Credit...Hugo Clarence Janody/Hans Lucas, via ReduxBy Vali R. Nasr
Dr. Nasr is a scholar of Iranian politics and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
The United States’ attack on Iran’s nuclear sites last weekend, following a weeklong Israeli bombing campaign, has marked a turning point for Iran. Washington’s involvement in the conflict represents one of the biggest challenges to the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979 and is a moment of truth for the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has maintained Iran’s hostility to the West during his 36 years in power.
Now the future of the country’s nuclear program, and the fate of the tenuous cease-fire with Israel, rests in his hands — and even in the face of grave threat, he is unlikely to back down.
Iran’s rulers are no strangers to war. Many of the country’s top leaders, including its president, foreign minister and key military figures, are veterans of Iran’s long war with Iraq in the 1980s, a grinding struggle that cost Iran billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. Under Ayatollah Khamenei, who served as president from 1981 to 1988 and became Iran’s supreme leader in 1989, the lessons of that brutal conflict have come to undergird the regime’s worldview — and its national security policy.
As Ayatollah Khamenei sees it, Iran is locked in a struggle for survival with the United States and its allies, including Israel. The policies he has pursued in the decades since he came to power — domestic repression, nuclear expansion and support for proxy militias including Hamas and Hezbollah — have all been in the service of winning that contest. His distrust of Washington has only deepened since Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal Tehran negotiated with the Obama administration.
The Islamic Republic understands its limitations in this struggle. Its military is woefully inadequate in the face of more advanced U.S. weaponry. Its economy has been severely constrained by international sanctions. And in recent years, Iranians have revolted against the regime’s policy of perpetual resistance against the West, as well as against the regime’s repressive domestic policies. The United States has also maintained a robust presence in the region, with tens of thousands of troops stationed across a network of bases.
If this history is anything to go by, Ayatollah Khamenei will not retreat, let alone surrender. He has, for now, accepted a cease-fire with Israel — but only because he is confident that Iran held its ground in the face of U.S. and Israeli strikes. In the past, too, he has made concessions when necessary. Tehran entered both the 2015 nuclear deal and the most recent round of nuclear negotiations with the United States in order to relieve economic pressure.
Ayatollah Khamenei is uninterested in making compromises that could fundamentally change Iran’s trajectory. He is wary of even appearing open to compromise, which he believes the United States would interpret as weakness. “America is like a dog,” he told his advisers in a meeting over a decade ago. “If you back off, it will lunge at you, but if you lunge at it, it will recoil and back off.”
Iran’s supreme leader has instead sought an equilibrium that can be summarized as “no war and no peace.” He wants neither confrontation nor normalization with the United States. What he wants is for Washington to stop containing Iran, unshackle its economy and allow Iran to embrace the status of a regional great power.
Ayatollah Khamenei believes that Iran can achieve this goal in time. If Tehran perseveres, he thinks, it can outlast Washington and Israel’s appetite for a fight. For decades, his regime has built its military strategy on patience and endurance, reflecting its rulers’ takeaways from the Iran-Iraq war. In 1980, Iraq launched a surprise strike against its neighbor, taking over thousands of square miles of southwestern Iran. Two years later, Iran was able to outmaneuver Iraq’s better-armed military through the use of guerrilla forces and so-called human wave attacks, allowing it to recapture much of its lost territory. The lesson, for Ayatollah Khamenei and his peers, was that Iran is capable of wearing down better-equipped foes — even when the odds are stacked against it.
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That lesson guided Iran’s response to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Convinced that Iran was next on Washington’s list, Ayatollah Khamenei charged Gen. Qassem Soleimani — who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020 — to take advantage of the chaos and brewing Iraqi insurgency by bogging the United States down in a quagmire. General Soleimani proceeded to build a network of Iranian influence across Iraq, co-opting Iraqi politicians and mobilizing Shia militias to attack U.S. forces. The strategy worked; by 2011, the United States had withdrawn most of its troops after a prolonged and exhausting insurgency.
In more recent years, Iran has had plenty of time to prepare for an American or Israeli attack. Its deep burial of the Fordo enrichment site, for instance, may have spared the facility from total destruction by U.S. bunker-busting bombs. A larger conflict would pose a bigger threat, especially at a time when the Iranian economy is weak and its population restive. For now, Tehran has probably concluded that it can endure wartime economic hardship and that the population will rally to the flag and direct its anger at foreign attackers.
With this calculus in mind, Ayatollah Khamenei clearly felt compelled to respond to show that he is not defeated. He also seeks to demonstrate that Washington cannot achieve its aims by force, be they regime change or dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. Iran is looking for deterrence, not escalation. The scale and timing of its missile launch targeting Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar appears carefully calibrated, with Iranian officials giving advance notice that the strike was coming.
If the cease-fire collapses and war resumes, Iran may choose to attack U.S. ships or bases in the Persian Gulf or close the Strait of Hormuz. Whether or not it does so, what matters is its ability to keep the world on its toes, using uncertainty to disturb energy prices and global business.
Should Iran attack, its strikes would probably aim to force Israel and the United States to settle for a war of attrition. A long slog, Iran believes, will foil U.S. and Israeli plans for a decisive victory and force them to compromise in the face of mounting costs and domestic backlash. Iran will not see President Trump’s call for peace as a welcome diplomatic off-ramp. Only after it has regained a measure of deterrence, potentially by acquiring a nuclear weapon, might Iran be ready to talk.
Does Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime have the military capacity, domestic strength and political endurance to sustain a war of attrition? That ambiguity is part of the supreme leader’s game plan. What might matter more is not whether Iran has the capacity to fight indefinitely, but that it could do so for longer than Washington or Israel is willing to countenance — especially if it is able to rebuild its nuclear infrastructure in the interim, and even assemble a nuclear arsenal.
Iran’s calculations will greatly depend on its assessment of how much of its nuclear program has survived the U.S. bombing and whether it can turn its existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium into nuclear weapons. It may soon close its nuclear program to outside inspection — and, even if it remains a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, keep the world guessing about its aims. The United States could try to block Iran’s progress, but short of putting boots on the ground, there may be a limit to what it can do.
And that is what Ayatollah Khamenei may very well be banking on: that the prospect of another “forever war” in the Middle East is sufficiently daunting to keep the United States at bay. It already looks to Tehran that it has persuaded Mr. Trump to eagerly embrace a cease-fire. Until now, Iran had hoped its nuclear ambitions might be enough to end American containment and win sanctions relief at the negotiating table. Now Ayatollah Khamenei may well conclude that the only way to achieve his goals is to cross the nuclear line once and for all.