After the Ayatollah

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. The man who ruled the Islamic Republic of Iran for 36 years, outlasted six American presidents, built and sustained the most consequential sponsor of terrorism in the modern Middle East, forged an empire that extended from Iran to the Mediterranean shores in the north and to the entry of the Red Sea in the south, whose proxies dragged Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen into decades of war and chaos, whose Revolutionary Guard propped up Bashar al-Assad as he gassed and barrel-bombed his own population into the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War, whose Houthis brought famine to Yemen, whose funding and direction made October 7 possible, and whose missiles rained on Israel as Hamas executed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, who oversaw the weekly chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” as liturgical rituals of his power—that man is gone, killed on a Saturday morning by the joint force of the two nations he swore to destroy.

He was eighty-six years old. He had been the supreme leader since June 4, 1989, elected by a special committee called the Assembly of Experts within hours of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, to a position for which he was, by the theological standards of Shiite jurisprudence, never fully qualified. Khamenei was a hojatoleslam, a mid-ranking title of respect for Shiite clerics, meaning “proof of Islam” or “authority on Islam.” Unlike his predecessor, he was not a grand ayatollah. His authority, therefore, was political rather than scholarly. He compensated for this deficit with ruthlessness, patience, and an unshaking commitment to the revolutionary project that consumed his entire adult life. He was nineteen when he first began studying under Khomeini. He was a revolutionary before he was anything else, imprisoned under the shah, wounded by an assassination attempt in 1981 that cost him the use of his right arm, and installed as president at forty-two in the chaotic aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. He served two terms, was elevated to supreme leader, and proceeded to outlast every rival, every reformist, every protest movement, and every American attempt at negotiation, containment, and coercion—until Saturday.

His career was the Islamic Republic. There is no separating the two. When Khomeini died in 1989, shortly after the end of a long, brutal, and destructive war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—a ceasefire Khomeini himself compared to drinking poison—the state he left behind was impoverished, volatile, and fractured. It was Khamenei who stabilized it—not through charisma, which he lacked, nor through theological authority, which he never fully possessed, but through the methodical cultivation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a parallel state, simultaneously economic empire, global terror network, and a praetorian guard whose fortunes were indistinguishable from his own.

Khamenei turned the IRGC from a revolutionary militia into the largest conglomerate in Iran, controlling perhaps a third of the national economy. He built the proxy network—Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias—into the most effective non-state military architecture in the world, and in doing so forged the most consequential imperialist force in the Middle East since the Ottomans. He accomplished all of this, it must be emphasized, while waging a four-decade war against the world’s superpower and being subjected to one of the most punishing sanctions regimes in modern history.

He advanced the nuclear program through every diplomatic arrangement designed to restrain it, extracting sanctions relief from the nuclear deal with the Obama administration while preserving the knowledge base and centrifuge infrastructure that made breakout capacity a permanent condition rather than a future possibility. He crushed one wave of unrest after another—the Green Movement in 2009, the pro-democracy protests of 2019, the “women, life, freedom” uprising of 2022, and, with a cruelty that hastened his end, the December 2025 protests, in which his security forces massacred thousands. He was, in the full sense of the word, the last man standing of the 1979 generation.

And now he is dead, and the republic he held together through force, violence, and the weight of sheer terror faces the question it has spent 46 years deferring: whether it can survive without a supreme leader, and whether anyone can command the loyalty that accrued not to the office but to the man.

Below, I will explain what Khamenei’s death means for the ideology he embodied, and then look at the geopolitical fallout in the region, and finally turn to the way the current war is already changing the fate of Islam in the Middle East.

The Spring of Youth, the Fall of Ayatollahs

The Islamic Revolution initially carried the dreams and the fantasies of a generation of disinherited minds and souls. The postwar prosperity of the West had made the radical politics of the 1930s obsolete; the enthusiasm of the 1960s student movements and the New Left had fizzled; and disillusionment with Communism, tainted by Soviet repression, was becoming terminal. In France, Michel Foucault and his post-structuralist fellow travelers had written the moratorium on Marx: there is nothing left but power and resisting power. No redemption and no progress. Only the machinery of domination and the fleeting, ecstatic moments of revolt against them.

In the Middle East, things were just as bleak. The first utopian movement, Arab nationalism, lay charred in the Sinai and the Golan after a humiliating defeat in 1967. Nasser’s successor had committed the ultimate betrayal: signing a peace agreement with Israel at Camp David in 1978. And the promise of the Palestinian armed struggle to succeed where Arab armies had failed was collapsing under the daily cruelty of the Lebanese civil war, where the revolutionaries who were supposed to liberate Jerusalem could not even hold Beirut.

For most of the Iranian people themselves, this was less about abstract utopias than about concrete conditions—the corruption of the Pahlavi court, the brutality of the shah’s secret police (SAVAK), the absence of economic prospects for a rapidly urbanizing population. But for a generation of Iranian thinkers, above all Ali Shariati, this dissatisfaction was raw material for something grander: a gnostic, existentialist, quasi-Marxist hybrid that would fuse Third World liberation theology with Shiite martyrology and move the wheel of history—or some Hegelian metaphor of that sort—back onto the path of redemption. Khomeini was there to catch hold of that wheel.

When the revolution came, when the Iranian monarchy was overthrown, the world of radicals, intellectuals, and poets was drowned in intoxication. Foucault, who had famously traveled to Tehran and met Khomeini in his Parisian exile, declared that the Iranian people were searching for what Europe had long forgotten: “political spirituality” that could transform the political landscape of the entire world. Arab intellectuals who felt betrayed by Sadat saw in the revolutionary ayatollah a substitute for the Egypt they had lost. Yasir Arafat flew into Tehran, the first foreign leader to visit after the revolution, and was handed the keys to the vacated Israeli embassy—the building rechristened the Embassy of Palestine, on a street renamed Palestine Street, a gesture so perfectly theatrical it could only have been scripted by revolutionaries.

Even a young London novelist named Salman Rushdie celebrated the revolution passionately, declaring that when Khomeini speaks “he echoes, in his fashion, the prophet himself; for Mohammad’s revelation, too, was a revolt against his time” and that Khomeini was restoring Islam to the “subversive, radical movement” it had originally been.

History, as it turned out, had other ideas about who would be moved and in which direction.

Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran was not merely another ideological state. It was, and I think many of our Ivy League leftist professors would agree, the most ambitious political-theological experiment of the 20th century—the only successful revolutionary project to fuse the power of the modern state and modern German ideology with premodern clerical authority and sustain it across nearly five decades. That was the theory. The practice was mass executions of political prisoners in the summer of 1988: thousands killed in weeks on Khomeini’s orders, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves. It was the hanging of homosexuals from construction cranes in public squares. It was the morality police beating women for the crime of visible hair. It was the assassination of Iranian dissidents across Europe. It was the bombing of a Jewish community center. It was the funding and arming of every militia, every suicide bomber, every sectarian death squad from Beirut to Baghdad to Gaza to Sana’a that could be enlisted in the service of the revolution. Foucault’s “political spirituality” built a torture state. Rushdie’s subversive, radical Islam issued Rushdie’s death warrant.

And yet it endured. It outlived the Soviet Union, which fell twelve years after the revolution. It outlived Baathist Iraq, which Saddam took to war against it for eight years and which the Americans dismantled in 2003. It outlived Qaddafi’s Libya, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, and Assad’s Syria—the last of which fell in 2024, taking with it Iran’s most important Arab client state and the corridor that connected Tehran to Hizballah. It survived invasions, wars, sanctions, cyberwarfare, targeted assassinations, internal uprisings, and a twelve-day combined Israeli-American air campaign just eight months ago. It survived because Khamenei understood that revolutionary legitimacy is sustained only by the credible monopoly on organized terror and the systematic, violent elimination of alternatives.

The Iranian Republic was also the last successor state in the ideological lineage that descended from Nazi Germany through Arab nationalism—the final regime to make the global propagation of anti-Semitism and the annihilation of Jews a matter of strategic doctrine. This last point may have been the factor that brought the ruthless career to its violent end, and understanding what follows requires understanding what Khamenei set in motion across the region in his final years, and what the forces arrayed against his project have now unleashed.

The Geopolitical Landscape

By the autumn of 2023, Khamenei’s empire was at its zenith. Hizballah dominated Lebanon politically and militarily, its arsenal larger than most NATO members’ armies. Assad had survived the civil war and was being welcomed back into the Arab League. Iraqi militias loyal to Tehran held the balance of power in Baghdad. The Houthis controlled northern Yemen and were about to demonstrate that they could close international shipping lanes at will. Hamas sat in Gaza, armed to the teeth, its tunnel network a fortress, its Iranian funding pipeline intact. The nuclear program was closer to breakout than at any point in its history. Then came the Hamas massacres of October 7, with Palestinian militiamen murdering, raping, and pillaging their way through southern Israel, and the empire that took four decades to build began to unravel in eighteen months.

Israel’s campaign in Gaza destroyed Hamas as a military force. The war expanded north, and Hizballah, which had spent two decades preparing for a decisive confrontation with Israel, was decapitated and shattered in weeks—Nasrallah killed, its senior command annihilated, its communications infrastructure compromised, its arsenal degraded beyond repair. Without Hizballah’s supply corridor through Syria, Assad’s position became untenable overnight; the regime that had survived a decade of civil war fell in days in December 2024, and with it went Iran’s land bridge to the Mediterranean. The dominoes fell in sequence—Gaza, then Lebanon, then Syria—each one exposing the next, each loss compounding the one before it, until what remained of the empire was the core itself: Iran alone, its proxy architecture in ruins, its nuclear program the last card, facing the combined military power of the United States and Israel with no buffer left.

The first blow against the core came last June. The U.S. and Israel launched a twelve-day air campaign against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure—the most significant direct strike on Iranian soil since the Iran-Iraq War. It degraded facilities and missile stockpiles, destroyed centrifuge arrays, and sent an unmistakable signal. But it stopped. The operation was limited in scope, punitive in character, and designed to deny rather than defeat. Iran absorbed the blow, declared victory in the rubble, and began rebuilding. The lesson Tehran drew was that American power had a ceiling, that Washington would hit hard but not follow through, and that the regime could survive whatever the Americans were willing to deliver. The lesson Washington drew was the opposite: that half-measures produce the worst of both worlds, the costs of confrontation without the benefits of resolution. Both sides were now operating on the conclusions they had drawn from June. One of them was wrong.

On February 28, 2026, the U.S. (“Operation Epic Fury”) and Israel (“Operation Roaring Lion”) launched a joint attack on targets across Iran, including the cities Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. This was qualitatively different from the June strikes in three critical ways: then the American strikes were over in hours, whereas now the U.S. military has planned for days of sustained operations. The strikes began in daylight on the first day of the Iranian work week in Ramadan, signaling a psychological-warfare dimension. And the target set was maximalist: Iranian media reported strikes on the Ministry of Intelligence, the Ministry of Defense, the Atomic Energy Organization, and the Parchin military complex. Israel targeted senior Iranian leadership, including Khamenei, the armed forces chief of staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, and head of the National Defense Council Ali Shamkhani. They are all dead.

Trump has explicitly called for regime change, telling the Iranian people to “take over your government” and offering IRGC members amnesty if they lay down arms. This was not a limited nor a punitive operation, but the long-deferred attempt to create the conditions for the Islamic Republic’s collapse.

The underlying strategic logic rests on a convergence that did not exist during previous rounds: the largest popular uprising since 1979, already underway since December; a regime that responded with massacres killing thousands; and a nuclear program advanced to the point where further delay compounded rather than reduced risk. The air campaign is designed not to impose regime change externally but to destroy the coercive apparatus that had prevented it internally.

At present, the IRGC is the critical variable and the main source of uncertainty. It is a revolutionary organization with distributed command authority, its own economic base, and an ideological infrastructure. American intelligence assessed that the IRGC would likely fill any leadership void when Khamenei is eliminated, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged to lawmakers that “no one knows” who takes over if the regime falls. These are not trivial admissions. The IRGC had survived every crisis the Islamic Republic had faced.

But an IRGC that cannot defend the supreme leader’s compound or protect the country’s nuclear infrastructure faces a crisis of credibility that no previous uprising has produced. The regime has always survived by persuading its security forces that it will endure. That conviction is now being tested. Every previous crisis came alone, and the regime defeated them in sequence—the protests of 2009 without foreign strikes, the sanctions without mass revolt, the June air campaign without an uprising. Now they have arrived together: a legitimacy crisis decades in the making, mass revolt on a scale not seen since 1979, economic collapse, and a military assault that is destroying in hours what the regime spent decades building. Whether this convergence is qualitatively different from past crises is the question on which the operation’s political outcome turns.

The fuzziness of the endgame had to be weighed against the alternative, not against an ideal. The alternative was a nuclear-threshold regime reconstituting its proxy network and negotiating only under maximum duress at the eleventh hour. The operation’s wager was that this convergence created conditions no previous round of sanctions, diplomacy, or limited strikes ever could. It is a defensible wager. Whether it proves fully correct depends on execution, persistence, and variables that no military planner fully controls. But we already know the answer to the first and most consequential variable: Khamenei is dead.

It is also worth remembering that the IRGC is not a monastic order: it is simultaneously business conglomerate and cult; its cohesion depends on solvency, and it can ensure loyalty only so long as it can meet payroll. When the headquarters are burning, the bank accounts are frozen, the supreme leader is dead, and the president of the U.S. is offering amnesty on live television, the question each employee faces is whether this regime is still the safest bet for his family’s future. Revolutionary guards only fight to the death for a revolution they believe is winning. When they believe one has lost, they start negotiating severance packages.

The Regional Spillover

While Russia and China had been deepening their relationships with Iran in the years leading up to the twelve-day war, they did not come to its aid. They look for strong and useful allies; they have no interest in rescuing lost causes.

With no help on the way from its friends, Iran responded by lashing out at enemies and neutral parties alike. It did so immediately and aggressively, targeting America’s al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, Ali al-Salem in Kuwait, Al-Dhafra in the UAE, and the U.S. Fifth Fleet’s base in Bahrain. Explosions were reported in Dubai, Doha, and Manama. Saudi Arabia confirmed that Iran targeted Riyadh and the kingdom’s eastern region. The Houthis announced they would resume missile and drone attacks on Red Sea shipping and on Israel.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil supply and a fifth of liquid-natural-gas shipments transit, is now effectively a war zone. The EU’s naval mission confirmed that vessels are receiving IRGC transmissions declaring passage prohibited. Major oil companies and leading trading houses have suspended shipments. Greece has advised all vessels to avoid the Gulf entirely. The U.S. Navy itself has warned it cannot guarantee the safety of shipping. Natural-gas tankers are making U-turns. Supertankers carrying Iraqi and Saudi crude have halted at the strait’s approaches.

Iran does not need to mine the strait or sink a tanker to achieve a functional blockade; it needs only to create enough doubt that the insurance markets and the shipping companies do the work for it. As of Sunday, roughly 200 vessels sit stranded outside the waterway, including at least 150 oil and gas tankers. Commercial traffic through the strait has collapsed by 70 percent. An Iranian strike on the tanker Skylight, hit five miles north of Oman’s Khasab port after ignoring IRGC orders, demonstrated that the threat is not merely rhetorical. The U.S. Navy can and likely will reopen the strait through the full destruction of the Iranian navy; the only question is when.

Iran is also deliberately widening the war by striking urban centers in the Gulf, attempting to fracture the implicit coalition supporting the U.S. operation. It is important to remember that Iran is not Hamas. Its missiles are not home-made projectiles lobbed without guidance systems from the rubble of a collapsed UNRWA building. When an Iranian drone strikes Dubai’s airport or its Fairmont hotel, it is because someone in Tehran chose these targets.

There is a clear strategy here. The question is whether it is a sound one. The Gulf economic model—the Emirates’ above all—is built on the promise of the oasis of stability in a neighborhood of chaos: that capital flows freely, that tourists, businessmen, Russian oligarchs, and Eastern European women arrive safely, that the skyline is always glamorous. The GDP of the Gulf states is functionally a confidence index. Strike the airports, the hotels, the commercial districts of Dubai and Doha and Manama, and you strike the foundation on which the entire post-oil diversification project rests. Iran is clearly betting that the Gulf states’ extraordinarily low tolerance for economic volatility will translate into political pressure on Washington to end the operation before it achieves its objectives.

There are good reasons to think this bet could work, and Tehran is not being irrational in making it. The major strategic recalibration in Gulf foreign policy in the past five years—building up relations with Russia and China, as a hedge against abandonment by the U.S.—was driven by exactly this experience. Iran-backed strikes on Riyadh’s (2019) and Abu Dhabi’s (2022) oil facilities that the United States failed either to prevent or meaningfully to respond to taught the Gulf leaderships a lesson they have not forgotten: that American security guarantees are conditional, intermittent, and unreliable under pressure. Tehran learned the same lesson from the other side—that hitting Gulf economic infrastructure produces political results disproportionate to the military investment. Trump himself is a known quantity in this regard; he favors short engagements, dramatic declarations, and rapid exits with even bigger declarations on Truth Social. The Iranian calculation is that a sustained campaign of economic disruption across the Gulf will collapse American political will before it collapses the Islamic Republic.

But this time Tehran may be miscalculating, and badly.

The difference is scale. Previous Iranian attacks were deniable, limited, and targeted—a drone strike on an Aramco facility here, a proxy attack on Abu Dhabi there—enough to send a message without forcing a strategic pivot towards cost absorption. What happened this weekend is categorically different. Iran launched ballistic missiles at the territory of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan simultaneously, killing civilians in Abu Dhabi, striking hotels in Dubai, hitting airports, and targeting the economic and civilian infrastructure of every Gulf Cooperation Council capital except Muscat. The distinction between a calibrated signal and an act of war against the entire Gulf system at once is not a matter of interpretation.

A Reckoning for the Gulf States

The attacks on the Gulf states come amid a widening schism between Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In December, longstanding tensions came to the fore, and the two countries are now working to build competing visions of the post-American order. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi back opposing factions in Yemen and East Africa, and are building rival port infrastructure around the Red Sea. Yet within hours of the strikes, the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman was on the phone with his Emirati counterpart, Mohammad bin Zayed. That this call happened at all suggests both capitals understood that their feud had become a strategic luxury neither could afford while Iranian ballistic missiles were targeting their sovereign territories.

Equally notable was Doha’s unusually firm statement condemning the Iranian attacks on its territory. Historically Qatar has been the Gulf state most accommodating of Tehran, often presenting itself as an arbiter between the Islamic Republic and its enemies both near and far. Qatar’s break with its characteristic equidistance signaled that the missile strike had crossed a threshold, posing a threat to its domestic economy it was unwilling to absorb.

Taken together, these signals suggest that Tehran’s gambit backfired. The Gulf states did not choose this war. Tehran has just demonstrated that neutrality offers no protection against a regime that treats its neighbors as targets regardless of their diplomatic position. The public statements made by the Emiratis and Saudis were calibrated to send Tehran a clear message: that the strikes against Gulf territory confirmed rather than undermined the case for removing the Iranian regime.

Prior to the war, the Gulf states might have been wary of the blowback from American or Israeli attacks. Now they are worried that operation might stop too soon, leaving a regime in place both able and willing to take revenge on them. Iran’s gambit, in other words, has backfired.

But Gulf tolerance, however firm in this moment, is not infinite. Gulf leaders have a finite reservoir of political and economic capital to absorb the costs of Iranian retaliation—and that reservoir has a floor, one that will drop faster if Iran escalates from hotels and airports to critical infrastructure such as desalination plants and power grids. Washington and Jerusalem are effectively operating on a clock set not only by their own military timelines but by the Gulf’s diminishing tolerance for sustained punishment. The operation must demonstrably cripple Iran’s ability to project force across the Gulf before the political will underwriting it exhausts itself.

The temporary vulnerability is the price of a permanent solution; the question is whether Washington will deliver the permanent solution or leave its allies exposed for nothing. To ensure the continued loyalty of its Arab allies in the decades to come, the U.S. will have to win this round decisively. Winning does not merely mean degrading Iran’s military infrastructure, which is almost certainly achievable; it means producing a substantial political outcome—regime collapse, a successor government willing to negotiate, or at minimum a credible demonstration that American power translates into durable strategic gains. If this round ends inconclusively, as the June 2025 strikes arguably did, it will constitute another blow to U.S. reliability and credibility, validating the fear that American power is operationally formidable but strategically incoherent. That fear is the structural foundation of Gulf hedging, and every inconclusive American military intervention in the region since 2003 has reinforced it.

With Khamenei’s confirmed death, the campaign has cleared the highest bar of operational credibility. What remains to be seen is whether the political outcome matches the military achievement.

What comes after the Islamic Republic is still an open question not just for the Iranians but for a whole region that was defined by it for decades. Iran is not Jordan. It is not an obstacle sitting inside an otherwise stable regional order, whose removal clears the path forward. Iran is a structure-setting state, one of the pillars on which the entire regional architecture, including the architecture of its enemies, rests. Every significant relationship in the Middle East is triangulated through Tehran. The Saudi-Israeli convergence exists because of the threat from Iran. The American military presence in the Gulf is justified because of Iran. Qatar’s policy of playing both sides, Oman’s back-channel role, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s positioning of himself as a Sunni alternative to the ayatollah, the sectarian balance in Iraq and Lebanon—all of these are calibrated against the Iranian variable. Remove the variable, and you do not clear the board. You collapse it. Every question the region thought it had settled reopens simultaneously, and no one has answers.

Let’s look briefly at how that plays out, beginning with the power vacuum an Iranian collapse has already started to create. Turkey is the most obvious candidate to fill it—a Sunni power, a NATO member, already projecting force into Syria, Iraq, Libya, the Caucasus, and the Horn of Africa, with an Islamist president who has spent two decades positioning himself as the leader of the Muslim world. But Erdogan’s Turkey is overextended, economically fragile, and ideologically ambiguous in ways that make it an unreliable inheritor. Does Ankara fill the space Iran vacated in Iraq? In Lebanon? Among the Shiite populations that Tehran organized and armed for decades? The answer is almost certainly no—Turkey lacks the sectarian infrastructure, the proxy networks, and the theological authority that gave Iran its reach. Thus the vacuum may not be filled at all—a recipe for chaos.

Iraq might be the arena where the aftershocks will be felt most strongly. The firm Iranian hand held together the fractious Shiite political class, directed the militias, mediated among factions, and provided the organizing logic for a state that has not functioned as a sovereign entity since 2003. Remove that hand and the question is not whether Iraq aligns with Washington or Tehran, but whether Iraq holds together at all. The Kurds in the north, already operating a de-facto state, will recalculate. The Sunni provinces, traumatized by Islamic State and marginalized by Baghdad, will recalculate. The Shiite south, suddenly without its external patron, will face an internal power struggle that Iran had suppressed by imposing hierarchy from outside. Similar consequences can be expected in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria.

Then there is a question that has gone unasked: does the removal of Iran obviate the need for an American presence in the Gulf? The entire U.S. military infrastructure in the region—the bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, the Fifth Fleet—is justified by the Iranian threat. Remove the threat, and the structural argument for Gulf dependence on Washington dissolves. The Gulf states will simply accelerate toward the strategic autonomy they were already pursuing. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were already hedging toward Beijing and Moscow before this week. What, exactly, brings them back?

Saudi normalization with Israel may still happen. The structural incentives have not disappeared, and Mohammad bin Salman has his own reasons for wanting a relationship with Jerusalem. But the urgency that made normalization feel inevitable was produced by Iran’s growing power. Remove Iran from the equation, and the benefits shrink, while the Palestinian cause—which is a useful foil for so many things—reasserts itself without appearing as a stalking horse for Tehran. Riyadh may now see all the more reason to delay recognition of Israel.

The Death of Islamism?

But far greater than the geopolitical fallout is the ideological fallout. Islamism was the grandest political vision the modern Middle East ever produced. It achieved in the Muslim world, roughly, what the French Revolution achieved in Europe: it merged spiritual salvation with political redemption, dissolved an entire cultural and religious inheritance into revolutionary thought, and offered a total account of history—its origins, its crisis, its direction, its destination. For a century, from Hassan al-Banna’s founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to the Islamic Republic’s current death gasp, that vision organized movements, toppled monarchies, built states, launched wars, and provided millions of people with an answer to the most disorienting question modern politics poses to traditional societies: what went wrong, and how do we get back to our golden age? It was, in the fullest sense of the term, a modern political ideology—German in its philosophical roots, Islamic in its aesthetics, revolutionary in its temperament, and total in its self-understanding.

That vision is no longer credible. It is no longer believable to the populations who have lived under it, who have buried its martyrs and suffered its morality police and watched its promises rot into corruption and repression. It is no longer believable to the intellectuals who once theorized it, who have quietly migrated to other vocabularies. And it is no longer believable on its own terms—which is the terminal diagnosis of any political theology, because a political theology that ceases to believe its own claims does not reform. It dies.

The Muslim Brotherhood model failed first: a brief, chaotic government in Egypt in 2012–2013 demonstrated the Brotherhood could win elections but could not govern a state, manage an economy, or not restrain its own maximalist impulses when power was finally within reach. The military coup that followed was the verdict of a society that had tested the proposition and found it empty. The Taliban governs Afghanistan, but what it governs is a humanitarian catastrophe; a landlocked, aid-dependent, failed state that has driven half its educated population into exile. No one holds up the Afghan emirate as a model to be emulated.

Islamic State was Islamism’s reductio ad absurdum: a caliphate of rubble, built on Wagnerian spectacle and apocalyptic enthusiasm, incapable of surviving the moment its violence was met with superior violence. Syria is the most instructive case because it is the clearest. Mohammad al-Jolani—the man who was born Abu Ahmad al-Sharaa, led an al-Qaeda affiliate, and then reinvented himself as the pragmatist ruler of a nation-state—governs Damascus today precisely because he understood what the others did not: that the Islamist proposition could not survive contact with governance and had to be shed, publicly and deliberately, as the price of power. That he changed his name, his rhetoric, his alliances, and his stated objectives is not evidence that Islamism can adapt. It is evidence that the only Islamist who successfully took and held a state in the 2020s did so by ceasing to be an Islamist, or at least what an Islamist has been so far.

Iran was the only Islamist project that combined revolutionary ideology with functioning state institutions, a sophisticated military-industrial complex, a nuclear program, an economic base large enough to sustain four decades of confrontations with the world’s preeminent powers, and a proxy empire spanning the region. It was Islamism’s proof of concept—the load-bearing wall. That wall has now collapsed. Its collapse does not necessarily kill Islamism as sentiment or as identity politics. But it kills the last credible demonstration that Islamism can govern, let alone deliver its envisioned utopia.

The deeper truth is that Islamism was always a modern ideological formation parasitic on the theological categories it claimed to be restoring. It did not return Islam to its origins. It dissolved Islam, perhaps irreversibly, into a revolutionary program that owed more to Hegel and Marx and the German political tradition than it ever owed to the Quran, and then claimed the authority of revelation for what was, in essence, the worst ideas of modern European politics translated into Arabic and Farsi.

The Islamic Republic was the most sophisticated deployment of this technology—the most complete fusion of modern state machinery, philosophy of history, and theological legitimation ever achieved in the Muslim world. Its destruction does not resolve the underlying theological and political crises from which Islamism emerged, but it destroys the most powerful institutional answer anyone managed to build.

The closest historical analogy for this collapse is the fall of Arab Nationalism—Islamism’s immediate predecessor, the first modern ideology to reshape the Middle East, and the original translator of German ideology into the region’s native political tongue. Arab nationalism was, in its time, no less total a vision than Islamism: it offered a unified account of Arab civilization, its humiliation, and its redemption, and it built states, fought wars, and organized the political imagination of an entire generation. That vision collapsed in June 1967, when Israel destroyed three Arab armies in six days, and the promise of secular nationalist redemption was incinerated along with them. By the early 1970s, Arab nationalism was no longer believable to the elites, the intellectuals, or to the young. Its grand narrative of unity and liberation had been tested against reality and found to be a lie.

But it did not disappear. Its repertoire—the language of Arabism, of Arab solidarity, of shared struggle—persisted as a rhetorical currency that leaders could spend without believing. Its institutions endured: the Baath party, founded to build the Arab nation, survived in Damascus and Baghdad for decades after anyone had stopped believing it was building anything. By the 1980s, to look at Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria and see Arab nationalism was to be under a ridiculous delusion. What remained was an empty shell, the institutional husk of an ideology, terrible as it was, that had been hollowed out and repurposed as the instrument of personal tyranny, sectarian rule, and raw, brutal power. The regimes in Iraq and Syria continued to evoke the ideals of Baathism, but neither they nor the masses they addressed believed in it, or thought anyone else did. Listening to the language of Arab unity coming out of Saddam’s mouth as he slaughtered Shiites, or out of Assad’s mouth as he barrel-bombed Homs, was to watch a corpse of a monster being animated by a demon.

Islamism will follow the same trajectory. It will not vanish entirely. Its repertoire will persist: the language of Islamic governance, of resistance, and of the umma may continue to be deployed by actors who believe in it less and less and use it when it suits them. The institutional residues, like the Muslim Brotherhood networks and their massive funds and portfolios, may endure in new configurations of power, hollowed out, repurposed, and instrumentalized, serving various ends for various demons.

The question is what this afterlife looks like in concrete terms. Can Turkey become another Iran? Erdogan has spent two decades Islamizing a secular state from within, and he now faces a Middle East without the Shiite rival against whom he defined his Sunni alternative. But Turkey’s Islamism was always a different species—laundered through NATO membership, EU aspiration, and Turkish statism, never claiming the theocratic totality that gave the Islamic Republic its power and its brittleness. Erdogan can fill vacuums in and mobilize transnational networks, but he cannot build a revolutionary Islamic state because he does not lead a revolution, and the Turkish public, which nearly threw him out in 2023, has no appetite for one.

If anything of Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis survive it won’t be as ideas. The idea is what died. They may survive in the same manner as the Baath: as armies, protection rackets, mafias with flags, instruments of local power that will use the old vocabulary when it suits them and discard it when it doesn’t. Hizballah will not rebuild itself as the vanguard of the Islamic resistance; it will persist as a local sectarian militia with a protection economy in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, trading on terrible memories and the threat of violence. Hamas will not resurrect the dream of Islamic liberation; it will endure as a mafia governing rubble. The Houthis will not project Iranian revolutionary ideology across the Red Sea; they will revert to what they were before Tehran’s investment—a tribal-religious insurgency with local power and no horizon beyond it.

What will not be produced, for the foreseeable future, is another grand vision or another Islamic Republic: another attempt to fuse religious authority with state power at the scale and sophistication that Khamenei achieved, backed by the genuine revolutionary conviction that the project was divinely ordained. That experiment has been run. The results are in. What follows is not the end of political Islam but its afterlife—and afterlives, as the Baath proved, can be uglier than the thing itself.

The Date of the Strike

Purim begins this evening. The festival that commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman’s plot to annihilate them—a story set, as it happens, in Persia, the land that became Iran. The book of Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible in which God’s name does not appear, and the rabbinic tradition has always understood this as the point: that divine action in history is sometimes most present precisely where it is most hidden, working through the decisions of men and women who do not fully understand the significance of their deeds. Khamenei, who fashioned himself the heir to an Islamic revolution against the enemies of God, was killed by the Jewish state on the eve of the Jewish festival that celebrates the destruction of a Persian enemy who sought to destroy the Jews. He would have appreciated the irony, perhaps. I certainly do.

Whether one reads this as providence or coincidence is a matter of faith. But no one can deny the resonance, and the symbolism will likely do political work that no policy can. For the Iranian diaspora celebrating in the streets tonight, for the protesters who survived January’s massacres, for the Israelis sheltering from Iranian missiles that can no longer be replenished by the man who ordered their construction, for the world’s Jews, this is not an amusing accident. It is a story to be told.

This is the end. Not the end of the war, but it is the end of the Islamic Republic, at least, as it has existed since 1979, if not altogether. And whatever emerges from the rubble of Khamenei’s compound and the wreckage of his nuclear program and the ruins of his proxy empire will not be the same thing. It cannot be. The ayatollah is gone. The last guardian of the revolution is dead, and the guardianship dies with him.

Seventy-two hours will tell us a great deal about what follows. But what happened today is already momentous. The longest-serving autocrat in the modern Middle East, the architect of the region’s most destabilizing project of terrorism, the first enemy of America and of Jews, was killed by those two nations acting in concert on the eve of the festival that commemorates exactly such a deliverance. History is not ironic. But it rhymes—sometimes in bangs, sometimes in a whimper, today in both.

Khamenei is dead. The Islamic Republic is over. The utopian vision of political Islam is largely no more. The rest is politics. Am Yisrael hai, and God bless the United States of America.