The Islamic Republic's paramount goal is survival. It is willing to destroy the country, and its people, rather than cede power. In the near term, that survival looks achievable: The regime retains enough coercive capacity to hold on. In the medium term, it is far less certain. But men fighting for their lives from bunkers do not think in the medium term. They think about tomorrow.
The assassination of Iran's top leadership has left no figure with both the power and the will to deliver a major compromise with Washington. But Trump has reportedly pinned his hopes on Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf emerging as the pragmatist willing to break with the past and partner with Washington.
Ghalibaf is a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, speaker of Parliament, and close adviser to the new supreme leader. He harbors ambitions of becoming Iran's nationalist strongman-the man who saves the country from ruin. But ambition is not the same as capacity. He is a creature of the IRGC, the institution most committed to the regime's ideological survival, and the war has narrowed rather than expanded the space for pragmatic maneuvering. His public statements on X
—a combination of grandiose threats, anti-Semitism, and calculated appeals to the anti-imperialist left-are those of a man aspiring to lead the regime, not change it. The Islamic Republic is a path-dependent aircraft with neither a captain willing to turn the wheel nor a crew willing to let him.
Trump's-and America's-predicament has no quick fix. A regime that came to power in 1979 by seizing the American embassy in Tehran and taking its personnel hostage now holds the global economy hostage, effectively controlling 20 percent of the world's oil exports. Tehran has begun treating the Strait of Hormuz as its own Panama Canal, running a protection racket in which vessel owners are permitted safe passage only by obtaining IRGC pre-approval and paying tolls in Chinese yuan.
In its 47 years of existence, the Islamic Republic has made perhaps two major compromises. The first was its 1988 decision to end the Iran-Iraq war-after eight years of fighting and an estimated 200,000 Iranian deaths. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously likened that concession to drinking poison. The second was the 2015 nuclear deal with Barack Obama. In both cases, Iran had come under existential economic pressure, and in both it was offered a diplomatic exit that did not require it to abandon its revolutionary identity. Many of Iran's people have concluded that this identity is the problem. But a critical mass of true believers has made the regime too rigid to bend and too ruthless to break.
Whenever this war ends, Iran's leaders will inherit a country in ruins. And they will find themselves reviled both internally and internationally. Tehran's stated terms for ending the war include reassurances that it won't be attacked again, and reparations for the billions of dollars in damages it has endured. But so long as the Islamic Republic's ideology and behavior remain unchanged—namely its commitment to "Death to America" and the destruction of Israel-neither condition is remotely achievable. No American president or Israeli prime minister will credibly promise not to attack a committed adversary, and the U.S. Congress will never vote for reparations to a government that has spent 47 years fighting America. Indeed, so long as Tehran aspires to rebuild its nuclear program, its missile arsenal, and its network of regional proxies, this war will likely have a sequel.
History suggests that an overconfident Tehran will overplay its hand. Its ideology compels it to pursue vengeance over advantage, even when the national interest demands restraint. This is the same regime that held American diplomats hostage for 444 days, extracting maximum humiliation from the United States at the cost of Iran's own international standing.
It prolonged its war with Iraq six years beyond the point when a favorable settlement was achievable.
Believing itself the Middle East's new hegemon, it was the lone country to publicly praise Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel-leading to the destruction of its regional proxies.
Trump’s approach to Iran is fundamentally flawed due to a misunderstanding of the regime: The Islamist regime thrives on conflict and isolation, viewing normalisation with the US as a greater threat to its survival than war. archive.ph/z5ZNA #IranWar #Islamism #trumpism