Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr have outlined a remade Islamic Republic emerging from the unprovoked war by Israel and the United States, respectively, President Donald Trump. A war out of aggression in violation of international law.

The Islamic Republic has already undergone dramatic molt. While Trump is still bragging, in interviews (see an especially ridiculos on Pod Force One), that Irans first, second and maybe third line of leaders are gone (after the “decapitation” strike on 28 February), so is its navy, its airforce, etc., Bajoghli and Nasr focus on remarkable lessons learned after the first US/Israeli attack in June last year which led to decentralizing from Tehran to provincial capitals its many executive decisions on trade, agriculture, and management of economic and social services from Tehran to provincial capitals. (Remember: last autumn, the water crisis had sparked the idea already to relocate the entire capital to the underdeveloped Makran region on the southern coast along the Gulf of Oman.)

While official statements and intelligence briefings indicate that approximately 40 senior Iranian leaders and security officials were killed in the strikes including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.  Iran managed to keep its governing institutions more or less intact. Together with nominating the surviving son of the Ayatollah, Mojtaba, his successor, a new generation took charge, all having been fighting in the war with Iraq in the 1980. The new leadership now is comprised of current or former members of the Revolutionary Guards.

“The Islamic Republic had long operated through a chaotic maze of competing power centers, which produced unending internal debate and sclerotic inertia. But between the two wars, that chaos gave way to organizational discipline and resilience. … Iran’s armed forces were reorganized into a web of operational commands resembling a guerrilla force more than a conventional military, with authority concentrated among like-minded cohorts rather than distributed among various factions.

“On the battlefield, Iran’s armed forces applied the lessons of the June 2025 war with precision. They responded to the U.S.-Israeli assault that began in February 2026 with systematic salvos of missiles and drones designed to deplete U.S. and Israeli interceptor stockpiles across the region. They had concluded that their adversaries expected to destroy Iran’s missile capability quickly and were not prepared for a prolonged campaign. During the 2025 war, Israel had targeted the entrances to Iran’s ‘missile cities,’ effectively sealing them and forcing Iran to launch mainly from eastern regions beyond Israel’s reach. Iran responded by dispersing its missile launchers across its vast geography and embedding engineers inside the missile cities, alongside military personnel, to repair damaged launchers and entrances in real time. This enabled Iran to continue firing longer than Israel and the United States had expected.

The IRGC also deployed cheap drones to overwhelm U.S. radar systems and military positions across the Persian Gulf and Israel, impeding the bombing campaign and opening missile routes to targets all over the region. Drawing on the logic of asymmetric warfare—and on the experience of using human-wave attacks to overwhelm Iraqi positions in the 1980s—Iran dispatched swarms of Shahed drones. These cheap, expendable weapons degraded the air defenses protecting U.S. bases, as well as those of Washington’s Arab allies, and opened corridors for precision missiles to strike high-value targets. The Iranian military had learned not just to absorb punishment but also to win strategic advantage by frustrating its adversaries’ war aims.”

The devastation of the first month of US/Israeli bombardment was in fact shocking. Public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, entire neighborhoods and even historic monuments lie in ruins. 

But unexpected for western observers and, in particular, Donald Trump, the new strategy worked: Iran survived. On the contrary, it got control over the Strait of Hormuz and faced down a U.S. naval blockade. It inflicted heavy damage on 16 U.S. bases and rendered several inoperable. In March, Iraqi militias compelled the United States to abandon Camp Victory, a major U.S. military installation in Baghdad that U.S. forces had occupied since 2003.

What is even more remarkable is that the trust of the glitzy Gulf monarchies in the US protecting them from any attacks was shattered.

If Bajoghli and Nasr are right, the new leadership was able to even unite the extremely regime-critical population behind it.

“[M]ilitary and [especially on Trump’s Truth Social platform] rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger toward the regime has not disappeared. The grief, frustration, and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian Empire in the fourth century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the seventh century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.”

When the Iranian people have now turned to nationalism, will they abandon Islam? It may well be. At least at the moment we are not faced by a”mullah regime” anymore.

“The war has been a crucible, forging a new iteration of the Islamic Republic and the first major generational shift since its founding. Power no longer resides with the founders. The second generation now runs military and political affairs while the third and fourth direct communications and international outreach.

…

“The republic born of the U.S.-Israeli wars is defined less by ideology than by nationalism, less by revolution than by statecraft, less by clerical charisma than by the confidence and technocratic ethos of a new officer class. In comparative terms, it resembles the military-led nationalist states of the twentieth century—Turkey under the later Kemalists, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser—in which ideology persisted but was subordinated to national interest and the imperatives of state power.

This turn away from dogma and toward pragmatic statecraft does not make the Islamic Republic more benign. Nationalist security states are often brutal to their own people and destabilizing to the international order. The emergent Islamic Republic will remain highly authoritarian. But the categories that Western analysts have often used to describe its various factions—hard-liners versus moderates, ideologues versus reformists—will be less accurate than ever. The priorities of the new Islamic Republic, and how it pursues them, will be shaped by the specific experiences of its two wars with Israel and the United States: the losses Iran sustained, the confidence its leadership gained, and the new social contract the fighting has made necessary and possible.”

Highly recommended reading.

4 June 2026 @ 17:52 UTC+2.

Last modified June 4, 2026.