Emerging from a withering war with the U.S. and Israel last year, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his military commanders determined that they needed a bold change in strategy.
To salvage the regime in the event of Khamenei’s potential assassination, they activated a high-risk and aggressive plan that is now playing out across the Middle East.
Iran had for two years responded to foreign attacks with limited counterpunches directed at its attacker. Instead, under the new strategy, Tehran would escalate conflict across the region, especially hitting Arab Gulf states and hampering the global economy in hopes of dampening President Trump’s willingness to prolong the conflict and coming back for a future one.
That plan includes implementing its so-called mosaic defense, a decentralized approach that allows individual commanders the autonomy to keep up the fight if cut off from their superiors.
Iran activated the new strategy after last June’s devastating 12-day war with Israel, with its leaders determining they had made a strategic mistake.
They had survived the most one-sided war they had ever fought despite a pounding that had killed many of their top military officers, sealed their nuclear program under mountains of rubble and wiped out many of their air defenses. But they remained trapped in a cycle of conflict with Israel and the U.S., emerging from each round weaker, more exposed and with enemies more emboldened to strike again. Something had to change.
Iranian officials started warning in October that their plans for responding to a renewed attack would be very different. They later told their neighbors privately, through diplomatic channels, that they would be in the first line of fire if fighting resumed, Arab officials said.
Ahead of the last round of nuclear talks in February, national security council chief Ali Larijani passed a letter to the U.S. via Oman saying Iran would no longer respond proportionally and would react aggressively to any attack, they said.
“The Americans must be aware that if they wage a war this time, it will be a regional war,” Khamenei said that month, as U.S. forces massed off Iran’s shores.
Weeks later, Khamenei would be dead, killed in the first salvo of the war. But the strategy he launched has played out over the past week. Despite a pummeling by American and Israeli airstrikes that has strained its ability to keep shooting, Iran has managed to keep up a sweep of attacks along a 2,000-mile front, drawing a widening circle of countries and economic interests into the war.
Before the end of the second day, Iranian missiles and drones had hit every country in the Gulf, followed by strikes on luxury hotels, energy facilities in multiple countries, key ports, U.S. embassies across the region, even Amazon data centers. By Thursday, the United Arab Emirates alone had been targeted by around 1,200 missiles and drones. Tehran fired a missile at a military base in Cyprus, its first first-ever target on European soil. The U.S. intercepted an Iranian missile headed for a military base in Turkey that holds nuclear weapons.
“There is a strong sense among officials that the Iranians have responded in a too symbolic, too restrained and too de-escalatory manner during previous attacks from Israel and the United States,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute think tank based in Washington. “In their view, there cannot be a cease-fire that will endure unless everybody feels that this was too costly.”
Tehran is making a huge gamble, ramping up conflict as it tries to face down two of the world’s most powerful air forces. It may fail, bringing new actors into the war against it and triggering powerful new financial sanctions from its neighbors. But if Iran’s gamble works—and the regime survives the bombing campaign that is grinding it down—it could give it time to regroup under Khamenei’s successor. That, in turn, could strengthen Tehran’s hands in any future negotiations on its nuclear or missile programs that follow.
It remains unclear who will emerge as Iran’s new leader. Khamenei leaves behind no apparent successor, largely by design, as he weeded out clerics that could rival his authority. Israel has said it will target the next supreme leader.
President Trump has said he wants a say in who runs Iran, as he had in Venezuela. But the supreme leader of Iran, a country of more than 90 million people, is a vastly different position than a secular president. Iran’s supreme leader is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the head of the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch. He is also designated as the pre-eminent authority for the world’s roughly 200 million Shia Muslims.
The current war will change the Islamic Republic. Iran will emerge from the conflict with severely degraded land, air and sea capabilities, and its regional ambitions tampered. Yet, Iranian security forces have not shown signs of fracturing, or large-scale defections. The domestic opposition lacks organization and arms. The regime may emerge badly weakened but it will fight ferociously to maintain power, former Israeli national security adviser Eyal Hulata said.
“They are not going to leave easily,” he said.
President Trump acknowledged Monday that he was surprised by the breadth of attacks Iran has been able to mount but vowed to crush its military threat. Adm. Brad Cooper, the Central Command chief said Thursday that Iran’s missile attacks were down 90% since Saturday. That’s either because it is no longer capable of firing as many missiles or because it is conserving its munitions. Iran is keeping up drone attacks on its biggest regional target—the United Arab Emirates.
Embracing escalation
Tehran had lost its ability to deter its enemies in the 2½ years since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas that prompted Israel to adopt a more aggressive military posture and go after Iranian allies across the region.
Iranian leaders sought to contain conflict, even after the two sides set aside a long shadow war and began exchanging direct blows in 2024. That April, under pressure to retaliate for an Israeli strike that killed senior operatives at a diplomatic building in Damascus, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles directly at Israel. But it intentionally telegraphed the attack, enabling Israel and the U.S. to fight it off without much damage, which kept the conflict from escalating.
In another attack six months later, after Israel killed the leader of Iranian ally Hezbollah and a Hamas leader in Tehran, Iran launched around 200 ballistic missiles at Israel but again did little damage. Israel’s limited but precise response disabled key Iranian air defense assets and destroyed machines required to make Iran’s most powerful missiles.
The June war brought the tit-for-tat fighting to a head. Israel knocked out Iran’s remaining air defenses and killed dozens of its top military officials and nuclear scientists. The U.S. joined in the fight, sending B-2 bombers and Tomahawk missiles to destroy Iran’s three main nuclear sites.
Iran pounded Israel with hundreds of missiles and fired 14 ballistic missiles against American bases in Iraq and Qatar. Most were intercepted, and a cease-fire was reached.
Some in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards believed in June that the tide was turning and opposed the cease-fire, Parsi said. The end of the conflict only brought tighter sanctions that pushed the economy deeper into collapse and raised the pressure on the Islamic Republic.
In October, Iranian Armed Forces chief of staff Maj. Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi warned that if Iran was attacked again, Tehran’s response would be “completely different.”
The key shift is that Iran embraced an expansion of the fight. Instead of focusing primarily on Israel—its well-defended enemy which was willing to absorb losses—it would direct its firepower at the Gulf Arab monarchies that had reached a fragile detente with Tehran years ago and had promised not to aid a U.S. attack.
“The Gulf is more effectively integrated into key global supply chains than Israel. If the Gulf goes off line, the world economy will feel it,” said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies who has worked with Gulf militaries on war gaming.
Iran’s survival
Iran’s first priority is survival. It activated its so-called decentralized mosaic defense, first announced in 2005.
The doctrine is informed by U.S. operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, as well as the 2007 war between Israel and Hezbollah, all conflicts where inferior armed groups were able to bloody or even repel much mightier military powers by absorbing damage and hitting softer targets.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is structured into 31 command centers—one for the capital, and one for each of the 30 provinces—each of which is empowered to take authority if the leadership is killed.
The units are trained to fight guerrilla warfare, taking advantage of Iran’s terrain, which is tricky for invaders. Population centers and major lines of communication are spread out within the interior of the country, beyond borders ringed by rugged mountain ranges, making enemy supply lines vulnerable to interdiction. The Persian Gulf, less than 100 nautical miles wide in many places, limits large vessels such as aircraft carriers. Its rocky coves are well suited for Iranian small boat operations and dropping of mines.
The Basij, a paramilitary volunteer group of hundreds of thousands of members, is embedded into neighborhoods in every town and city, including mosques, to prevent unrest.
When the war came, Iran on Day 1 hit targets across the Gulf, including in Dubai, which has prospered from its reputation as a safe haven and has become the Middle East’s hub for social media influencers. Now, some of its most iconic luxury hallmarks were on fire, including the Fairmont hotel on the Palm Jumeirah and the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab. Dubai’s airport, the world’s busiest for international travelers, was closed after being hit with a drone.
Iran has since escalated its attacks to oil and gas facilities. Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery, with a capacity of 550,000 barrels per day and home to the kingdom’s largest offshore crude loading terminal, halted operations as a precautionary measure after an Iranian drone hit an oil-storage facility.
It hit the U.A.E. oil hub of Jebel Ali, then struck the alternative loading site across the peninsula at Fujeirah. Iran struck the key Qatari liquefied natural gas site at Ras Laffan and attacked a number of vessels trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz, shipping lane for about a fifth of global oil supplies.
It also hit several U.S. military facilities, including key stations for tracking Iranian missile launches in Bahrain and Qatar.
Part of Iran’s strategy is to try to soak up the Gulf’s air defense supplies. Gulf states are much more vulnerable than Israel to Iranian short range missiles and drones, which can reach them in minutes.
Earlier this week, after absorbing heavy bombing runs, Iran hit a succession of U.S. embassies and consulates across the region. It continues to land strikes on energy infrastructure, most of them with Shahed drones that cost roughly $35,000 to produce, and many times more to shoot down.
Gulf officials are now warning that production shutdowns could send the oil price to $150 per barrel, potentially causing price shocks in the U.S. ahead of November’s midterm U.S. elections.
“What is surprising is how there was no point—even on Saturday morning—where there was the level of paralysis in Iran that we saw at the start of the June war,” Krieg said.
If Iran’s military is able to keep fighting, including launching drones and ballistic missiles, it could inflict significant American casualties, said Nico Lange, a senior fellow at the Munich Security Conference and a former German Defense ministry chief of staff. Six U.S. troops have already been killed in the conflict.
“Tehran is counting on gaining time to maintain its power,” Lange said. “The U.S., on the other hand, will come under pressure within a few days to look for ways to exit or at least limit the operation if the Revolutionary Guards continue to maintain their capacity to act.”
The demonstration that the regime is able to conduct multiple operations even after dozens of its leaders were killed carries a message to its enemies.
“The purpose of the fighting is not necessarily to win the war,” said Vali Nasr, a former senior U.S. official and an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University. “They have to change the perspective in the U.S. and Israel that the Islamic Republic is weak and that they can effect regime change.”
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com