When the Islamic Republic came into being in 1979, its leaders looked to remake the Middle East. We can now say that they succeeded, though not in the ways they hoped.
Rather than eliminating Zionism, ejecting the United States, and establishing the hegemony of Tehran, the net result of the post–October 7, 2023 wars is something like the opposite of these objectives—and the regime’s actions since America and Israel launched this most recent phase of the post-10/7 wars have only further weakened its own regional standing.
Someone with a mischievous spirit and a time machine might be inclined to return to October 6, 2023, and show Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the headlines of recent days. The experience would be like an American reviewing Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a dystopian alternative history in which the Axis powers won World War II. Only in this case it would be a nonfiction vision of the future.
So what, exactly, are the consequences of Iran’s miscalculations?
