The Strategic Follies of the Islamic Republic
· The Atlantic
When Western countries engage in conflict with other parts of the world, they often indulge in a kind of strategic orientalism. They attribute to the enemy extraordinary degrees of perseverance, fanaticism, cunning, and farsightedness. The war with Iran has proved no exception: As soon as the missiles began to fly, the familiar tropes returned. The regime possesses strategic patience, akin to the years of effort required to manufacture a Persian carpet; it is animated by indomitable religious zeal; it has mastered the art of winning by losing; and, of course, it thinks half a dozen moves ahead, as you might expect from the land that created the modern game of chess.
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This gives the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran way too much credit. The past half century reveals a record not of strategic brilliance, but of consistent folly, as the regime has waged wars badly—failing to achieve its objectives, creating new enemies, and inflicting more damage on itself than on others.
Within a year of the revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, Iran was attacked by Iraq: A bloody eight-year war ensued. The war itself was not Iran’s choice. But the regime still had its choice of tactics, and some of those were awful. It chose to launch human-wave attacks—some conducted by young men in their early teens—that withered under Iraqi artillery barrages and poison gas. The waste was shocking.
If that war was unavoidable, picking repeated fights with the United States, first by holding hostages from its embassy and then by attacking shipping in the Persian Gulf, was not. In a series of sharp engagements in the 1980s, American naval and Special Operations forces sank Iranian ships and speedboats and destroyed Iranian bases being used to attack tankers. U.S. forces began large-scale escort-of-convoy operations—yes, it has been done before—to get oil through the Strait of Hormuz. They succeeded, and the Islamic Republic was humiliated.
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The Islamic Republic had declared from the outset that Israel was the lesser Satan and the United States the greater. The latter was to be driven from the Persian Gulf, the former to be annihilated. These objectives had absolutely nothing to do with any reasonable definition of Iranian national interest, and their pursuit brought only military devastation and economic misery to the country. Before the revolution, some 50 years ago, Israel’s GDP was a quarter that of Iran. Today, with a tenth of Iran’s population, its GDP is greater than Iran’s.
The policies pursued by the Islamic Republic in the 1990s—the death fatwa against Salman Rushdie and attempts to kill his associates, the terror bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina—gained it nothing but opprobrium. More recently, it attempted to assassinate a former American president. At the same time, it began a serious effort to bring Israel to its knees by assembling a crushing array of proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, a Syrian client state with a large Iranian and Hezbollah presence, and two irregular groups with which it partnered, the Yemeni Houthis and Palestinian Hamas. At the same time, it built a covert nuclear-weapons program, and assembled an arsenal of ballistic missiles to be able to attack Israel.
The aim here—which, judging by their declarations, the Islamic Republic’s leaders believed within reach—was the destruction of Israel. In response to an Israeli strike in Damascus in April 2024 that killed the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, Iran fired hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. In October of that year, following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, it did the same.
What was the return on its investment? In a series of Israeli campaigns, some grueling (the war in Gaza’s tunnels), some tactically dazzling (the so-called beeper attacks on thousands of sabotaged Hezbollah pagers), the proxies and partners were defeated. Hamas was ground down, Hezbollah shattered, the Syrian regime collapsed in a renewed civil war, and the Houthis silenced, for the moment, by combined Israeli and American attacks. Israel’s punitive raids on Iran were limited. Iran’s strategy of encirclement of Israel had collapsed, and its ballistic-missile counterpunch was largely deflected by Israeli and Western defenses.
There remained the Iranian nuclear program, long delayed and stymied by sabotage, assassinations, and sanctions. The Trump administration, like its predecessors, hoped to negotiate the Iranians out of approaching nuclear capacity but failed.
And so came, with American approval, the June 2025 12-day war in which Israel demolished Iranian air defenses, killed dozens of senior commanders and scientists, and, together with a one-day American intervention, smashed Iranian nuclear sites. And after another American attempt at negotiation came the current war, the most extensive set of precision attacks on military targets the world has ever seen.
The final outcome of the present conflict is unknowable, but some of the results are clear: the destruction of Iranian air defenses and its navy, the elimination of several ranks of senior leaders, the shattering of military infrastructure and industry. The Iranian counterpunch this time consisted chiefly of attacks against its Gulf neighbors, most of whom had declined to get involved in this war. Iran’s strategic logic was the same as in the mid-1980s: attack the world’s oil supply in order to bring the war to a conclusion on favorable terms by holding Western economies hostage. The result thus far has been the intensification of American military pressure and the permanent alienation of its neighbors, some of whom will support or even join the war against Iran.
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And now, it appears, Iran’s leaders, most of whom dare not touch electronic means of communication or appear in public, have concluded that they have the upper hand. They talk of imposing peacetime tolls on commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, insisting on massive reparations and the expulsion of American bases by their neighbors. It reflects a self-assessment reminiscent of Monty Python’s Black Knight.
Meanwhile, what of Iran itself? The capital city running so short of water that there has been serious discussion of having to move it, a drug-addiction problem that is among the worst in the world, hundreds of billions spent on a badly damaged nuclear program or lost in foreign investment or to sanctions, and a population so seething with anger at its rulers that its risings against them every few years can be controlled only by massacres of thousands of unarmed civilians.
In the early 1980s, in the full flush of revolutionary ardor and against an age-old enemy who had attacked them without provocation, the Iranian people and armed forces fought and suffered for their country. That enthusiasm was gone less than a decade later, and although some portion of the population may still retain it, it has largely dissipated in the welter of corruption, maladministration, and tyranny that are the hallmarks of the regime. Their supposedly clever leaders have fallen, one after another, to American and Israeli bullets and bombs.
As for that noble Iranian game, chess. Ayatollah Khomeini initially banned the game, relenting shortly before his death, and today Iran has a few grandmasters playing the game their country brought to the world. But some of the best players, and particularly women, have defected to the West or been barred from playing at home—for the crime of wanting to compete with Israeli grandmasters, or simply for refusing to wear the hijab. It is a revealing record of folly on the part of leaders who are, from the strategic point of view, idiots.