Hours after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, all of Iran’s parliamentarians rose from their seats to chant “Death to Israel!” and “Palestine is victorious; Israel will be destroyed!” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and other top Iranian officials, including the former head of the country’s military forces, expressed their support for Hamas, declaring that Iran “will stay with the Palestinian freedom fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem.”
These statements were not symbolic. Despite cleverly choreographed denials designed to avert direct military retaliation, Iran’s fingerprints were all over the October 7 operation. Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are only the biggest in a network of 19 armed groups that Iran has established along Israel’s borders. The groups get financial support, training, and weapons from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Hamas receives an estimated $100 million annually, Hezbollah $700 million, and Islamic Jihad tens of millions.
Even if Iran did not direct Hamas’s attack on that day, senior Iranian leadership was almost certainly aware of the group’s operational plans and ambitions. Indeed, on January 16, amid escalating attacks by the Iranian-supported Houthi militia on vessels in the Red Sea, Iran’s foreign minister delivered a defiant threat to the West that left no doubt as to Iran’s central role in the current turmoil: “The security of the Red Sea is tied to the developments in Gaza, and everyone will suffer if Israel’s crimes in Gaza do not stop,” he said, adding, “Iran has always defended its interests, including commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, with the blood of martyrs and soldiers.”
Together with a range of other policies—military assistance to Russia for its war in Ukraine, ever-closer military and economic ties with China, and dogged pursuit of a nuclear-weapons program—Iran’s complicity with Hamas signals that the country has entirely broken with the West and abandoned any aspiration to seek even minimal rapprochement with the Western-led international order. This abandonment will have consequences that Washington must avert if stability, let alone peace and prosperity, are to be hoped for in the Middle East.
Yet the administration of President Joe Biden has refrained from highlighting Iran’s role in plunging the region into war and, bafflingly, so laxly enforced oil sanctions that, according to sanctions experts, Tehran has been able to fill its coffers with an estimated $30 billion in revenue. The United States even pledged to free up $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil revenues in exchange for the release of American hostages last September—the equivalent of paying ransom. After the Hamas attack on Israel, and under pressure from congressional Republicans, Washington and Doha agreed to hold up those funds’ dispersal. But anticipating such payouts very likely gave Hamas incentive to take hostages on October 7 in the first place.
Biden’s conciliatory approach has empowered Iran in the region and undermined the significant progress toward an Israeli-Arab détente that began during the Trump administration. Iran has everything to gain from disrupting a political realignment that would marginalize it by normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Hamas’s war also allowed Iran to disrupt plans for the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor. That arrangement would have tied India to Europe via Israel and the Gulf, bypassing Iran and competing with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which Iran now sees as part of its eastward-looking “Asian” future.
Save for one strike in early January that killed a militia leader in Baghdad, the United States has not retaliated against Iran for its attacks and those of its proxies on U.S. military forces in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. Iran has thus paid almost no price to date for its actions against the United States or in Israel, Lebanon, Ukraine, or the Red Sea. No wonder the Iranian Parliament was so triumphant: The Islamic Republic has scored win after win and outmaneuvered the United States into accommodating its regional ambitions and allowing it to become a threshold nuclear-weapons state.
Caution is of course preferable to reckless escalation as a response. The question is whether U.S. restraint projects weakness rather than judicious statecraft, and thereby emboldens adversaries. Writing for this magazine last year, George Packer identified a fatal flaw in the American foreign-policy approach that fetishizes diplomacy: “Autocratic regimes will exploit American restraint to enlarge their power at the expense of their own people, their neighbors, and the international order.”
On January 29, a militia armed and supported by Iran crossed the brightest of red lines by killing U.S. military personnel with a drone strike. Even then, the Biden administration seemed unwilling to wake from its apparently delusional slumber. White House spokespeople repeated stock phrases—“We are not looking for a war with Iran. We are not seeking a conflict with the regime in a military way. We’re not looking to escalate”—seemingly oblivious to the reality that Iran had already escalated.
The Obama administration was the initial promoter of the idea that a truce with Iran, prioritizing the avoidance of military conflict above everything else, could persuade Tehran to curb its destabilizing actions in the region. The longer-term goal was to enable the United States to disengage from Middle East wars and redirect attention to China and Russia. At its foundation, the Obama Doctrine, as it was known, held that regional allies, especially Saudi Arabia, needed to establish a “cold peace” with Iran, despite being declared enemies. One party certain to object to this arrangement was Israel, but Washington disregarded that eventuality in making its outreach and concessions to Iran with the 2016 nuclear deal (officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). The view of many progressives that Israel was the major source of regional conflict gave the administration’s position political cover.
After a brief interregnum under Donald Trump, the Biden administration picked up the Obama team’s agenda of outreach toward Iran and restraint at virtually all costs in the face of provocation. So far, in the current conflict, the United States has carefully avoided hitting any Iranian facility inside or outside Iran, even when Iran and its proxies attack U.S. forces, Israel, or internationally flagged commercial-shipping vessels. In January, the United States redesignated the Houthis as a global terrorist organization, and the U.S. military interdicted a Yemeni boat in the Red Sea carrying Iranian-manufactured ballistic missiles to the Houthis—but both the U.S. secretary of state and the national security adviser pointedly avoided even mentioning Iran in their official statements. Worse, the United States apparently alerted the Iranians to the interdiction in advance—hardly a way to signal seriousness.
Avoiding a regional conflagration surely seems like a prudent goal. But failing to enforce effective deterrence isn’t the way to secure it—rather, that laxness has emboldened Iran and led to precisely the escalation that restraint was intended to avert. Worse, the timidity is rooted in misguided assumptions about the motivations and ambitions of the Iranian regime and has had the effect, however inadvertently, of appeasing a declared enemy.
Even supporters of engagement with Iran, such as the former State Department adviser Vali Nasr, have acknowledged since October 7 that the Obama Doctrine was “completely incorrect.” And yet so far, Nasr observed, “the United States has not updated its thinking.”
Indeed, the Iranian regime brilliantly gamed the Obama and then Biden team’s technocratic attempts to fine-tune “stability” in the region by keeping its aggression just below the threshold that would provoke a robust U.S. response, thereby incrementally raising the limit of U.S. tolerance. The U.S. has mounted no credible deterrence as Iran has progressed toward nuclear latency while drawing into alignment, economically, with China and, militarily, with Russia.
Iran’s break with the West should not be surprising: It is the culmination of a trajectory that began even before the Islamic Revolution. The antipathy of Iranian Islamists toward the United States, Israel, and the core principles of Western liberalism was clear in 1979, when radicals seized the U.S. embassy and held its personnel hostage for 444 days. It was clear when the Islamic Republic established Lebanese Hezbollah to destroy Israel soon after. And it was in full evidence in 1989, when Iran’s then–supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a global call for the assassination of the writer Salman Rushdie, on the grounds that his novel offended Islam.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has shouted its hatred for the West from the rooftops for anyone who cared to listen. But few in the bien-pensant society in the West did listen. Or, if they heard, they discounted the seriousness of the regime’s articulated aspirations. The claim was that Iranians didn’t really mean death to Israel and death to America. Those who warned that Iran—much like Hamas and Hezbollah—has no interest in comity with Western powers and their friends and allies were denounced as warmongers and advocates of American empire.
The misconception that the Iranian regime, despite its tough facade, is a status quo power aiming for peaceful coexistence with the West and its allies, has long hindered a true understanding of its nature. Supporters of this view work in academia and in think tanks, such as the Quincy Institute and the International Crisis Group. Their view of Iran’s stance toward the West seems to ignore the Islamic Republic’s consistent self-description and demonstrated behavior as an adversarial state.
The Islamic Republic of Iran prides itself on being a revolutionary state (or “revisionist,” in the foreign-policy jargon), driven by Islamist ideology to replace what it views as an illegitimate and unjust U.S.-led international system. Iran has little interest in rapprochement, let alone in a constructive relationship with America and its allies, beyond occasional tactical cooperation on peripheral issues. The regime’s goal is to dominate its region as it has dominated its society, an ambition that is clearly at odds with U.S. interests in the Middle East.
Those who view Iran as an accommodationist state suggest that Islamist ideology is mostly rhetorical window dressing, behind which lie conventional national interests and foreign-policy goals. In this view, “Death to America” is a bluff to strengthen the country’s bargaining position with the West. Many who see the regime this way also paint it as an aggrieved postcolonial nation resisting foreign influence.
With regard to Iran’s domestic politics, purveyors of this dovish view tend to portray the power structure in the regime as a more or less level playing field, in which reformers and hard-liners struggle for the “soul” of the 1979 revolution. Supposedly, multiple voices and power centers compete to shape policy, and the supreme leader plays the role of a mediator or balancer among factions. The regime’s center of gravity is thus mutable, such that even a few vociferous reformists may gain clout.
These conditions may have prevailed during the brief period of reform politics, from 1997 to 2004. But they were snuffed out after the regime crushed the 2009 Green movement—a political crisis that brought millions into the streets of Iranian cities to protest what they viewed as a fraudulent presidential election. Once the Islamic dictatorship fully consolidated domestic power and stamped out internal opposition, it was able to pursue a bolder foreign policy. With oil prices running high and a ready customer in China, Iran was emboldened to enter as a belligerent in a European war for the first time in its history by supplying the Russian forces invading Ukraine with drones and other military assistance. In return it received Russia’s increased support in regional and international politics, including on the UN Security Council, which still oversees various legal constraints on Iran.
Despite all this, many Iran experts insist that Iran be viewed as a “normal” country driven primarily by pragmatic interests. Adherents of this view go through conceptual contortions to show how Iran’s regional policies, even its enmity toward Israel and the United States, reflect long-standing security concerns unrelated to the ideological makeup of the regime. Imperatives arising from Iran’s so-called strategic loneliness, we are told, force Iran into expedient, nonideologically based alliances, such as supporting Christian Armenia against Muslim Azerbaijan. The need for “strategic depth” against Israel’s supposed threats to attack Iran drives Iran’s support for Israel’s enemies. These types of explanations are offered as evidence of a regime desperately pursuing national and not ideological strategic objectives, behind which lies a yearning for reconciliation with the West and even the United States itself. The barrier to repairing the broken relationship, according to this logic, is irrational American prejudice and a desire to dominate the world.
But this accommodationist position confuses means and ends; Islamic Iran is a master of flexible tactics but has never wavered from its commitment to the goals of the 1979 Islamic revolution that put it in power. The anti-liberal, anti-Western Islamism that has persisted all these decades must be taken seriously as the engine of Iran’s domestic and foreign policy. Iran is not a hybrid political system combining theocracy and democracy; rather, elections are an instrument of theocratic rule.
The members of Parliament who chanted “Death to Israel” on the day of the greatest Jewish loss since the Holocaust were handpicked by the ruling clerics. The Islamic Republic of Iran has always been determined to upend and then dominate the Middle East regional order, to expel the Americans and destroy Israel. Iran rejects the entire post-1945 U.S.-led international order. Of course, it exploits the system where it can for the purpose of undermining it, much as China does. But Iran’s ultimate goal is unquestionably adversarial toward the West.
The evidence in support of an adversarial interpretation of Iran is stronger than for an accommodationist view. Iran has been consistent in its anti-American stance for more than four decades; that is a long time to dissimulate for short-term gains. Iran has been willing to put its soldiers and commanders on the battlefield to pursue that stance. It has been willing to forgo the enormous economic benefits it could have received if it joined the international global market. It has been more than willing to provoke the West into imposing sanctions, and then to suffer under them, in the name of preserving its anti-American posture and “revolutionary” credentials.
Had these obvious truths been taken more seriously, engagement with Iran, based on the assumption that Iran is a “normal” country and not a revisionist state, would never have gone as far as it did—certainly Biden would not have sought to revive Obama’s failed strategy. Iran would likely be just as anti-American, but it would not have been emboldened and enriched by reduced sanctions enforcement as it expanded its power through its regional proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah. During this same period, Iran has maneuvered adroitly within a changing Asian geopolitical landscape to align itself with China and Russia, partnerships with U.S. adversaries that further bolster its security and economic resources.
The unipolar moment, when the United States was unopposed by other great powers, came to an end sometime around 2014. China interpreted the financial crisis of 2007 and the U.S. debacle in Iraq as signaling the decline of U.S. global stewardship. Russia annexed Crimea after seeing that its aggression against Georgia in 2008 met with minimal pushback from the U.S. or Europe. Moscow recognized Obama’s calls for foreign-policy restraint as a weakening of America’s commitment to global leadership, a process that Trump accelerated. When Obama drew a red line on chemical-weapons use in Syria in 2012, then reneged on it a year later, he effectively handed Syria over to Iran, which then drew Russia into Syria and, by extension, the Middle East in 2015.
In the past decade, Iran’s ambitions have only expanded as the geopolitical landscape has shifted. A new authoritarian axis that includes China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea now threatens the security of the United States and its allies. The countries in this axis are not entirely aligned in their values and interests, but they share an anti-Western agenda. Iran now has the opportunity to project power in the Middle East—and every reason to reject any new nuclear deal or rapprochement with the West.
Iran’s support for Hamas’s October 7 attack heralds its final break with the West and is the harbinger of a new world order—one that will likely lead to significant pain and violence in the years to come.