After war with Israel and US, Iran rests on a knife edge

DUBAI – Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran. As she watched Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran’s political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009.

Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential, and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a ceasefire vied with each other.

“For a moment, I imagined seeing Iran again in my lifetime,” said Ms Saberi, 48, a dual Iranian and American citizen and author who has taken a break from her journalistic career. “I also thought how ridiculous it was that the Islamic Republic wasted decades accusing thousands of women’s rights advocates, dissidents and others of being spies, when they couldn’t catch the real spies.”

Those spies, mainly from Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service, penetrated Iran’s highest political and military echelons. The question now is what a shaken Islamic Republic in dire economic straits will do with what Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, has called “a golden opportunity for change”. That moment is also one of extreme, even existential, risk brought on by the 12-day Israeli-Iranian war that the US briefly joined.

The military campaign flirted with dislodging the clerical autocracy that has made uranium enrichment the symbol of Iran’s national pride, but stopped short of killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said that the ayatollah’s death would “end the conflict”. The 46-year-old Islamic Republic limps on.

It does so despite the collapse of its “axis of resistance” that was formed through the funding, at vast expense, of anti-Western proxies from Lebanon to Yemen; despite the devastating bombing of its equally exorbitant nuclear facilities that never produced a bomb and scarcely lit a lightbulb; and despite the humiliation of surrendering the skies above Iran to its enemies.

Yet Mr Khamenei, as the guardian of the theocratic anti-Western revolution that triumphed in 1979, sees himself as the victor. “The Islamic Republic won,” he said in a video broadcast on June 26 from a secret location, laying to rest rumours of his demise.

His is a survival game dosed with prudence that now faces the greatest test of his 36 years in power.

“To understand Iran and Khamenei and the people around him is to understand that the Islamic Republic’s survival is always a victory,” said Dr Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, a London think-tank.

Revolution at a crossroads

Already, tensions over how to address the crisis brought on by the war are evident.

Mr Pezeshkian appears to favour a liberalising makeover, repairing relations with the West through a possible nuclear deal. He has spoken in recent days of “an opportunity to change our views on governance”.

It was not clear what he meant, but many in Iran favour strengthening elected institutions and making the supreme leader more of a figurehead than the ultimate font of authority. They seek an Islamic Republic that is more of a republic, where women are empowered and a younger generation no longer feels oppressed by a gerontocratic theological system.

Mr Khamenei insisted that the Israeli and American attack on nuclear facilities had failed “to achieve anything significant”. But Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi seemed to question that judgment, saying on June 26 that the country’s nuclear facilities had suffered “significant and serious damage”.

Hardliners see any disunity as a danger signal. They believe concessions presage collapse. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 69 years after its formation, and the “colour revolutions” that brought Western democracy to post-Soviet states, deeply affected Mr Khamenei and his entourage.

They are suspicious of any nuclear deal, and adamant that Iran must retain the right to enrich uranium on its soil, which Israel and the US have said is unacceptable. They are also strongly represented in the country’s single most powerful institution, the Revolutionary Guard.

The Guard numbers 150,000 to 190,000 members, Dr Vakil said. With control over vast swathes of the economy, they have a deep vested interest in the government’s survival. They are the kind of large institutional buffer that President Bashar al-Assad in Syria lacked before his downfall in 2024.

Already, as it did in 2009 when a large-scale uprising threatened the toppling of the Islamic Republic, Iran has embarked on a crackdown involving hundreds of arrests, at least three executions, and the deployment of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia in Kurdish and other restive areas.

Iranians have seen this movie before. Some wonder what the war was for if they are to face another bludgeoning. “The people want to know who is to blame for multiple defeats, but there is no leader to take on the regime,” said prominent political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla in the United Arab Emirates. “A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.”

This weakness appears deep. The “victory” claimed by Mr Khamenei cannot disguise the fact that Iran is now a nation with near zero deterrence.

“I would imagine that deep in his bunker, Khamenei’s priority must be how to rebuild a deterrence that was based on the nuclear programme, the missile programme and armed proxies, all now in shreds,” said Mr Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and, as United Nations undersecretary-general for political affairs in 2012, one of the few Americans to have met the supreme leader.

“Khamenei was obsessed with the mendacity and belligerence of the United States,” Mr Feltman recalled. “His eyes were benevolent, but his words, expressed in a quiet, dull monotone, were anything but benevolent.”

Paranoia, institutionalised

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr Khamenei’s predecessor, promised freedom when he came to power in the 1979 revolution that threw out a shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West. But it was not to be. Tensions soon erupted between those who had fought for democracy and those for whom theocratic rule was more important.

The Islamic Republic’s first president, Mr Abolhassan Banisadr, was impeached and ousted after a little more than a year in office, for challenging the rule of the clerics. He fled to France. Thousands were executed as the government consolidated its power.

War engulfed the revolutionary country in 1980, when Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, ordered an invasion.

The fighting would go on for eight years, leaving an estimated 500,000 people dead, most of them on the Iranian side, before Mr Khomeini drank from “the poison chalice”, as he put it, and accepted an end to the war.

The generation that fought that war, now largely forgotten in the West, forms much of the political and military elite in Iran today. They came away from the war convinced of American perfidy in the light of US military support for Iraq, persuaded of Iranian resilience and viscerally dedicated to the revolution for which they had seen so many fall.

“The war, in many cases, embedded a paranoid worldview, a sense of victimisation that has led the elite, and particularly Khamenei, to be unaware of how the world is evolving around them,” Dr Vakil said.

All of this has shaped the nazam, or system. It is now thoroughly institutionalised. Change has proved difficult and conflict has festered. In the more than four decades since the revolution, the century-long Iranian quest for some workable compromise between clericalism and secularism, one that denies neither the country’s profound Islamic faith nor its broad attraction to liberal values, has endured.

At times, the tension has flared into violent confrontation, as when more than two million people took to the streets in 2009 to protest against what they saw as a stolen election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

The vote had been preceded by weeks of vigorous televised presidential debates, watched by tens of millions of people, and the rapid rise of Mr Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s liberalising Green Movement. All that evaporated as the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia clubbed protesters into submission over the days after the vote.

Seldom, if ever, had the two faces of the Islamic Republic been so evident, one vibrant and freedom-seeking, the other harsh and closed, succeeding each other at hallucinogenic speed.

More recently, in 2022, a wave of protests erupted after a young woman, Ms Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police soon after her arrest for failing to cover her hair with a hijab.

The movement reflected deep exasperation at the notion that ageing clerics should tell women how to dress, and it led to some change. Many more women now go without hijabs; reprimands have become rarer and milder.

The government’s ability to suppress challenges, through repression and adaptation, reflects its strong survival instincts, and complicates assessments of its possible durability even as a clear majority of Iranians oppose it.

So, too, does popular weariness after a century of upheavals that have left Iranians with little taste for further turmoil and bloodshed.

“The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the ceasefire than the war itself,” said Mr Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the UAE’s Federal National Council who now heads a consultancy focused on risk management.

“But we here in the Gulf are status quo powers that favour stability,” he added.

A toppling of the Islamic Republic would likely have little support among Persian Gulf states, which include Saudi Arabia, not out of any love for Mr Khamenei, but a desire to remain havens of peace and prosperity.

“For now, I don’t see any forces gelling to go up against the regime,” Mr Feltman said.

“But Israel will strike again if it sees any redevelopment of Iran’s nuclear or ballistic programmes.”

A tug that endures

Ms Saberi’s hopes rose and fell during the recent fighting as she sat in her parents’ home in North Dakota. Against her better instincts, she found herself digging out her Iranian passport as the 12 days passed, and considering renewing it.

She has not visited Iran in the 16 years since her release, knowing that return, as she put it, “would be a one-way ticket”. But the tug of her second home, Iran, where she lived for six years, endures.

“Iran’s in our heart, it’s in our blood, there is nowhere in the world like it, and I know so many Iranians in the diaspora who would go back and contribute if the regime falls,” she said.

“My dad, in his 80s, spends his time translating Persian poetry.” NYTIMES