When the warlord Ismail seized the Persian throne in 1501, he faced a problem common to usurpers: how to hold a conquered land against a more powerful neighbour. His solution was original. Sunni subjects were given an ultimatum: embrace a new faith, take to the road, or die. Within a generation, the empire was remade as Shi’a, its mosques repurposed, its madrassas emptied, its pulpits given over to the ritual cursing of the first three caliphs – sectarian theatre designed to ensure blood stayed hot and bridges stayed burnt. Ismail did not much trouble himself with doctrine. But he understood that a Persia made spiritually alien to the Sunni Ottoman world could not easily be digested by it. He made his empire unconquerable by rendering its people unconvertible.

The Safavids fell in 1736, having unified Persia under native rule for the first time in a thousand years. Shi’ism returned to Persians what the Arab conquest had taken: a faith that was theirs alone, fused to national sovereignty. Even the Pahlavis, who spent half the twentieth century trying to secularise Iran by force, could not dissolve it. The mullahs did not create this identity in 1979. They claimed it.

In February, Ayatollah Khamenei was killed in an Israeli strike. His son and successor Mojtaba lost his wife and child and remains in a coma. In eighteen months, Israel has killed the armed forces chief of staff, the head of the Revolutionary Guard, most of the air force leadership, and fourteen nuclear scientists. The regime has not cracked. After the strikes of June 2025, Tehran atomised command, granting Revolutionary Guard units licence to act without waiting for orders. The system redesigned itself to survive the killing of its leaders.

The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Brent crude sits above $100. The International Energy Agency calls it the worst energy security crisis in history. In Yemen, the Houthis have ended a month of calculated restraint, firing their first missiles at Israel. They have not yet closed Bab al-Mandeb – the Gate of Tears – but for the global economy the name may soon prove prophetic. If shut, the last free-flowing artery for Gulf energy exports goes with it. Iran is one of the few states that can use geography to force the cost of a regional war onto every household on earth.

Now look at the other side. Trump has issued a 48-hour ultimatum, suspended it, extended the suspension, announced “productive” talks, declared those talks were going “very well,” recast Iran’s selective release of ships as a “sign of respect,” and finally claimed that regime change had already been accomplished. Seven positions in the space of a month. The Wall Street Journal now reports that Trump has told aides he would end the war without reopening Hormuz, because doing so would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. The Revolutionary Guard has held one position since February. The clerical state has held one since 1979. The identity beneath both has held since 1501.

Nobody in this White House could name Ismail, or explain why that ignorance is a problem. The Trump Administration’s approach to Iran follows the pattern of every American administration before it, only cruder. Pressure, ultimatum, partial retreat, renewed pressure. Earlier presidents dealt in sanctions and communiqués. Trump added bunker busters. But the underlying conceit is unchanged: that enough force will succeed where the Ottomans, the Russians, and the British failed. A nation that once converted an entire population by force to preserve its sovereignty from the superpower of its day will not tamely buckle under air strikes from the superpower of ours.

This is not just Trump’s failing, though he is especially unfit for the challenge. Another president would inherit the same handicap: fixed terms, a voter base repulsed by foreign wars, and electoral incentives that prize the immediate over the enduring. Obama’s deal becomes Trump’s belligerence becomes Biden’s half-measures becomes the next reversal. After the nuclear deal, Iran watched its economy open and slam shut within eighteen months. Tehran now sees the volatility of American promises as more dangerous than the predictability of permanent sanctions. It no longer negotiates on the assumption that Washington will keep its word. Every negotiation is just a breathing space.

This odious regime will survive this war. It has survived worse: eight years and half a million dead defending the oil-rich province of Khuzestan against Saddam Hussein. But the kindling of a future Iranian democracy may not.

When the nuclear deal was signed in 2015, Iran’s pro-American, secular middle class comprised roughly 65 percent of the population. Ali Vaez argues that 5 percent annual growth sustained over a decade would have expanded that class until the regime’s grip became untenable. Instead, sanctions and isolation have collapsed the middle class to 35 percent. Almost 40 percent of Iranians are vulnerable to falling below the poverty line. More than 100,000 students study abroad and fewer than 1 percent come back. The tools designed to weaken the regime have destroyed the demographic most likely to change it from within.

The West has spent fifty years trying to change what Iran does. Sanctions target behaviour. Strikes target capability. Diplomacy targets policy. None has touched the identity beneath. This war will be no different.

Iran still holds cards it has not played. Bab al-Mandeb can be closed in a day. Gulf production facilities sit within range of Iranian drones and missiles. Swarming them would knock out production at the source – not merely shipping – and remove oil from the global market for years. American electoral cycles will turn. The Israeli courts may come for Netanyahu. Tehran can wait for its adversaries to rotate out of office, out of coalition, or out of nerve. None of this required special foresight, only a passing familiarity with how Iran has operated for five centuries. The men who planned this war appear not to have bothered.

And yet the regime is dying on its own clock. Only 11 percent of Iranians support the principles of the Islamic Revolution. Just 40 percent identify as even nominally Muslim in survey data, against 99.5 percent in the census. The generation that marched for Khomeini in their twenties is in its late sixties and seventies. The median age of the political elite exceeds seventy.

The middle class is the only force that has ever threatened to change what Iran is. The students, the women who cast aside their hijabs knowing the cost, the professionals who have not yet left. They need time, and they need to survive. After 2009, after 2022, after the massacres of 2025, they are still there. Smaller, poorer, angrier, and waiting – the first casualties of every American policy designed to help them.

About the Author

Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat.

On Substack, Luke writes about the systems we’re breaking and the blindness that lets us — from climate and geopolitics to AI and the future of work. Read & Subscribe on Substack here.