Iran’s New Grand Strategy

How a Remade Islamic Republic Will Reshape the Middle East At the outset of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in February 2026, the Islamic Republic appeared battered and weakened. Large-scale bombing had destroyed industry and infrastructure, and a U.S. naval blockade had devastated an already ailing economy. In early March, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” Several weeks later, he declared “total and complete victory.” Three months in, however, the picture looks quite different. Iran retains its military and industrial capacity, and despite Trump’s call for Iranians to topple the regime, no popular uprising is in the offing. The war’s initial aim—to deliver a death blow to the Islamic Republic—has proved unattainable. Rather than breaking Iran, the crucible of war has transformed it in unanticipated ways. To survive and establish new strategic advantages, the Islamic Republic had to adapt and innovate, changing how it waged war, ran the state, and managed society. And it had to do so with unprecedented speed. Tehran is now confident in what it has achieved and determined to consolidate those gains at home and abroad. The war has given rise to a new Iran, one that will reshape the Middle East and influence the course of geopolitics for years to come. Sensing that the Iranian regime was weakened by Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025 and a popular uprising in January 2026, Israel and the United States launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28. They expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over. Many Western observers view the new leadership that emerged during the war, which is dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as more ideologically hard-line and hawkish toward the United States and Israel. But that’s not quite right. What truly distinguishes it is subtler and more consequential. Observers outside Iran focus on the handful of top leaders such as Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader; Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament; and Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the IRGC. More important, however, is the transformation in the ranks below them: a new generation of IRGC commanders and civilian security officials who came of age after the 1979 revolution. They now hold key decision-making positions, and their nationalistic outlook on statecraft and security is redefining the Islamic Republic. The worldviews of the founding generation of the revolution, including former leaders Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, were forged by their long opposition to the U.S.-backed rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and years spent in the shah’s prisons or in exile. Those at the helm today, Iran’s second generation of revolutionaries, including Mojtaba Khamenei, Ghalibaf, and Vahidi, were teenagers and young adults during the Iran-Iraq War. Their worldview was hardened in the trenches of the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Those in the new managerial class of Iran’s political and armed forces, the third generation of the revolution, know nothing but postrevolutionary Iran. The members of this officer class of the armed forces and the IRGC, along with their affiliated security institutions, adopted a structured, technocratic culture and a strategic outlook built around national defense, not revolutionary ideology. And they govern with the confidence of leaders who believe they have successfully defended Iran in two wars against militarily superior powers (last year’s 12-day war and this year’s far larger conflict), achieving something the revolution had only promised: a genuine weakening of American power in the Middle East. The previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the February war, was the product of the intellectual and political currents of pre-revolutionary Iran in the Pahlavi era. His political education had been honed by debate with secular nationalists, leftists, and liberals who shared his goals of toppling the monarchy and standing up to Western imperialism. Once in power, the revolution’s leaders imposed their ideology on Iran, but they never overcame the insecurity inherent in asserting the right to rule over a society that would not wholly submit. The new generation knows none of this firsthand. Most of them were children at the founding of the Islamic Republic and were raised believing in its right to rule. These men did not fight their way to power; they came of age inside the institutions of power, taking their legitimacy as given. The insecurity that marked the founding generation—the constant need to prove that the revolution was real, its claims serious, the old elite truly defeated—is largely absent. They are not defending a revolution. They are administering a state. This psychological distinction ha

Iran’s New Grand Strategy

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