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.

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