For nearly four months, the United States and Israel set out to break the Islamic Republic. They very nearly did, but they did not finish the job.
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.
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.
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.
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Unfortunately, in the West we have two associated weaknesses. Firstly, we have become so arrogant about our western values that we complacently assume they are here to stay, embedded and don't need defending. Wrong. Secondly, we assume our values translate to others and/or only look at others through our own prism, again assuming it's relevance and validity. Again, wrong. And nowhere does this show itself so foolishly as in (the complex) matters of the Middle East, both over there, and as it increasingly relates to, and impacts, our own countries at home.
The point about the assumption of the brief unipolar moment, and arrogance and hubris in the immediate post-Cold War period that the answer to despotic regimes and ideologies was “more markets, more democracy”, needs to be more widely appreciated. You’ve nailed the fundamental categorical error at the heart of this delusion regarding the Islamic Republic, and the shifting balance of power to the axis of Türkiye, Syria, Qatar, and the IRI.