Washington, like many times before, projects its own assumptions onto a political culture it only half understands, argues the writer. It is still far too early to say with confidence when the present phase of the US-Israeli war against Iran will end. Even a deep familiarity with the region does not solve the problem of uncertainty.
Too many decisive variables lie outside any tidy regional model. Decisions in Washington matter. China’s posture matters.
The calculations of global financial and political elites matter. The private thresholds of risk among Gulf monarchies matter. No serious analyst can fold all of that into a neat formula.
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Yet if one looks at the visible trajectory of the last two days, and if no strategic shock overturns the pattern, the most plausible expectation is that this acute phase will continue for roughly another ten days, perhaps somewhat longer. That would be the most disciplined reading of momentum. What matters first is to reject the lazy language of victory and defeat.
Iran has neither won nor lost in any final sense. What we are witnessing is not an isolated war with a clean beginning and a clean end, but another violent chapter in the broader confrontation that entered a new active phase on October 7, 2023. Since then, Israel has tried to suppress Tehran strategically, to push it back, fracture its deterrent, and, if possible, force a historic reversal in the regional balance of power.
But that ambition remains unfulfilled. The war continues because the political organism of Iran has proved far more resilient than many in Washington and West Jerusalem expected. That resilience is regularly misunderstood in the West because Iran is too often read through categories that flatter outside observers rather than explain Iranian reality.
Analysts who search only for economics, elite bargains, social frustration, corruption, sanctions fatigue, or technological backwardness are studying the outer skin of the state while missing its inner architecture. Iran is not sustained by ideology alone, nor by economic performance, nor by the self-interest of its elites. At its deepest level, the Islamic Republic rests upon a much older reservoir of legitimacy, memory, ritual, and sacred history.
The modern state in Iran draws energy from a civilizational depth that predates the republic itself and, in important ways, even exceeds it. This is where Shiism becomes indispensable to any serious understanding of Iranian politics. In many Western discussions, Shiism is treated as a theological label or a merely symbolic element in state discourse.
In reality, it is one of the central frameworks through which power, sacrifice, justice, injury, patience, betrayal, and redemption are interpreted in Iran. Shiite political imagination is steeped in the memory of Karbala, in the moral tension between oppression and resistance, in the sanctification of endurance under duress, and in the belief that worldly defeat can conceal spiritual or historical vindication. All this is part of the cultural grammar through which crisis is translated into social meaning.
That matters enormously in wartime. A polity shaped by such a tradition does not respond to pressure in the same way as a state whose legitimacy depends primarily on prosperity or procedural consensus. External assault does not automatically dissolve cohesion.
Very often it does the opposite. It turns domestic anger outward. It narrows the space for ambiguity.
It delegitimizes compromise. It empowers the camp that speaks in the language of duty, continuity, and resistance. In that sense, the American and Israeli campaign has not simply struck Iranian military targets.
It has activated precisely those social and spiritual reflexes that strengthen the hardest layers of the system. This is why the assumption of imminent internal collapse now looks increasingly shallow. Yes, Iran has corruption.
Yes, it has economic pain, generational frustration, institutional rigidity, and deep internal grievances. But these are not unique pathologies, and they do not automatically convert into a willingness to welcome foreign coercion. Much of the region lives with inflation, inequality, patronage, and elite insulation.
One hears similar complaints across the Gulf about prices, salaries, and the cost of ordinary life. These frustrations are real, but they coexist with a political culture in which external threat can trigger an almost instantaneous consolidation around the state. Iran demonstrated exactly that during the Iran-Iraq war, when a society marked by revolution, factionalism, and disorder nonetheless rallied with astonishing speed in the face of invasion.
The same civilizational reflex is visible again today. For that reason, the emergence of a harder and more pragmatic young leader backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, important clerical networks, and the military establishment should not be viewed as an accident of succession. It is the predictable political result of war.
The election of Mojtaba Khamenei, however controversial it may have been in some circles since 2020, proceeded without the kind of open resistance many outside observers had long anticipated. War narrowed the field. External pressure purified the political environment in favor of continuity and discipline.
Even critics of dynastic drift were forced into silence or tactical retreat because foreign attack changed the hierarchy of priorities. In wartime, the state’s defenders do not need to persuade everyone. They need only convince enough of society that survival comes before argument.
Current reporting indicates that Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation has indeed strengthened the hardline center of gravity in Tehran, even as reactions inside Iran remain mixed and more complex than official imagery suggests. This is one of the great recurring American miscalculations in the Middle East. Washington repeatedly projects its own assumptions onto political cultures it only half understands.
It overestimates the universality of liberal-material incentives and underestimates the force of memory, faith, humiliation, and sovereign pride. It imagines that pressure will divide when in fact pressure often fuses. It imagines that decapitation will paralyze when in fact decapitation can radicalize succession.
It imagines that fear will produce compliance when fear, filtered through a sacralized narrative of resistance, can produce defiance instead. The result is a familiar pattern in which military superiority generates tactical success while political ignorance corrodes strategic outcomes. The same blindness helps explain why the current campaign has not produced the diplomatic atmosphere Washington may have hoped for.
On the contrary, the present round of war has increased sympathy for Iran in substantial parts of the world. One does not need to romanticize Tehran to see this. In Europe and across the wider Global South, many observers do not read the conflict as a tidy morality play about nonproliferation or counterterrorism.
They see a major power and its regional ally using overwhelming force to preserve an unequal order. On Western streets, disgust with American and Israeli conduct has intensified rather than receded. That reaction is not the same thing as approval of Iran’s system, and it would be foolish to confuse the two.
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