Iran’s leaders now face unprecedented peril. The regime has lost its footing, and the global mechanisms to avoid conflict no longer work
Dr Sanam Vakil is the director of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme
Forty-seven years on from the Iranian revolution, Iran is confronting a strategic reality it has never faced before – a simultaneous crisis of domestic legitimacy and a credible threat of external attack so severe that regime survival can no longer be taken for granted. Until now, Tehran has survived wars, sanctions, assassinations, mass protests and international isolation through a strategy of projecting strength abroad, repressing dissent at home and generating a permanent crisis to justify poor leadership and political failure.
Today, Donald Trump has mobilised an “armada” to the Middle East that includes the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, guided-missile destroyers, an expanded air presence and missile defence systems. This force projection suggests the US is no longer focused on containing Iran but rather compelling a final resolution of a long-running conflict. The choice at hand is either the acceptance of a US-imposed settlement or the destruction of the Islamic republic as it exists today.
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