in what it has achieved and determined to consolidate those gains at home and abroad. The war has produced a new Iran, one that will reshape the Middle East and influence the course of geopolitics for years to come.

A Quiet Transfer of Power

Israel and the United States believed the Iranian regime had been exhausted after the 12-day war in June 2025 and the popular uprising in January 2026. On 28 February, they launched an air campaign against Iran. They expected a swift victory through the assassination of the regime’s most senior leaders. Yet decapitating the leadership did not lead to the collapse of the system. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take power.

Many Western observers see the new wartime leadership, dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as more ideologically hardline and more confrontational towards the United States and Israel. But this is not entirely accurate. What truly distinguishes it is more subtle and more consequential.

Observers outside Iran focus on a number of senior figures, such as Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, and Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard. More important, however, is the transformation taking place in the lower ranks: a new generation of Revolutionary Guard commanders and civilian security officials who grew up after the 1979 revolution. They now occupy vital positions within the decision-making circle, and their nationalist approach to state management and security is reshaping the identity of the Islamic Republic.

The worldview of the revolution’s founding generation, particularly Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, was shaped by their long opposition to the US-backed rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and by the years they spent in the Shah’s prisons or in exile.

Those now holding the levers of power, the revolution’s second generation, including Mojtaba Khamenei, Ghalibaf, and Vahidi, were teenagers and young men during the Iran-Iraq War. Their worldview was formed in the trenches of the longest conventional war of the twentieth century.

The leaders who represent the new administrative class at the heart of Iran’s regime and armed forces, the revolution’s third generation, know only post-revolutionary Iran. This generation of officers in the armed forces, the Revolutionary Guard, and the wider security institutions has adopted a disciplined technocratic culture and a strategic vision centred on defending the homeland, not revolutionary ideology. They are now leading the country with the confidence of commanders who believe they have successfully defended Iran in two wars against militarily superior powers: last year’s 12-day war and the current war. In doing so, they believe they have fulfilled promises the revolution once made: to materially weaken American influence in the Middle East.

The former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the February war, was a product of the intellectual and political currents of pre-revolutionary Iran under the Shah. His political experience was refined through debate with secular nationalists, leftists, and liberals who shared his goals of overthrowing the monarchy and confronting Western imperialism. Once they came to power, the leaders of the revolution imposed their ideology, but they never overcame the insecurity that came from imposing their vision on a society that refused to fully submit to them.

The new generation knows none of that. Most of them were children when the Islamic Republic was established, and they were raised to believe in its absolute right to rule. These men did not make their way to power through struggle. They were raised inside the institutions of government, treating their legitimacy as a settled matter. The anxiety and insecurity that marked the founding generation, especially the constant need to prove the legitimacy of the revolution, the seriousness of its claims, and the total defeat of the old elite, are largely absent from them. They are not defending a revolution. They are managing a state.

This psychological distinction has deep consequences. When Ali Khamenei’s generation confronted the world, whether in hostage-release negotiations, nuclear talks, or regional confrontations, its rhetoric always carried an undertone of grievance, echoing historical wrongs and Islamic triumph.

That rhetoric was powerful and authentic, but it was also a strategic burden. It made their positions predictable and defensive, and left them vulnerable to confusing the defence of ideology with the defence of Iran’s national interests. The two were not always clearly aligned.

The new generation has separated the revolution from the art of statecraft. It does not adopt slogans of revolutionary greatness at home or abroad, nor does it call for revolutionary struggle. The regime’s new leaders are pragmatic, experienced nationalists operating according to a realistic and precise assessment of Iran’s capabilities and weaknesses.

Unlike their predecessors, they are capable of exercising strategic patience while also moving decisively. They repeatedly and publicly identify Iran’s vulnerabilities, something the founding generation lacked the confidence to face honestly, and treat them as problems that require solutions. This mindset drove the changes Tehran made in the period between the two wars.

Between Two Wars

Before the American-Israeli attack in June 2025, Iran’s rulers believed they could indefinitely maintain a state of neither war nor peace with the United States and Israel. That calculation proved wrong, and the process of shedding that false confidence began the moment the 12-day war ended.

The new Revolutionary Guard leadership expected the June ceasefire to collapse and another war to erupt, perhaps with the United States involved from the beginning. Iranian universities, research institutions, think tanks, and government bodies began hosting discussions on lessons learned and required changes.

More institutional change occurred during those eight months than in the previous ten years. Many executive decisions related to trade, agriculture, and the management of economic and social services were transferred from Tehran to provincial capitals. Organisations overseeing propaganda, domestic public communications, and the dissemination of information abroad underwent comprehensive reform. The bureaucracy of the Islamic Republic had long been marked by institutional inertia, but it now gave way to the necessity of rapid adaptation. In this process, technocrats took control of decision-making.

After Khamenei was killed in an American-Israeli airstrike, the appointment of his son Mojtaba was remarkably swift and organised. He was selected by the new generation that had risen after the June 2025 war, partly because he had long been one of its most prominent defenders.

Mojtaba had belonged to the Revolutionary Guard and participated in the Iran-Iraq War before joining the religious seminary to become a cleric. He later served alongside his father, overseeing the transformation of the Revolutionary Guard and the rise of its future commanders. Mojtaba’s ascent confirmed and accelerated the generational transition. It did not produce the institutional collapse Washington had expected. It produced the opposite.

The way the elder Khamenei was killed, in his home rather than in a fortified bunker, was highly significant. The new leaders quickly described his death as martyrdom, and the narrative worked. Rather than damaging the regime’s morale, his assassination gave the new generation of leaders direction and purpose. Their first act was to mobilise their base to protest the assassination. This message also drew a broad segment of Iranian society to rally around the flag.

Tehran’s management of the current war reflected the technocratic approach of the new generation. For a long time, the Islamic Republic had operated within a maze of competing power centres, producing endless internal disputes and paralysis.

But in the period between the two wars, that disorder gave way to discipline and organisational flexibility. A new Supreme Defence Council was established under Revolutionary Guard generals Abdolrahim Mousavi, Mohammad Pakpour, and Ali Shamkhani to accelerate military changes. Ghalibaf, the former Revolutionary Guard general who became speaker of parliament in 2020, and Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, played parallel roles in the civilian and economic bureaucracy through government ministries and local authorities.

As veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, these men had learned how to manage a state under battlefield pressure. Facing the greatest challenge the country had experienced since the 1980s, the founding generation moved quickly to reorganise the state according to wartime requirements.

These leaders oversaw the transition to the new generation, which quickly gathered scattered power centres into a coherent decision-making structure capable of surviving and continuing even if the most prominent leaders were lost.

Iran’s armed forces were reorganised into a network of operational commands, closer to guerrilla forces than a conventional army. Authority was concentrated in ideologically cohesive groups rather than distributed across different factions. Although Larijani, Mousavi, Pakpour, and Shamkhani were later killed in Israeli strikes, the resilience they helped build was not shaken.

On the battlefield, Iran’s armed forces applied the lessons of the June 2025 war with extreme precision. Iran met the American-Israeli attack that began in February 2026 with organised waves of missiles and drones, specifically designed to drain American and Israeli interceptor stockpiles in the region.

The Iranians concluded that their enemies had expected to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities quickly and were unprepared for a long campaign. During the 2025 war, Israel targeted the entrances to Iran’s “missile cities”, effectively sealing them and forcing Iran to launch missiles mainly from eastern regions beyond Israel’s reach.

Iran responded by deploying missile launchers across its vast territory and stationing engineers inside the missile cities alongside military personnel to immediately repair damaged launchers and entrances. This enabled missile launches to continue for far longer than Israel and the United States had expected.

The Revolutionary Guard also launched low-cost drones to drain radar systems and American military sites in the Gulf region and Israel. This disrupted the air campaign and opened safe pathways for missiles to strike targets across the region.

Drawing on the logic of asymmetric warfare, and the experience of using human waves to overwhelm Iraqi positions in the 1980s, Iran sent swarms of Shahed drones. These low-cost weapons exhausted the air defences protecting American bases and the bases of Washington’s Arab allies, opening corridors that allowed precision missiles to strike high-value targets. Iran’s military learned how to absorb strikes and losses, and how to achieve strategic gains by frustrating the goals of its enemies.

A New Balance of Power

The most important victory achieved by the new generation of leaders is that their strategy achieved its objectives. The regime survived decapitation attempts, withstood intense American and Israeli bombardment, imposed control over the Strait of Hormuz, and confronted the American naval blockade.

At the same time, it expanded the battle into the Arabian Gulf, inflicted severe damage on 16 American bases, and rendered many of them unusable. In March, Iraqi militias forced the United States to abandon Camp Victory, a major American military facility in Baghdad that US forces had occupied since 2003.

Iranian attacks also triggered a crisis of confidence between the Gulf states and Washington. Through the war, the United States caused Gulf cities and vital infrastructure to become targets, failed to protect them, and turned their economies into casualties of the conflict.

This crisis of confidence between Gulf capitals and Washington will continue beyond the current war. The question remains how many American bases will be rebuilt, and whether the United States or its Arab allies will find much use for them in the face of an Iran that has proven its ability to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran imposed heavy costs on global energy markets and international trade by closing the strait and targeting energy infrastructure. This attack, combining drone swarms, fast boats, and mines, displayed a capability Washington had long underestimated.

Tehran sees the current stalemate as a new balance of power. While the American naval blockade damaged Iran’s economy, it also revealed the strategic importance of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz. By shifting from air war to naval blockade, the United States implicitly acknowledged that Iran had changed the battlefield on which the conflict would be decided.

Trump considered the naval blockade the ideal solution to settle the war, but the blockade only placed greater pressure on the global economy. The current stalemate suggested a greater degree of strategic parity, a point the Iranian leadership reinforced by saying the war would end only when both the United States and Iran loosened their grip over the Gulf.

From now on, control of the strait, unquestionably a vital chokepoint for the global economy, will represent an effective economic weapon in Tehran’s hands and a deterrent against future attacks. For Iran’s leaders, this newly acquired card partly offsets the costs they have paid during the war, including the decline of their Lebanese ally Hezbollah and other setbacks suffered in recent years, such as the loss of Syria as a strategic corridor after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which had been Iran’s strongest ally in the Arab world.

From Tehran’s perspective, the American policy of containment towards Iran, practised for decades, has come to an end. The new regional order will take shape amid declining American dominance and greater multipolarity. China will become an increasingly central player, and Iran will be an essential actor, not a marginal one.

Tehran intends to consolidate these gains in any agreement to end the war. Its insistence on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and imposing fees on ships, along with its preconditions for talks, namely a ceasefire in Lebanon and the end of the American naval blockade, reflects the leadership’s conviction that the war has shifted the balance of power in its favour. This is the basis on which Iran’s new rulers are negotiating.

Statecraft Before Ideology

Iran achieved these strategic gains by applying the lessons of the 12-day war with remarkable speed. In June 2025, Iran found itself fighting on Israel’s terms. This time, it was determined to fight on its own.

Alongside the reorganisation of Iran’s military, several other developments emerged. One was Tehran’s attack on information infrastructure. Iranian leaders realised early that they could not match American and Israeli superiority in satellite intelligence, precision strikes, and integrated air defence.

What they could do was frustrate American and Israeli battlefield decision-making by creating gaps between what sensors captured and what commanders interpreted. Iranian strikes on American radars in the Arabian Gulf weakened the infrastructure supporting American and Israeli air operations in the region. Iran systematically worked to undermine the enemy’s technological superiority rather than confront it directly.

Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz was another major development. Closing the strait had long been discussed in Tehran as a practical option, while Washington dismissed the possibility on the grounds that it would harm Iran’s own exports. Moreover, American officials believed US naval power could destroy the Iranian fleet at the beginning of the war, depriving Tehran of the ability to close the strait.

Iran proved all of these assumptions wrong. For more than four decades, Iranian military doctrine has focused on asymmetric warfare, exploiting the weaknesses of conventional American and Israeli forces. Iran did not need a conventional navy to close the strait. It controlled it using drones, fast boats, and the threat of mines, calibrating pressure systematically and sustaining it for weeks while avoiding the full-scale confrontation it could not win.

All sides now understand that the Strait of Hormuz is an Iranian pressure card, not merely an open waterway protected by the United States. One Iranian analyst said: “Sanctions relief no longer matters to us, because we know it will not happen, and even if it does, it will not last long. We are not making the mistakes of the past. Managing Hormuz is the key now.”

This represents a fundamental shift in Iran’s economic strategy, from seeking reintegration into the Western financial system, something the new generation considers unattainable, to attempting to benefit from a vital geographic position.

The war also pushed Tehran to strengthen its tactical alliance with China and build something resembling a strategic partnership. Iran’s leadership concluded that there is no path to normalisation with the United States, while also recognising that it cannot confront American and Israeli pressure alone.

The Iranian regime believes Beijing now sees a resilient Iran as a trustworthy ally. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in May after meeting his Chinese counterpart in Beijing: “Our Chinese friends believe Iran’s international position has strengthened since the beginning of the war. We are entering a new era of Iran-China cooperation.”

Facing the necessity of post-war reconstruction, Iranian leaders are more open than ever to China as a key partner in rebuilding and economic recovery.

Iran’s wartime media campaign marked another turning point compared with the past. The Iranian government’s messaging through media and diplomatic channels showed a deep understanding of global public opinion. Iranian embassies published content that spread widely across social media platforms, including animated videos using Lego-style characters set to music, provoking broad discussions far beyond the Middle East.

Iran’s narrative of the war succeeded in reaching wide audiences across the Arab world, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and even the United States and Europe. It had a strong impact. This strategic communication reflected the same technocratic skill that characterised Iran’s military campaign.

Finally, Iranian leaders understood that economic stagnation is the greatest threat to the stability of the regime. The lesson they drew from recent popular protests is that economic grievances strengthen opposition. For that reason, as soon as the ceasefire was announced last April, the government quickly moved ahead with an economic reform package, ending a number of subsidies and programmes that had previously enjoyed political protection. The leadership said the move was necessary to deal with the economic fallout of the war.

The rush to announce infrastructure rehabilitation projects, including bridges, railways, and hospitals, suggests the government is moving towards a new social contract based on efficiency rather than ideology. The Revolutionary Guard has demonstrated its capabilities on the battlefield. The question Iran’s new leaders are now asking themselves is whether they can operate with the same efficiency in managing the economy.

The Shift in Public Opinion

After the popular uprising and the massacre of protesters in January 2026, Iranians appeared united against the regime. Iranian politics at the time was marked by division between an angry population tired of isolation and suffering caused by American economic sanctions, and a government whose popularity was declining as its crises deepened. The war made the scene more complicated.

The destruction caused by the war was enormous. Public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historical landmarks, and entire neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble. While Israeli and American bombs and missiles fell on Iran, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy, and wipe out its civilisation. This military campaign and hostile rhetoric provoked a nationalist reaction that crossed political divisions.

Popular anger towards the regime has not disappeared. The pain, frustration, and accumulated resentment caused by decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape through which those feelings are expressed.

Popular anger is now appearing in the form of a national struggle against a foreign enemy, one Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who invaded the Persian Empire in the fourth century BCE; the Arab armies that invaded the country in the seventh century; and the Mongols who came six centuries later.

Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war did not trigger street protests. The longer the war continued, the more the regime’s fear of popular uprisings declined. The Iranian street did not move against the state. It stood beside it, organising daily marches across the country, forming human chains to protect power stations, and gathering on bridges Trump had threatened to destroy.

The sharp division that defined the scene in January faded, not through persuasion or repression, but through the lived experience of bombardment and the sight of destruction.

According to an analysis by Bloomberg, two-thirds of the targets bombed in Tehran before the ceasefire were residential and commercial buildings and other civilian facilities. In press interviews, Iranians spoke of waves of bombardment targeting them day and night, leaving deep psychological wounds.

For Iranians, the armed forces were no longer the body repressing them, but the force defending them. Chants across Iran embodied the shift in public mood, with crowds cheering Iranian missile and drone strikes abroad. As Iranian philosopher and dissident Mohammad Mehdi Ardabili said in Tehran during the fifth week of the war: “At this moment, the Islamic Republic and Iran are one and the same. If the Islamic Republic falls, Iran falls.”

This sentiment extended to the way the war was managed at home. Iranians noticed, with some surprise, that there were no food or fuel shortages after weeks of bombing and naval blockade, and daily life continued largely as normal.

One Tehran resident said: “Apart from the bombs, we did not feel that we were at war. If the Islamic Republic could always manage the country with this level of efficiency, we would not have the criticisms we are used to making.” Such views do not amount to support for the regime, but they do reflect a change in how Iranians perceive their leaders.

The internet shutdown reinforced this dynamic. When the government cut off information coming from abroad as part of its defensive strategy against American and Israeli intelligence operations, Iranians felt resentment. But they had no choice except to turn to the domestic internet and local media.

This blocked Iranian media outlets abroad and social media accounts aimed at mobilising opposition, creating a different kind of national conversation. New and more complex views took root regarding the Revolutionary Guard, the security threats facing Iran, what the country had achieved, and what must be defended.

One veteran activist, who had been interrogated many times because of his opposition to the regime, said: “I always ignored or rejected what the Revolutionary Guard or the regime said about Israel or the United States. But in the past few weeks, I had no choice except to use local messaging and news apps, and we were forced to see their positions and the reality of being attacked daily.” A university professor said: “The country has entered a nationalist war, and a new identity is now forming.”

A New Measure of Loyalty

The Islamic Republic has long tried to establish a social contract with its people, but the terms of that contract have changed radically throughout its history. In the early years, the contract was based on revolutionary transformation and wealth redistribution. In the 1990s, it shifted towards economic growth and limited social openness in exchange for political stability.

Two decades ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad directed oil revenues to the poor in exchange for loyalty to official ideology. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, promised economic growth through the nuclear deal and sanctions relief.

All of these efforts failed, to varying degrees and for different reasons, to establish a stable relationship between state and society.

What is being offered now is a technocratic nationalist bargain, in which the state’s legitimacy rests on its proven ability to defend and rebuild the country. The terms of this contract are nationalist, not Islamic.

State media is publishing content featuring veiled and unveiled women standing side by side. It presents Iranian identity as cultural, not purely religious, and targets segments of society that had completely rejected the Islamic Republic, including the youth and the urban middle class.

This is not liberation. In reality, the regime continues to harshly suppress political opposition. But the state now acknowledges that it needs a much broader social base than Islamic ideology alone can provide. The Islamic Republic today is closer to an authoritarian right-wing nation-state than to a theocratic state.

Islamic ideology still exists, but it is being subordinated to the requirements of national cohesion. The test of political loyalty is no longer “Are you Islamic enough?” but “Are you Iranian enough?” The mosque remains present, but the dominant political symbol now appearing on necklaces and jacket pins worn by young and old alike is the map of the country.

Government-organised demonstrations defending infrastructure attract all groups, including regime opponents who had previously been repressed. These demonstrations have become focal points for nationalist feeling centred on preserving Iranian civilisation and celebrating resilience in the face of overwhelming force.

Iran’s leadership understands that this moment is unique and may be temporary. The people who defended power stations will return to their previous demands once the immediate danger passes. The war has overshadowed Iranian anger over repression, economic mismanagement, and mistreatment of women and minorities, but it has not eliminated it.

The state’s concessions on social issues, including relaxed enforcement of the hijab, tolerance of concerts, and acceptance of women riding motorcycles, are an attempt to make the current unity sustainable before the political situation changes. Whether these concessions are enough to radically alter the relationship between state and society remains to be seen.

For Iran’s rulers, addressing economic grievances will be essential once the war ends. Washington assumes Tehran remains interested in negotiating for sanctions relief, but the Revolutionary Guard is not relying on diplomacy. It no longer believes the United States will lift sanctions. Instead, it seeks an agreement that ends the war, consolidates Iran’s gains, and opens the way for economic returns through taxing maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Washington interprets this new position as stubbornness rooted in ideological rigidity and factional rivalry within the regime. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April: “Unfortunately, the hardliners with a pessimistic vision of the future are the ones who hold absolute power in that country.” He added: “Our team is not only negotiating with the Iranians. Those Iranians then have to negotiate with other Iranians to find out what they can agree to, what they can offer, what they are willing to do, and even who they are willing to meet.”

Vice President JD Vance repeated this view in May, saying: “The Iranians themselves may not be entirely clear on the direction they want to take. They are also simply a divided country.”

Rubio and Vance are wrong. Tehran’s hardline approach does not reflect ideological rigidity or internal factional struggles. It reflects the confidence Iran has gained, along with the lessons learned from the war and previous rounds of negotiations.

Iran’s leaders understand that the United States is seeking through talks what it failed to achieve through war, and that Washington is not interested in reaching an agreement but in Iran’s surrender. Talks with the United States collapsed twice because of American and Israeli operations, first last June and then in February. After talks in Islamabad collapsed on 12 April, Washington immediately imposed a naval blockade, followed by another demand for unconditional surrender.

Iranian leaders believe they have won the war. They are unwilling to give up the gains they have achieved or return to the cage of containment in which they lived before the war. This self-confidence, rooted in the belief that the war strengthened Iran rather than weakened it, shapes their outward vision and is central to consolidating legitimacy at home. Their diplomatic strategy for a final settlement must reflect what their resilience during the war has achieved.

The Principle of Multiple Fronts

Iran’s clear shift towards nationalism at home does not mean Tehran will abandon its regional allies. It will not radically renegotiate its relationships with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, or the Houthis in Yemen.

But it will manage these relationships with greater strategic discipline and less ideological romanticism. Iran’s new leadership will not sacrifice Iranian interests on the altar of revolutionary solidarity. Instead, these alliances will be used as part of a coherent regional strategy aimed at preserving strategic depth against continued pressure from the United States and Israel.

Iranian strategists concluded that, during the war in Gaza, it had been a mistake to allow Israel the time to target the pillars of the “Axis of Resistance” one by one. The American-Israeli strikes over the past year were a direct result of that failure to coordinate with allies.

Iran learned the lesson in February, quickly mobilising Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraqi militias at the same time. This created a second front for Israel in Lebanon, expanded the war across the region, and forced the United States to close Camp Victory in Iraq. Tehran considers this confirmation of the effectiveness of the multiple-front principle.

Iranian leaders are not preserving their regional network out of an ideological desire to expand influence. They are doing so based on the calculation that Iran cannot enjoy full sovereignty while facing military threats and economic blockade from the United States and Israel.

This broader view of regional defence is confirmed by Iran’s insistence that negotiations with the United States must be conditional on a ceasefire in Lebanon, and that any final agreement must end the war on all fronts and reflect Iran’s strategic gains. From Tehran’s perspective, American and Israeli policy aims at Israeli domination of the Middle East, a goal that requires Iran to be weak and exhausted.

The Axis of Resistance, once seen by many Iranians as a voluntary effort with an ideological background, is now viewed by a broader segment of the public as a means of defending the country. Iran’s objective of preventing the United States from rebuilding its damaged radar facilities in the Arabian Gulf is another expression of the same logic. It is an effort to undermine the early-warning infrastructure that supported American military dominance in waters Iran considers its strategic backyard.

A New Islamic Republic

The war became the crucible that shaped a new version of the Islamic Republic. It marked the first major generational transition within the regime since the revolution. Power is no longer monopolised by the founding generation. The second generation now manages military and political affairs, while the third and fourth generations handle communications and external engagement.

In its early years under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic was a revolutionary state centred on ideological transformation, the authority of the supreme leader who executed divine will, and the export of revolution abroad.

After Khomeini’s death in 1989, and during the era of reforms and the consolidation of hardline rule under Khamenei, the republic became a post-revolutionary state, constantly torn between its founding ideology and the demands of governance. The leadership ruled an increasingly rebellious population through repression, patronage, and limited openness. It saw resistance to American influence as a necessity of anti-imperialism, but it remained first and foremost an Islamic Republic, governed by the founding generation and fuelled by internal conflicts.

The republic born from the American-Israeli wars is more nationalist than ideological. It focuses on statecraft more than revolutionary slogans, and relies more on the spirit of a new class of technocratic officers than on the charisma of clerics.

This version resembles the military-led nation-states of the twentieth century, such as Turkey under the later Kemalists and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, where ideology continued to exist but was subordinated to national interest and the demands of state management.

This abandonment of rigid doctrines and movement towards pragmatic statecraft does not make the Islamic Republic more moderate. Such nationalist security states are often harsh towards their people and destabilising internationally.

The Islamic Republic in its current form will remain an authoritarian state. But the categories often used by Western analysts to describe factions within the regime, hardliners versus moderates, ideologues versus reformists, will be less accurate than ever.

The priorities of the new Islamic Republic, and the way it pursues its goals, will be shaped by the experience of its two wars with Israel and the United States: the losses Iran endured, the confidence its leadership gained, and the new social contract the war made both necessary and possible.