Tehran’s Hard-Liners Squandered Decades of Strategic Capital and Undermined Deterrence
Afshon Ostovar
On June 12, Israel unleashed a series of strikes that damaged Iranian nuclear facilities and missile sites, destroyed gas depots, and, critically, killed scores of top regime officials. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei remains alive. But his most important deputies—including Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of the armed forces, and Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—are dead.
A few years ago, the sudden, near-simultaneous killing of Bagheri, Salami, and a host of other senior leaders would have been unthinkable. Over three decades, the hard-liners who control Iran’s regime had built up what seemed like a formidable system of deterrence. They stockpiled ballistic missiles. They developed and advanced a nuclear enrichment program. Most important, they established a network of foreign proxies that could routinely harass Israeli and U.S. forces.
But Iran’s hard-liners overplayed their hand. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the regime’s leaders opted for a campaign of maximum aggression. Rather than letting Hamas and Israel fight it out, they unleashed their proxies at Israeli targets. Israel, in turn, was compelled to expand its offensive beyond Gaza. It succeeded in severely degrading Hezbollah, the most powerful of Tehran’s proxy groups, and eviscerating Iranian positions in Syria—indirectly contributing to the collapse of the Assad regime. Iran responded to this aggression by unleashing the two largest ballistic missile attacks ever launched against Israel. But Israel, backed by the U.S. military and other partners, repelled those attacks and incurred little damage. It then struck back.
With that, the foundation of Iran’s deterrence strategy crumbled. Its ruling regime became more vulnerable and exposed than at any point since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. And Israel, which has dreamed of striking Iran for decades, had an opportunity it decided it could not pass up.
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REVOLUTIONARY HUBRIS
Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, leaders in Tehran have cultivated a web of proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq—and developed ties with the Assad regime in Syria. These regional alliances, paired with Tehran’s robust ballistic missile program, allowed Iran to threaten adversaries directly and from afar, giving hard-liners core sources of power. The country’s leadership wasn’t immune to pressure: it pursued nuclear negotiations with the United States in 2015, for example, to help alleviate the economic pain created by sanctions. But even these talks facilitated Iran’s rise as a regional power. The resulting Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action provided Tehran with extensive sanctions relief without limits on its defense, other than temporary guardrails on enrichment. In 2018, the United States withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions. But Iran’s consequent nuclear provocations served as a lightning rod to absorb outside pressure and insulate the regime’s other malign behavior.
In October 2023, the Islamic Republic was peaking. It exerted heavy influence over a wide swath of land, from Iraq to the Mediterranean. It had bullied neighboring Arab rivals, namely Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, into submission. And Iranian proxies, armed with rockets, missiles, and drones, were keeping constant pressure on Israel.
In October 2023, the Islamic Republic was at its peak.
The October 7 attacks seemed, at first, to only further empower Iran. After all, Tehran’s primary regional adversary was suddenly enmeshed in an all-consuming conflict. Iran thus encouraged its proxies to join the fight against Israel, creating a united, regionwide front under Tehran’s leadership. Hezbollah’s persistent rocket fire into northern Israel forced civilians there to flee the towns near the border with Lebanon. In Yemen, the Houthis expanded their attacks to commercial shipping in the Red Sea, putting a severe strain on global commerce and compelling the United States to concentrate significant naval power and resources on countering their aggression. By mid-2024, Iran and its proxies were seriously testing the U.S.-led regional order.
Yet within a few short months, Iran’s regional framework all but collapsed. Israeli military offensives eviscerated Hamas in Gaza and devastated Hezbollah in Lebanon—key nodes in Iran’s decades-long pressure campaign against Israel. Then came the surprising fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, in December. Syria had been vital to Iran’s larger deterrence architecture not only because it presented another front against Israel but also because Syrian territory—which shares a long border with Lebanon and northern Israel—contained the main route through which Iran supplied weapons to Hezbollah and to Palestinian militants in the West Bank.
In the face of these setbacks, Iran could have opted to regroup. Instead, it opted to escalate the conflict with Israel by directly striking the country in April and October 2024. By taking such action, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had hoped to showcase its military might and reestablish deterrence. Instead, the IRGC exposed the limitations of its missile capabilities. Even though the April and October strikes were the largest-ever ballistic missile attacks against Israel, Israel’s vaunted air defenses, combined with those of the United States and its regional partners, intercepted almost all of Iran’s drones and missiles. The small handful that did strike Israeli territory either missed their targets or did insignificant damage.
The attacks exposed Iran as weak. They also prompted Israel to hit back against Iran directly, using its superior airpower to destroy key Iranian air defense batteries and military facilities in October, shattering the final barrier that had previously prevented Tehran’s adversaries from using military force against its territory. Iranian deterrence collapsed.
WINDS OF CHANGE
Despite the setbacks the Iranian regime had suffered, its leadership and military commanders were far from admitting defeat at the beginning of 2025. In a March 2025 speech, Salami rejected the idea that Iran had lost its competitive edge, touting the Islamic Republic’s very survival as proof of the effectiveness of its grand strategy. The regime, after all, had been at war not with small powers but with large ones that had the most advanced weapons, equipment, and militaries. “It is miraculous that our nation has been able to stand up to arrogant powers,” Salami said. He struck a similar tone in a May speech, stating, “A nation [that] is not captive, a nation [that] raises the banner of resistance and acts on the words of its supreme leader with all its heart, such a nation will never be defeated.”
Now, of course, Salami is dead, and it is harder than ever for Iran to claim it has won its engagements. In just a few days, Israel has done significant damage to Tehran’s military and nuclear program. Although the true scale of the destruction is known only to Iranian leaders, it is unlikely that the country will easily rebound from this low ebb. Perhaps most significant, Iran has lost nearly all of its ability to defend its skies from adversaries. Its once hailed air defenses have been destroyed or made inoperable across most of the country. Its missile stockpiles have been depleted, many of its mobile launchers have been destroyed, and the facilities it used to manufacture missiles and process their fuel lie mostly in smoldering ruins. Finally, much of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has been damaged or destroyed. Iran may still possess a stockpile of highly enriched uranium and some underground cascades of centrifuges. But in the near term, nuclear enrichment no longer provides deterrent value.
Added to this is the loss of the defense establishment’s brain trust. The assassinations of numerous veteran commanders and military officials, including General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force and the architect of its missile strategy, will leave a gaping hole in the regime and erase knowledge built on decades of experience. The regime has already replaced these commanders, but what cannot be duplicated so quickly is the trust that their predecessors had earned from Khamenei, the commander in chief, and the influence that they held over the regime’s grand strategy.
Iran has lost nearly all of its ability to defend its skies from adversaries.
Faced with such a defeat, the regime could accept defeat, cut its losses, and seek compromise with Israel and the United States. That path, at the very least, would require the regime to abandon enrichment. It could also mean that Tehran has to give up its missile program, end support to proxies, and renounce its goal of destroying Israel. But as much as the Iranian people would prefer this outcome, for the regime it would be tantamount to total surrender, viewed as a solution that would portend the eventual collapse of Iran’s ruling theocratic system.
To avoid a total surrender, Khamenei could also keep the fight going. That might include going for a nuclear breakout. Assuming Iran still possesses its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and retains the know-how, the regime could still try to test a nuclear device, hoping that becoming a nuclear state will restore a measure of its lost deterrence. Tehran could also continue to wage war, aiming to either exhaust Israel’s will to fight or increase support for the regime among the Iranian people. The regime may even hope that Israel expands its strikes, or aim to draw in the United States, believing that if more Iranian civilians are killed, Iranian society will become more sympathetic toward the country’s only defenders: the regime. That “rally around the flag” effect is, at this point, the regime’s last remaining hope to get Iranians on its side.
But increased aggression is a very dicey bet and could leave the regime isolated and broke. The longer the war continues, the greater the destruction the country will face, which would reduce the regime’s capacity to simply operate. If there is no rally around the flag effect, or if it eventually passes, the Islamic Republic’s citizens could ultimately turn on the regime. And if the government secures a nuclear weapon in order to safeguard its hold on power, Iran could end up looking quite a lot like North Korea—a scenario no Iranian would want.
Whatever happens, the Iranian regime has doubtless lost its decades-long conflict with Israel. It will either have to give up its foundational political ideology and seek integration with the rest of the region through diplomatic and economic engagement, or it will need to double down on its beliefs, drawing further into itself. Ali Khamenei and the IRGC have lost; the regional status quo they established is finished.
