No Tears for Khamenei, No Illusions About What Comes Next
- Jinane Ejjed
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Trump's high-risk gamble on regime change in Iran ignores longstanding lessons on war in the Middle East.
For decades, American and Israeli officials have insisted that Iran stands perpetually on the threshold of nuclear capability—always nearing, never quite arriving. The claim is older than the Islamic Republic itself. Under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a staunch Western ally, Iran launched a civilian nuclear program in the 1950s and, in 1968, became a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The ambition was framed not as defiance but as modernity.
That continuity was shattered in 1979. The overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, ending a monarchy that traced its lineage back more than two and a half millennia, did more than reorder Iran’s political system. It unsettled the architecture of power across West Asia. The revolution’s shockwaves travelled quickly. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged as the new center of authority, and the Islamic Republic announced itself with a doctrine of studied isolation: “Neither East nor West, only the Islamic Republic.” What followed was not independence but entanglement. War with Iraq soon erupted, compounding the turmoil of the late seventies and contributing to the oil shocks that rattled global markets. For the monarchies of the Gulf, and for European states dependent on their energy and influence, the fall of Iran’s shah raised a specter more frightening than instability: contagion.
In September of 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. Saddam Hussein framed the assault as the resolution of a long-standing border dispute, seeking control over the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab, Iraq’s narrow passage to the Persian Gulf, and over Khuzestan, an oil-rich Iranian province with a substantial Iranian Arab population. The war that followed was punishing and protracted, marked by trench warfare, chemical weapons, and staggering civilian loss.
By the late nineteen-eighties, the conflict had drawn in outside powers. The United States, under Ronald Reagan, intervened decisively but discreetly, backing Baghdad while avoiding formal declaration. What emerged was a bifurcated war: Iraq waged a brutal land campaign, while American naval and air forces conducted a shadow conflict in the Gulf. The result, often described as an Iraqi victory, left neither side intact. Iran survived, radicalized and encircled; Iraq emerged militarized and emboldened, its debts unpaid and its ambitions unresolved.
War in the Gulf, often encouraged or sustained by Western powers, is not new. The current escalation cannot be understood without tracing the history of relations between Israel and Iran. The two countries severed diplomatic ties in 1979, after Iran’s revolution recast Israel as the “Little Satan” and the United States as the “Great Satan.” These labels reflected a political worldview shaped by rupture with the West. Since then, hostility has become institutionalized.
What is now described as an Israel–Iran proxy conflict developed gradually across multiple theaters. Its most recent phase has taken shape in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, but its foundations are older and more structural. Iran has sought regional leverage through nonstate allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and armed Iraqi militias operating alongside and outside the state. This strategy allows Tehran to project power while limiting direct confrontation.
Israel’s objectives have centered on eliminating Iran’s nuclear program and weakening Iran-aligned forces across the region. The United States has supported this approach through sustained military assistance, providing Israel with billions of dollars in funding and weapons while framing its role as defensive. In practice, American involvement has deepened Israel’s strategic reach and reduced their costs of escalation.
The nuclear issue remains central. Israel has repeatedly targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, arguing that preventive action is necessary to block an existential threat. Iran, citing repeated violations of its sovereignty and the collapse of trust, has suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each side presents its actions as deterrence. Each treats the other’s as aggression.
Since Friday, June 13, 2025, Iran has been subjected to sustained Israeli airstrikes. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has justified the campaign as necessary to eliminate the threat posed by Iran’s military capabilities. At the same time, diplomacy has continued in uneven bursts. The United States and Iran have engaged in intermittent negotiations since 2012, often resuming talks only when conflict appears close to widening. The most recent round of negotiations concluded two days ago in Geneva. Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, described them as the “most intense” discussions to date. In his State of the Union address earlier this week, Donald Trump said that Iran wanted a deal but had yet to offer what he called the necessary assurance: a commitment never to pursue a nuclear weapon.
Israel has put pressure on the United States for decades to bomb Iran, no matter who the Prime Minister of Israel happens to be. Former top national security adviser to Donald Trump and former ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, John Bolton was one of the architects of regime change in Iraq. Bolton was among the architects of regime change in Iraq, and he has never disguised his views on Iran.
In a 2015 op-ed for the New York Times, he wrote that “the inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program,” and that only military action, like Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor built with North Korean assistance, could achieve what diplomacy could not. Bolton’s warmongering is not unusual. What is unusual is the way Iran is treated as an exception. Other states in the region pursue nuclear technology with little alarm. Saudi Arabia has signed nuclear cooperation agreements with South Korea, China, France, and Argentina, with plans to construct up to sixteen reactors by 2030. Pakistan could rapidly supply nuclear weapons or technology to Egypt, Turkey, or others. North Korea, for the right price, might sell to anyone, including behind the backs of its Iranian partners.
An important distinction to note: there is little evidence that Iran has developed nuclear weapons capability, let alone a bomb. Israel, by contrast, is widely believed to possess between 90-400 nuclear warheads. This imbalance is treated as stabilizing rather than provocative. Historically, Israeli strikes on nuclear infrastructure have been followed not by regional collapse but by temporary de-escalation. Iran’s large-scale ballistic and drone strikes in October 2024 came only after repeated Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
What remains consistent is illegality. Israeli and American strikes on Iran violate international law, just as Iranian strikes on Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq do. The use of force against a state is prohibited under the United Nations Charter, except in cases of self-defense or with Security Council authorization. None of these conditions have been met. Earlier yesterday, the United States and Israel struck a school in southern Iran, killing 108 people. The Iranian Red Crescent said at least 201 people throughout the country had been killed in the air strikes, with 747 injured.
As Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has observed, the clash between Washington and Tehran is also a clash of egos, though not of the same kind. Donald Trump’s hubris has been performative, cultivated through spectacle and projection, rooted in his self-image as the ultimate dealmaker and strongman. Ali Khamenei’s hubris is doctrinal. It rests on ideological rigidity and the conviction that his authority is divinely sanctioned, beyond negotiation or compromise.
Bombing as a tool for systemic political change has repeatedly failed. The record is clear. It failed in Iraq in 2003, in Libya in 2011, and earlier in Serbia. When the United States invaded Iraq, it dismantled the Ba’athist state and killed Saddam Hussein. It killed one million civilians, fractured Iraqi society, and replaced authoritarian stability with permanent insurgency. The removal of a regime was swift. The construction of a state never followed. In Libya, NATO airpower helped bring about the fall and killing of Muammar Gaddafi. The aftermath was not democratic transition but a collapse. Armed factions filled the vacuum. The country ceased to function as a coherent state. Serbia offers a similar lesson. NATO’s air campaign weakened the government of Slobodan Milošević, but it did not resolve the ethnic, political, or regional fractures that fueled the conflict. Coercion forced concessions, it did not produce reconciliation. Airstrikes can destroy regimes by they cannot build legitimacy.
I am relieved at the news of Khamenei’s death. During his decades in power, he presided over the killing of thousands of Iranians, hollowed out the country’s international standing, and oversaw the collapse of an economy already strained by years of Western sanctions. The protests of January 2026, sparked by inflation and shortages, were met with what may have been the regime’s most violent crackdown. Estimates from human rights monitors range from 6,800 to as many as 30,000 people killed within forty-eight hours. Khamenei ruled for thirty-seven years, emerging as the most powerful political figure in the Gulf, exerting decisive influence in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza. After the death of his mentor, Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989, Khamenei institutionalized Khomeini’s theory of Islamic government, entrenching clerical rule while foreclosing meaningful political participation. Under his leadership, Iranians were largely cut off from the global financial system. Their passports became among the most restricted in the world. Their currency became one of the most devalued. For much of his tenure, Iran existed in a state of permanent confrontation with the United States and Israel, while waging sustained repression against its own population. No one should mourn the passing of a regime that murdered its citizens, weaponized sectarian and religious identity, funded armed proxies across the region, supplied weapons to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and was responsible for the killing of American personnel.
Today and yesterday, I spoke with my contacts in Doha, Qatar and Manama, Bahrain who say Iranian missiles are landing in their cities. My contact in Manama had to flee to the other side of Bahrain because an apartment building complex near her had been bombed. About four miles away, Iran carried out several additional strikes on a compound where The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based.
The United States and Israel have chosen regime change. The death of Ali Khamenei marks the start of a gamble that enough violence will cause the Islamic Republic to collapse. This is not strategy. It is escalation dressed up as inevitability.
President Donald Trump is acting on a shallow understanding of Iranian self-determination. What he wants for Iran is not what Iranians have demanded through years of protest and repression. He has shown little grasp of Gulf politics, little interest in history, and no commitment to sustained, good-faith negotiation. He did not ask Congress for authorization. He did not ask the American people.
That choice carries consequences. A strong majority of Americans wanted Trump’s second term focused on domestic priorities, especially the economy. By bypassing Congress and public consent, Trump has ensured that he alone will own the outcome.
History is not ambiguous here. As Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution has written, the Iran–Iraq War produced “no good guys”, only brutality on both sides. Saddam Hussein ruled through terror and genocide. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini built a theocracy that imprisoned, executed, and exiled thousands of its own people. Removing one tyrant did not deliver freedom. It delivered more bloodshed. There are no good guys waiting to emerge from this war, only populations left to absorb its costs.
Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be careful. They are initiating a major war with a nation of 93 million people, a civilization more than 2,500 years old, real retaliatory capacity, and no clear internal opposition ready to take power. This is not a limited strike. It is a high-risk bet with no defined end state. History suggests that once wars like this begin, control is lost first. Empires rarely lose wars because they miscalculate the enemy. They lose them because they misunderstand the country they are trying to remake.
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