Khamenei’s last war

For the first time in its decades-long standoff with Israel, the Islamic Republic has taken a hit at its very core. In response to a string of precision strikes on its nuclear and military infrastructure, Tehran launched a large-scale barrage of missiles and drones toward Israeli territory. But while such exchanges have become a familiar feature of their shadow war, this round marked a shift—both symbolically and strategically.

Beneath the surface, however, another struggle is unfolding—one that may prove even more consequential. The ideological foundation of the Islamic Republic, velayat-e faqih, is beginning to show signs of strain. Iran’s response to military pressure didn’t just expose gaps in its defenses—it laid bare a deeper crisis in governance. At the heart of it is a growing uncertainty: can a system built around the theological authority of one man survive the weight of the 21st century?

Khamenei’s Final Inheritance

Ali Khamenei is the last leader of the Islamic Republic shaped directly by the revolutionary era. When he took power in 1989, he was not a natural heir—lacking both the charisma and religious stature of Ayatollah Khomeini. What he had instead was a talent for outlasting rivals and consolidating structures. With his generation fades not only the memory of Khomeini, but the worldview in which sacrifice, delay, and martyrdom counted as strategy.

Iran’s military doctrine took shape during the 1980s—amid isolation, exhaustion, and a long, ultimately futile war with Iraq. From that experience emerged a lasting principle: avoid direct confrontation with stronger armies; instead, build a network of inexpensive, flexible, ideologically loyal proxies. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, Palestinian factions—each became part of what would be called the Axis of Resistance. Iran led this network not by engaging in open warfare, but by orchestrating it from behind the scenes.

Under Qassem Soleimani, the strategy found its full expression. As commander of the Quds Force, he gave it operational coherence, personal diplomacy, and a messianic tone. After his death, the system became decentralized and far less capable of a coordinated response. What remained was a doctrine of exhaustion and managed chaos.

The logic of war has shifted. Israel now carries out precise strikes on Tehran and key infrastructure—fast, clean, and without meaningful international backlash. The Islamic Republic no longer appears as the architect of proxy wars; it has become their target, and on its own soil. Across the Muslim world, most governments have stepped aside. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates offered little more than formal statements. Muqtada al-Sadr—never fully aligned with Tehran—openly declared that Iraq must not be dragged into a foreign war. The Axis of Resistance, once a web of coordinated pressure points, now shows signs of collapse. In Lebanon and Syria, it is demoralized or redirected. In Iraq, frozen by political calculations. In Yemen, fractured by direct hits to the Houthi leadership. Beyond its slogans, Tehran is increasingly isolated.

The generation shaped by the 1980s was never prepared for a war like this—one where the initiative belongs to the enemy, and the old rhetoric no longer lands. A regime that spent decades preaching that the martyr always triumphs now finds itself helpless in the face of technological and strategic superiority.

The Waning of Velayat-e Faqih

The concept of velayat-e faqih, devised by Ayatollah Khomeini, assumed direct rule by a religious leader vested with the sole authority to interpret God’s will in politics. It was more than a theocracy: a system built entirely around the rahbar–the “supreme leader”–immune to oversight, with a vertical structure anchored in a single source of legitimacy. Even within Khomeini’s circle, the idea that the rahbar’s authority should override all other norms sparked unease. Some clerics in Qom believed religion was meant to inspire, not govern. But it was the radical vision that ultimately triumphed. In a 1988 letter to Prime Minister Mousavi, Khomeini stated plainly that a state acting in the name of the rahbar could, when necessary, set aside sharia if required to protect the Islamic order. That logic was later used to justify property seizures without judicial rulings and to bypass the norms of Islamic legal and contractual systems.

Four decades later, that model has entered a phase of intellectual and institutional exhaustion. The generation that built the revolution is gone. The death of Morteza Motahhari—philosopher, theologian, Khomeini’s disciple, and the chief architect of the Islamic Enlightenment discourse—left behind a vacuum no one has managed to fill. Motahhari believed Islam could challenge the West on the field of ideas. His project was social, rational, and anti-imperialist, yet deeply orthodox. He imagined the Islamic Republic as a system capable of renewing itself through internal debate. But after his assassination and the purge of moderate voices that followed, that intellectual tradition fell into decline.

The figure of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who died in 2021, embodied the shift to a different kind of ideologue—not a philosopher, but a guardian of orthodoxy. His influence was significant, yet his project was purely defensive: he sought not to rethink the system, but to protect it from within. After his death, even that current faded. Other prominent clerics—like Naser Makarem Shirazi and Javadi Amoli—remained within the bounds of the traditional religious establishment and never developed schools of thought of their own. Today, in Qom—the intellectual center of Shia Islam in Iran—no new paradigms are being born. Education has narrowed to the rote transmission of inherited frameworks, theology offers rhetorical reinforcement rather than renewal, and ideology has lost its edge, echoing itself rather than expanding.

In place of ideas, the regime has cultivated narrative managers—figures like Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi, a publicist and member of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, who frame the official line in terms of moral duty and geopolitical enmity. Their role isn’t to generate concepts but to stabilize interpretation—from religious mobilization to foreign policy justification. The center of ideological gravity has shifted—from the seminaries to a structure orbiting the IRGC

The Rise of Apocalyptic Shiism

Mahdist circles—once seen as peripheral—have become increasingly influential in recent years. Several of the Supreme Leader’s representatives in the IRGC now come from this milieu, as do a number of key ideological figures. In this context, Mahdism refers not simply to belief in the Hidden Imam’s return, but to a political doctrine that builds state strategy around the anticipation of his appearance.

The Jamkaran Mosque—long a site of popular devotion and said to be a possible place of the Imam’s return—has been absorbed into the state’s ideological infrastructure. Mahdist themes appear with growing frequency in Khamenei’s speeches, particularly in sermons, media content, and educational programs managed by his office. Within the IRGC, this line is represented by the Ammar think tank led by Mehdi Taeb, as well as figures like Ali Saeedi, the former Supreme Leader’s representative to the Corps, and Mehdi Golpayegani, head of Khamenei’s office and coordinator of ideological budgets. The Mahdist current is now effectively embedded in official state discourse.

What we are witnessing, then, is an institutional shift—from the rational Shiism of modernist philosophers to a theology of the end times. The leading figures of this turn—Golpayegani, Saeedi, Taeb—do not follow in Motahhari’s footsteps. They challenge the very premise of a reasoned, philosophical discourse within the Islamic Republic. Their narrative is one of apocalyptic mobilization: shaped by fear, martyrdom, and siege.

In this context, the question of succession becomes especially revealing. Mojtaba Khamenei—long rumoured as a potential successor to his father—now appears increasingly unconvincing: he lacks both charisma and clerical authority, and the apparatus that once supported him has been weakened by war. Among the technocrats and IRGC figures, there is no candidate who commands either the necessary religious legitimacy or an elite consensus. What once functioned as a closed and tightly controlled system now finds itself unable to name a successor without threatening the very logic it was built to preserve. Unlike Hamas, where leadership can be rotated without destabilizing the system, the Islamic Republic is structured more like a theocratic monarchy—yet one that has failed to produce a legitimate heir.

The Transformation of Anti-Israel Rhetoric

The shift in Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric is not merely a matter of foreign policy—it reflects a deeper ideological stagnation. In the 1970s, the anti-Zionism of figures like Khomeini and Motahhari was embedded in a broader anti-imperialist project. Today, it has calcified into a closed system of self-justification: “Israel” has become a universal metaphor, invoked to explain everything from economic crises to domestic dissent. It functions as a symbolic scaffolding for a legitimacy that has grown fragile.

The possibility of Israeli strikes was never absent from Tehran’s strategic calculus. Amid mounting regional tensions, the regime had long accepted them as an element of managed risk. The primary wager was not on military retaliation, but on the political utility of such attacks—as tools of mobilization. External aggression, it was assumed, would produce national cohesion, temporarily suspend internal divisions, and bolster regime legitimacy. Yet the social inertia that architects of this strategy counted on has proven weaker than expected. The public’s response shows not mobilization, but detachment: silence, retreat into private life, disengagement from state narratives. A regime that sought to provoke a siege mentality now confronts the indifference of those who no longer see in it either meaning or representation.

Western analysts often speculate about a possible popular uprising. Yet even during the most extensive wave of protests following Mahsa Amini’s death, the structure of resistance remained fragmented. Iran’s opposition lacks an administrative center, military capacity, or stable channels of domestic funding. Exiled movements—including Prince Reza Pahlavi, who still commands personal popularity and political moderation—do not possess the institutional base for transformative change. Their platforms are incoherent, their activities largely confined to media and symbolic protest support. Internal unrest, in turn, is swiftly contained—not only through repression but due to its disconnection from real levers of power.

Meanwhile, a new rhetoric is beginning to take shape on the regime’s periphery. Groups that once hesitated to speak of regime change are now issuing open calls for uprising. Iranian communists, Kurdish parties, and the Baluchi group Jaish al-Adl have all released statements urging resistance—without demanding condemnations of Israel or the United States. At the same time, Western intuition is shifting. Even cautious voices like Christiane Amanpour have begun acknowledging Reza Pahlavi’s name recognition and his potential role as a unifying figure in a transitional phase. This doesn’t mean the opposition has found a roadmap. But it does suggest that the IRGC may soon have no one left to bargain with. Structural change may not come from the top, but from the vacuum the regime can no longer fill.

The Final War and the Limits of the System

Not long ago, a popular revolution in Iran seemed implausible. Today, it has become a credible trajectory—no longer inevitable, but no longer unthinkable. If the regime fails to preempt transformation, that transformation will be imposed from the outside—by the street, by institutional collapse, or by sustained external pressure, amplified by geopolitical isolation and economic exhaustion. A third path—a soft internal reset—remains theoretically possible. But none of the major elite factions, whether reformists, technocrats, or security figures, offer a vision that goes beyond the system itself. All have been shaped by its rules and speak its language, differing only in tone. What are called “reforms” are not an alternative but a reshuffling. Internal transformation is nearly impossible because no one within the regime is capable of thinking outside its architecture.

While this transformation remains hypothetical, some of its preconditions are already visible. Officials’ families are leaving the country. Strikes on Tehran have shattered the regime’s symbolic immunity, while a series of car bombings, attacks on nuclear scientists—and even widely circulated videos showing raw sewage flooding the streets of the capital—have marked a psychological threshold: if targets can be hit with such precision in the heart of the country, and if even basic urban infrastructure is visibly collapsing, then the regime no longer controls its own core. Some of these attacks may not be the work of external actors but of internal forces operating at the intersection of elite discontent and sabotage. This is not yet a full split—but it is no longer loyalty.

The war of 2025 is not just another chapter in the long confrontation; it is a direct collision with the structural limits of the political system Khamenei built over decades. His final war risks becoming not a culmination, but an end. A regime once sustained by ideological fervor and the ritual of resistance has lost its capacity for strategic thinking and administrative adaptation. Today, it functions as a post-ideological machine—running on inertia, fear, and hope for a miracle. And if salvation is still possible, it can come only from elites willing to choose realism over fanaticism. But even that demands more than mere intent: it requires a subject capable of speaking—and being heard. The real question now is whether such a figure still exists in Iran.