Suzanne Maloney
At a February 2026 gathering to commemorate the revolution that ushered in Iran’s Islamic Republic, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, struck a reflective note. He remarked that it had been “a strange year,” alluding to Israeli and American attacks on Iran’s nuclear program eight months earlier, and offered an extended justification of the unprecedented violence deployed by regime enforcers to suppress mass protests that had erupted in late December. He described the unrest as an attempted coup orchestrated by Israel and the United States and boasted that it had been “crushed under the feet of the Iranian nation.”
Predictably, Khamenei then turned to the United States, the regime’s foremost adversary and a frequent focus of his invective. He dismissed “the crumbling U.S. empire” and President Donald Trump’s threats of military action against Iran, insisting that “the Americans themselves who are constantly threatening that there will be a war . . . know that they don’t have the staying power for such a thing.” He added that “the U.S. President has said that for 47 years, the United States hasn’t been able to eliminate the Islamic Republic . . . . That confession is true. I say, ‘You, too, won’t be able to do such a thing.’”
These would prove to be some of Khamenei’s final public statements. Eleven days later, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran that killed him, along with members of his family and several senior military and political leaders. It was the first salvo in a war that would methodically degrade Iran’s navy, air force, and ballistic missile program, as well as its broader security infrastructure and defense industrial base. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump told the Iranian people in his address announcing the start of the campaign. “It will be yours to take.”
But as thousands of American and Israeli strikes pummeled the country, Iran’s leaders managed to regroup, installing Khamenei’s even more hard-line son Mojtaba as his successor. And Tehran immediately began retaliating with missile and drone strikes that targeted American military bases and the economic and energy infrastructure of Iran’s neighbors. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth derided Iran’s response as “indiscriminate targeting, flailing recklessly.” But Tehran’s strategy soon became clear: its attacks had effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas exports pass.
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