One of the questions I am asked most often these days concerns the surprising resilience of the Islamic Republic. Beyond any moral judgment, the fact remains that a state has managed not only to survive the January uprising but also to endure two wars against the world’s leading superpower and the most powerful military force in the region without collapsing. In both wars, Iran did not fall and held its ground.
For those who study states, especially in the Middle East, and considering what has happened to other states in the region during wars or the Arab Springs, this fact deserves serious study.
The other question, linked to the first, is: what do Iranian leaders really think? What do they believe they will achieve from this war? Why do they not behave as many expect?
Part of the answer lies in history.
Iran’s resilience, even under heavy bombardment, is connected to forty-seven years of isolation. The country has organized itself so that it cannot be easily subdued. The electrical system, for example, was deliberately built so that it cannot be easily taken down: it would take months of bombing to really bring it down.
The same applies, in a different form, to the water and food issue. Iran suffers from water scarcity due to climatic reasons, mismanagement, and corruption. But one of the main reasons is also the decision made in 2011, when Obama first introduced the system of secondary sanctions: the country decided it had to become self-sufficient in terms of food.
Iran overproduces agricultural goods because it trades little, and this choice has a huge cost, but at the same time, it is one of the factors that allow it to sustain a war like the current one.
Sovereignty before ideology
In the West, we focus a lot on the religious character of the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic, on the fact that it is a theocracy. But we fixate too much on this aspect and do not take seriously enough the perspective of national security, which is central for Iranian leaders.
In this sense, Iran is a rational actor, in the Weberian sense of the term. This does not mean its rationality is universally shared, but that it possesses a coherent theory about what the main threats to the country are and how to defend against them.
The fundamental mistake of the Islamic Republic is perhaps having read Iran’s history in an all-encompassing way, both the long history dating back to the Safavid era and especially the 19th and 20th centuries, which every Iranian knows well.
In the long 19th century, Iran barely survived as a state. It was deeply penetrated by imperial powers. Its history resembles, in some respects, more that of China than other formally colonized countries: it was never colonized in a legal sense, but it had almost purely nominal sovereignty over a territory tolerated by colonial powers.
When it began to recover at the beginning of the 20th century, it was occupied during World War II. It went through a first real regime change, if we want to call it that, with the removal of the monarch. It suffered a famine during the war. And immediately after the conflict, it risked being dismembered again when the Soviet Union refused to withdraw from the northern provinces.
Seven years later came the era of the anti-imperialist struggle for control of oil, led by Prime Minister Mossadeq, which ended with a military coup that Iranians have come to interpret, rightly or wrongly, as orchestrated by London and Washington.
In the imagination of Iranian revolutionaries, the country has never truly been independent and sovereign in the last two hundred years.
A few months ago, former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said in an interview that the Islamic Republic is the first Iranian government in over two centuries to have given the country true sovereignty and real independence. It is a very bold statement, which I personally do not agree with. But it is what they truly believe.
The central conviction is that the Islamic Republic’s main historical success was not making Iran Islamic, but making it independent. And that only an Islamic regime can guarantee this independence. Ali Khamenei deeply believes this. And from this conviction comes a precise mission: to preserve and protect the country’s independence.
Against whom? Against the United States.
How the regime interprets the conflict
It was very significant to me that, in his first public speech after the January massacres, Khamenei interpreted a mass popular uprising not as an internal political crisis, not as a sign that Iranian society was tired and wanted something different, but as yet another episode in a long-lasting conflict with the United States.
The first thing he said was that Washington has been trying to subjugate Iran for forty-seven years. In his eyes, it was not a matter related to Trump but to American policy as such.
For him, Iran’s central drama is this: we expelled the Americans, we want independence, and they will never reconcile themselves with our independence. They want to bring Iran back to a condition of colonial subordination, which is how Khamenei and the Islamic Republic elite interpret the Shah’s period.
This point is essential because it tells us how the Iranian leadership reads the current war. For the Islamic Republic’s top leaders — and I am not saying for all Iranians — this is not primarily a clash for the regime’s survival. This is how their opponents describe it, inside and outside the country. But they see it as an existential struggle for Iran’s independence as a state.
In their reading, it is not about signing or not signing a particular point of a nuclear agreement. It is about preventing the United States from bringing Iran back to the Shah’s condition, that is, a subordinated Iran. And it is precisely against this that the 1979 revolution, in their eyes, was made.
The great divide between Khamenei and Iranian society is not only about the veil or religious norms.
The decisive point is another: Khamenei believes that defending Iran’s independence justifies any sacrifice.
At a certain point, however, a growing part of the population no longer saw either the necessity of that sacrifice or the absence of less costly alternatives. From there arose the rejection of the Islamic Republic.
This will be one of the decisive knots of Iran’s future: to what extent will the war convince part of the population that the issue of national independence is real, not illusory? That it is not just an internal political clash but also the concrete destruction of what Iranians associate with their sovereignty: steelworks, industry, national heritage, territorial integrity.
It is around this knot that the relationship between what remains of the Islamic Republic and Iranian society will be organized.
The founding trauma: the Iran-Iraq war
Beneath the grand ideological narrative of the Islamic Republic, there is also a concrete historical experience that weighs heavily: the Iran-Iraq war.
In my opinion, it is perhaps the experience that most deeply shaped the Islamic Republic, for at least two reasons.
The first is that it was an immense war. Probably the greatest war of the 20th century that almost no one in the West talks about. Looking at the numbers, more than 500,000 Iranians died in that conflict. Multiples of that number were mutilated or marked for life. The country’s social profile changed due to internal migrations. The entire economy changed, also because the Islamic Republic signed a new social pact with the population: sacrifices and resources for the war in exchange for protection and assistance programs that would modify the very character of the regime.
Moreover, that war produced some decisive lessons. Iran was occupied for two years before managing to free itself. This still weighs today on how Iranian leaders think about the possibility of occupation or foreign penetration. The idea is: we’ve been through it already, we can endure.
The second lesson was loneliness. At the time, for various reasons — also because of Iran itself, just think of the American hostage crisis — the United States and Europe supported Saddam Hussein, as did Arab countries and the Soviet Union. No one sold weapons to Iran. No one really helped Iran. Whatever the country had to do, it had to do alone.
From here comes an important part of the resilience we see today. Once again, Iran is alone. It may be that China helps it in some way, or that some Arab countries do something, but it has no natural allies or structural partners in this war. Everything it can do, with its missiles, drones, and adaptability, it must do alone.
This condition, prolonged for forty-seven years, has created a country capable of managing, improvising, and building on its own.
It is not an exclusive characteristic of the Islamic Republic: it is also found in the private sector, everyday life, and the country’s material culture. If you are an entrepreneur in Tehran producing water bottles, you have to learn to manage everything on your own. It is a very different mentality from many Arab countries, and it is part of what today translates into resistance and resilience.
There is also a second aspect: the entire generation that truly counted in the Islamic Republic received its political and strategic education during the Iran-Iraq war, starting with Ali Khamenei.
Before, he was a political activist, an opponent imprisoned several times, but he had no government experience. That war shaped him as a wartime president. The same goes for the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards. They did not go through traditional military academies: their school was the trench warfare against Iraq.
For Qasem Soleimani’s generation, that was the founding experience. He was seventeen when he participated in the liberation of Khorramshahr.
Their vision of war, resistance, military organization, and fighting against a superior enemy was born there. Young Iranian generations may have distanced themselves or forgotten it, but the old generation that governed the country until today is a direct child of that conflict.
From advanced defense to proxy war
Another decisive step, to understand today’s Iran, is the long season of proxy war, which began in a limited way in Lebanon in 1982 but took on much greater importance from 2003, with the American invasion of Iraq, until Soleimani’s killing in 2020 and then until the wars following October 7.
After the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran concluded that it could not effectively defend its western border. That is where Alexander the Great, the Arab armies, and then the Iraqi army had entered.
In the memories of the Pasdaran commanders and Khomeini’s proclamations, what strikes is that the idea of “exporting the revolution” as we often understand it in the West is almost entirely absent.
The debate was much more concrete and military: the border is not defensible without adequate means, without tanks and artillery that no one sells us; therefore, we must move our defense perimeter further forward.
The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 made this logic even stronger. For Tehran, that was probably the moment when the American threat appeared most real: the United States seemed ready to overthrow one “rogue” regime after another. Afghanistan had fallen, Iraq too, Bush had included Iran in the “axis of evil.” The prospect of a direct attack seemed concrete.
Iran’s response was clear: make sure the “crocodile,” that is, the United States, cannot easily swallow its bite. It is an expression Khamenei used then, which helps understand the present as well. The goal is not necessarily to win conventionally, but to make the aggression too costly, too long, too difficult.
From here comes the building of networks of militias and armed allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen: a form of regional guerrilla warfare against the United States and Israel. For the Arab countries that had to host or endure this strategy, it was understandably perceived as an intolerable violation. But in the Iranian view, it served to constantly remind Washington and Israel of the potential cost of any direct attack on Iran.
This strategy worked until it stopped working, that is, until the collapse of the deterrence system after October 7.
But Tehran continues to think this way: it was not a total waste because for twenty years, from 2003 to 2023, that network protected the country. If Israel did not attack Iran in the hardest years of the nuclear crisis, and if the United States never launched a direct war, it is also for that reason.
A state built to resist
The Islamic Republic, from the beginning, was not built to be popular. It was built to be resilient.
On the level of consensus, it has failed and will continue to fail. But its structures — from the Basij to the Revolutionary Guard, from the ideological promotion system to how it cultivates the 15-20 percent of the population that forms its hard core — were designed as survival tools.
Part of this architecture derives from war experiences. Another from the fact that the regime has perceived itself for forty-seven years as fighting the world’s leading superpower. Another still from the early years of the revolution, when many leaders were assassinated in a sort of creeping civil war against the left.
The Islamic Republic does not depend on a single person. It is a multinodal system. It is also for this reason that it appears chaotic and corrupt: there is no single authority dominating all others. There are multiple centers of power — in the clergy, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, among oligarchs, in the economic sector — connected in different ways.
This explains why, even after the elimination of numerous Revolutionary Guard commanders, the system has not collapsed. It remains standing, reorganizes, adapts.
The principle is what they call a “mosaic” command and control: the system must never depend on a single decision-maker. If you eliminate one person, another takes their place; if you eliminate two, there is a third or fourth ready. To truly collapse such a system, it is not enough to decapitate it once: you must strike it repeatedly and for a long time.
Missiles, drones, and asymmetric warfare
Another great pillar of Iranian resilience is the massive investment in missiles. The June war showed Israel that Iran’s missile program is deadlier and more dangerous than many thought before the conflict.
But even in this field, the Iranian logic remains that of asymmetric warfare. The most sophisticated weapons are part of the picture; the other part is the ability to use relatively cheap means with a mass logic.
The Shahed drone, according to American estimates, costs about $35,000; according to Iranians, much less. The electronic components are adapted from common commercial uses. And these drones are deployed in such quantities on the field as to saturate the enemy.
In a way, they are the contemporary equivalent of the human waves of the Iran-Iraq war. Back then, Iran had no tanks or conventional superiority; it had young people ready to run across minefields. Today the principle is similar: use quantity, sacrifice, saturation, adaptation.
Iranians know they cannot face the United States and Israel in a conventional war on their ground. They learned from Saddam Hussein that Washington can demolish a traditional army in a few weeks. For this reason, they choose another battlefield: the global energy market, Gulf economies, the Strait of Hormuz.
Their lateral escalation capability consists precisely in this: if Israel strikes an Iranian field, Iran can strike one in Qatar or threaten the region’s energy traffic. It is a form of deterrence different from the classic one but extremely powerful.
An increasingly militarized Iran
The war has transformed Iran, and it has done so in a way that promises nothing good.
In my judgment, it has made explicit what was already underway: Iran is now a state of the Pasdaran. No longer simply a theocracy. The state’s language remains religious, the laws remain religiously based, but the system’s heart is now military. Real power is in the hands of the generals.
The Revolutionary Guards were already very influential before. Now they are the state in an even more direct sense. Civil facades remain — the Supreme Leader, the president, parts of the judiciary — but the system is dominated by the Pasdaran.
This also produces another effect: the war has strengthened the hardest and most aggressive component of the apparatus.
The commanders emerging believe Khamenei has been too cautious and that precisely this caution ended up inviting the attack against Iran. According to them, Tehran should have reacted more harshly already when the United States left the JCPOA, when Soleimani was killed, when other regime allies were hit.
This more aggressive orientation is already visible in foreign policy. What we do not yet know is what it will mean internally.
The new social pact
Much will depend on how the war ends, what Iran will gain from it, and under what conditions it will emerge. But one thing is certain: there will be a need for a new social pact with the population.
For three reasons.
The first is that January happened. Alienation, anger, and despair among the population have not disappeared. The regime cannot govern as if nothing happened.
The second is reconstruction. The war will have enormous material consequences and will impose a new national discussion on resources, priorities, and cost distribution.
The third is that the Iranian power system is changing. The new arrangement arises in a different context and may choose different paths, even if initial signs do not seem encouraging.
As for Iranian society, the majority of the population remains, in my opinion, in the same state of mind it had in January. Perhaps it is not ready to return to the streets immediately, but that fracture has not been healed.
However, something has changed. After the uprising against the veil mandate and after the June war, it seemed the regime wanted to lower the level of confrontation with the gray population, those not organically aligned but not fully oppositional either.
Instead, what happened afterward had a different effect: it re-mobilized the regime’s hard base.</p
