When President Donald Trump ordered the strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and a cluster of first-tier commanders on February 28, 2026, the strategic calculus behind the decision appeared unmistakable: replicate the “Venezuelan model,” decapitate the leadership, and the regime’s behavior would change, if not collapse altogether. The gambit failed. The reasons for that failure reveal more about the Islamic Republic’s durability.
The core flaw in Washington’s reading was its conflation of the Supreme Leader with the system itself. That assumption is analytically thin. The Islamic Republic is not a personal autocracy held together by one man’s will. It is a hybrid polity, architecturally designed to balance the logic of the state with the logic of the revolution.
Ali Khamenei spent decades, since 1989, embodying precisely this balance. His was not a pragmatism that compromised the ideology; it was the ideology’s adaptive mechanism at work. He expanded the Axis of Resistance and kept the revolutionary rhetoric at full volume, while simultaneously authorizing nuclear negotiations and calibrating regional escalation. But Khamenei was never the sole guardian of the revolution. The Islamic Republic has developed a dense institutional architecture precisely to ensure ideological continuity regardless of who occupies the highest office.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia are the sharpest instruments of revolutionary enforcement. Layered above them are deliberative bodies: the Guardian Council, charged with vetting legislation and candidates for their adherence to Islamic law, and the Assembly of Experts, which elects the Supreme Leader. Both are dominated by clerics whose institutional loyalties are firmly on the revolutionary side of the ledger. The system is not a hierarchy with a single apex. It is a web, and cutting one node does not collapse the web.
What the assassinations did achieve was the removal of figures who had learned, over time, to mix revolutionary conviction with a degree of openness to negotiated outcomes. Their replacements, now rising within the IRGC hierarchy, appear to have drawn a sharper lesson from the confrontation: that greater radicalism, not less, is the appropriate response to US and Israeli pressure. The strikes, in other words, may well have eliminated the moderating layer between Iran’s revolutionary ideology and its military decision-making. To understand the significance of this shift, one must clarify what is meant by “revolutionary ideology” in the first place.
From Revolutionary Universalism to the Axis of Resistance
Two terms require brief clarification at the outset. “Revolutionary ideology,” as used here, does not denote a fixed doctrinal system with a defined catechism. It refers instead to a mobilizing framework, a set of commitments organized around resistance to the US-led international order, the rejection of Israeli legitimacy, and the belief that these positions must be actively projected through aligned Islamic movements across the region. As a mobilizing framework rather than a creed, it is inherently adaptable. It can contract or expand, intensify or moderate, without ceasing to be itself. This is precisely what makes it durable.
“Pragmatism,” by contrast, is used here in a specific and limited sense, and the Islamic Republic’s history offers three distinct variants that are easily conflated. The first is Khomeini’s pragmatism, which was situational and crisis-driven. When he accepted the 1988 ceasefire with Iraq, describing it as “more deadly than drinking poison,” he was overriding ideology by necessity, not incorporating flexibility into the system’s logic. The second is Khamenei’s pragmatism, which was institutional and strategic. He authorized nuclear negotiations and calibrated regional escalation not as concessions to adversaries but as instruments for sustaining the revolutionary project over the long term. The third is the pragmatism of the reformist current, figures who genuinely sought a grand bargain with the West, believing that ideological retrenchment served neither Iran’s interests nor its people. This third variant is qualitatively different from the first two. It implies a willingness to revise objectives, not merely tactics.[1]
So defined, pragmatism and revolutionary ideology are not opposites in the Iranian case. In its Khamenei variant, pragmatism is the mechanism through which the ideology endures, the means by which it adapts to reality without formally conceding its core premises.
To understand where Iran’s revolutionary ideology stands today, one must trace its trajectory since 1979. The revolution succeeded by declaring a new epoch, an Islamic awakening, and immediately universalizing its message. In the aftermath of the Shah’s fall, Iran’s example animated Shia and Sunni Islamist movements alike across the region. But the ideology that circulates today through the “Axis of Resistance” is not quite the ideology of 1979. It was recast—institutionally, economically, and geographically—by a decade of internal restructuring that began in 1989.
This shift is often understated. The year 1989 did not mark a retreat from revolutionary ideology so much as a reorganization of who controlled it and on what terms. When Ali Khamenei was elevated to Supreme Leader the same year, despite lacking the religious credentials of his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, he owed his position to the political machinery of the state rather than to clerical seniority. His authority was structurally dependent on sustaining the revolutionary institutions, above all the IRGC, that had backed his ascension.
The same period brought a sweeping privatization drive under President Rafsanjani, ostensibly aimed at postwar economic reconstruction. In practice, it transferred substantial state assets into foundations and enterprises controlled by the IRGC and the clerical establishment, entities formally private but politically inseparable from the revolutionary order. When Western sanctions intensified in subsequent decades, it was precisely these networks that proved most adept at circumventing them. Revolutionary ideology and economic self-interest were thus mutually reinforcing. Sanctions have produced an economy that feeds revolutionary ideology within these networks while hollowing it out within society. At the institutional level, this economic strain has not weakened the regime. It has consolidated the actors, above all the IRGC, who benefit most from the confrontational posture that sanctions were designed to penalize.
The Rafsanjani and Khatami governments did attempt genuine diplomatic openings, such as toward Gulf states after the Second Gulf War (1990–91), and they partially succeeded until the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Simultaneously, the cultural gravitational pull of globalization, Western consumer culture, digital connectivity, and liberal individualism exerted increasing pressure on younger Iranians, particularly in urban, middle-class environments where neither the revolution nor the Iran–Iraq War had left firsthand memories. The same dynamic of globalization and Westernization, in varied forms, played out among Shia communities across the region.
The 1990s witnessed the consolidation of the Axis of Resistance, precisely as a counter-current to the Madrid and Oslo peace processes, by hosting several international conferences in support of the First Intifada in Palestine. Iran, along with its Palestinian and Lebanese allies, positioned itself as the organized rejection of any negotiated settlement with Israel. Iran cultivated Shia political organizations in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula while simultaneously attempting outreach to Sunni Islamist movements, eventually building durable relationships with Palestinian resistance movements—Islamic Jihad and Hamas—and becoming their principal external patron. The Islamic Republic projected itself as the vanguard of an authentically Islamic challenge to Western hegemony, while simultaneously managing a domestic political economy increasingly organized around the confrontational posture that ideology demanded.
Iran’s bid for pan-Islamic leadership had always rested on an uneasy foundation: a Shia state claiming to speak for a predominantly Sunni region. That tension, long managed through shared opposition to Israel and the United States, became increasingly difficult to contain as Iran’s regional footprint grew more explicitly sectarian. Deliberate sectarian incitement, whether by regional states seeking to contain Iranian influence or by jihadist movements with their own agendas, proved effective in driving a wedge between Iran and Sunni Islamist movements that had once shared the grammar of Islamic awakening. The Syrian civil war became the starkest illustration. Movements that had once stood on common ground were now fighting one another. Iran’s revolutionary appeal, which had once aspired to be pan-Islamic, contracted steadily into a primarily Shia political space. In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, Tehran adapted, investing in Shia political formations in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen while maintaining its Palestinian partnerships as a bridge across the sectarian divide. The war in Yemen, which erupted in 2015, illustrated a further dimension of this dynamic. The Houthis, a movement that had developed its own revolutionary Islamic ideology independently before drawing closer to Iran, became an illustration of how the Axis of Resistance could expand beyond direct Iranian cultivation. The Saudi-led intervention in Yemen deepened Iran’s alignment with the Houthis, bringing into the Axis of Resistance a movement that does not subscribe to Wilayat al-faqih, a reminder that the Axis is held together by shared enmities more than shared theology.
The Nationalization of Revolutionary Fervor
The Israeli campaign against Iran and its allies following October 7, 2023, struck at the transnational dimension of Iranian revolutionary ideology with unusual precision. The assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was particularly consequential. More than a close ally, Nasrallah was the most credible and compelling external embodiment of the Iranian revolutionary idea. He was a figure who translated the ideology into an indigenous Lebanese and Arabic idiom and made it electorally and militarily formidable.
With Nasrallah gone and the Palestinian cause militarily constrained, the revolutionary project has folded inward. Khamenei himself had actively encouraged a synthesis between revolutionary Islam and Iranian national identity, but the Israeli strikes of summer 2025 accelerated that fusion. The Supreme Leader’s decision to incorporate nationalist poetry into the profoundly religious occasion of Ashura was a revealing signal. The regime was consciously building on the national solidarity generated by foreign attack, understanding that external aggression is among the most reliable mobilizers of domestic cohesion.
This dynamic is historically consistent. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s consolidated an initially fragile revolutionary government into a cohesive state apparatus precisely because Saddam Hussein’s invasion unified Iranians across factional lines. The current conflict appears to be following a similar logic, with US and Israeli strikes producing patriotic solidarity even among Iranians who harbor deep reservations about the Islamic Republic’s domestic governance. The difference is one of degree, not kind. In the 1980s, the regime was consolidating from weakness. Today it is defending from a position of entrenched institutional depth.
The cost of this nationalization, however, is the attenuation of the transnational dimension. An ideology that becomes primarilynationalist in content is an ideology that has, in part, conceded its universalist ambitions. Whether the battlefield contributions of Iran’s allies in the current war suffice to reverse this contraction remains an open question, one whose answer depends heavily on the war’s outcome.
Radicalism at the Helm: The Post-Khamenei Transition
The manner of Khamenei’s death matters. A natural succession would have involved institutional deliberation, coalition-building, and the likely emergence of a figure who combined revolutionary credentials with some form of pragmatic flexibility. His assassination has changed those incentives. Within an institution like the IRGC, whose identity is built around confrontation with external enemies, the killing of the Supreme Leader by the US and Israel does not generate pressure toward compromise, but rather pressure toward escalation.
This dynamic interacts uneasily with the reform-minded current within the Iranian system — officials and constituencies who have long sought a grand bargain with the United States, an agreement that would trade certain strategic postures for economic normalization. That constituency has not disappeared, but Washington has, on multiple occasions, foreclosed the deals that might have empowered it. And the assassination of senior leadership has dealt its remaining credibility a severe blow. The moderates’ argument, that negotiation is possible and beneficial, is considerably harder to advance when the other side is eliminating your interlocutors.
The Structural Limits of Revolutionary Mobilization
Despite the radicalizing pressures of the current conflict, Iran’s revolutionary ideology faces durable structural constraints that no military outcome will easily dissolve.
Economically, the combination of sustained sanctions and the costs of active conflict have placed enormous strain on Iranian society. The regime’s legitimacy among those segments of the population most susceptible to revolutionary mobilization, urban youth and the professional middle class, is not automatically restored by battlefield developments. These constituencies have their own grievances, their own aspirations, and their own relationships with satellite television, social media, and Western popular culture—a world that the revolutionary state regards with suspicion.
Regionally, the picture is similarly complex. Gulf Shia communities, with the partial exception of Bahrain, are generally disinclined toward revolutionary adventurism. These communities, especially in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have accumulated material stakes in existing arrangements. While pockets of resistance persist at considerable cost to those involved, the dominant tendency within these communities has been toward economic participation rather than political confrontation. Bahrain is a different case. The embers of the 2011 uprising have never been fully extinguished. The structural grievances that fueled it, namely the systematic exclusion of the Shia majority from senior positions in the security services, the judiciary, and the upper echelons of the economy, which has remained unaddressed. Unlike their counterparts in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia or the wealthier neighboring states, Bahraini Shia communities have not been meaningfully incorporated into the material arrangements that elsewhere mitigate the incentives for open confrontation with the state. It is precisely this combination of political marginalization and economic exclusion that keeps the ground fertile for Iranian revolutionary ideology. Where material grievance and sectarian solidarity converge, Tehran’s ideological appeal finds a more receptive audience than anywhere else in the Gulf.
Among Saudi Shia, no visible public reaction to the war has emerged. Those who sympathize with Iran are unlikely to express that sympathy beyond private settings. Religious networks remain wary of severe security reprisals, while any armed current was effectively suppressed during the 2017 security operations in the old city of Awamiyah, Qatif.
Iraq presents a different configuration. While some Iraqi Shia factions have actively supported Iran-aligned military operations against US and Israeli targets since October 7, the broader Shia political landscape has moved in a more restrained direction. Even factions long assumed to be close allies of Tehran, including Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (The League of the Righteous), which previously declared explicit loyalty to the doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih, have progressively moderated as they have become more deeply embedded in Iraq’s political system. Electoral competition and the imperatives of state-building tend to domesticate revolutionary movements. As a result, most Iraqi Shia political actors are focused less on advancing revolutionary ambitions than on stabilizing the country and managing its internal contradictions.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah commands the loyalty of a substantial majority of the Shia community, yet divisions within that community have deepened since the organization’s decision to open a military front against Israel following October 7. Whatever the legitimacy of the decision to join the current battle in light of systematic Israeli violations of the November 2024 ceasefire, a segment of the Shia public has grown weary of displacement, bombardment, and the recurring cycle of confrontation. Revolutionary ideology can endure popular exhaustion for considerable periods, but it cannot disregard it indefinitely.
Iran’s relations with its broader Sunni neighbors remain deeply hostile. Antipathy toward Iranian regional ambitions is pronounced across much of the Arab Sunni political landscape, though Iran appears to have significant support among Palestinians and, notably, among Egyptian Sunnis who have recently expressed public solidarity with Iran.
The persistence of Israeli military operations across Gaza and beyond continues to generate radicalizing pressures within Sunni communities that have no organizational connection to Iran. These pressures are not uniformly channeled, and many will find expression through forms of political Islam that have no relationship, and considerable hostility, toward Tehran. But in an environment of sustained Israeli military action and direct US involvement, intersections between some of these currents and Iranian strategic objectives are not implausible, particularly if Hamas survives in Gaza with its operational capacity intact.
Iran’s continued partnership with Palestinian resistance movements has historically functioned as its most effective bridge across the Shia-Sunni divide. It remains the Islamic Republic’s most powerful source of legitimacy in the wider Muslim world, one that neither sectarian alignment nor geopolitical rivalry can entirely neutralize.
The Impact of the War’s Outcome
Iran’s revolutionary ideology enters the post-Khamenei era under simultaneous pressure and renewal. The external attacks that killed the Supreme Leader and eroded the Axis of Resistance have, paradoxically, provided the conditions for a new wave of internal and external mobilization.
Behind the geopolitical calculus lies a society that has paid an enormous human cost—in lives lost, in displacement, and in grief. The structural constraints are real: an exhausted economy, a restive society, a regional environment in which many Shia actors have chosen pragmatism over revolutionary solidarity, and a Sunni world that views Iranian ambitions with suspicion. These constraints will not vanish with the end of the current war. But neither will the ideology. Revolutionary ideas rarely die; they contract, adapt, and wait for the conditions that allow them to expand again.
The decisive variable is the war’s outcome. A result that the Islamic Republic and its allies can credibly frame as a strategic success would restore legitimacy to the revolutionary project across much of the regional Shia landscape, and potentially beyond it. Conversely, an outcome that clearly disadvantages Iran would accelerate the contraction already underway. What it is unlikely to do, however, is bring the ideology to an end. Revolutions that have institutionalized themselves as deeply as Iran’s do not simply dissolve; they evolve. And the form that Iran’s revolutionary ideology assumes after this war will be shaped, above all, by how this war itself is resolved.
[1] For scholarly treatments of the distinction between pragmatist, reformist, and hardliner currents in post-revolutionary Iranian politics, see Saïd Amir Arjomand, After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors (Oxford University Press, 2009): 65–70 on the emergence of these factions, and 133–148 on the transition from revolutionary export to pragmatism in foreign policy.