Khatiri, National Review: Khamenei’s Last Hope
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gives a press conference in Tehran, Iran, May 10, 2024.(Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)
Read Dissident Project speaker Shay Khatiri’s new article in National Review.
or too long, Americans have looked at Iran’s nuclear program as primarily a military question. Separately, they look at political trends, wondering where the regime is headed. That misses the point. The nuclear program is the crown jewel of Iran’s foreign policy, which itself is an outgrowth of domestic trends. For the past two decades, the state has compensated for losing its ideological footing at home by becoming more extreme in its foreign policy.
Today, it finds itself at a critical point: With recent foreign policy setbacks having put it on the back foot abroad, a very secular polity, and irrecoverable economic conditions, the state needs nuclear weapons not just for deterrence but especially to persuade its supporters that the Islamic Republic is still worth defending.
This is not immediately evident to Americans because they underestimate the power of ideology and thereby fail to accept the static structure of the Islamic Republic — a folly that has been deforming American policy in the Middle East. In 1979, months after the foundation of the Islamic Republic, Jeane Kirkpatrick explained this distinction in her seminal essay “Dictatorship and Double Standards.” A traditional autocracy can evolve because its authority lies in the customs and traditions of its polity, which are fluid. Unlike traditional autocracies, ideological totalitarians have no room for evolution and little for compromise. The Islamic Republic is a revolutionary, ideological, totalitarian regime. With a mandate from Allah, it seeks to penetrate every layer of the polity and indoctrinate everyone within. The revolution is perpetual, and perpetual revolution requires perpetual war.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was born out of three promises: public practice of Islamic law, economic leveling, and anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism — one might say that, like Ronald Reagan, Ruhollah Khomeini had a three-legged stool of social, economic, and foreign policies. These three ideals were a reaction to the trends under the last shah. Half a century later, the state is facing a crisis of legitimacy for its failure to deliver on its promises.
Domestically, secular women are increasingly resisting compulsory wearing of the hijab, a pillar of the revolution on par with anti-Zionism. A retired general was recently caught on video criticizing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — a redline increasingly crossed by regime hard-liners in recent years — for being too easy on women who no longer observe the hijab law. Mosques have never been quieter in Iran, and alcohol consumption has never been higher. Un-Islamic music is played loudly in every car. To add insult to injury, there is often a dog in it. (Islam bans dog ownership.)
Economic dissatisfaction is another feature of everyday life. Iranians are getting poorer. In 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini railed against poverty and economic inequality and famously promised to make utilities free. Today, power and water outages are daily occurrences. Poverty is mounting. At every corner, children search the trash for food. Even the regime’s rank and file are struggling. But not the elite. The guardians of the revolution and their children live luxurious lives. Thanks to social media and smartphones, photographic evidence of both widespread poverty and regime fat cats travels at the speed of light, creating a gut-wrenching contrast. Whereas most Iranians, including supporters of the Islamic Republic, drive 1980s-vintage Kias or Peugeots from the ’90s, the streets of Tehran are filled with the latest models of Maserati, and everyone assumes that the driver is the son of someone connected to the regime.
Conservative youth are the most politically important demographic for the state. Though only a small percentage of the population, they do the regime’s dirty work. They are often recruited from mosques to join the Basij militia. At a time when, to separate themselves from the theocracy, even most of the faithful do not attend mosque services, it is a safe bet that regular mosque-goers are regime partisans. Officials rely also on the judgment of trusted imams who identify candidates to recruit for the Basij. Members of the Basij rise through the ranks and are tasked with state security, be it fighting in Syria, spying on citizens, or beating up and shooting at protesters. They also get priority for the top STEM jobs, so they can later be recruited by the military and defense industry. If the state loses its Basij members, it will lose control.
Here is where it gets tricky for the Islamic Republic. The state’s survival depends on maintaining a certain level of popular support, especially among young conservatives. To make up for the shrinking population of its supporters, the state tries to increase their revolutionary fervor. Their intensity has been waning recently because the Islamic Republic is failing to realize its revolutionary mandates.
Today, thanks to new technologies, the contrasts between the elites and the working class circulate, as they did not in the ’70, in the form of indisputable evidence. Also, back then young, religious men began migrating from villages to major cities. Seeing them for the first time, they failed to recognize their own country. There, Islam did not exist as a feature of public life. That led to a resentment that culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Shackled by a collapsing economy and a hostile and uncooperative population, the state is falling short of its ideals. The state cannot fill the mosques when most young people are militantly anti-Islam. (Shiism is the state religion, and less than a third of Iranians identify as Shiite Muslims.) It has given up on cracking down on women for improper hijab-wearing (or for not wearing it at all) and on other forms of un-Islamic public practices. These practices remain unlawful, but the government simply lacks the money to hire enough cops — especially when many of them have proven to be not too enthusiastic about enforcing Islamic law. The regime’s economic policy is full of contradictions. Its communistic structure results in the distribution of poverty. Always fearful of war and sanctions, it has a bias for domestic production and against foreign imports (a ruinous policy). To maintain the support of its elites, Tehran must turn a blind eye to their corruption, which in turn demoralizes the state’s foot soldiers. (The supreme leader once regretted that many young Iranians have a greater passion for the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid than for the regime’s objectives. As a literally card-carrying fan of Real Madrid, the author of this essay must concede that Khamenei, for once, is correct.)
But these problems alone do not explain the demoralization of the regime’s supporters. Cracks in the third leg of the stool, foreign policy, are what might prove lethal. The state does not compromise with its dissidents, but it does so with its supporters. For the past two decades, the loss of heaven at home was substituted by making life hell for Americans and Israelis.
Since the 2000s, the state had made its people — not the Iranian people, but the Islamic Republic’s people — happy by undermining the international order. Its satellite, Hamas, became the government of Gaza. It maintained a nuclear program. It backed an insurgency in Iraq that led to the eventual withdrawal of the U.S. military in 2011 and killed thousands of Americans. The Islamic Republic saved the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria for a time and parked its military on Israel’s borders. It transformed Hezbollah into a fearsome — or so it was thought — force that Israel had to reckon with.
American policymakers who were hoping that Iran’s increased moderation on social issues at home was an early indicator of changes in foreign policy misunderstood that the outcome of that domestic moderation was in fact regional terror. They confused the relationship between the regime — the state and the ever-shrinking number of people who willingly follow it and buy into its ideology — and the people. The moderation on social issues reflects not a compromise between the two sides but negative polarization. As the regime increases violence against dissent, people do not become more religious; they curse the saints. As they curse the saints, they create a crisis for the state, as it needs to maintain legitimacy among its supporters.
The regime is on its back foot abroad, too. On their Telegram channels, Basij members bemoan that the U.S. military remains in the region and attacks Iran’s proxies with impunity. Gaza is nearly leveled, and Israel has assassinated key figures, from Iranian military officers to Hamas leaders, while Iran failed to kill a single Israeli as it sought revenge in two rounds of missile and drone barrages.
Hezbollah’s slain leader, Hassan Nasrallah, occupied a unique place in the regime. A story may explain his place as an icon. Hassan Khomeini is the grandson of the regime’s founder, the late Ruhollah Khomeini, and the custodian of his grandfather’s mausoleum. Hassan Khomeini supported the Green Movement protests in 2009. During his speech on the anniversary of his grandfather’s death, Basij members, who were most of the attendees, chanted, “The real grandson of Ruhollah is Seyed Hassan Nasrallah,” acclaiming the Lebanese leader as the heir to the revolution.
The Israeli strike that killed Nasrallah was a critical juncture. On their Telegram channels, younger regime supporters began criticizing the regime’s direction, calling it too soft. On live state TV, a young journalist reporting from Beirut went off script, attacking the regime’s policies of the past several years, characterizing them as too lenient toward the U.S. and Israel. He complained that Tehran had been too accommodating of the Americans rather than taking the fight to them. Stopping short of calling out Khamenei, he ended his rant, “Mr. Islamic Republic, wake up!”
Since Israel killed Nasrallah, the Islamic Republic has taken a turn for the worse. The pager operation and subsequent invasion of Lebanon eliminated Hezbollah as a formidable military force. That in turn enabled the Lebanese government to take steps toward eliminating it as a domestic political bloc. Not long after, Assad’s regime in Syria unexpectedly fell; rather than rush to save it, Iran withdrew its forces. In Iran, as for some protesters at Columbia University last year, Houthis are the last hope, and a waning one, for the resistance.
The revolutionary grievances that led to the triumph of the Islamic Revolution and to the ousting of the shah were threefold: capitulation to America, the undermining of public Islam by cultural liberalism, and the corruption of the pampered elite as the poor starved. It’s déjà vu all over again — this time, on the theocracy’s watch. The nuclear program is Khamenei’s last chance to save his regime and leave a legacy.
Ten years ago, he needed the money from a deal more than he needed uranium enrichment. His missile program was not advanced enough for a weapon. His regional footing was strong, with his military, proxies, and satellites spread everywhere, and especially with Hezbollah on Israel’s neck. Most importantly, he did not have much to prove at home. He was already on a winning streak. The only problem was that dealing with the Americans is a taboo among the hard-liners and the conservative youth. So he gave the green light to Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Javad Zarif — at the time, the president and foreign minister, respectively, both of them moderate and despised by the hard-liners — for a nuclear agreement, and he saved face by distancing himself from them and the 2015 nuclear deal publicly. Qom Seminary students have a reputation in Iran for being greedy and fat: Khamenei had his cake and ate it too.
This time, Khamenei is playing the same cards but with a different objective. He wants a nuclear weapon, not another agreement, but he still needs time, and he must fend off an attack on his nuclear sites. As they did last time, both the Islamic Republic and the American president want to reach a diplomatic agreement. Khamenei is not going to come out in favor of negotiations, but he is not getting in their way, either, as they delay the military strike, looming over his head, against his precious nuclear program.
Even if one sets aside the destruction that a nuclear-armed Iran would be capable of, the stakes for Iran are still very high: it is survival or collapse. A nuclear weapon would revitalize morale among the rank and file who keep the regime in power. A decisive attack that would destroy the program for good would damage beyond repair the regime’s legitimacy among its supporters.
The critical failure of U.S. policy toward Iran has been its utter ignorance of the Islamic Republic’s internal politics. The state seeks survival, which means that it seeks to keep its people happy. President Donald Trump perceives himself as a great dealmaker, but he should be wary: the only deal that would satisfy Khamenei would allow him either to acquire a nuclear weapon or to reconstitute Hezbollah and Hamas and bring Nasrallah and Qasem Soleimani back from the dead.
Or he can remember what happened the last time he attacked the Islamic Republic, by killing Soleimani: Iran hid in its shell, waiting for Joe Biden to become president. Except that this time, the regime might die waiting.
