Much has been said about the ongoing war involving the United States, Israel and the Islamic regime in Iran. Analysts focus on strikes, retaliation, energy markets and escalation risks. Those things matter. But they are not the whole story. The real strategic question is whether this war merely degrades a regime, or whether it accelerates the political transformation already underway inside Iran.
That is the part too many observers still fail to grasp.
Beyond the Collapse Narrative
For decades, the Middle East has been viewed through a familiar Western script: war brings destruction, state collapse, refugee flows, famine and long-term chaos. Iraq and Libya became the defining images. So when Iran is discussed, many instinctively reach for the same template. Yet Iran is not following that script. The country is under severe pressure, but the deeper story is not simply one of collapse. It is one of political reawakening.
The Islamic Republic was born in 1979 out of an unstable coalition of leftists, Islamists, secular liberals and anti-Shah revolutionaries. That coalition did not survive its own victory. Ayatollah Khomeini and his loyalists eliminated their rivals and built a system that masqueraded as pluralism while preserving ideological monopoly. The supposed divide between “reformists” and “conservatives” was never a genuine alternative for the Iranian nation. It was a mechanism for managing dissent while keeping the regime intact.
A Pattern of Resistance
And yet the Iranian people never accepted this settlement in full. For more than four decades, they have looked for openings, however small, to reconnect with normality, sovereignty and the free world. They voted when the ballot box seemed to offer the faintest crack in the wall. And when even that avenue closed, they returned to the streets.
That pattern has repeated itself across generations: the student protests of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, the nationwide unrest of 2019, and the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. Each time, the regime answered with repression, bullets, arrests and fear. Each time, dissent returned. Reuters reported today that Iran executed three men arrested over protests on January 8, after what it described as one of the harshest crackdowns in the Islamic Republic’s history.
What is changing now is not only the persistence of protest, but its ideological clarity.
The Rise of a Post-Ideological Patriotism
A more openly patriotic current has emerged inside Iran. Increasingly, many Iranians are not merely rejecting the current rulers; they are rejecting the full revolutionary inheritance that has dominated the country since 1979. Islamism has failed them. Revolutionary leftism has failed them. Groups once presented as alternatives, including the Mojahedin-e Khalq, are rejected by many not as solutions, but as part of the same disfigured political legacy.
That is why slogans matter. Chants such as “Javid Shah”, “Long live the King”, and “No to leftists, no to the Mullahs, no to the Mojahedin” point to something more serious than nostalgia or anger. They reveal a search for continuity, nationhood and political rupture all at once. They show that for many Iranians, patriotism itself has become the language of defection from every ideology that helped build or sustain the post-1979 order.
Why the West Misreads Iran
This is precisely where much mainstream Western media coverage becomes confused. Too often, it still interprets Iran through the old categories: reform versus hardliner, civil society versus clerical authority, diplomacy versus escalation. And when war enters the picture, the coverage defaults to the familiar imagery of destruction alone — shattered infrastructure, economic pain, humanitarian risk, regional instability. Those dangers are real, and they should not be minimized. But what that lens often misses is the political will of the Iranian people themselves.
In Iraq or Libya, the Western imagination became fixated on what happened after the state fractured: militias, migration, collapse. In Iran, by contrast, many people are not responding to pressure by abandoning the country or surrendering to fatalism. They are staying. They are watching. They are waiting for the first real opening to flood the streets and finish what generations before them began.
This is why the success of the war, if it comes, will not be measured only by eliminated commanders or degraded missile stockpiles. It will be measured by whether the war accelerates the collapse of the regime’s ideological legitimacy and strengthens the patriotic mood that has been building inside Iran for years.
An Uncomfortable Alignment
And this is also why the movement inside Iran can appear, in important respects, more intelligible to the MAGA worldview than to much of the Western foreign-policy establishment. Not because Iranian protesters are formally part of an American political project; they are not. But because the instincts are recognizable: hostility to failed ideological elites, contempt for clerical and revolutionary dogma, emphasis on nationhood, and a desire to reclaim sovereignty from a ruling class seen as corrupt, parasitic and detached from the people. Framed that way, the alignment is not organizational. It is temperamental and political.
That point will make some uncomfortable. So be it. The greater error is to pretend that the old interpretive categories still explain Iran. They do not. A new reality is taking shape, and it is more nationalist, more anti-ideological and more openly hostile to the revolutionary inheritance than many in the West and Islamists are willing to admit.
The most important force in Iran today is not a missile battery, a proxy militia or a clerical faction. It is a population that has endured decades of repression and still refuses to surrender the idea of reclaiming its country. The war matters because it is colliding with that internal reality.
So yes, the war may weaken the regime militarily. It may even help bring about its end. But that is not its only possible success, nor perhaps its deepest one. Its deeper success would be to reveal, accelerate and vindicate the political transformation already underway inside Iran: the rebirth of a patriotic nation determined to bury not just the Islamic Republic, but the entire ideological order that made it possible.
That is the story the West still struggles to tell. But it may well be the story that decides the future of Iran.
Hessam Faghihian
Doctoral Researcher
