To read the present conflict in Iran only through the categories of the Iran-Israel rivalry or the Tehran-Washington confrontation is to miss its most consequential dimension. For Israel, the central problem is the neutralization of a military and potentially nuclear threat. By the time of the military attacks of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that Iran had accumulated 9,247.6 kg of enriched uranium in total; by the time of the attacks in mid-June 2025, it had also accumulated 440.9 kg enriched up to 60 percent U-235, making it the only non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT to have produced and accumulated material at that level (IAEA 2025a; IAEA 2026). For the United States, the conflict is embedded in a broader calculus of regional security, alliance credibility, energy security, and escalation control. For several Arab states, it is principally a matter of balance, containment, and spillover management. Tehran, however, increasingly appears to read the war in a different register: not simply as another episode in a long regional struggle, but as a crisis touching the continuity of the state itself.
That proposition should not be overstated. Iran is not facing imminent disintegration, nor does every Iranian official statement amount to an explicit doctrine of existential war. Yet the cumulative effect of three developments has altered the strategic picture. First, the conflict has moved from covert contestation and proxy warfare toward repeated direct interstate exchanges, including Iran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel in April 2024 and the twelve-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025 (USIP 2024; House of Commons Library 2025; Bagheri Dolatabadi 2026). Second, Tehran’s long-standing model of “forward defence” or strategic depth through regional partners has been badly damaged by Israeli operations against Hezbollah and other aligned actors, as well as by the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 (Azizi 2021; SWP 2025; Chatham House 2024; Chatham House 2025a). Third, Iranian official discourse since June 2025 has placed growing emphasis on sovereignty, territorial integrity, national unity, and the fusion of domestic cohesion with external security (UN Security Council 2025a; UN Security Council 2025b; Khamenei 2025a; President of the Islamic Republic of Iran 2025a).
The argument of this article is therefore narrower, but also more precise, than the language of “regime survival” usually permits. Iran is no longer thinking about war only as a struggle for influence. It is increasingly framing it as a struggle for state continuity. That shift matters because it changes the political meaning of both escalation and compromise. It also helps explain why outside observers often misread Tehran’s calculations. When a conflict is coded as existential, the costs of attrition do not necessarily produce pressure for moderation. On the contrary, the costs of de-escalation can appear even higher if compromise is believed to reveal weakness, reduce deterrent credibility, expose internal vulnerability, or invite further coercion.
At the centre of this argument lies a more specific proposition about Iranian political and strategic imagination. In that imagination, the solidity of the political centre is treated as the precondition for territorial integrity and for the consolidation of a national identity capable of integrating a socially diverse country. A strong centre is assumed to generate centripetal dynamics: it holds the national space together, contains the peripheries, and makes political integration possible. Conversely, any weakening of the centre is liable to be read as the trigger for centrifugal pressures: fragmentation of loyalties, renewed particularisms, vulnerability along the margins, and, in the worst case, territorial dislocation. Within that representational framework, regime change is feared not simply as elite turnover at the top, but as a possible opening to the disintegration of the state itself. The existential charge of the current conflict follows from that equation between the fragilization of the centre and the possible disintegration of Iran as a territorial polity (CFR 2024; Britannica 2026a; Britannica 2026b).
A Binary Reading of War
Iran’s strategic posture cannot be understood if one simply projects onto it the categories used by its adversaries. In the Iranian view, the conflict is not merely about relative gains or losses within a regional balance of power. It is increasingly cast as an ordeal in which the relevant alternative is not victory versus compromise, but continuity versus degradation. That does not mean Tehran literally believes that every military setback will produce immediate collapse. It means that the leadership increasingly speaks and acts as if sustained military pressure, repeated attacks on Iranian territory, shrinking regional depth, and the erosion of deterrence could together threaten the state’s capacity to remain the uncontested political centre of a very large and socially heterogeneous country (Khamenei 2025b; President of the Islamic Republic of Iran 2025b; World Bank 2026; CFR 2024).
Put differently, the Iranian fear is not reducible to the loss of influence abroad. It concerns the durability of the centre at home. Once the centre is perceived as weakened - militarily, economically, or symbolically - external pressure can be read as feeding domestic fragmentation. In this sense, the language of existential war is tied not only to deterrence but also to a historically rooted anxiety about centre-periphery relations, borderland vulnerability, and the political management of diversity. The issue is not whether those fears are fully objective. It is that they structure how risk is imagined and therefore how policy is made.
This shift became more plausible after June 2025 because the conflict was no longer confined to deniable strikes, sabotage, or partner-based escalation. The House of Commons Library notes that the June 2025 war began with Israeli strikes on Iranian territory and ended with a ceasefire announced on 24 June 2025, while Bagheri Dolatabadi observes that no peace agreement - or even a signed ceasefire - followed, leaving both sides to prepare for the next round (House of Commons Library 2025; Bagheri Dolatabadi 2026). From Tehran’s perspective, this sequence matters. Once war repeatedly reaches Iranian soil, the conceptual distance between defending the regime and defending the country narrows considerably.
Iranian diplomatic language after the June 2025 attacks is revealing here, not because official rhetoric should be taken at face value, but because it indicates how Tehran wants the confrontation to be understood. In letters to the UN Security Council, Iran described the attacks as violations of its sovereignty and territorial integrity and framed its military response in the language of self-defence and deterrence (UN Security Council 2025a; UN Security Council 2025b). Khamenei, for his part, repeatedly tied the country’s security to “the unity and cohesion of the nation,” while President Masoud Pezeshkian similarly stressed national unity as a condition for resisting external pressure and preserving state security (Khamenei 2025a; President of the Islamic Republic of Iran 2025a). The important point is not that Tehran has abandoned ideological language. It plainly has not. The point is that ideological language is increasingly embedded within a vocabulary of sovereignty, territorial integrity, national cohesion, and the resilience of the political centre.
The Ceasefire as a Moment of Exposure
It is at this point that the Iranian suspicion of ceasefires becomes more intelligible. In many Western strategic traditions, a ceasefire is the first step toward negotiation, deconfliction, or stabilization. From Tehran’s perspective, however, a ceasefire can also create a dangerous interval in which the real balance of losses becomes visible. It may reveal depleted stockpiles, weakened launch capacity, degraded command structures, reduced regional reach, and the damaged condition of allied actors. In that sense, a pause in fighting can be experienced not as relief, but as exposure.
The Iranian strike on Israel on 13-14 April 2024 remains a key turning point here. According to the Iran Primer, Iran launched 170 drones, at least 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles in an unprecedented direct attack on Israel; militia allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen also participated (USIP 2024). Even if most of these projectiles were intercepted, the operation mattered because of what it signalled: Tehran was seeking to demonstrate that it retained the capacity to strike openly and directly, not only through proxies and partners. In other words, the operation was not just retaliation. It was also a performance of deterrence.
This logic became more acute after the June 2025 war. By then, the issue was no longer simply whether Iran could launch a major salvo, but whether it could do so in a way that restored fear after the direct exposure of its own territory to attack. The IAEA’s reporting underscores the significance of this moment of exposure. As of 17 May 2025, before the June attacks, the Agency estimated Iran’s total enriched uranium stockpile at 9,247.6 kg (IAEA 2025a). After the attacks, the IAEA stressed both the damage to facilities such as Natanz and the urgent need to re-establish continuity of knowledge over Iranian nuclear material, especially the stockpile enriched to 60 percent (IAEA 2025b; IAEA 2025c; IAEA 2026). In strategic terms, this means that ceasefires or pauses in fighting can expose not only military losses but also the degree to which deterrent assets, nuclear opacity, and technological credibility have been compromised.
The point, then, is not that Iran prefers perpetual war. It is that an ill-designed ceasefire can look dangerous in Iranian eyes because it may freeze Iranian losses without clearly restoring Iranian deterrence. If a pause confirms that regional partners have been weakened, air defences penetrated, missile sites degraded, and nuclear infrastructure mapped, then de-escalation can appear less like stabilization than like a snapshot of vulnerability. For a leadership that links its own authority to the maintenance of a strong political centre, such exposure is doubly dangerous: it threatens deterrence abroad and authority at home.
From the “Iran of Influence” to the “Iran of Deterrence”
For years, Iran’s regional security posture rested on what might be called a model of forward defence. As Hamidreza Azizi showed in his study of the concept, Iran’s doctrine was meant to keep confrontation away from its own borders by building strategic depth through allied armed actors, political partners, and overlapping theatres of influence, especially in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and, later, Yemen (Azizi 2021). The purpose was not formal empire. It was layered depth: the ability to complicate enemy planning, increase the costs of attack, and ensure that the main arena of confrontation remained outside Iran’s core territory.
That model has not disappeared, but it has been severely damaged. Chatham House’s analysis of the “axis of resistance” emphasizes that the network was designed precisely to provide Tehran with strategic depth and deterrence; yet in 2024 Hezbollah suffered major setbacks, including the loss of much of its senior leadership, while the overthrow of Assad forced Iran to rely more heavily on allies in Iraq and Yemen (Chatham House 2024; Chatham House 2025a). The SWP similarly argues that, by October 2024, the Tehran-led axis had already been badly weakened by Israeli military operations, and that the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 further reduced Iranian room for manoeuvre in Syria (SWP 2025). The network survived, but in a more fragmented, less coherent, and more stressed condition.
The Lebanese front illustrates the point numerically. CSIS recorded more than 4,400 combined rocket, missile, and other stand-off attacks by Israel and Hezbollah after 7 October 2023, turning the border into a theatre of attrition rather than a stable front of deterrence (CSIS 2024a). Later CSIS analysis found that, in the last week of September 2024, the number of violent incidents linked to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict increased 4.5 times relative to the weekly average between 7 October 2023 and 31 August 2024, while the average distance of strikes from the Blue Line also increased dramatically (CSIS 2024b). Attrition of this kind does not merely degrade materiel. It reduces the political utility of a partner as a strategic asset.
This is why the language of the “collapse” of Iran’s regional strategy should be handled carefully. The network has not vanished, and Iran retains meaningful leverage through Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and other instruments. Yet the balance between indirect influence and direct deterrence has undeniably shifted. The IISS argued in June 2025 that Israel’s attack revealed the limits of Iran’s missile strategy because depleted medium-range missile stocks and weakened regional allies left Tehran with fewer options for retaliation against Israel, even if shorter-range capabilities remained available in its immediate neighbourhood (IISS 2025). In effect, Iran has been pushed from an “Iran of influence” toward an “Iran of deterrence”: less able to rely on layered regional buffers, more dependent on missiles, drones, direct retaliation, and the threat of escalation.
That transition is strategically significant because direct deterrence is more visible and, therefore, more vulnerable. Proxy networks offer ambiguity, deniability, redundancy, and political reach. Missile-and-drone deterrence offers speed, spectacle, and coercive signalling, but it is easier to monitor, easier to target, and harder to convert into durable political control. It is also more closely tied to the integrity of the homeland. When deterrence shifts from depth to direct retaliatory capacity, the defence of the state’s external envelope becomes more central to the regime’s political self-understanding and to its insistence on the resilience of the centre.
Why War Becomes a Territorial Question
This is where the conflict ceases to be only a geopolitical contest and becomes, in Tehran’s own framing, a territorial question. Iran’s geography matters. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Iran as a country dominated by a high interior basin ringed by major mountain systems, with much of its territory structured around difficult relief, plateaus, passes, and peripheral corridors rather than a flat, easily integrated core (Britannica 2026a). Such geography does not mechanically produce insecurity. But it does make territorial control, lines of communication, and centre-periphery relations especially important.
Iran’s demography reinforces this point. According to the World Bank, Iran’s population exceeded 90 million by 2024 (World Bank 2026). This is a large state by regional standards, with multiple urban systems, long land borders, and socially diverse frontier zones. Here caution is essential: statistics on ethnicity in Iran are contested, politically sensitive, and often methodologically weak. Even so, broad estimates consistently indicate a plural social structure. The Council on Foreign Relations notes that roughly one in four Iranians is Azeri and stresses that major minorities such as Kurds, Baluchis, and Azeris have historically mobilized more often for rights and representation than for outright secession (CFR 2024). Britannica likewise describes Iran as a culturally diverse society in which Turkic, Kurdish, Arab, Baloch, Lur, and other communities form important components of the national whole (Britannica 2026b).
This is precisely why the robustness of the centre occupies such an important place in Iranian political imagination. In a territorially extensive and socially plural state, the centre is expected to perform an integrative function. It does not merely govern; it symbolically binds the national whole. From that standpoint, the weakening of central authority is feared because it could reactivate centrifugal dynamics in spaces already viewed as strategic margins. The issue is less a deterministic claim about imminent separatism than a strategic representation of vulnerability: once the centre is weakened, the periphery may no longer be reliably held within a cohesive national framework.
The point is not that diversity automatically produces fragmentation. It does not. Nor is there compelling evidence that Iran is on the verge of ethnic disintegration. The point is more subtle and more political. Under conditions of repeated external attack, shrinking strategic depth, and economic strain, diversity can be securitized by the centre and treated as a latent fault line. This is especially true because many of the populations most frequently discussed in security terms are concentrated in border provinces or strategic corridors. Tehran may therefore perceive external pressure, internal dissent, and territorial vulnerability as increasingly interconnected.
Economic conditions sharpen this sensitivity. Iran’s inflation rate remained extremely high in 2024 at 32.46 percent, according to World Bank data reproduced by Our World in Data, while the World Bank’s 2025 macroeconomic outlook warned that heightened military tensions and sanctions pressures were increasing inflationary expectations and exposing the economy to further shocks (Our World in Data 2026; World Bank 2025). Economic stress does not automatically translate into territorial instability, but it raises the political premium on cohesion, policing, and distributive control. In wartime conditions, the defence of regime authority can then be reformulated as the defence of national cohesion under siege.
From Regime Survival to State Survival
This is the core analytical shift. So long as conflict was framed mainly in ideological language - resistance, revolution, anti-Western defiance - it could still be interpreted principally as a regime war. Once it is reframed as a defence of borders, territorial continuity, sovereign rights, and national unity, it becomes something different: a war of the state, or at least a war represented as such. That does not mean the regime and the state are actually identical. It means the regime is attempting to make them appear identical, both to its own population and to outside audiences.
The distinction matters because, in the Iranian representational universe, the state survives through the solidity of its centre. A centre that remains militarily credible, politically commanding, and symbolically integrative is understood to keep the national space together. A centre that appears penetrated or humiliated risks doing the opposite. This is why the concept of “state survival” is analytically more useful than the narrower formula of “regime survival” in the present case. It captures the way Tehran fuses deterrence, sovereignty, national cohesion, and territorial integrity into a single register of political continuity.
Much of the external debate still oscillates between two simplified readings: either Iran is a revisionist power seeking regional hegemony through armed partners, or it is an ideologically driven regime interested above all in self-preservation. Both readings capture part of the truth; neither is now sufficient. Iran remains a revisionist power in important respects, and the Islamic Republic remains deeply concerned with regime survival. But after the direct interstate escalations of 2024 and 2025, and amid the weakening of its regional buffers, Tehran’s preferred political language increasingly binds regime survival to the defence of the nation’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and internal cohesion (UN Security Council 2025a; UN Security Council 2025b; Khamenei 2025a).
This move has major domestic consequences. The more war is presented as existential, the easier it becomes to justify centralization, exceptionalism, and securitization. War turns into a matrix of legitimacy. The leadership can present itself not simply as the holder of political authority, but as the final barrier against encirclement, chaos, and national fragmentation. In that sense, the existential framing of war is not merely descriptive. It is productive. It creates the political conditions under which compromise becomes suspect and coercive resilience becomes virtue.
It also reshapes the meaning of deterrence. For Israel, deterrence is tied to threat denial, military superiority, and the destruction or rollback of Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities. For Tehran, deterrence increasingly appears as the minimum condition for political continuity. That continuity is not only regime continuity in the narrow sense; it is the preservation of the political centre’s claim to hold together the territorial and social whole. That is why the issue cannot be reduced to whether Iran can still strike Israel or still arm regional partners. The deeper issue is whether Tehran believes it can still convince adversaries that pressure short of full-scale invasion will remain costly, prolonged, and regionally expansive. If it cannot, then every ceasefire becomes dangerous, every pause becomes diagnostic, and every compromise risks being read in Tehran as the first step in a longer process of downgrading the state itself.
Conclusion
Iran can no longer be adequately analysed only as a revisionist regional power seeking to maximize influence through a network of allies. That framework remains useful, but it is no longer sufficient. It does not fully explain why compromise can appear more dangerous than attrition, why direct deterrence has become so central, or why the defence of the regime is increasingly articulated as the defence of the state itself. A more convincing reading is that Tehran has been pushed from a strategy of influence toward a strategy of preservation: preservation of deterrent credibility, territorial integrity, nuclear opacity and strategic ambiguity, and, above all, preservation of the political centre’s claim to embody the nation. In Iranian political and strategic thought, the solidity of the centre is widely understood as the condition of state continuity. A strong centre generates centripetal dynamics: it holds together a large and socially diverse national space, contains the peripheries, and sustains a common political identity. Conversely, the weakening of the centre is liable to be read not merely as a loss of governmental authority, but as the activation of centrifugal forces—fragmented loyalties, heightened peripheral vulnerability, and, in the worst case, territorial dislocation. In that perspective, the issue is not simply regime change in Iran, but the possibility that the destabilization of the centre could ultimately threaten the cohesion of the state as a whole.
This is what gives the conflict its existential character in the Iranian imagination. Whether that perception is fully grounded or partly constructed is, in one sense, secondary. In strategy, perceived existential threats are politically decisive even when they are not wholly objective. What matters is that Tehran is acting as though the stakes are existential: as though the erosion of deterrence, the contraction of regional depth, and repeated attacks on Iranian territory could combine to weaken the centre on which state continuity depends. This also clarifies the meaning of Iranian statements rejecting negotiation. Taken literally, such language is misleading. It does not necessarily amount to an absolute refusal of diplomacy; rather, it signals a refusal of negotiation conceived as capitulation, as an asymmetrical freezing of the balance of forces, or as a mechanism for managing Iran’s weakening without addressing the conditions that produced it. From Tehran’s standpoint, a ceasefire is unlikely to be acceptable if it merely suspends hostilities while preserving the structures of vulnerability: direct military exposure, covert sabotage, targeted killings of scientists and strategic personnel, sanctions pressure, and restrictions that prevent the reconstitution of national capabilities. What Iran appears more likely to seek, therefore, is not a simple pause in the fighting but a settlement that can be represented as ending the war under conditions compatible with state survival. In Iranian terms, negotiation is meaningful only if it entails substantive guarantees: a durable end to direct attacks, an end to indirect campaigns of sabotage and assassination, relief from the economic pressure associated with sanctions, and a security framework that permits reconstruction without institutionalizing structural weakness. Otherwise, a ceasefire risks being interpreted less as peace than as an intermediate stage in a longer process of strategic neutralization.
That is why an agreement that merely stops the fighting while leaving Iran durably weakened, exposed, sanctioned, and constrained is unlikely to appear acceptable to the Iranian leadership. From Tehran’s perspective, such an outcome would not constitute a stable peace. It would amount instead to a managed condition of attrition—one that impedes recovery, prolongs asymmetry, and organizes the gradual erosion of the regime through the sustained degradation of the state’s strategic base. In this sense, the relevant analogy is not with war termination properly understood, but with prolonged coercive containment. As of 22 March 2026, while the conflict was still unfolding, reporting indicated that the renewed Iran-Israel-US war had entered its fourth week, that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz had been severely disrupted, and that the IAEA was again warning about the risks created by military strikes near nuclear facilities (Associated Press 2026; IAEA 2025b).
These developments strengthen rather than weaken the central argument of this article. Once direct war reaches the Iranian homeland, strategic infrastructure, and the material bases of deterrence, Tehran is likely to interpret the conflict less as a bargaining contest over influence than as a confrontation over the durability of the state itself. Under such conditions, the defence of the regime becomes fused ever more explicitly with the defence of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the political centre understood as the guarantor of national cohesion. More broadly, the Iranian case suggests a wider analytical point: under conditions of sustained coercion, states may progressively collapse the distinction between regime security and state survival, until the defence of the centre becomes inseparable from the defence of national continuity itself.
References
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Bagheri Dolatabadi, A. (2026) “The June 2025 Israeli War: Iran’s Assessment and Regional Consequences” Middle East Policy. DOI: 10.1111/mepo.70008.
Britannica (2026a) “Iran - Mountains, Plateaus, Deserts”.
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Dr. Tewfik Hamel is a researcher and lecturer specializing in strategic studies, military history, and geopolitics. He holds a PhD in History from Paul-Valéry University (Montpellier, France), a Master’s degree in Political and Social Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Diploma in European Studies from the University of Strasbourg, and a Maîtrise in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Algiers. He is also an associate researcher at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (France), the Initiative for Peace and Security in Africa (Senegal), and the Institute for Applied Geopolitical Studies (France). His recent work focuses on contemporary military doctrines, security dynamics in the MENA region, and the interplay between technology and warfare. He regularly contributes to academic and policy journals, including Sécurité Globale and Revue de Défense Nationale.
The most important question raised here may be broader than whether Iran is fighting for regime survival or state survival. The deeper question is what happens to a state’s strategic options when sustained external pressure begins to alter the relationship between deterrence, territorial security, internal cohesion, and political authority.
From a field-informed strategic perspective, pressure does not automatically produce concession. Actors adapt to pressure, but the form of adaptation depends on what they believe is at stake and on which capabilities they believe must be preserved for the next stage of the conflict.
This is where the distinction between tactical effect and strategic outcome becomes important. A military strike may destroy a capability. A sanctions regime may impose severe economic costs. The weakening of regional partners may reduce strategic depth. But none of these effects, by itself, determines the final strategic outcome.
The critical question is what remains afterward.
Does the actor still possess deterrence? Can it regenerate capacity? Can it preserve internal cohesion? Does it retain freedom of action? And, perhaps most importantly, how many viable options remain available for the next round?
This also changes how we should understand a ceasefire. A pause in fighting is not automatically strategic stability. Its significance depends on what each side can restore, what vulnerabilities have been exposed, and how both sides adapt during the pause.
In that sense, strategic endurance is not simply the ability to absorb punishment. It is the ability to absorb pressure, adapt, preserve critical capabilities, and maintain meaningful choices for the future.
That may be one of the most important lessons of the Iranian case: strategic outcomes are often determined not only by what an actor can achieve today, but by what it remains capable of choosing tomorrow.
Wahidullah Noorzai (NIDA)
Field Strategist | Military & Security Analyst | Field-Informed Strategic Reasoning