The Tehran that the world knew is gone. It died in the fires with former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war in February. His son and new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — wherever he is and in whatever physical condition — witnessed his father, wife, and other close family members die in the same airstrike that wounded him. The White House believed that the conflict would last only a few weeks, but the Islamic Republic has proven less fragile than anticipated by the United States and Israel, who now must deal with surviving Iranian leaders who experienced similar trauma and loss in early strikes. Washington has struggled to appreciate how its devastating attacks altered Tehran’s mindset: The White House instead still expresses confusion at “crazy” Iranian behavior that won’t return to prewar expectations.
I argue here that the “crazy” Iranian behavior confounding Washington in part reflects a subtle but important shift in Iran’s mindset. The U.S.-led attack was end-of-days fodder for true believers inside the upper echelons of the Islamic Republic, who listened to years of paranoid predictions about just such an apocalyptic attack at weekly Friday prayers. The surviving members of Iran’s inner circle — the New Tehran — are now acting based on an altered set of strategic principles. Despite the tactical brilliance of the U.S. military, the White House cannot find an endgame and risks turning a crisis into a catastrophe if it cannot adjust to Tehran’s new reality.
As a former CIA analyst, my job for many years was to set aside my personal views and instead see the world as Iranian leaders do. My goal was to get inside the heads of Tehran’s hardliners, who have very different perspectives than Western analysts. Such an exercise can be uncomfortable to do with violent authoritarians hostile to the United States — especially when the exercise challenges one’s core assumptions and values — but it provides helpful clarity when an adversary’s behavior defies expectations. Of course, Iranian leaders do not regularly broadcast their private deliberations — and their public statements can be misleading bravado and propaganda. So divining Iran’s true leadership decision-making is often more art than science. Yet, it is still possible to deduce much of their unspoken internal logic by analyzing regime actions and viewing the world through Tehran’s ideological lens.
The White House is engaged in an intense game of Kremlinology, seeking to figure out which leaders are up and down in Tehran. Iran’s decimated inner circle faces internal divisions, which almost certainly are compounded by the uncertainty of Mojtaba Khamenei’s status. Some Western observers have characterized the regime’s condition as leaderless anger incapable of making peace. However, the simplest explanation is that U.S.-Israeli decapitation strikes shifted Iran’s political center of gravity towards the military hardliners around Mojtaba Khamenei who are responsible for fighting the war and who favor more aggressive tactics without Ali Khamenei’s natural caution as a buffer. Public squabbling and factional rivalries are a hallmark of politics in the Islamic Republic, but are often over-indexed by Western observers, so hope that some internal regime fissure will ease America’s dilemma is unrealistic. If the regime survives a few more years, differences between Iran’s newly shuffled leaders perhaps could widen into gulfs and present real forks in the road for Iran, but a shared bunker mentality during this crisis almost certainly will keep their tactical disagreements from being too meaningful for U.S. policy.
Right now, too much focus on Tehran’s leadership dynamics is a distraction that prevents Washington from stepping back and acknowledging that there is some broad strategic coherence to New Tehran’s harder-line posture. Taken collectively, Iran’s actions in the past seven months can be read as reflecting a sober reassessment based on its bitter lessons from the war. New Tehran recognizes that there is little to gain by playing it safe: Its only chance to survive is an aggressive posture that imposes enough cost that the United States and its regional partners can no longer easily threaten the Islamic Republic’s existence — even if that brinksmanship brings the regime’s own survival to the edge.
Below are key elements of New Tehran’s mindset. Understanding how they affect Iranian behavior will be critical for Washington to recalibrate its assumptions and successfully conclude the war.
Can’t Deter “Dead Men Walking.”
The unprecedented decapitation strikes on Iran’s leadership have likely persuaded its surviving members that they are “dead men walking.” The regime change rhetoric from hawks in the United States and Israel during successive attacks on Iran probably has convinced Tehran that its enemies will never stop trying to “finish the job” until the regime and its leadership cadre are dead, regardless of whether there is a ceasefire to end this current round of conflict. President Donald Trump’s regular threats to annihilate the regime probably keep their personal survival top of mind. The question for regime leaders is probably whether the United States and Israel will try again to kill them next month or next year. Iranian leaders likely see more decapitation strikes after the U.S. midterm elections as a credible threat, given reporting that the White House is considering more attacks. Indeed, Mojtaba Khamenei’s disappearing act can probably be explained by the regime’s fear of another targeted attack if the United States and Israel could ever confirm his location.
In 2019, Iran accepted an off-ramp to the conflict started after the United States killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Qods Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. Ali Khamenei feared that all-out war would risk regime survival and encouraged “strategic patience.” Last summer, Iran again accepted a ceasefire to conclude the “12-day war” after Israel and the United States struck Iranian military and nuclear facilities. Ali Khamenei again feared escalation and accepted another ceasefire. More than likely, Iran’s hardliners have since privately concluded that Ali Khamenei’s decision to play it safe ultimately cost him his life.
While this “dead men walking” mindset has eroded U.S. and Israeli deterrence, Iranian leaders are not suicidal and would prefer to find a way to secure their country’s future with their lives intact. Yet, like those committed to ideologies and nationalities around the world, they will die in defense of the Islamic Republic if necessary. And like leaders in many countries, they will maximize the pain for their enemies before their demise.
Iran’s leaders also likely view their survival after the massive U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign as demonstrating the limits of air power alone. Tehran has grown accustomed to Trump’s threats of massive escalation. But Iran’s inner circle probably asks itself: What is he going to do that Iran has not already endured? Will he kill the Supreme Leader again? Pile more rubble on Iran’s nuclear facilities? He has already done all of these things — and continues to conduct periodic airstrikes on Iran’s military to “mow the lawn.” A red line Trump has threatened to cross but largely held back is bombing Iran’s civilian infrastructure, such as water and electricity. Iran has warned that it will inflict the same pain back onto Gulf Arab civilian infrastructure — which is more vulnerable to failure, hence the Gulf’s private pleadings with Trump to avoid such escalation. Iran is mindful that the United States still could send in ground troops and force regime change as it did with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. However, the regime knows how unlikely such a deeply unpopular step would be for the White House, especially given its belief that many of its 90 million citizens would help turn its territory into another quagmire for the U.S. military.
The Israeli Threat is Endemic, The U.S. Threat is Existential
While Iranian leaders recognize that the United States has the military heft to end the Islamic Republic — even if Tehran is skeptical that Trump is willing to pay the high price necessary to do so — Tehran probably calculates that Israel’s small but sophisticated conventional military lacks the mass alone to bring down the Islamic Republic. Which is probably why, in Tehran’s likely estimation, Israeli leaders spent so much energy convincing the United States to join attacks on Iran and accomplish what Israel could not. Iranian leaders almost certainly have watched the gap widen between American and Israeli goals as the war dragged on, with Israel annoyed that the United States doesn’t seem as committed to regime change. Iran expects its deadly battles with Israel across the region to continue — and Iran understands just how lethal Israel can be — but Iranian eyes remain focused on the unique existential threat posed by the U.S. role in the war.
Facts on the Ground, Not Cheap Talk
The United States has sent repeated diplomatic feelers to Iranian leaders through various creative channels about ending the conflict, but Iran’s constant rebuffs indicate that they see most U.S. diplomatic offers as cups of poison. Many Iranian leaders are wary that the United States and Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran twice in the past two years when Tehran’s diplomats were in negotiations with Washington. This pattern probably has confirmed Iranian hardliners’ cynicism that the White House often uses negotiations as a military tactic — either for misdirection to lull Iranian defenses or as a pause to allow the U.S. military time for rest and reinforcements before coming back once more to finish the job. In June, Tehran almost certainly was willing to try the short-lived Memorandum of Understanding because it was sequenced in a way to test whether Washington was indeed willing to accept changed facts on the ground. From Iran’s perspective, the agreement was more than just a simple de-escalatory off-ramp because it recognized Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz — administered jointly with Oman — as a security guarantee against future U.S. attack. It also provided significant sanctions relief without offering any concrete concessions in Iran’s nuclear program. Iranians allege that the United States immediately set about skirting its obligations, including undermining Iranian control of the strait, which Tehran saw as just further evidence of American duplicity.
No Urgency to End Hormuz Standoff
Trump was reportedly surprised that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. The irony is that Iran had not previously closed the strait because it feared U.S. military reprisal for doing so. But once Iran had already suffered the very attack it feared, that calculus flipped. If Tehran had ever attempted to close the strait preemptively, Washington would have been able to organize a worldwide coalition against Iran’s aggression. But because the United States initiated this round of conflict without consulting allies, Europe and Asia will not join a U.S. coalition to help Washington out of its strategic predicament. The U.S.-Israeli attack gave Iran a path to finally wield the strait as a geographic cudgel, and New Tehran is keen to make Washington taste its own medicine: economic pain.
The U.S. military has performed impressive work since August: clawing back open lanes in the strait by escorting tankers, clearing mines, destroying Iran’s closest launch sites, and blinding Iran’s radar systems, briefly almost reaching pre-war shipping levels in late September. Iran’s leaders almost certainly view this partial opening as a tactical development that can be reversed with perseverance and escalation. In early October, Iran’s attacks on tankers reached the highest levels of the war, pushing down tanker traffic levels as per-tanker costs continue to soar. Iranian leaders almost certainly are betting that the U.S. military cannot sustain its white-knuckled level of commitment to military-escorted tanker traffic. Iran’s leaders will have seen the reports that U.S. military leaders elsewhere in the world are already complaining about the unsustainable resource strain necessary to maintain even this partial reopening of the strait. The massive resources needed to sustain this tempo of U.S. military operations long-term will have significant knock-on implications for worldwide readiness. Iran’s hardliners are probably eager to re-teach Washington the bitter lesson of its forever wars: Geography cannot be changed and the U.S. military — despite being the most powerful in the world — cannot outlast the people that live there.
Eyeing U.S. Drawdown as a Chance to Reshape the Region
Iranian leaders believe that the United States is now abandoning its military bases throughout the region — many of which Iran damaged. After decades of American military presence in almost every country in the Middle East, Iran’s hardliners almost certainly hope this means the tide of “U.S. imperialism” is receding. They will have seen the reports that the United States is running out of missiles and interceptors to continue the conflict and are hoping that constraint shakes U.S. military credibility across the globe. New Tehran can glimpse a new post-America reality within reach.
Meanwhile, Iran views the Gulf Arab monarchies as accomplices in America’s attempted murder of the Islamic Republic. U.S. bombs hit Iran from Gulf Arab lands, and Iranian hardliners see American forces eat and sleep in these neighboring countries while U.S. strikes kill Iranian children. Tehran has watched Gulf leaders — who lobby for regime change in Iran — woo Trump and his family with sweetheart financial deals. Tehran now wants Gulf capitals to see U.S. military assets in their respective countries as a liability, not protection. Indeed, Iran is probably confident that Gulf leaders are frustrated enough with the dragging conflict that they will increasingly reach out to Iran to explore a separate peace.
Confident It Can Outlast American Resolve
American leaders have repeatedly declared that its “economic D-Day” pressure campaign will soon collapse Iran’s economy — and therefore the regime. With the U.S. pivot from kinetic strikes to economic pressure several months ago, Iran is prepared for a slugfest battle of wills to find out who can endure more pain. New Tehran is under no illusions: U.S. economic pressure still deeply hurts. Iranian leaders acknowledge how gravely their people suffer under shortages and an increasingly worthless currency. Yet those leaders regularly cite the death of nearly half a million Iranians in its bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s — when food was rationed — as evidence of national grit. New Tehran’s cynical calculation is: What are a few more months of deprivation after decades of economic suffering? Iran has built the tools for a survivalist economy — which White House advisers quietly admit could prolong the economic siege for years. Iran has also proven a repeated ability to find new workarounds to ease the economic pressure constantly ratcheted up from Washington.
Between the U.S. blockade and new sanctions grounding most Iranian air travel, Iran is also looking to Central Asian land routes to skirt the U.S. siege. New Tehran almost certainly is counting on Russia and China to be Iran’s military and financial lifeline. Iran understands that Moscow and Beijing value Tehran as a geopolitical thorn in the side of Washington, and Iranian leaders are willing to play along in Russian and Chinese visions of creating an anti-American world order — and humbling Washington in the Middle East would be a happy bonus for Moscow and Beijing. Since the war began, Russia and China have reportedly provided Iran with missile and drone components, munitions resupply, and even potential targeting intelligence of U.S. military positions — all of which help keep Iran’s military viable. Iran probably believes it can count on Beijing to honor Tehran’s financial deposits in Chinese banks from years of oil trade to purchase critical goods from China, even if that trade slows as blockaded oil revenues decline.
The regime has also discovered there is not the linear relationship between economic strife and political instability that many in Western democracies naturally assume. As in North Korea and Venezuela, a population that loses economic hope tends to be less restive than populations with rising economic expectations, suggesting there is unlikely to be a magic point where economic grievances culminate in some revolutionary arc. Iran’s leaders are also brutal men who have proven willing to kill their own civilians to put down unrest. And Iran retains the ability to further damage Gulf economic infrastructure if the U.S. blockade is truly asphyxiating Iran’s ability to sustain itself.
New Tehran is skeptical that the U.S. economy can handle a longer-term standoff. Iranian leaders accuse the White House of manipulating energy markets to keep oil prices artificially low, but Tehran remains confident that the United States cannot cheat the laws of supply and demand forever. Iran is also aware that the strait’s partial closure has also painfully damaged the export of other key products besides oil — such as liquefied natural gas, fertilizers, and particularly diesel — that are creating critical shortages in the global economy. Greater Houthi control of the coast along the Bab al-Mandeb and repeated damage to Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline add additional stress on global energy prices. New Tehran calculates that when the music stops, oil prices will climb to painful heights that will buckle Washington’s resolve. Iranian leaders gloat that they ended the political career of an American president in 1980 and almost certainly hope to deliver a similar electoral blow in the upcoming U.S. midterm election.
Survival Only Through Strength
Iran’s leverage to strike a favorable deal has ebbed and flowed in the past seven months, but Iran’s red lines for a deal have remained stubbornly unchanged, suggesting that their calculus is more than a simple “cut the best deal available” logic. Some observers may contend that Ali Khamenei’s cautious “live to fight another day” logic is still operable and that Tehran will simply make the best deal it can if or when its leverage decays. But Iran’s primary leverage — closure of the Strait of Hormuz — has been eroding for two months, yet Tehran’s negotiation position has not softened. Tehran’s bar for an acceptable deal appears fixed. As long as Washington is unwilling to provide durable concessions, New Tehran will be prepared to endure a long and painful conflict because it is fighting for its very survival. For New Tehran, no deal — regardless of how tactically favorable a deal is vis-à-vis Iran’s relative position of negotiation leverage — will suffice if the deal doesn’t secure Iran the kinds of tangible gains represented in the Memorandum of Understanding. The regime probably is willing to take the country to the brink of ruin to break the U.S. grip on the region and force the White House to walk away from its hawkish dreams of ending the Islamic Republic.
And if the United States ends the conflict with the Islamic Republic left standing, Tehran’s new hardline leaders will be intent on rebuilding Iran’s strength so that the regime is never again in such a weak position to suffer an attack. Iran will not only rely on its ability to control regional waterways. Iran will widen, harden, and advance its missile and drone program to create new layers of deterrence — though it will probably take years for Iran to fully rebuild its arsenal. Iran will regrow its regional proxy forces that Israel weakened in recent years.
Tehran also likely will reconsider its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Ascendant hardline voices in the regime probably will argue that the caution and moral constraints imposed by Ali Khamenei on the country’s nuclear program only emboldened Iran’s enemies. Trump himself jokingly admitted that he would be more friendly to the Supreme Leader if Iran had a nuclear weapon. Indeed, Iran’s leaders see the stark contrast in how Trump curries favor with nuclear-armed North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un while bombing Iran. New Tehran very likely may soon determine that it is time to become the nuclear-armed Iran that its enemies so deeply fear.
Who Will Blink First?
Although the U.S. military capably executed its mission, the strategic goals for the war miscalculated Tehran’s resistance and evolution in thinking. This misreading of Tehran has left the White House stuck: unwilling to make a humiliating deal or to pay the exorbitant military, political, and economic costs necessary to dislodge the regime. And while U.S. leaders hope its middle-ground plan for slow economic pressure will get lucky and bring Iran to its knees, energy markets tighten, U.S. military resources thin, regional actors question Washington’s leadership, and political allies of the White House defect to oppose the conflict.
If Iran defies Trump’s prediction that the regime will soften its demands after the U.S. midterm elections, the White House may be forced to finally recalibrate to a New Tehran. The United States will then face whether to escalate the conflict or cut its losses and — for now — swallow a less-than-ideal diplomatic solution.
Iran is notorious for defying the expectations of even the most seasoned Iran hands. It is worth considering: What would be indicators that, buried beneath the rubble, Old Tehran’s instincts reassert themselves, and Washington will not face this difficult choice? New Tehran is full of anger and bravado, but that doesn’t mean its worldview accurately understands facts on the ground. The clearest sign that Iranian leaders are returning to past form would be if Iran accepted a simple blockade-for-blockade ceasefire that ended the double enclosure of the Strait of Hormuz and returned regional waters to their pre-war condition. Permutations of a less-for-less deal short of the previous agreement that do not include key durable concessions from the United States would also suggest that Iran’s early war defiance was more temporary rage than a new harder-line doctrine. Iran probably would only accept such a limited ceasefire if it feared internal collapse. Iran’s acceptance of such a ceasefire would indicate that American and Israeli hawks were correct to trust that the U.S. blockade would eventually wear down Iran’s economy and bankrupt the regime’s ability to retain control.
Alternately, it is possible that Iran’s anger and the chaos among Iran’s harder-line inner circle prevent Iran from finalizing a deal — even one that is favorable to the regime. Some of Iran’s military leaders are hostile to the idea of any accommodation with the United States and believe Iran should fight until America is driven from the region. There are some reports that such hardliners helped unravel the Memorandum of Understanding in June by launching unauthorized attacks. If Iran failed to agree — and implement — a future deal more favorable to Iran than the previous agreement, without significant shifts in conditions of the war, that would be a sign that Iran’s leadership is indeed broken and unable to make cohesive decisions.
While there are no easy solutions to the strategic dilemma in which the United States finds itself, bold action may still allow the United States to explore new opportunities amid this crisis. New Tehran has brash ambitions, but it privately understands that it is still weak, suggesting creative diplomatic solutions that address both Iran’s fears and American interests. While Iran probably will not accept a deal that it views as less than the June agreement, Iranian leaders may be open to other imaginative arrangements that could assure New Tehran that it will not re-fight this war in a year and give Washington more room to minimize the most unfavorable parts of the previous agreement.
For example, a newly established multilateral forum that includes regional — and potentially third-party European and Asian — partners to enforce a ceasefire could evolve over time into a regional security framework that lowers the risk of miscalculation and provides mutual security guarantees against one-sided aggression. U.S. congressional action — related to both presidential war powers and sanctions relief — could possibly give Iran extra confidence that the United States will not renege on its promises in a ceasefire and renew the conflict. If the United States is already intending to reduce its military footprint in the region because of vulnerabilities highlighted by the war — combined with changes in military technology reducing the local footprint necessary to maintain significant strike capabilities — America could make a show of conceding to Iran a rollback in U.S. military basing in the region as a tangible sign that the United States is not positioned for renewed conflict.
Such a needle will be difficult to thread politically for the White House, especially after the backlash it received from regional partners and U.S. hawks for the June Memorandum of Understanding. Any similar ending to the conflict will be strategically painful for the United States and likely leave it in a worse strategic position than it was before the war. A revived Islamic Republic will regain military capabilities, regrow regional proxies, and may pursue nuclear weapons. There should be no illusions that Tehran, after such a deal, will be magically cooperative: Rather, its hardline leaders will be as strident and dangerous as ever. But these risks are almost certainly coming back anyway if the regime remains in place. Making such difficult decisions is the job of the U.S. president, who can work with regional partners to collectively manage the slow regrowth of Iran’s military capabilities through rebuilt defenses and restored deterrence — something the region had capably done for many years. Recognizing that this war has been a misstep and cutting its losses would allow the United States to regroup and find its footing in the region again. This would be preferable to the alternative of doubling down on a war against a New Tehran that continues to flummox Washington — at growing cost.
Cole Bucy is a former CIA analyst and served as director for Iran at the National Security Council in 2015 and 2016.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
Image: Amir Pashaei via Wikimedia Commons