Iranian fans cheered.

But before Iran’s next match against Wales four days later, most of a starting lineup that looked intimidated either sang or mouthed their national anthem’s words meekly as fans jeered.

What happened? Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps approached the players between games and threatened their loved ones back home if they continued to protest.

Those incidents exemplify the pervasive control the IRGC holds not only over the national team but over all Iranian soccer. Since the United States and Canada view the IRGC as a terrorist group, both nations refused to grant visas to Iranian soccer officials and support personnel—including Mehdi Taj, president of the national federation, and Hedayat Membini, its secretary general.

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As part of the visa restrictions, the national team had to live and train in Tijuana, though all its first-round games took place in Seattle and Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles, California. After each game, the squad immediately returned to Tijuana.

“The group stage is finished tomorrow and we don’t have our logistics people here,” forward Mehdi Taremi, the team captain and a veteran of three World Cups, said after Iran’s final first-round game Friday. “We don’t have recovery or logistics people to help us. They don’t have a visa.”

“We have to fight everything here,” he added. “FIFA did nothing. It’s not fair. Who wants to help us? It’s a disaster World Cup, a disaster.”

But consider that Taremi spent most of his career supporting the regime. He not only was a personal friend of the late Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, one of the protégés of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In 2017, Taremi reposted Khamenei’s Twitter declaration that Israel would cease to exist within 25 years.

The relationship between the regime and sports began when Khamenei secured the IRGC’s loyalty by promising economic opportunities insulated from financial accountability. As a result, the IRGC expanded into industries ranging from banking to mining to agriculture to construction, and accounts for more than 50 percent of Iran’s gross domestic product.

“Over the past two decades, most sports clubs and related bodies have been taken over by political or security-military organizations, with former Revolutionary Guards holding the top positions,” Kambiz Foroohar, a journalist and consultant, wrote in 2021. “The financial benefits of running a sports club are simply too great for the Revolutionary Guards to ignore.”

Money becomes the reward for exercising political power.

“The Guards see sports as a form of social control to be exploited in pursuit of domestic policy objectives,” Foroohar wrote. “The country’s two most popular sports, wrestling and football, attract a young male demographic, often from poor socio-economic backgrounds, that needs to be managed and directed. Furthermore, sports have a symbolic value, as policies applied to the athletic domain project ideals for society at large.”

The IRGC exerts its power in domestic soccer through the Persian Gulf Pro League. Former IRGC commanders serve as club executives or board members, especially at two of the biggest clubs in Asia: Persepolis and Esteghlal, bitter rivals based in Tehran. The chief executive officer of one mid-level club, working under a double alias, not only was an IRGC commander and the head of security for state television. Amir Mansour Bozorgian-Asl (his real name) belonged to an assassination team that murdered in Vienna the leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, in 1989, as well as other Kurdish activists elsewhere.

The IRGC even owns one club: Shiraz’s Fajr Sepasi FC, which the unofficial Team Melli website called “the most hated club in Iran!”

Khamenei protected his IRGC allies in soccer by ordering a popular Iranian soccer commentator off state television in 2019 for being too tough on corruption and mismanagement. Adel Ferdosipour, whom Newsweek described in 2009 as one of Iran’s 20 most powerful people, had been covering soccer for two decades.

Corruption flourished under Taj, who was an IRGC intelligence officer at 19 and is serving his third term as president of the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For example, players accused the federation in 2019 of stealing 1.5 million Swiss francs, or $1.3 million, they received for playing in the 2014 and 2018 World Cups. The IRGC even influences the choice of a national coach.

Since the men’s national soccer team represents the sporting world’s most direct connection with Iran, the regime takes great pains to use it to promote propaganda and to enforce political compliance. The team’s official video for this year’s World Cup began with shots of an Iranian flag flying near bomb damage accompanied by a statement of defiance:

“Even if the entire world becomes our enemy, this land belongs to Imam Mahdi, the imam of the time.”

Shia religious imagery and singing dominate the video, which includes an AI-generated image of head coach Amir Ghalenoei with his hands extended in prayer.

Later, players wearing the national white soccer uniform turn into soldiers wearing camouflage and helmets while brandishing automatic weapons.

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Authorities spare no expense to ensure compliance. For the 2022 World Cup, the regime spent $2.36 million to send about 350 agents and social media specialists to the tournament. Qatari authorities helped by banning the lion-and-sun flag, symbolic of the deposed Pahlavi dynasty, and other anti-regime messages.

One year later, when Qatar played host to the Asian Football Confederation’s 2023 Asian Cup, undercover IRGC and Basij agents arrived to “boost player morale and be in the presence of international photographers,” Membini said. About 100 of the more than 300 agents attended training sessions while many served as undercover fans. That effort cost the regime about $300,000.

For this year’s World Cup, FIFA capitulated to the demand to ban the lion-and-sun flag but allowed fans to show the Palestinian flag when Iran plays.

Compliance also involves punitive measures. Forward Sardar Azmoun, a World Cup veteran who scored 57 goals in 91 games for Iran and plays in the United Arab Emirates after two seasons with top European clubs, was expelled from the national team in March for appearing in photos with Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE’s prime minister and the ruler of Dubai. Iran considers the UAE a wartime enemy.

In 2023, the news agency Tasnim, which the IRGC operates, reported that prominent players were arrested for drinking alcohol, illegal in Iran, and socializing with unmarried women. In 1984, the regime executed Habib Khabiri, Iran’s captain, for supporting political opposition.

During the massive demonstrations in December, January and February, as the regime killed tens of thousands of protesters, Iranian soccer players stood with them. Ali Karimi, who played in the 2006 World Cup and for Germany’s Bayern Munich, joined other former players, a soccer coach, a referee and Iranian sportswriters in an open letter to FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.

Karimi and his fellow signatories demanded that FIFA condemn the regime’s attacks, whose victims included “members of the football community, sanction Iran’s federation for violating FIFA statues and suspend its national teams from all competitions, including this year’s World Cup.

“I have always considered myself one of the people,” said Karimi, who had his property confiscated by the regime and now lives in Los Angeles. “Now that our country is going through one of its most sensitive and sorrowful periods, the least I can do is be the voice of my people.”

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Two months later, five members of the national women’s team received asylum in Australia, site of the Women’s Asian Cup, after starters refused to sing the Iranian anthem.

The persecution of Mohammed Rachid Mazaheri, a reserve goalkeeper on Iran’s 2018 World Cup squad, best illustrates the close cooperation between the IRGC and the FFIRI. The federation suspended him in 2019 after he criticized the government for spending money on building soccer stadiums in Iraq. One year later, the IRGC interrogated Mazaheri for protesting the execution of three prisoners. In 2021, he received a second suspension from the FFIRI for supporting mass protests over the severe lack of water.

Then in February, as the regime continued to murder protesters, the IRGC arrested Mazaheri for posting an Instagram picture of Khamenei with the caption, “Satan” and the phrase “Khamenei! Know that your command over this holy land has ended.”

No news about Mazaheri’s fate has since emerged.

Joseph D’Hippolito is a contributor to IDI

On April 15, 2023, a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan between two war criminals: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, commander of the Rapid Support Forces. Both men lead military forces that were once part of the Sudanese army; this is, in other words, a state of fracture and military conflict following an alliance, and following war crimes both sides had committed against the Sudanese people and against the civilian opposition. In 2003, al-Burhan and Hemedti took part, on the orders of Omar al-Bashir, in the savage massacres in Darfur that claimed more than 300,000 lives. In October 2021, the two men joined together in the coup against the civilian government that had been formed after the Sudanese uprising.

The war has plunged Sudan into total ruin. According to international reports, between 150,000 and 200,000 Sudanese have been killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, with more than 50,000 missing. Roughly 14 million Sudanese have been displaced inside and outside the country, and 34 million suffer from widespread hunger. Thousands of women have been raped: according to Doctors Without Borders, 3,396 women were sexually assaulted in Darfur alone between 2024 and 2025, and international reports estimate that hundreds of women across Sudan have taken their own lives as a result of this rape. Six million children have been forced out of school, along with 714 university students; 89 percent of farmers have lost the ability to work their land; and infrastructure has been destroyed on a vast scale across the whole of Sudan.

Mass graves. Mass rape. Ethnic cleansing. Forced displacement. Enforced disappearance. Torture. War crimes. Extrajudicial executions. The largest humanitarian crisis in the world. The most dangerous famine in the world. A surge of hate crimes. Even chemical weapons have been used in this filthy war, by the Sudanese army.

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And yet, for all the horror of what is happening, Sudan has drawn no real attention from the international community. There is no media coverage of what is taking place there; not a single demonstration has been held against the continuation of this war, even as thousands of demonstrations have filled the streets of the West on behalf of Gaza. This war has earned no global concern whatsoever, and we have heard not one voice from the women’s organizations against the mass rape of Sudanese women. All of this is because the Arabs and Muslims wanted to steer attention and money toward shining the spotlight on Gaza alone, for the sole reason that Israel is the other party in the equation.

Foreign intervention has prolonged the war, deepened the crisis, and fed the conflict, for there are states backing each side of the war for reasons of their own. Egypt, for instance, backs al-Burhan because it supports military rule and has stood behind every military coup in Sudan’s history. The opposite is true of the UAE, where, over the past fifteen years, Mohammed bin Zayed has pursued two principles without apology: a determined campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, and the conviction that the UAE is entitled, like any sovereign state, to put its own interests first. Both are at work in Sudan. With the Muslim Brotherhood holding the Sudanese army in its grip, Abu Dhabi had every reason to back the other side, and its economic ties to Hemedti gave it a further, perfectly ordinary national interest in the outcome.

As for Saudi Arabia, which was in a cold war with the military regimes back in the 1960s, it backs al-Burhan for one reason only: because the UAE backs the other side, as part of the current rivalry between the Saudis and the Emiratis.

There are many other parties entangled in the Sudanese crisis as well, South Sudan, Chad, Libya, the Central African Republic, Turkey, Russia, Ethiopia.

The most dangerous intervention America has observed is the Iranian one: arming the Sudanese army with drones, and training the Muslim Brotherhood elements fighting alongside that army. This is a dangerous scenario that Iran had been planning, to close the Bab al-Mandab strait and disrupt international trade through the Red Sea by means of its Houthi allies in Yemen and the Brotherhood in Sudan. For this reason the American administration designated the Brotherhood organization in Sudan a terrorist group in 2026 and warned al-Burhan against cooperating with Iran.

It is these international interventions that have blocked any solution to the crisis. On July 30, 2025, the Washington meeting on the Sudanese crisis collapsed over an Egyptian-Emirati dispute: the United States had circulated a draft plan for a settlement that everyone, including the UAE, accepted, and Egypt rejected, and so the meeting failed.

Sudan’s Crisis Is an Old One

But the crisis in Sudan is old, and it can be summed up in three words: England, Egypt, and Islamic sharia.

England, for the sake of its own interests, assembled an enormous Sudanese state out of mismatched ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, Arabs and Africans, Muslims and Christians and pagans, warring tribes, clashing races, forming the largest country in Africa until the secession of South Sudan, and currently the third largest.

Egypt, for its part, has backed military rule and supported the coups in Sudan, from Ibrahim Abboud’s coup in 1958 to al-Burhan and Hemedti’s coup against the civilian government in 2021.

And Islamic sharia bred a contest and a bidding war over Islamization between the military and the Islamists. Across the seventy years since Sudan’s independence, the military has ruled for fifty-nine years and civilians for only eleven, and even those civilian years were divided between two Islamist movements, the Mahdiyya and the Khatmiyya. Military rule, too, was blended with Islamic rule: General Jaafar Nimeiri imposed strict sharia law in September 1983, and Omar al-Bashir ruled for thirty years, a Brotherhood government under military cover, since al-Bashir was himself a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. And now al-Burhan’s army is controlled by the Brotherhood.

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Islamic sharia also fed a surplus of hatred, a surplus of violence, a surplus of tyranny, and a religious supremacism and persecution against non-Muslims, along with a supremacism over non-Arabs. The imposition of sharia ignited a war in southern Sudan that killed millions, until South Sudan gained its independence on July 9, 2011.

This is why the Sudanese scene has been marked by:

• Arab supremacism and persecution of Africans. (During the rape of girls in Darfur in 2003 and 2004, the soldiers would say to the African women: “You should be proud, slave, that the one raping you is an Arab, so that you will give birth to an Arab.”)

• Religious supremacism and persecution of non-Muslims.

• Military supremacism over civilians.

The Sudanese army is fighting an existential battle on behalf of the ruling military class, allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to be rid of a man of its own making, Hemedti, and no longer sees him as representing it.

Hemedti, too, is fighting an existential battle, for himself and his family. He runs the largest private army in Africa, controls a vast gold trade that has widened his alliances, and has been able to operate a mercenary trade serving African and Arab conflicts. He sees himself as the representative of a large region attempting to break away, the region of Darfur.

Because each side regards this war as existential and zero-sum, because the parties to the conflict are being fed by various states, because neither side can win it outright, and because of the hatred rooted deep in Sudan’s components, the solution, in my view, is a new partition of Sudan, to reduce this hatred, this strife, and these civil conflicts.

Magdi Khalil is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

On the first morning of the war, in late February, the strikes found the Supreme Leader. Ali Khamenei had spent his final years in a bunker so deep the elevator took five minutes to reach him. It was not deep enough. Much of the military high command died with him. In the months that followed, the proxy crescent he had strung across the region, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and the client already lost in Damascus, came apart. The currency collapsed. By every ordinary measure, a state takes blows like these and falls.

This one didn’t.

The memorandum brokered through Pakistan and signed in Versailles is not the record of Iran’s defeat. It is the record of its survival, and for a regime built to outlast every man inside it, survival is the only victory that counts.

To see why a war meant to humble Tehran has ended up enriching it, you have to find the assumption underneath American policy, the belief that prosperity dissolves conviction. Feed a people into global markets, reconstruction contracts, oil revenue, and the comforts of modern life, and in time they’ll trade their grievances for growth.

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This belief belongs to the entire post–Cold War West. Republicans and Democrats alike have bet that commerce would tame ideology, a conviction with a long pedigree. It runs from Montesquieu, who held that trade softens men and quiets nations, through Francis Fukuyama, who declared liberal capitalism the end of history, down to the creed of Davos.

In January, a revolt over a collapsing currency spread to more than two hundred cities across Iran. The regime answered with rifles. The killing peaked on the eighth and ninth of the month, and then the state cut the country’s internet and worked in the dark. Around fifty thousand people were arrested in the weeks that followed. Detainees were tortured, and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented rape among the methods.

President Trump, that winter, named the regime as murderers and vowed the men responsible would be tried and executed.

Those are the men now sitting across the table. The administration that called them killers in January is, by June, lifting their sanctions, thawing their accounts, reopening their ports, and helping raise a reconstruction fund of at least three hundred billion dollars.

Article Five of The Islamic Republic’s constitution lodges authority not in the will of the people but in the guardianship of the jurist—Velayat-e Faqih—held in trust during the absence of the Hidden Imam. The preamble hands the Revolutionary Guard with the mission of guarding a revolution and carrying it beyond the border. Other armies defend a country. The IRGC was built to defend an idea.

When the strikes killed the Supreme Leader, it was the Guard that closed ranks and chose the next one; the office passed from father to son. The Guard and its Basij were the hands that did the killing in the streets in January. And through its engineering empire and its web of front companies, the Guard is also one of the largest economic actors in the country, with its hands on construction, energy, and trade.

So, when the memorandum says “Iran,” the reconstruction billions and the unfrozen accounts don’t settle on some abstraction called the nation. Given the Guard’s reach, any recovery will flow back to the one institution that survived the war, named the new leader, and ran the massacre, the institution whose written purpose is to export the revolution.

What Iran gives, it gives an “affirmation” that it won’t build a bomb, a promise, or a lie, that was made over and over again. The enriched uranium stays in the country, and the things that make Iran a revolution rather than a state, the ballistic missiles, the proxy armies, Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, aren’t in the text at all.

This is not an Iranian peculiarity. The 2020 Doha agreement made the Taliban a partner. The movement waited out the most powerful coalition on earth and walked back through the gate. What it has built since is in the United Nations’ own reporting: al-Qaeda has reopened training camps and madrasas, moves freely across much of the country, and its leadership now openly calls the faithful to come train in Afghanistan and go out to strike Western targets. A country the West spent twenty years and a trillion dollars to deny to terror is, once again, terror’s preferred address.

Syria runs the same play. Ahmed al-Sharaa, until recently Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a man whose career ran through al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, is now received in the oval office as a partner. Over the last year and a half, his jihadists massacred the Alawites, Druze, and Christians of Syria.

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Qatar has spent a generation buying the satellite channels, the endowed chairs, the institutes and lobbyists that carry political Islam into the center of Western life, and funding Hamas along the way. Turkey supplies the harder currency of politics and arms, casting itself as protector of the Islamic project and now standing behind the new order in Damascus. The US enters both in its ledgers as allies and never asks what the money is for.

A president who built his name on the art of the deal does not seem to grasp that some men cannot be bought into the circle he is selling. The wager beneath all of it is that prosperity dissolves conviction, that a jihadist made rich will become a partner. It is a delusion. A rich jihadist in Syria does not abandon the caliphate; he funds it. A rich jihadist in Iran does not abandon the imamate; he rebuilds the Guard that carries it. The rich jihadists of Qatar have had a generation to prove the point, and they spent their fortune not on joining the modern world but on exporting the very project the West keeps trying to purchase its way out of. Wealth does not soften that kind of conviction. It arms it. And a deal that hands these men money, ports, and time has not bought peace. It has made a down payment on the next war.

Ali Siadatan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

More From IDI

Earlier this month, Aaron Hutchings, a Christian man from the United States, traveled to Pakistan and paid approximately $4,000 to liberate a family trapped in bonded labor for an extraordinary 140 years; four complete generations whose lives had been consumed by inherited debt at a brick kiln in the Kasur region.

The family’s enslavement began in the 1880s when an ancestor took out a loan, unwittingly condemning his descendants to generations of unpaid labor. This tragedy illuminates Pakistan’s brick kiln industry, where an estimated hundreds of thousands remain enslaved across more than 20,000 facilities, despite bonded labor being outlawed in 1992. The system operates through “peshgi”—advance payments or loans given by kiln owners to workers during emergencies, for weddings, or medical bills. With extremely low wages, arbitrary fines, manipulated accounts, and crushing interest rates, repayment becomes virtually impossible. These debts become family obligations passed down through bloodlines, with children as young as four or five beginning work to “repay” ancestral obligations they never incurred.

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In Pakistan, Christians frequently face systemic discrimination that forces them into hazardous labor with minimal safety protections. They are often allowed to only occupy lower-status jobs such as cleaning and sanitation work, or as bonded laborers in brick kilns. Many Christians are trapped in debt.

Workers are forced to descend into deep sewers without protective gear (like masks or gloves), exposing them to toxic gases. This exploitation continues to take lives.

On May 7, Shabbir Masih, a 33-year-old Christian sanitation worker in Pakistan, died after inhaling toxic gases after his supervisors forced him to perform a dangerous task.

Masih died working inside a 25-foot-deep mainline sewer operated by the Water and Sanitation Authority (WASA). According to his widow, Masih was fully aware of the danger posed by the work. For three consecutive days, he refused to descend into the sewer. On the final night, WASA officials arrived at his home at 10 p.m. and took him away.

“He knew it was a death trap,” his widow said. “He was very worried for the last three days and told me that they were threatening him [if he did not] go deep into that sewer.”

Masih’s widow is demanding justice for her husband. She says WASA forced him to work in the sewer against his will. WASA has refused accountability in Masih’s death, claiming he was hired as a contractor, a deliberate outsourcing arrangement designed to avoid responsibility.

Masih is not the first Christian to die because of this pattern of systemic discrimination. Labor rights groups assert that the recent fatalities highlight ongoing discrimination and marginalization faced by Christians.

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While Pakistan’s Christians comprise less than 2% of the country’s population, they work 80% of sanitation jobs. These workers are not given proper training or protective equipment to carry out their job responsibilities. They are sent into deep sewers without any safety measures; if they refuse, they are threatened with job loss. The Christian community, which lives below the poverty line, constitutes a large portion of this workforce.

In May and April, at least five other Christian sanitation workers lost their lives. One remains in serious condition after inhaling toxic gases while working in sewers in Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces.

On May 4, two workers (Shakeel Masih and Samar Masih) died in Sahiwal, Punjab. They were cleaning a manhole without any protective equipment. On April 17, three other workers (Wilson, Waqas, and Nazeer) were killed while clearing a blocked sewer line in Surjani Town, Karachi, Sindh Province.

Justice Raja Inam Amin Minhas of the Islamabad High Court noted that over 70 Christian sanitation workers have died since 1988 due to exposure to toxic gases.

International Christian Concern notes:

“Christian workers are deliberately assigned to the most dangerous, undesirable jobs. According to the Center for Legal Justice (CLJ), from 2011 to 2023, at least 40 Christians lost their lives in manholes due to a lack of proper training and safety equipment. Workers often don’t refuse dangerous assignments, even when they know it may cost them their lives, because sudden job termination is a risk they cannot afford. Most are the sole providers for their families.”

Meanwhile, bonded labor is still a widespread form of slavery. Laborers become trapped, unable to repay their loans due to high interest rates. In 2024, the organization Global Christian Relief reported of this type of “Christian slavery” in Pakistan:

“Today, there are 20,000 brick kilns across Pakistan. An estimated 3.5-4 million people working in the kilns as bonded slaves—many of them are Christians. An estimated 3.5-4 million people working in the kilns as bonded slaves—many of them are Christians.

“As the minority, Christians in Pakistan comprise less than 2% of the population. And many believers in this small bracket are steeped in poverty and hold the most undesirable jobs: sewer cleaners, street sweepers, house cleaners, and, of course, brick makers.

“Bonded slavery is technically illegal in Pakistan, but the government chooses to ignore it or accept it as a societal norm. Here’s how it works: Brick kiln owners, preying on desperation, extend loans to those in dire need—a perceived lifeline for medical emergencies, wedding expenses, or simply putting food on the table. With no other options, many, including Christians, unaware of the trap, accept these offers. However, the relief is short-lived, as the loans become shackles that bind families to the kilns. Interest rates devour their daily wages, leaving them with a meager payout that condemns them to decades of servitude.”

Dr. David Fischler, a pastor and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Here I Am Charitable Foundation, told IDI:

“The US government needs to start taking widespread human rights violations in Pakistan seriously. A first step would be assisting Christians who want to leave the country to do so, enabling them to go wherever they desire, particularly to the US after proper vetting. A second would be expanding sanctions beyond the country’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs. For instance, members of Pakistan’s police forces and judiciary who refuse to enforce basic protections of Christians should be specifically cited and prohibited from receiving funds from the federal government or family abroad. Export prohibitions could be put in place against any sector of Pakistan’s economy where Christians are exploited or mistreated. The US could also cut off all non-humanitarian aid, which would amount to about $150 million.”

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Nick Donnelly, a deacon with the Diocese of Lancaster, also calls on the international community not to ignore the plight of Christians in Pakistan. In an interview with IDI, Donnelly said:

“The international community needs to recognize that Islamist Pakistan is systematically imposing apartheid on Christians, as severe as the daily injustices, cruelty, and violence of apartheid-era South Africa. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, the international community, led by the UN, applied escalating diplomatic, economic, and cultural pressure to isolate the apartheid regime. Just as the international community condemned and punished South Africa, it urgently needs to do the same to Pakistan.

“The US and EU need to lead the world in banning new investments, loans, and imports of goods. We need to encourage consumer boycotts of Pakistani goods and campaign for sports and cultural isolation. Pakistan must be excluded from the Olympics. Pakistan’s politicians must be banned from international travel and their personal bank accounts and assets frozen. Islamist Pakistan must become an international pariah until it abandons its persecution and violence against Christians. If only Pope Leo XIV would consistently speak out against the bigotry and chauvinism inherent in Islam, then the international community might take action.”

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

Japan followed a different but equally destructive path. The state fused emperor worship with militant nationalism, demanding absolute loyalty and sacrifice. The cult of the divine emperor justified imperial conquest across Asia, while the Bushidō ethic was weaponized to sanctify death in battle. Surrender was taught to be dishonorable; death for the emperor was glorified as the highest virtue. This fanaticism gave rise to the infamous kamikaze pilots, young men ordered to crash their planes into American ships, and suicidal banzai charges that wasted thousands of lives in hopeless assaults.

What made these regimes so dangerous was the fact that millions embraced them as if they were divine missions. In Germany, Hitler was not merely a political leader; he was exalted as the Führer, the embodiment of the nation’s destiny. His words carried the weight of scripture and were endlessly preached through rallies, broadcasts, and propaganda that blurred the line between politics and liturgy. The Nazi Party created rituals, torchlight parades, salutes, mass rallies at Nuremberg, that functioned like sacred ceremonies, binding the people into a cult of blood and soil. Children were indoctrinated from the earliest age in the Hitler Youth, taught that to die for the Reich was the highest honor.

Japan mirrored this same religious intensity in its own form. The emperor was not a politician but a living god, the divine descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. His commands were treated as sacred edicts, and loyalty to him was loyalty to heaven itself. Both systems were, in essence, political religions.

When the Allies finally broke the military power of Germany and Japan, they did more than conquer armies and topple governments, they humiliated the gods themselves. In Germany, Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker shattered the illusion of the Führer as an invincible prophet. The Reich he had promised would last a thousand years lay in ashes after barely twelve. Concentration camps were liberated, and the sacred mission of the Aryan race collapsed into the undeniable reality of gas chambers and mass graves. The god of Nazism had failed, and the religion of racial destiny was exposed as a cult of death.

In Japan, the defeat was even more dramatic. The emperor was forced by the Americans to renounce his divinity publicly.2 The god of the Japanese people became just a man. Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated not only two cities but also the myth of divine protection and invincibility. The Bushidō-fueled dream of imperial destiny ended in surrender, and the same soldiers who had once sworn to die for the emperor now watched him bow to the will of foreign occupiers. The sacred aura that had justified conquest, martyrdom, and mass sacrifice was stripped away in an instant.

Within a single generation after their defeat, both Germany and Japan rose from devastation to become stable, prosperous democracies. In Germany, the rubble of the Third Reich gave way to the Wirtschaftswunder, the “economic miracle.” Factories opened, industries modernized, and within decades, West Germany had become one of the leading economies of the world. At the same time, democratic institutions took root: multiparty elections, a strong rule of law, and checks on state power. The same nation that had once waged total war on Europe was now a reliable partner in peace and a cornerstone of the Western alliance.

Japan underwent a parallel transformation. Under American occupation, its feudal-style militarism was dismantled, and a new constitution enshrined parliamentary democracy, civil rights, and limits on state power. Far from returning to conquest, Japan poured its energy into technological advancement, trade, and education. By the 1960s and 1970s, Japan had become an economic powerhouse, exporting innovation and culture around the globe.

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When America invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, it did so with the confidence of a nation that had already proven it could remake shattered societies. The memory of Germany and Japan loomed large in the minds of policymakers. Twice in the 20th century, the United States had not only defeated violent totalitarian regimes but had rebuilt those nations into thriving, democratic allies. Germany and Japan had gone from enemies bent on global domination to pillars of the free world. South Korea, too, had emerged from the chaos of war into prosperity and democracy. Washington assumed Iraq and Afghanistan could follow the same trajectory.

These countries, like Germany and Japan, were ruled by brutal regimes that had terrorized their people and threatened global security. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a police state marked by mass graves, chemical attacks, expansion, and a cult of personality. Afghanistan under the Taliban was a medieval theocracy that harbored terrorists and crushed women under rigid oppression. To American leaders, the situation looked familiar: remove the dictators, topple the regime, and then introduce democratic institutions, free markets, and constitutional limits. With sufficient aid and oversight, the people, freed from tyranny, would naturally embrace liberty and prosperity.

But the American project in Iraq and Afghanistan collapsed into catastrophe. Trillions of dollars were spent, thousands of American lives were lost, and yet the results were the opposite of what Washington envisioned. In Iraq, the fall of Saddam Hussein unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Shia militias, empowered by newfound dominance, sought revenge and control under the guidance of clerics. Sunnis, stripped of the power they had held for decades, turned to insurgency, eventually fueling Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later the rise of ISIS, the most brutal jihadist movement of the 21st century.

Afghanistan followed an equally devastating trajectory. When U.S. troops withdrew in 2021, the entire system the U.S. built collapsed in mere days. The Taliban returned to Kabul without resistance, reclaiming the very power they had lost twenty years earlier. Instead of producing stable allies, the interventions left behind shattered states and emboldened enemies. In Iraq, America unintentionally created the conditions for Iran’s expansion and ISIS’s rise. In Afghanistan, it fought the longest war in American history only to see the country fall back into the hands of the very regime it had overthrown.

Why did America succeed in Japan and Germany but fail in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The ideologies that dragged Germany and Japan into destruction were powerful, but they were ultimately state-driven constructs, manufactured, amplified, and enforced to unify the nation around a central figure. Both systems functioned like religions, but religions bound to mortal men. Their rituals, their scriptures, their claims to truth, all orbited around a single earthly center. And when those figures fell, the ideologies fell with them. Once the central pillars were broken, the systems they upheld collapsed, leaving a vacuum that could be filled by a new order. This was why democratic institutions and market reforms could take root so quickly: the old gods were dead, and the people were freed from their spell.

But Iraq and Afghanistan were not ruled by a passing ideology or the charisma of a single ruler. Neither Saddam Hussein nor the Taliban was the true god of those societies. The god of Iraq and Afghanistan was Allah, transcendent, untouchable, and eternal. When Saddam swung from the gallows, the faith that ordered life in Iraq remained intact. When the Taliban were driven from Kabul, the theological soil that sustained them was not uprooted. Unlike Hitler or Hirohito, Allah could not be killed, dethroned, or humiliated. This god was the absolute sovereign in the Muslim imagination. And His sovereignty stood in direct contradiction to everything America hoped to impose.

The Globalization of Christian Ethics

Whether in Germany and Japan or in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States sought to export the very system that had yielded liberty, prosperity, and stability at home, a system built on democratic institutions, free markets, and constitutional limits. The logic seemed straightforward: if this system had birthed the American order, why should it not be universally applicable, capable of rebuilding other shattered nations? This is not to sanitize America’s self-interest or its ambition to secure allies; such motives are part of human nature. Yet what critics denounced as “American imperialism” was, in reality, the engine that turned devastated nations into stable, prosperous allies.

But what America was exporting was never merely a political arrangement. It was an ethical system. The institutions, parliaments, constitutions, markets, were only the outer shell. At their core was a moral framework shaped by centuries of Christian thought: a vision of law, labor, and liberty ordered toward human flourishing. What America carried abroad was not just governance; it was a way of understanding man, power, and society. Christianity had always been concerned with life, and life abundant. Its moral law was ordered toward the good of man: “I came so that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

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Over centuries, this theological conviction was translated into concrete institutions. Augustine’s vision of the two cities, Aquinas’s doctrine of natural law, Locke’s contract theory, and the Protestant work ethic all became building blocks of Western civilization. Power was limited because man was sinful. Labor was dignified because man was made in God’s image. Property and covenant were respected because stewardship was a moral duty. Even the state itself was justified only insofar as it served justice and human flourishing. Church and state were separated in accordance with Christ’s command: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). This separation was not an act of secular rebellion but the natural fulfillment of Christian teaching.

Over time, these Christian ethics became cloaked in secular, humanistic language. As Western civilization matured, Christian ethics were recast in universal terms that transcended explicit theology. The Enlightenment’s language of “natural rights” and “social contracts” was, in truth, the secularized continuation of the Christian vision. Over time, this moral framework was globalized and woven into international charters and institutions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, enshrines principles that make little sense apart from the Judeo-Christian inheritance: the inherent dignity of the individual, the sanctity of life, and the moral obligation of rulers to serve justice. Nations aspiring to join the modern world could not escape adopting this moral grammar born of Christianity. Whether in constitutions, treaties, or global organizations, the ethical DNA of Christianity, repackaged in secular humanist language, became the assumed foundation of what it meant to be “civilized.”

Postwar nation-building did not require mass conversion to Christianity in order to yield similar outcomes. What mattered was whether a society’s theological soil was compatible with Christian ethics. In Germany, that soil was already present. For centuries, Christian thought had shaped German life, and even under the darkness of Nazism, voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminded the nation of its true foundation. His resistance to Hitler and his theology of costly discipleship embodied a Christian ethic that could not be extinguished. When Hitler fell, Germany did not need to invent a new moral order; it returned to one it had long known. Repentance from Nazism meant rediscovering its Christian inheritance, which allowed democracy, human rights, and rule of law to take root quickly and endure.

Japan, though not historically Christian, possessed cultural and ethical traditions that did not resist Western institutions. The collapse of State Shintō and the emperor cult created a vacuum into which democratic ideals could enter. Japan was able to adapt to constitutional democracy and free markets without a theological clash. While Christianity remained a minority faith, the society proved compatible enough with Judeo-Christian principles of law, rights, and civic order for the system to flourish.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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The Christian and Amazigh activist, Slimane Bouhafs, is a target of Algeria’s repressive system that uses blasphemy laws to silence Christians and critics of Islam. On 6 March 2026, Algerian authorities for the second time arbitrarily prevented Bouhafs from leaving the country. According to the news website Tamurt, Bouhafs wanted to travel to find some peace and “escape the pressure, daily harassment, and surveillance of the security forces.”

This was the latest rights violation that Bouhafs has experienced in his country for his Christian faith and political views.

A former Muslim who converted to Christianity in 1997, and the former Chairman of the St. Augustine Coordination of Christians in Algeria, Bouhafs has lost his civil rights due to his religious conversion and his defense of minority rights and freedom of religion.

In a 2026 report titled “the Oppression of Christians in Algeria,” the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ) details Bouhafs’ case:

“In 2016, Bouhafs was arrested for simple Facebook posts considered as an “attack on Islam and its Prophet.” Specifically, it was stated that he “shared four altered Quranic verses, offensive images of the Prophet, as well as articles denigrating the Islamic religion.”

Following proceedings (which were marred by irregularities), he was sentenced to three years imprisonment. His fragile health in detention and the conditions of his imprisonment prompted international mobilization, leading to his early release in July 2018 following a partial presidential pardon.

Fearing further prosecution, he left Algeria and took refuge in Tunisia, where he was granted refugee status in 2020 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Despite this international protection, in August 2021 he was abducted in Tunis and returned to Algeria. He was then tortured and placed in pre-trial detention for “membership in a terrorist organization” and “undermining national territorial integrity.”

He was sentenced again to three years in prison. Since September 2024, having served his sentence and being officially a free citizen, his situation has remained very difficult.

In February 2025, he issued an appeal for help:

“I have become stateless, in my own country of Algeria. I have no identity documents. I am deprived of all my rights. The Algerian authorities refuse to issue me documents proving my identity. Even my retirement pension has been withdrawn. I am issuing a distress call to all international bodies and to all people of goodwill to come to my aid.”

Christians effectively have no freedom of expression in Algeria, notes ECLJ. Christians or ex-Muslims in the country face arrests for various offences such as the mere expression of Christian faith, the publication of a prayer, evangelization speech, or statements criticizing or mocking Islam or its prophet:

“Any expression of Christian faith may be regarded as an attempt to “undermine the faith of a Muslim” or as an offence against the precepts of Islam and may result in prosecution. Judicial repercussions and arrests mainly affect evangelicals, whose more visible practices are more likely to attract the authorities’ attention. Catholics, however, are not spared, despite their choice to practice their religion with great discretion.”

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An Algerian convert to Catholicism told ECLJ:

“I was working with Mother Teresa’s sisters in Algiers, and one day I was summoned by the police and questioned for several hours because I was accused of proselytism. They had an entire file on me, with photos of me at church and with the children I was caring for.”

According to the 2026 report by Open Doors, more than 50 Algerian Christians have been prosecuted in recent years, with some receiving suspended prison sentences and fines for reasons related to Christian practice: “unauthorized worship,” “organizing a place of worship without a permit,” distribution of religious materials,” or “proselytism.”

According to the organization the Voice of the Martyrs, at least 64 Algerian Christians are awaiting trial for activities related to their faith.

Article 144 bis 2 of the Penal Code, introduced by a law promulgated on 26 June 2001, punishes “anyone who offends the Prophet and the messengers of God or denigrates the dogma or precepts of Islam.” This offence is punishable by 3 to 5 years’ imprisonment and a fine. It may be committed by any means: “in writing, drawing, statement, electronic means or any other medium.”

Meanwhile, all Protestant churches have been shut down by the Algerian government. The ECLJ notes that the 2006 Ordinance 06-03 and the 2012 Law on Associations impose a strict authorization regime for the exercise of non-Muslim worship. The result is that it is difficult to open places of worship or register religious associations.

Since 2006, 58 Protestant churches have been forced to cease their activities and have been closed by the authorities. Protestants are now deprived of freedom of worship in Algeria. They are compelled to gather in private homes, outdoors, or online.

But even then, they cannot freely worship. Pastors and members of evangelical churches risk prosecution when they gather. During a police raid in April 2025, following a religious service held on Good Friday, ten Christians were detained for nine hours. They were interrogated, photographed, and their phones were confiscated.

A high-profile case demonstrating the pressures faced by Algerian Christians is of Pastor Youssef Ourahmane, the Vice-President of the Protestant Church of Algeria. The pastor organized a spiritual retreat at a site containing a chapel that had been closed by the authorities. For this, he was accused of “holding an unauthorized religious service” in a “building not permitted for that purpose.” On 2 May 2024, the Tizi Ouzou Court of Appeal upheld his conviction, sentencing him to one year’s imprisonment, six months suspended, and a fine of 100,000 dinars.

Similarly, Pastor and bookseller Rachid Seighir, along with his assistant Nouh Hamimi, were sentenced on appeal on 6 June 2021 to one year’s suspended imprisonment and a fine of 200,000 dinars for distributing Christian books in their bookshop.

The ECLJ gives brief historical background information regarding the Christian roots of Algeria. From the second century onwards, North Africa became one of the major intellectual centers of Christianity and was predominantly Christian. In 680, Islamic armies invaded the territory of present-day Algeria under the leadership of Uqba, a companion of Muhammad. The subsequent Arab conquest of the Maghreb was followed by a process of Arabization, which took centuries to take hold. For a considerable period, significant Christian communities persisted throughout the Maghreb, particularly in Kabylia, which was resistant to Islamization. It was not until the 13th century, under the Almohads, who tightened Islamic religious norms, that Christianity almost completely disappeared.

Christianity returned to Algeria in 1830 with the arrival of French settlers and missionaries. A significant Christian minority from Europe subsequently formed in the cities, where churches, schools, and hospitals were built. The Catholic Church thus became an official and influential institution.

Algeria’s declaration of independence in 1962 and the exodus of the Pieds-Noirs (people of European descent born in Algeria during French rule of 1830–1962) as well as the vast majority of Algerians who had converted to Catholicism led to the near disappearance of this Christian presence, which still numbered close to one million Christians in 1950.

The Catholic Church was then reduced to a church tolerated by the Algerian State, with no missionary role. It was allowed to continue to exist, but its status became highly regulated. In 2022, Caritas, the charitable arm of the Catholic Church which served the entire population of Algeria, was closed by the authorities.

According to figures from Open Doors, the current population of Christians in Algeria is approximately 156,000. This is a huge decrease from the nearly one million Christians in 1950.

In Algeria, the choice for citizens is often described as “the mosque or the court.” And all this is happening in a formerly majority-Christian country.

The Western churches and governments should take this history as a lesson as to what might be awaiting them if the current tide of Islamization is not stopped in the West. They should also take concrete action to help Bouhafs, Ourahmane, and other Christians persecuted in Algeria.

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Keep that thought close. We will need it.

A Theocracy Meets Reality

In a previous analysis, we argued that the West has fundamentally misread the Islamic Republic for nearly half a century—projecting secular assumptions onto a system that is theological by design and constitutional structure. Western governments negotiated with Tehran as though it were a hostile but pragmatic state with negotiable grievances. It never was. Its constitution is a theological operating manual. Its foreign policy is eschatology in action. Its military is, by its own founding document, a transnational revolutionary force tasked with extending divine sovereignty across the earth.

That misreading has now collided with a moment of historical consequence.

The Trump administration struck Iran’s three principal nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—in June 2025 under Operation Epic Fury. The strikes entombed nearly a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium deep underground. A ceasefire followed. Negotiations are now underway, and President Trump has stated that Iran has agreed to surrender that buried material—what he calls “nuclear dust”—with American and Iranian personnel working together to excavate it.

Read that again slowly.

American special operations forces. Inside Iran. Coordinating with Iranian counterparts. Physically removing the material that represented the regime’s ultimate guarantee of survival.

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If this happens, it is not merely a diplomatic agreement. It is a civilizational rupture—one that exposes, more starkly than any analysis could, the central question now hanging over the entire region: can the ideological core of the Islamic Republic actually permit this? And if it cannot, what comes next?

What the Constitution Will Not Allow

To understand why the negotiations keep breaking down—why commitments are made and reversed, why the Strait of Hormuz opens and closes, why a deal that seems close keeps collapsing—you have to understand what the Islamic Republic was built to be.

Article 5 of the Iranian constitution codified the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih—the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist. The Supreme Leader ruled not as a political executive but as the Vicar of the Hidden Imam: the divinely authorized regent governing on behalf of the Mahdi, exercising delegated divine sovereignty. Article 11 declared all Muslims a single nation—making Iran not a state defined by geography but the headquarters of a global Islamic mission. Articles 152 through 154 codified the export of revolution as constitutional duty. The IRGC’s founding mandate charged it explicitly with extending divine sovereignty across the earth.

This is not background. This is the operating system.

A government deriving legitimacy from electoral mandate can lose an election and reform. A government deriving legitimacy from divine mandate cannot negotiate it away without ceasing to be itself. Permanent confrontation with the United States—the “Great Satan”—was never a policy position. It was a theological commitment woven into the system’s constitutional identity. The revolution did not merely oppose American power. It defined itself against it.

To invite American forces onto Iranian soil to remove the nuclear program is not, within this framework, a strategic concession. It is an act of apostasy—the negation of everything the revolution claimed to be.

This is why the negotiations keep failing. Not because the diplomats are incompetent. Because the ideology cannot survive what the agreement requires.

Two Systems, One Breaking Point

The regime Khamenei built over forty years was never one thing. It was two things uneasily cohabiting inside the same institutions. The first is the theological system—the Mahdist revolutionary vision in which confrontation with the enemies of Islam is eschatologically required, martyrdom is honorable, and no material calculation overrides the divine timeline. The second is the institutional system—the IRGC’s military and economic empire, the intelligence services, the judiciary, the machinery of a deeply embedded security state.

Khamenei held these two systems together. With his death, the tension between them is now fully exposed.

The institutional layer—the pragmatists who understand that the economy is failing and that time is measured in months, not years—wants to deal. They are the ones at the table. But they do not control the system they represent. The IRGC’s ideological core answers to a different logic entirely. Not statecraft. Doctrine. A conviction that divine victory is assured regardless of material reality—and that any leader who surrenders the revolution’s identity for economic relief has betrayed something far larger than a negotiation.

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A deal is reached. The ideological core reverses it. This is not confusion. This is two systems inside one state in open conflict—and the one animated by theology refusing to yield to the one animated by economics.

The “nuclear dust” proposal makes this fracture undeniable. The institutional pragmatists may be willing to allow American forces in to excavate the buried uranium. The IRGC ideologues—who regard that uranium as the material expression of divine mandate—cannot be. The same institution. Irreconcilable positions. No Khamenei to hold the contradiction together.

The Trump Paradox

Here is what makes this moment historically remarkable—and what most analysis misses entirely.

Donald Trump is, by temperament and stated conviction, a dealmaker. He does not want war with Iran. He has said so repeatedly and demonstrated it in action. Before the twelve-day war, he sought negotiation. He offered terms. He asked for peaceful surrender. When that failed and strikes became unavoidable, he limited their scope and immediately returned to the table. After the ceasefire, he sought negotiation again. He is seeking it now. The same offer, made repeatedly: come to terms, open the Strait, surrender the nuclear program, and we will deal.

The pattern has repeated itself at every turn—not because of Trump’s choices, but because of theirs.

And this is the paradox that history may record as this era’s defining irony: a president who has tried harder than most to avoid regime change may be forced, by the logic of the ideology he is facing, to deliver it. Not as preference. As consequence.

Because the only deal Trump can actually get—the one that holds, the one where the Strait stays open, the one where American and Iranian personnel genuinely stand together in the rubble of Fordow—requires the removal of the very force that keeps reversing every agreement. The IRGC’s ideological core will not sign. It will not hold. It will reverse, delay, and escalate, because its theology demands it and its institutional power enables it.

The deal requires the regime change. The regime change is the deal.

To get the surrender he wants, Trump may have to deliver the death blow he has sought to avoid — not to Iran, but to Khamenei-ism as an institutionalized force. The removal of the theological-ideological layer embedded in the IRGC is not a byproduct of resolution. It is the precondition for it. Without it, nothing fundamentally changes. The same actors remain. The same doctrine remains. The same mechanisms of reversal remain. And the world returns, inevitably, to the same cycle.

This is not a diplomatic problem. It is a theological one. And it has only one resolution.

The People Waiting Beneath the System

There is a force that Western analysis consistently underweights: the Iranian people themselves.

The Islamic Republic never achieved genuine popular consent. What it achieved was compliance—enforced by the morality police, the judiciary, mass surveillance, and the memory of what happened to those who resisted. The Mahsa Amini protests were not a political eruption. They were a civilizational declaration: we do not consent, we never consented, and we reject the system imposed on us. The women who removed their hijabs in the streets were not making a fashion statement. They were making history.

This population understands something the outside world is only beginning to grasp: that a genuine opening with the United States would do more than relieve sanctions. It would crack the ideological architecture that has governed every dimension of their lives for forty-seven years. And they understand that the IRGC understands this too.

A war can be framed theologically—as the confrontation the Mahdi’s return requires. But American boots on Iranian soil, working alongside Iranians to dismantle the nuclear program—that cannot be framed this way. It is the visual refutation of everything the revolution promised. The ideological core fears that image more than it fears the bombs.

The flip-flop is not a negotiating tactic. It is the theological system choosing potential war over certain irrelevance.

What Falls With the Regime—and What Can Fill the Void

The stakes extend far beyond Iran’s borders, and this is where the analysis must be fully honest.

The Islamic Republic has never been merely a state. It has been the proof of concept—the living demonstration that political Islam could seize state power, resist the world’s dominant superpower for decades, and sustain a revolutionary order in deliberate defiance of liberal modernity. For Islamist movements worldwide, from the Muslim Brotherhood to movements reshaping Turkey, Qatar, and sub-Saharan Africa, Tehran functioned as the anchor of ideological confidence. This influence reached Western universities and political institutions—the regime’s revolutionary theology wrapped in Marxist vocabulary, its theological ambitions expressed through the language of decolonization and resistance, made legible to audiences who could not see the eschatology beneath the terminology.

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If the Islamic Republic falls—not merely weakens, but falls—the proof of concept fails. The ideological confidence that sustained movements from Tehran to Toronto weakens at its source. The network loses its center. The narrative that positioned political Islam as the tide of history loses its most powerful exhibit.

But here is what that moment also creates: a void.

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic offered an answer—however violent, however false—to the deepest human questions about meaning, order, justice, and transcendence. When that answer collapses, the questions do not disappear. They remain. And they demand a response.

This is the opportunity—and the responsibility—that the Judeo-Christian tradition now faces. Not to impose. Not to replace one ideological project with another. But to offer, into a space that is about to open, what it has always claimed to possess: a vision of human dignity, ordered liberty, and transcendent meaning that does not require the subjugation of women, the export of violence, or the machinery of theocratic enforcement to sustain itself.

The fall of the Islamic Republic is not only the end of something. It is the opening of something. The question is whether the civilization that has the answer is prepared to offer it.

The Judgment Already Underway

“He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings.” (Daniel 2:21)

A system that claimed divine authority is being measured against the reality it produced—forty-seven years of repression, exported violence, and a population that has quietly, at great cost, largely stopped believing. The eschatology it weaponized has turned against it. The confrontation it framed as redemptive revealed its limits. The promise did not materialize.

What is unfolding in the negotiating rooms, in the streets of Tehran, in the question of whether American and Iranian personnel will stand together in the rubble of Fordow—this is not merely a political crisis. It is the possible end of the most consequential experiment in modern political Islam as a governing system. Not theorized. Decided. In history. In real time. Now.

The question for policymakers, for church leaders, for all who bear responsibility for understanding this moment: do they see it clearly?

Not a rogue state to be managed. Not a negotiating partner to be appeased.

The end of an ideological era. And the beginning of whatever, by the grace of history and the courage of a long-silenced people, the wisdom of those who govern, and the readiness of a civilization that knows what it believes—comes next.

Ali Siadatan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

This article is a companion to “The Islamic Republic: A Theocracy Misread by the West” published by the Ideological Defense Institute on February 24, 2026.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI