Iran: The Ayatollah's strategy has spun out of control since 7 October

When Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, launched the murderous assault on southern Israel on 7 October, 2023, he would have foreseen the pitiless military response from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. But there was nothing preordained about what has come since in the region. If Sinwar imagined that the attack would unite Israel’s enemies, Sunni and Shia, in one united front against the Jewish state, he was deluded. History is not linear; it is contingent and discontinuous, and momentous events such as the Hamas attacks invariably have unintended consequences.

Consider the astonishing events since 7 October in the wider region: the humiliation and defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon following Israel’s long-planned and ruthlessly executed infiltration of its network and assassination of its senior leaders, including Hassan Nasrallah, one of the heroes of the self-styled Islamist resistance; the fall of the tyrannical, hollowed out Assad regime in Syria; repeated Israeli airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, and the US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. While Europe fretted about the legality of the attacks on Iran, America and Israel acted.

Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, or the Shia Crescent, the network through which the regime funded and directed proxy militias in pursuit of regional hegemony, has been decisively weakened. The Iranian economy is in freefall and the state’s military vulnerability has been exposed: within 48 hours of launching air strikes, Israel had established control of the skies over Tehran. And now the very survival of the Islamic republic and of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 86-year-old supreme leader, is threatened as anti-government protests intensify in the country.

In this week’s Spectator, Peter Mandelson referred to Iran’s coming “democratic transition” as if it was inevitable. The idea we are on the cusp of a new democratic era in Iran seems fanciful – Mandelson is, after all, a Blairite – but as the protests spread, the regime like a rotten tooth is crumbling from within. The great unknown is how long the regime will endure and what would follow its demise. Civil war? A mass exodus to neighbouring states? The emergence of a military strongman? The restoration of the monarchy?

In Shah of Shahs, his compelling eyewitness account of the last days of Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi’s rule, Ryszard Kapuscinski describes the exact moment a despotic regime collapses as “the greatest riddle known to history”. In late December 1977, on a state visit to Iran, American president Jimmy Carter praised the Shah’s government as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world”. Yet within two years, the widely loathed monarch had been overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, Carter’s administration was embroiled in the Iran hostage crisis following the seizure of the US embassy, and a new age of terror had begun. In 1980, the Americans backed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its brutal near-eight year against Iran.

The 1979 Iranian revolution was a turning point in the late 20^th century. Later that year, Saudi militants stormed and occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, before being violently defeated after a two-week siege. Together, these shocks heralded a new age of radical Islamism, whose effects rippled across the region and the world with lethal consequences.

“The question is,” says Ali Ansari, professor of Iranian history at St Andrews University, “whether we are on the edge of a precipice in Iran or not? I would say we are precariously close to the edge. The regime - in effect a kleptocracy - is running out of road.”

Donald Trump is threatening military strikes against Iran if the regime starts killing its own people and says the supreme leader is looking to flee the country. Friends with family in Iran say that it is hard to know exactly what is going on because the internet is down. The regime has turned in on itself.

The protests, which began in late December among business owners and students in cities over surging inflation and the collapse of the national currency, have since spread rapidly to smaller towns. Disorganised and fragmented, they reflect widespread public discontent rather than a coordinated opposition movement with a coherent political programme or leadership. Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the late shah, the “little prince” as some call him, is a prominent regime opponent close to Israel. While one should not underestimate the depth of monarchical nostalgia, there is no organised campaign inside Iran to restore his family to power as his father was restored following the CIA-backed coup against Muhammad Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister in 1953.

“Khomeini will not go without a fight,” says Christopher de Bellaigue, author of several notable books on Iran. “He has thousands of highly committed, ideologically rigid, ossified people who regard him as the viceroy of God. And although they are a minority, they are still the minority that has the guns. They’re still the minority that has control of the money. Khomeini’s got nowhere to go, in my view. And he wouldn’t go anyway because he has a very serious worldview formed by notions of martyrdom.”

How serious is Trump about striking Iran to defend Iranians? The regime would be foolish to disregard his threats. They have emboldened the protestors - a reversal of Iranians’ longstanding loathing of foreign intervention. “Maduro is the newest person to find out that President Trump means what he says,” said Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, after the capture of the Venezuelan president. In January last year, while discussing Iran in a Senate confirmation hearing, Rubio said: “I don’t know of any nation on earth in which there is a bigger difference between the people and those who govern them.” That comment resonated among Iranians.

After Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton to become president for the first time, Barack Obama - whose administration negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran nuclear deal, (from which Trump withdrew in 2018) - was travelling with close associates in Lima, Peru. “What if we were wrong,” he said after reading a column about identity politics. “Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into the tribe.” His aides tried to reassure him, but he went on: “Sometimes I wonder if I was ten or twenty years too early.”

Could it be that rather than arriving too early Obama was in fact an emissary from a dying era? Nearly ten years later, Trump is serving his second term and is intent on remaking the world but not in ways Obama could ever have imagined or wished for. The ideal – more a cliché really - of the liberal international rules-based order so cherished by Obama, has been shattered. Where Obama wanted to bring the Islamic Republic in from the cold, Trump seeks its destruction.

Trump said this week he “did not need international law”. He is a cold-eyed mercantilist: for him what matters above all else is the exercise of hard power in the national interest. It is not that the rules of the geopolitical game have changed since he returned to the White House, it’s that he never believed they applied to America in the first place.

And now as the world is being reordered around us with dizzying speed, events that once seemed unthinkable – the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, the American threat to Greenland, the Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent destruction of Gaza with all its radiating consequences – become not just thinkable but likely. The inexorable harshness of the world is revealed. It’s little wonder, then, that Netanyahu feels emboldened as he contemplates the region’s transformation since 7 October, 2023.

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