In what should surprise absolutely no one who has watched five decades of Western military interventions in West Asia, Israeli intelligence has reportedly concluded that Iran’s new leadership is more extreme and ideologically rigid than the one it replaced.
The finding emerged from a closed-door briefing delivered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. According to reports, Israeli military and intelligence officials warned lawmakers that Iran’s current leadership—shaped by war, assassination, and external pressure—has become more hardline, not less.
This outcome was not only predictable; it was practically inevitable.
The Rise of the IRGC Generation
Iran’s emerging leadership cohort is heavily drawn from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an institution that has steadily gained influence over the past four decades as external pressure on the country intensified.
These figures are widely viewed as more ideologically rigid than the previous political elite. Years of sanctions, covert operations, assassinations of senior officials, and now direct military confrontation have pushed power toward security institutions rather than civilian political networks.
War has a way of doing that.
In political systems under siege, the people who rise are rarely moderates. They are the ones who survived the battlefield, the intelligence war, and the internal struggle for power.
The result is a leadership class forged in confrontation rather than diplomacy.
Personal Stakes in the Conflict
The hardening of Iran’s leadership is not just institutional—it is also personal.
Many of the individuals now shaping policy have lost colleagues, family members, or close associates in recent strikes. Some have been wounded by themselves. Such experiences rarely produce conciliatory politics.
Instead, they reinforce a worldview that sees compromise as weakness and confrontation as a necessity.
Even the absence of Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—has fueled speculation about the direction of Iran’s future leadership. Reports suggest he may be even harder-line than his father, though he has not appeared publicly since the U.S.–Israeli attacks began.
Whether he ultimately plays a central role or not, the broader trend is unmistakable: Iran’s political center of gravity has shifted toward the security state.
History Repeating: The Lesson of 1980
What many policymakers appear to forget is that this dynamic has already played out once in Iran—and with remarkably similar results.
In 1980, when Saddam Hussein launched his invasion of Iran, the newly established Islamic Republic was in a deeply fragile state. The revolutionary government was divided internally, the economy was collapsing, and political factions were battling for control of the post-revolutionary order.
To many outside observers, the regime in Tehran appeared to be on the brink of collapse.
Saddam and his advisers believed the invasion would deliver the final blow. Iraqi intelligence assumed that Iran’s internal divisions would trigger uprisings and possibly even counter-revolution. In other words, they expected the Iranian state to fracture under pressure.
Instead, the exact opposite happened.
Rather than turning against the revolutionary government, Iranians rallied around it in the face of foreign invasion. Nationalism, religion, and wartime mobilization fused into a powerful political force that strengthened the regime’s legitimacy.
The war became what historians later described as the crucible that forged the Islamic Republic.
The Birth of the Security State
It was during this period that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) transformed from a revolutionary militia into the central pillar of Iran’s political and military system.
The war expanded the Guard’s power, numbers, and prestige. The Basij volunteer forces were mobilized. The state used wartime mobilization to consolidate control, suppress internal rivals, and deepen ideological indoctrination across society.
By the early 1980s, the regime that had once looked fragile had instead become far more durable and far more radicalized.
External pressure did not weaken the revolutionary state.
It hardened it.
The Pattern Reappears
Today’s developments appear to be following a similar trajectory.
Israeli intelligence now reportedly concludes that Iran’s new leadership—dominated by figures tied to the IRGC—is more ideologically rigid than the previous political elite.
But this outcome should not be surprising.
History shows that war rarely produces moderates in revolutionary systems. It tends instead to elevate the most disciplined, militant, and ideologically committed actors.
That is exactly what happened in Iran in the 1980s.
And it may be happening again now.
The Strategic Paradox
The paradox facing Washington and its allies is therefore familiar.
Efforts intended to weaken or destabilize Iran risk producing the opposite result: a more unified society, a more powerful security apparatus, and a more radical leadership.
The same pattern repeated across Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
And Iran’s own history suggests it may repeat there as well.
When a nation perceives itself under existential threat, politics shifts toward those who promise resistance rather than compromise.
In Iran, that almost always means the Revolutionary Guard.
The Eternal Fantasy of “Liberators”
Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, some voices in Washington continue to repeat the same refrain heard before the Iraq invasion in 2003:
The people will greet us as liberators.
History has repeatedly shown how detached that assumption is from reality.
It did not happen in Iraq.
It did not happen in Afghanistan.
And it is unlikely to happen in Iran.
Afghanistan offers perhaps the starkest example. After more than twenty years of occupation, trillions of dollars spent, and thousands of lives lost, the United States withdrew—only to see the Taliban regain full control of the country within weeks.
The grand project of nation-building collapsed almost overnight, leaving behind a fragile state that quickly reverted to the very movement the intervention was meant to defeat.
The Same Architects of Failure
What makes the current moment particularly striking is that many of the same policymakers who advocated for past regime-change operations are again calling for similar strategies in Iran.
These figures supported the interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria—policies that destabilized entire regions and produced prolonged conflict.
Libya descended into fragmentation and militia rule after NATO’s intervention.
Syria became a grinding proxy war that reshaped the region’s geopolitical landscape.
Iraq remains politically fractured more than two decades after the invasion.
Yet the lesson many of these strategists appear to have drawn is not caution, but persistence.
The Misreading of Iran’s Internal Politics
In the opening days of the recent bombing campaign, the Trump administration seemed to assume that Iran’s political system might collapse under the pressure.
The expectation—expressed implicitly and sometimes explicitly—was that mass protests would erupt and topple the Islamic Republic.
That did not happen.
Despite the loss of dozens of senior civilian and military leaders, the state has not fractured. Iran’s political institutions remain intact, and the country’s security apparatus continues to function.
President Trump has recently suggested that these losses amount to a form of “regime change.” But leadership decapitation is not the same as systemic collapse.
In many cases, it has the opposite effect.
External attacks often strengthen internal cohesion, consolidating power around the most disciplined and ideologically committed factions.
Diplomacy in the Shadow of War
Against this tense backdrop, diplomacy is tentatively underway.
Vice President JD Vance traveled to Pakistan for high-level talks involving Iranian officials, signaling an attempt to open a channel for negotiation even as hostilities continue.
Reports indicate that around seventy Iranian officials traveled with the Tehran delegation, suggesting an effort to present a unified negotiating front.
But expectations for a breakthrough remain low.
The two sides reportedly entered the discussions with positions that are far apart, reflecting the deep mistrust that has accumulated over decades of confrontation.
The Predictable Consequence
If Israeli intelligence assessments are correct—that Iran’s new leadership is more extreme than the one before—it should not be viewed as a mystery.
It is the logical consequence of sustained external pressure, assassination campaigns, sanctions, and military conflict.
When a nation is pushed into a permanent state of siege, moderates rarely gain influence.
Hardliners do.
That pattern has repeated itself across history and across regions. Iran may simply be the latest example.
And unless policymakers absorb that lesson, it is unlikely to be the last.
There isn’t a single objective that has been furthered in any way with this war.
If the objective was to denuclearize Iran – if anything – Iran now has more incentive to nuclearize, given an attack by two nuclear powers (who openly flaunt ‘nuking Iran’, ‘destroying its civilization’, and ‘turning it back into the stone-age’).
If the objective was to undermine America’s principal rivals, i.e., Russia and China, then, if anything, they have benefited from the war, and it has been the West that has suffered economically and splintered as a result.
If the objective was to decapitate the regime and bring about a new regime, if anything, Iran’s new government is now patently more hardline and militant. The consequences of this will be felt by the people of Iran and the region for many decades to come.
No matter how this ends, for the U.S., this war is a monumental, strategic disaster – caused by listening to Israel’s Netanyahu, instead of listening to America’s own experts (who were all fired en masse by the Trump administration under Israeli influence). Mark my words, this is a catastrophic own goal that historians will judge a key turning point for America.
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