The strikes on Iran were designed to do what years of sanctions, isolation, and internal unrest had not: bring the Islamic Republic to the point of collapse. The architects of the campaign, whether in Washington or Tel Aviv, appeared to share a common strategic calculation: that a direct blow to the upper layers of the Iranian state, from the assassination of military commanders and political leaders to attacks on military and security infrastructure, would trigger mass anti-government mobilisation, encourage defections within the regime, and ultimately bring the Islamic Republic down from within. The calculation was not absurd. In recent years, Iran had moved through one wave of unrest after another: the protests of 2017 and 2019, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement following the death of Mahsa Amini, and most recently the nationwide uprising of January 2026, sparked by a collapse of the rial and suppressed in a crackdown that the Iranian government itself acknowledged had killed more than 3,000 people, the deadliest episode of domestic repression since the founding of the Islamic Republic. The gap between state and society, especially in the major cities, had become impossible to disguise. Economic crisis, declining legitimacy and deep social pessimism all reinforced the perception that the Islamic Republic had entered one of the most fragile moments in its history.
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What followed, however, was the opposite of what was expected. The streets did not become the scene of mass uprising against the state. In many cities, in contrast, they became sites of mobilisation by forces loyal to the ruling clergy, a mobilisation that went well beyond officially organised gatherings and continued night after night for weeks. State organisation and propaganda cannot fully explain it. Something deeper was activated: a religious-heroic discourse that had played a foundational role in consolidating the Islamic Republic during the first decade after the 1979 revolution. That discourse, whose formative moment was the Iran-Iraq War, had regained political energy after years of gradual erosion.The central issue is not simply that the war increased support for the government among parts of its loyal base. More importantly, for sections of that base, the war once again produced meaning.The Islamic Republic is not merely a political structure with a constituency. For many loyalists, it constitutes what Clifford Geertz once called a “system of meaning”, not merely an ideology, but a moral and symbolic world through which political reality is rendered intelligible. Concepts such as resistance, martyrdom, siege, sacrifice, steadfastness, and defence are not experienced merely as political slogans, but as elements of an ethical and existential worldview. External war, particularly in the form this war took, reactivated that universe.
To understand the significance of this development, one must return to the role of the Iran-Iraq War in the consolidation of the Islamic Republic. The regime was not consolidated only through elections or bureaucratic institutions but through war. The eight-year conflict with Iraq was far more than a military confrontation. It was one of the Islamic Republic’s most important engines for producing legitimacy, loyalty, collective identity, and political myth. During a period in which the post-revolutionary order was still unstable and multiple political forces, liberals, leftists, nationalists, and armed opposition groups, competed for influence, the state constructed a religious-heroic discourse that fused Shi’a symbols, Ashura, martyrdom, mazlumiyat (historical suffering and victimhood), with national themes of defending territory and resisting invasion. Those who went to the front were not fighting for a government. They were defending Islam, the homeland, honour, truth, and the revolution itself. This fusion produced a powerful emotional bond between sections of society, the wartime experience, and the ruling clerical establishment. At its centre stood Ayatollah Khomeini, whose revolutionary and religious authority elevated him, in the eyes of many supporters, to a position approaching Weberian charismatic authority: a figure treated not merely as a political leader but as the embodiment of the revolution and religion itself. The war helped fuse clerical rule, national defence, sacrifice, and Shi’a symbolism into a shared moral and political universe. The conflict was therefore not only a battlefield. It was one of the principal arenas in which the post-revolutionary order was stabilized.
The Iranian state gave this universe a name: defa-e moqaddas, “Sacred Defence”. The label itself is revealing. The eight-year war with Iraq was not framed, in official Iranian discourse, as a war of national defense or territorial defense, but as a sacred undertaking, charged with the same theological weight that Shi'a tradition reserves for the battle of Karbala and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. To die at the front was not to die for the state; it was to die in a lineage stretching back fourteen centuries. This framing bound the revolution to the deepest emotional reservoirs of Shi'a religiosity, and it made the Islamic Republic, the inheritor of a sacred history rather than a recent political experiment. “Sacred Defence” never settled into historical memory; it became one of the emotional foundations of the Islamic Republic itself. Even after the war ended, the ruling clergy worked to keep that discourse alive. Through state media, war cinema, martyr commemorations, “Rahian-e Noor” tours, schools, and official memory projects, it tried to preserve the war’s heroic memory. The “Modafean-e Haram” (Defenders of the Shrine) project in Syria and Iraq was a further effort, reproducing the same religious-heroic narrative in a new geopolitical setting. The massive funeral processions following the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 were the clearest display of the enduring power of this symbolic universe after the 1980s.
Yet over the past two decades, its mobilising power had drained. A younger generation with no direct memory of war saw the world differently. Cultural transformation, digital media, expanding urban middle classes, and successive protest movements all widened the distance between large parts of society and the state’s official narrative. For many young Iranians, the language of martyrdom and Sacred Defence no longer carried the emotional force it had carried during the 1980s. The erosion had several sources. For Iranians born after the late 1980s, now the demographic majority, the war was not a lived experience but a state-curated memory, encountered through textbooks, murals, and televised commemorations. The discourse itself had also been overused and instrumentalized: invoked by officials to justify almost any policy, from economic austerity to internet restrictions to foreign interventions, until its sacred register began to sound like routine political rhetoric. And it was visibly contradicted by the lives of those who invoked it most loudly, a revolutionary elite whose children lived comfortably abroad while ordinary Iranians faced inflation, unemployment, and currency collapse.
The recent war reactivated this fading symbolic structure. Three developments mattered most. The first was Iran’s military endurance. Before the war, the working assumption, even among some regime supporters, was that in the event of direct confrontation with the United States and Israel, Iran would collapse within days. Given the asymmetry in military power, this expectation was not implausible. The destruction of Iraq and Libya, the collapse of Afghanistan, and repeated reports of intelligence penetration into Iran’s security infrastructure all reinforced it. Yet the outcome differed sharply from those expectations. Iran did not collapse. It absorbed military pressure for weeks, and went on retaliating, against what many regard as the world’s most powerful military coalition. This endurance generated a renewed sense of confidence among loyalist constituencies and was not experienced merely as nationalism. For many supporters of the ruling clergy, it was confirmation of a narrative the regime had told for decades: that resistance against world’s oppressive order was not propaganda, but historical reality. For many regime loyalists, the war turned abstract ideological claims into lived historical experience.
The second was the refusal of political and military elites to flee. A familiar opposition narrative held that senior officials of the Islamic Republic would abandon the country at the first moment of real crisis. Stories of officials’ families settled in Europe, Canada, and the United States had become deeply embedded in public discourse. The war broke that narrative. Even amid assassinations and targeted strikes, no major officials abandoned their posts. Many remained despite direct personal risk. Some were killed alongside members of their families. Within the regime’s loyalist base, this produced narratives strongly reminiscent of the Iran-Iraq War period itself: commanders who remained, families who shared their fate, officials who could have escaped but chose not to. And this matters: religious-heroic political discourse depends on moral exemplars, figures whose conduct gives the language of sacrifice something concrete to point to.
The third, deeper than the first two, was the symbolic meaning attached to the deaths of political and military figures. Within the religious-heroic logic of the Islamic Republic, the death of a commander in the line of duty is not read as defeat, but as symbolic triumph. A figure killed while remaining at his post enters the category of shahid (martyr), which carries enormous emotional and theological weight in Shi’a political culture. The Islamic Republic has long depended on martyrdom narratives for symbolic reproduction, yet in recent years the political potency of that language had noticeably weakened. The war revitalised it.
At this point, politics moves beyond ordinary dissatisfaction and economic grievance and enters what Émile Durkheim described as the realm of the sacred: a symbolic world in which collective sacrifice, ritualised mourning, and martyrdom generate forms of solidarity not reducible to material interest alone. None of this, of course, means the Islamic Republic has recovered the broad social legitimacy it lost over years of repression, economic crisis, and political exclusion. Large parts of Iranian society, younger urban generations, significant number of men and women identifying themselves with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and sections of the urban middle class, almost certainly continue to view the regime much as they did before the war. Memories of state violence, repression, economic hardship, and restrictions on everyday life do not disappear in a few weeks of military conflict. Even if some critics, particularly those opposed to foreign intervention, moved temporarily closer to the government during the war, this should not be mistaken for a broad restoration of legitimacy.
The more important development lies elsewhere: the reactivation of the symbolic world that forms the ideological core of the Islamic Republic. In many ideological states, survival depends less on mass popularity than on the cohesion, commitment, and mobilisations capacity of a loyal core. The recent war strengthened precisely that core. If the Islamic Republic emerges from this conflict intact, and current evidence suggests it will, the war will become a long-term source of symbolic legitimacy and internal cohesion for the ruling clergy. Much as the Iran-Iraq War shaped the political imagination of the Islamic Republic for decades, the current conflict will generate a new foundational narrative: endurance under simultaneous external pressure, the deaths of senior figures, and the reactivation of collective sacrifice. And it will do something decades of propaganda could not: transmit the religious-heroic discourse of the revolutionary generation to younger cohorts who never experienced the Iran-Iraq War directly, something decades of state propaganda alone struggled fully to accomplish.
The implications extend beyond domestic politics. A state whose loyalist base feels cohesive and historically validated behaves differently, at home and abroad. It approaches negotiations, regional conflicts, and internal crises with greater confidence. The deepest analytical mistake of outside observers has been to read the Islamic Republic only as a political structure, rather than a meaning-producing ideological order whose power still derives, partially, from a religious-heroic symbolic universe that had not disappeared so much as gone semi-dormant. The war reawakened that world and that may prove to be one of the most unintended consequences of a campaign meant to bring the Islamic Republic to an end.
Naser Ghobadzadeh is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at the American University in Bulgaria. His research examines religion and political power from a comparative and international perspective, focusing on state–religion relations, Islamic political thought, and electoral authoritarianism. He is the author of Theocratic Secularism: Religion and Government in Shi’i Thought (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Editorial Credit: Arina Singh
This is a particularly important argument because it moves beyond the conventional assumption that external military pressure necessarily produces internal political collapse. The deeper question is not simply whether a regime is popular or unpopular, but what happens to the relationship between coercion, identity, legitimacy, and collective meaning when an external war suddenly enters the political equation.
The distinction between broad legitimacy and loyalist cohesion is especially important. A government can experience profound social dissatisfaction, economic crisis, political exclusion, and declining legitimacy while simultaneously retaining a highly committed core capable of absorbing extraordinary pressure. These two realities are not mutually exclusive. In fact, history demonstrates that authoritarian and revolutionary systems can sometimes become more cohesive under external threat precisely when their broader social legitimacy is weakening.
The Iranian case discussed here illustrates this mechanism particularly well. War can transform an abstract political narrative into a lived experience. Concepts such as resistance, sacrifice, martyrdom, national defence, encirclement, and historical injustice acquire political force when individuals experience danger directly. The important analytical point is therefore not simply that war creates nationalism. It is that war can reactivate an existing symbolic structure and give it new social meaning.
From the perspective of comparative conflict analysis, this phenomenon deserves wider attention. Afghanistan offers another important laboratory for understanding the same problem from a different historical and political context. Across decades of conflict, external military intervention repeatedly produced outcomes that were difficult to explain through material power calculations alone. Military superiority did not automatically translate into political control; institutional investment did not necessarily produce institutional legitimacy; and the removal of powerful actors did not necessarily eliminate the social narratives that sustained their movements.
This suggests a broader proposition: political systems and armed movements should not be assessed only through their formal institutions, military capabilities, economic indicators, or polling data. Their resilience also depends on the depth of their symbolic infrastructure—the narratives, memories, identities, rituals, historical grievances, and moral frameworks through which supporters interpret sacrifice and survival.
This is particularly relevant to the study of regime change. External actors frequently calculate the probability of political collapse by measuring elite fragmentation, economic pressure, military vulnerability, popular dissatisfaction, and opposition mobilisation. These variables are important, but they can become misleading when the target possesses a powerful mechanism for converting external pressure into internal cohesion.
The paradox is therefore profound: a military campaign designed to accelerate regime collapse can sometimes strengthen the very political constituency required for regime survival.
But there is an equally important qualification. Temporary wartime cohesion should not automatically be interpreted as durable political legitimacy. A population may rally around the state against an external threat without accepting the state's domestic political order. National defence, opposition to foreign intervention, religious solidarity, and support for the governing regime are analytically distinct variables. Confusing them risks overstating the political recovery of the Islamic Republic.
The most useful analytical distinction, therefore, may be between three forms of political support:
support for the state, support for the nation, and support for the regime.
They can overlap during wartime, but they are not identical.
This distinction is also essential for understanding Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and other conflict environments where external intervention has repeatedly produced unintended political consequences. The battlefield is not only a contest over territory and military capability. It is also a contest over meaning. Whoever succeeds in defining sacrifice, victimhood, resistance, legitimacy, and historical memory can influence political behaviour long after the immediate military confrontation has ended.
For this reason, the most consequential unintended consequence of war may not be territorial or military at all. It may be the reconstruction of political meaning.
The central lesson for strategic policymakers is therefore straightforward: before attempting to destroy a political order from the outside, one must understand what psychological, historical, religious, national, and symbolic mechanisms may cause external pressure to strengthen rather than weaken its core constituency.
Military power can destroy infrastructure. It can eliminate commanders. It can disrupt institutions.
But it cannot automatically destroy a political narrative.
And when war gives that narrative new meaning, the strategic outcome can become the opposite of what the campaign originally intended.
— Wahidullah Noorzai
Former Senior ANCOP/ANP Officer | Field Strategist & Regional Security Analyst
NOPGC — Noorzai Operational Police Generation Center