A year of conflict in the Middle East has destroyed the foreign-policy approach of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His strategy was always implausible, but its collapse has led Iran to the brink of its first international war since 1988.
What I like to call the Khamenei Doctrine—those close to him have variously dubbed it “strategic patience” or, more to the point, “no peace, no war”—rests on a duality that has remained constant through Khamenei’s 35 years in power. Iran refuses any public dealings with Israel, clamoring instead for the Jewish state’s destruction and surrounding it with Arab militias that seek to destroy it. Iranian officials deny the Holocaust and chant “Death to America” at events and ceremonies. And yet, at no point does Khamenei intend to get into a direct conflict with Israel or the United States—because he knows very well that such a confrontation could be fatal for his regime.
So what is the point of holding this contradictory posture? Khamenei is a true fanatic. He forged his beliefs as a revolutionary in the 1960s, when he read Sayyid Qutb and Mao Zedong. But he isn’t blind or stupid. Rather, he is patient and pragmatic. He appears to have accepted that his dream of destroying Israel won’t be realized in his lifetime, but he remains ideologically committed to it as a long-term goal for Islamists across generations. He has declared that Israel won’t exist in 2040—a year he will see only if he lives to be more than 100. But he seeks to advance the cause to the extent he can, building the strength of Israel’s enemies, and then handing off the task to his successors.
Khamenei knows that his extreme worldview is not popular among most Iranians, or even among much of the country’s ruling elite. And so he adjusts the institutional balance among the Islamic Republic’s various political factions, using the competition among them to gain breathing space when necessary, but never wavering from his objectives.
He makes international adjustments with similar strategic caution. He pursued the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers to alleviate the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran. But during the negotiations, Iran made clear that its support for regional militias, and its anti-Israeli and anti-American orientation, was nonnegotiable. Iran would talk only about its nuclear program, despite the concerns that Western negotiators expressed over Iran’s “regional behavior.” Then President Donald Trump tore up the deal in 2018 and brought a policy of maximum pressure to bear on the Islamic Republic. Khamenei delivered his response in a sermon in 2019: “There will be no war, and we won’t negotiate.” He was referring to the United States, but the phrase was an apt summary of his approach to Israel as well.
From the point of view of many Iranians, Khamenei’s policies have been disastrous, bringing international isolation, economic ruin, and political repression. But for his own purposes, before October 7, 2023, the leader might have seen his policy as a great success.
When Khamenei ascended to power in 1989, most of the region’s Arab states had long since given up the fight against Israel; Khamenei picked up the anti-Zionist mantle and made Iran the sole supplier for anti-Israeli militias across the region. He built a so-called Axis of Resistance, uniting armed groups in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to shoot at Israel, call for its destruction, and occasionally skirmish with U.S. forces in the region. All of this was a win for Islamist internationalism. In the service of that agenda, Khamenei has shown little compunction about sacrificing Iran’s potential as a country for its nearly 90 million inhabitants.
But the Khamenei Doctrine was always untenable, and the events of the past year have shown why. The strategy—build up anti-Israeli forces incrementally, without getting into a direct confrontation—required a certain adroitness. At times, Khamenei has had to restrain the Axis forces with calls for prudence. And the Axis is itself a problem—unwieldy, sometimes insubordinate, and unpopular at home and abroad.
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Most of the Axis militias are Shiite (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are the exceptions), and some have participated in the region’s sectarian civil wars, which claimed thousands of Sunni Muslim victims—Iraqis, Syrians, and Palestinians. For this reason, not even anti-Israeli populations in the region are unreservedly enthusiastic about the Axis. Within Iran, meanwhile, Khamenei has a hard time selling his animus against Israel to a populace that largely does not share it, and that holds him to account for problems closer to home. When Iranians rise up against their regime—as they did in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022—they often use slogans that signal their displeasure with Iran’s support for the Axis. Probably the best-known is “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, I give my life to Iran!”
The October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed at first looked like a gift to Khamenei. The conflict would foreclose the possibility of a Saudi rapprochement with Israel and disrupt what Israelis had taken to calling their “growing circle of peace” with Arab countries (Khamenei has long sought to prevent such normalization). But a year later, Khamenei’s doctrine has never looked weaker. Iran and its Axis claim to be the defenders of the Palestinian cause—but they have so far avoided directly intervening in a war that they themselves call “genocide.” At the beginning of the conflict, Iranian hard-liners expressed anger that Tehran was not joining the fight. “Children die under rubble while our missiles rot in their silos,” tweeted a well-known anchor on Iranian state television. Hezbollah, some regional analysts grumbled, was being held back by Iranians consumed by their own narrow interests.
In April, Israel attacked an Iranian consular building in Damascus, and Iran finally did what it had not done in its entire history: It fired missiles and drones directly at Israel. Far from being deterred, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has since only upped the pressure on the Islamic Republic, killing Iranian and Axis commanders wherever it can and intensifying the war in Lebanon. It is pummeling Hezbollah with special intensity, killing dozens of its top commanders, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and, most probably, his would-be successor, Hashem Safieddine. After much reticence, Khamenei launched another round of missile attacks on October 1. And Israel has vowed to retaliate.
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Khamenei has thus brought his country to the brink of a war that he has long sought to simultaneously suggest and avoid. Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based security expert who supported the Iranian attacks in April and October, assured me that Iran was prepared for whatever force Israel might bring to bear. The country has readied itself with “all of its defense capabilities” on alert, he said; it has invested in domestic air defenses and acquired Russian-made S300 surface-to-air missile systems. Still, Najafi conceded that Iran’s size will make it difficult to defend. Other experts I spoke with took a bleaker view. “It is not clear how Tehran can climb out of this situation,” Mojtaba Dehghani, an Iranian expert with a close understanding of the regime elites, told me. “They are not ready for this war.”
Many in the Iranian opposition argue that Tehran should stop stoking hostilities with Israel and the United States and prioritize economic development instead. The stipulation is found in most opposition political platforms, including those of leftist groups, many of which support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Dehghani agrees with the demand and thinks some in the regime leadership might concur. But he says that such a big “paradigm shift” will be difficult to pull off with Khamenei still in power. The leader is 85, and no one really knows who will succeed him, or whether that succession will bring in new outlooks and commitments; such uncertainty complicates planning for anything beyond the visible horizon.
In the meantime, Khamenei holds his nation hostage to a doctrine that courts the conflict it also seeks to avoid. Iran needs to make a historic shift if it is to avert a disastrous war that few Iranians want—and begin building a better future instead.
theatlantic.com