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It was typical Ali Khamenei: the man who makes the final decisions in Iran did not want to make one. On October 27th the supreme leader gave a speech about Israel’s air strikes on Iranian military facilities the previous day. It was a weighty moment: never before had the Jewish state overtly bombed the Islamic Republic, despite their decades-long shadow conflict. Yet Mr Khamenei’s words were muted. The Israelis, he vowed, would be made to understand the power of Iran. What that meant was up to others to decide: “Our officials should be the ones to assess and precisely apprehend what needs to be done,” he said. It was not a call for calm, but nor was it a declaration of war.
Such indecisiveness is no longer sustainable. The Israeli air strikes on October 26th, retaliation for an Iranian ballistic-missile barrage on October 1st, had significance far beyond their military impact. They signalled the failure of Iran’s national-security doctrine. The strategy that Mr Khamenei pursued for decades has fallen apart—and Iran’s 85-year-old leader seems incapable of charting a new course.
The old course involved avoiding the choice between ideology and pragmatism that all ideological regimes tend sooner or later to face. Though Iran was not at peace with its neighbours, until recently it was not quite at war with them either. It spurned the West—“Death to America” was a core tenet of its ideology—even as it pursued the West, desperate for relief from economic sanctions. It could not decide whether its rogue nuclear programme was a path to a bomb or a bargaining chip.
A revolutionary who was jailed and tortured by the shah’s secret police, Mr Khamenei was, and still is, a zealous ideologue. He sees the West as decadent and insists that Iran should try to become self-sufficient. But the Iran that he came to lead in 1989 had just emerged from a brutal eight-year war with Iraq. The state was bankrupt. Mr Khamenei himself was a controversial choice for supreme leader: he was not yet an ayatollah, and the constitution had to be amended before he could take the job. He had plenty of enemies within Iran.
Thus he tempered his ideology with pragmatism. The economy needed to be rebuilt, so he allowed Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who served as president from 1989 to 1997, to pursue better relations with Arab states and the West. But such overtures were never permanent. For Mr Khamenei, compromise was a tactical move: the destination remained the same, even if the path zigged and zagged.
Hostility towards America and Israel has remained a constant. Mr Khamenei sees the former as an implacable foe, and he believes not only that the latter must be destroyed but that it will be; he claims Israel will not survive past 2040. Under his leadership, Iran spent decades arming Arab militias, such as Hizbullah in Lebanon. They were to serve both as Iran’s forward defence—to keep conflicts away from its borders—and the vanguard of a future battle with Israel. But Mr Khamenei realised that battle lay in the future: he spoke of “strategic patience”, a multi-generational struggle to achieve his goals.
Then came a series of events that seemed to bring those goals much closer. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iran built formidable militias in Iraq. It did the same in Syria after the Arab spring of 2011, and also deepened its ties with Hizbullah and the Houthis, a Shia rebel group in Yemen. Officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard, began talking of a land bridge linking Tehran to the Mediterranean.
Much of this coincided with Binyamin Netanyahu’s long tenure as Israeli prime minister. Though it is hard to remember now, he was once seen as cautious about the use of military force. He tried to avoid conflict with both Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon, remaining largely aloof while Iran built up the militias’ arsenals.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama was eager to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. After a decade of ill-fated wars in the Middle East, so were many Americans. Even Donald Trump, for all his hostility towards Iran, largely held his fire.
For Mr Khamenei, this may have seemed like validation. He wanted to pursue his ideological goals without embroiling Iran in a war. Regional chaos and hesitant foes allowed him to do that: Iran built a formidable proxy force and walked right up to the nuclear threshold without being attacked. It negotiated with America even as its militias struck America and its allies. The supreme leader’s balancing act worked—until October 7th.
When Hamas militants crossed into Israel and massacred almost 1,200 people, they demonstrated the flaw in using proxies: foreign groups can have divergent interests. No doubt Mr Khamenei supported the idea of a decisive war against Israel. Not the timing, though. But the late Yahya Sinwar, then the leader of Hamas in Gaza, had no time for “strategic patience”.
A strategy that was built over decades collapsed within a year. Hizbullah had looked formidable when it fought in Syria and skirmished on the border with a reluctant Israeli army. But it buckled in the face of a full Israeli assault. The brutality of Hamas’s attack on October 7th convinced Mr Netanyahu to drop his former caution, and Joe Biden, the American president, did surprisingly little to restrain him. Instead of a shield, Iran’s proxies became a liability.
Now Iran needs a new security doctrine. The immediate question is how it might regain some measure of deterrence. One option would be to try to rebuild its militias. But that would mean doubling down on a failed strategy. Israel will probably never again be so tolerant of Iranian-backed militias on its borders, and those armed groups may struggle to regain their former support. Gazans are furious with Hamas for dragging them into a war, and many Lebanese feel the same about Hizbullah. Even if they could be rebuilt, it would take many years.
A second option would be for Iran to boost its own capabilities. It could try to strengthen a regular army hollowed out by decades of sanctions and under-investment. In recent years it has sought to acquire both Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 air-defence systems from Russia. That would give it some ability to protect its airspace against Israeli incursions.
But there are several obstacles to a military build-up. One is supply: Russia’s war in Ukraine means it does not have many spare jets or air-defence batteries lying around. Another is money: Iran has run large deficits for years. Israel has demonstrated that it can fly dozens of planes up to 2,000km from home and strike at precise targets. Iran cannot quickly match that capability.
Instead of the air force, Iran could build up its missile units, which have struck at Israel twice this year. Israel would struggle to defend against sustained barrages, because it has a limited number of the Arrow interceptors used to shoot down ballistic missiles (America sent its own air-defence system as back-up). But what Iran builds, Israel can destroy: among its targets in October were machines used to make motors and solid-fuel propellant for ballistic missiles (see next story). They will be expensive and time-consuming to replace.
That leaves a third option, which is fast gaining support in Iran: a nuclear deterrent. Iran needs just days to enrich enough uranium for a bomb (though it would need much longer to build a warhead and fit it onto a missile). But a race for a bomb would invite further attacks by Israel and, perhaps, America—and with several of its S-300 air-defence batteries damaged by Israel’s strikes in October, Iran is in no position to defend against them.
All of these options assume that Iran will need to deter America and Israel because it will continue to be hostile towards them. But it does have another choice: to pursue a less ideological foreign policy.
That would be a dizzying about-face. But Iran has made those before. Mr Khamenei has described Saudi Arabia’s rulers as an American-Israeli plot to drive a splinter into the heart of the Muslim world and promised that “divine vengeance” would befall the monarchy. They cut diplomatic ties in 2016 after rioters sacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran; three years later came an Iranian-backed attack that briefly knocked out half of Saudi oil production.
Yet last year Mr Khamenei allowed Iran’s arch-conservative president, Ebrahim Raisi, to restore normal relations with the kingdom. The hope was that ties with the Saudis, and their Gulf neighbours, might bring more investment to Iran. It would also reduce the criticism on Saudi-funded satellite channels, a major annoyance for the regime. The relationship is hardly a warm one. Still, a day before Israel attacked Iran, the Saudi navy conducted a joint exercise with its Iranian counterpart. The Saudis were also among the first to condemn Israel’s air strikes.
A more pragmatic foreign policy would not upset Iranians, who are broadly dissatisfied with Mr Khamenei’s approach. For years, a popular protest slogan in Iran has been “not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran”. One recent poll found that 78% think Iran’s foreign policy is a cause of its economic problems, while 43% think it contributes to tensions in the region (just 18% think it eases them). Two-thirds of Iranians want to normalise ties with America.
There is far less support for recognising Israel, with just 25% in favour and 67% against (though, in a police state, people may not feel comfortable answering this question truthfully over the phone). But Iran would not have to establish ties with the Jewish state, merely stop fighting it, as most Arab states did decades ago.
It is hard to imagine Mr Khamenei talking about detente, a repudiation of his life’s work. His successor will decide whether to continue a war of choice that has impoverished Iran for decades and now brought it under attack by an enemy state for the first time since the 1980s. That decision has never been more urgent.
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