I was genuinely surprised.

Not by a statement from Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, but by an interview aired by Al Jazeera. Jasem Mohamed Al Budaiwi, Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council said:

“This is one of the most dangerous and sensitive phases the GCC has faced since its founding… comparable to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990… What Iran has done is unjustified aggression and unprovoked attacks against the countries of the region.”

For years, much of the Arab media ecosystem, including Al Jazeera, maintained a calibrated tone when it came to Iran. Critical at times, but often cautious, especially when Iran positioned itself within the broader narrative of resistance against Israel or the United States.

This interview was different. It reflected a level of clarity and frustration I haven’t seen before.

To understand why this matters, it is worth recalling how quickly the Arab position on Iran has evolved over the past decade.

There was a time not long ago when Saudi Arabia’s leadership described Iran’s supreme leader in existential terms. Mohammed bin Salman once warned that Ayatollah Khamenei was “the new Hitler of the Middle East,” capturing the depth of the perceived threat at the time.

But that phase did not last.

By 2023, the region had moved in a very different direction. Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to restore diplomatic relations in a deal brokered by China. The agreement was widely seen as a significant step toward de-escalation after years of proxy conflict, with the potential to stabilize key states like Yemen and reduce regional tensions more broadly.

This shift was part of a broader strategic calculation across the Gulf. The priority became stability. Economic transformation agendas, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, required a more predictable regional environment. Engagement with Iran was about risk management, not trust.

And for a brief moment, it seemed to work.

The region experienced a relative cooling of tensions. Communication channels reopened, and the prospect of a managed coexistence, however tenuous, appeared possible.

That moment is now over.

The current conflict has exposed the limits of that approach. Iran is no longer perceived primarily through the lens of ideological rivalry or distant proxy conflicts. It is now seen as a direct and immediate security threat.

The targeting of Gulf infrastructure, airports, and energy assets has had a profound effect on policy thinking. These are countries that, until recently, were actively pursuing de-escalation. They engaged diplomatically, avoided confrontation, and in some cases positioned themselves as intermediaries.

And yet, they were still targeted.

From a policy perspective, the assumption that engagement could meaningfully reduce exposure to Iranian ire is now being reassessed. What was previously seen as a strategy to lower risk is increasingly viewed as insufficient in the face of direct threats.

The language coming out of the Gulf reflects this recalibration. The tone is more direct, less hedged, and increasingly aligned across capitals that historically approached Iran differently.

The Gulf has never been a fully unified strategic bloc. Qatar’s mediation role, Oman’s neutrality, Saudi Arabia’s leadership ambitions, and the UAE’s strategic pragmatism have often led to policy divergence.

What is developing now is a more unified assessment of Iran as a shared security concern.

This does not necessarily mean escalation is imminent. Gulf states are deeply invested in avoiding a wider regional war. But it does suggest that the fundamental baseline has moved. Engagement may continue, but it will be pursued with fewer illusions and under stricter assumptions about risk.

For policymakers in Washington and European capitals, this moment should be read carefully.

The Arab position is adaptive and shaped more by events than by ideology. Over the past decade, it has moved from confrontation to cautious engagement, and now back toward a more skeptical and security-driven posture.

What is different this time is the speed and clarity of the shift.

And that is why the interview on Al Jazeera matters. It signaled that the way Iran is being framed, not just by governments but in broader Arab discourse, is changing again.

The region has seen these cycles before. But each time, the stakes get higher. The Arabs have changed their minds about Iran. Again. And whatever happens next will determine whether the Gulf’s reassessment of Iran leads to lasting change or another temporary adjustment.

A missile strike lands near Tehran. Within minutes, the footage is translated and shared across diaspora networks from London to Los Angeles. At the same time, families tied to Beirut refresh their phones as evacuation warnings spread and neighborhoods are reduced to rubble.

This is no longer a distant war. For millions of Iranians and Lebanese abroad, it is a daily reality, experienced in real time, shaped from afar, and argued over across borders.

But proximity has not engendered unity. It has exposed deeper disagreements about what the future should look like and who gets to define it.

As war and economic recession continue in Lebanon, the diaspora has become indispensable. Remittances are sustaining families, funding evacuations, and replacing basic state functions.

Alongside this economic role, a more controversial idea has resurfaced among segments of the Lebanese Christian diaspora: the possibility of an autonomous, or even independent, Christian-majority entity centered in Mount Lebanon.

This reflects a growing sense that the Lebanese state, in its current form, is no longer viable. Hezbollah’s military dominance, repeated cycles of conflict, and prolonged institutional breakdown have led some to revisit older visions of decentralization or partition.

Support for such proposals is limited and difficult to quantify. Among a smaller but increasingly organized current within the Lebanese Christian diaspora, the Christian Lebanon Initiative has articulated a structured proposal for the creation of a sovereign Christian state in Mount Lebanon. The movement presents its project as a lawful, phased strategy grounded in constitutional and international frameworks, outlining steps that include building transnational community structures, developing coordinated civic and economic networks, and preparing legal arguments for potential self-determination.

While these ideas remain contested and do not represent the majority of Lebanese Christians, their growing visibility reinforces how diaspora spaces can become arenas where competing, and at times controversial, visions of national futures are articulated and debated.

Within some segments of the diaspora, particularly among communities historically aligned with Hezbollah’s political base, there are voices that continue to view Hezbollah as a legitimate actor within Lebanon’s political system and as part of the broader Axis of Resistance. Supporters argue that its role functions as a deterrent in a volatile regional environment and represents a constituency that cannot be excluded from Lebanon’s power-sharing structure. From this perspective, calls for external pressure, disarmament, or structural exclusion risk destabilizing the country further.

At the same time, other voices within the Lebanese diaspora argue that Hezbollah should be disarmed fully and without delay, framing their position as consistent with Lebanon’s official commitment to place all weapons under state authority. They point to the government’s approval in September of the Lebanese army’s plan, presented by General Rodolphe Haykal, to bring all arms, particularly Hezbollah’s, under state control. For supporters of immediate disarmament, this decision represents an institutional mandate to strengthen the state’s monopoly over force and implement existing security commitments.

Their argument is shaped not only by frustration with prolonged conflict, but also by concerns about continued Iranian involvement in Lebanese affairs, which reinforces parallel military structures and complicates full sovereignty. From this perspective, completing the army’s plan is a necessary step toward restoring state authority, stabilizing the country, and creating conditions for long-term peace.

These positions, partition, reform-within-unity, and continued resistance alignment, reflect not a single diaspora narrative, but a divided political landscape that mirrors Lebanon’s internal divisions.

The Iranian diaspora is similarly divided about who should govern Iran.

One of the most visible tensions is between those who support a return to monarchy, often associated with the legacy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and those calling for a democratic system that rejects both the current regime and Iran’s monarchical past. Among monarchist-leaning segments of the diaspora, his son, Reza Pahlavi, is increasingly seen as a legitimate successor or, at minimum, a unifying transitional figure. This support is visible in diaspora protests and echoed inside Iran, where slogans such as “Javid Shah” (“Long live the Shah”) have re-emerged, alongside chants calling for the return of the Pahlavi dynasty . These expressions reflect not only nostalgia for the monarchy, but also a search for recognizable leadership in the absence of a clear alternative.

At the same time, this vision is heavily contested. Some Iranians, continue to associate the monarchy with authoritarian rule, arguing that calls to restore it overlook the repression and inequalities that contributed to the Iranian Revolution. Critics within the diaspora often emphasize that replacing one centralized authority with another risks repeating patterns of exclusion and political repression. Instead, they advocate for pluralistic and democratic frameworks that prioritize institutional accountability over individual leadership. This divide is not only ideological but generational, reflecting different lived experiences of Iran’s past and different expectations for its future.

These divisions shape how diaspora communities engage with the outside world, what kind of change they advocate for, and how they frame Iran’s future to international audiences.

In both cases, distance does not remove people from political life, but reshapes how they participate in it. Calls for partition in Lebanon or restoration in Iran may gain traction abroad partly because the immediate consequences are less visible. The risks—renewed conflict, instability, unintended outcomes—fall primarily on those on the ground.

This does not make diaspora voices irrelevant. But it does mean they operate under different conditions, with different constraints. Despite their divisions, both diasporas play a real role in current events.

Lebanese abroad are sustaining an economy in free fall. Iranians abroad are shaping how protests, repression, and war are seen globally, through media, advocacy, and political lobbying.

They influence narratives, fund survival, and keep attention on crises that might otherwise fade from the news cycle. But they do so without consensus, and often in competition with one another.

Many in the diaspora live between two realities: physically in one country, but emotionally and politically tied to another. War, protest, and collapse don’t seem so far away—they show up daily, on screens, in conversations, and in the impossible choices people have to make.

This creates a form of engagement that is immediate but uneven. Close enough to care deeply, far enough to be removed from the full consequences of every decision.

The role of the diaspora in Iran and Lebanon is complicated. It is neither detached nor decisive, neither purely constructive nor inherently harmful.

The question is how to understand their influence without overstating it, or dismissing it. Because in both Iran and Lebanon, the future is no longer being imagined only within national borders. It is being debated, contested, and partially shaped far beyond them.

And that reality is becoming harder to ignore.

A government does not need to ban something outright to make its intentions clear. Sometimes it only needs to regulate it so tightly, so selectively, and so ideologically that the message becomes unmistakable. That is what happened in Damascus last week.

The controversy began when the Damascus governorate issued Decision No. 311, barring the serving of alcohol in restaurants and nightclubs across the capital, requiring bars and clubs to convert their licenses into café permits, and restricting the sale of sealed bottles to a few predominantly Christian neighborhoods, including Bab Touma, Bab Sharqi, and al-Qassaa. The decree also imposed location rules that require outlets to be at least 75 meters from schools and places of worship and 20 meters from security facilities, with businesses given three months to comply. Reuters described it as one of the clearest signs yet of the Islamist-led authorities’ turn toward conservative social enforcement.

After the backlash exploded, Damascus officials tried to walk it back without really withdrawing it. In a late clarification carried by state media, the governorate insisted the measure was merely “organizational,” not new in principle, and rooted in older regulations dating back to 1952 and later administrative decisions. It also said five-star hotels were exempt, apologized to residents of Bab Touma, Bab Sharqi, and al-Qassaa for the “misunderstanding,” and promised to review the designation of the three neighborhoods during the three-month implementation period.

But by then, the public had already understood the deeper meaning of the move. On Sunday, March 22, hundreds of Syrians gathered in Bab Touma to protest, carrying signs defending personal freedom and rejecting the sectarian sorting of Damascus neighborhoods. One AP photo from the protest captured the sentiment perfectly: “No to dividing Damascus neighborhoods along sectarian lines.” Protesters from different sectarian backgrounds chanted, “Syrians are united.”

And that is why the official defense of the decree has fallen flat. Its supporters have tried every familiar line. They say this is just regulation, not prohibition. They point to old Syrian laws, Ottoman precedents, and even the American Prohibition era, as though historical analogy could somehow neutralize the political meaning of a decision taken here and now. They say every state regulates vice. They dismiss critics as people who only care about drinking, nightlife, or have loose morals. But that argument has backfired because almost nobody protesting this decision is really protesting on behalf of alcohol alone.

If a regulation is designed so restrictively that it effectively bans most of the population, and if the authorities designing and enforcing it belong to a political current that already favors prohibition on ideological grounds, then this is not neutral governance. It is ideological social engineering disguised as public administration. The wording of the governorate’s own clarification gives the game away: the stated aims include “public morals,” “civil peace,” and neighborhood “specificity.” Those are the kinds of elastic formulas by which personal freedoms are gradually narrowed, selectively applied, and then normalized.

This decision did not emerge in a vacuum. It follows a widening pattern. In January, authorities in Latakia barred female public employees from wearing makeup during working hours, prompting immediate criticism before officials retreated into the usual language of “professional appearance” and “balance.” Earlier, the Tourism Ministry issued beach and pool guidelines requiring women on public beaches and in public pools to wear more modest swimwear, such as burkinis or body-covering suits, while allowing more relaxed standards in luxury hotels and private venues. That move, too, was defended as culturally sensitive regulation rather than coercion, before officials scrambled to soften its interpretation amid public outrage.

Seen together, these measures do not look incidental. They look cumulative. Makeup at work. Modest swimwear on public beaches. During Ramadan, tighter restrictions were imposed on those seen eating or drinking publicly. And now, the near-elimination of alcohol service in Damascus, except in a few Christian districts that are implicitly marked as socially distinct. Each measure is small enough, in isolation, for its defenders to ask, “Why all this fuss?” But politics is often revealed less by dramatic decrees than by patterns of administrative pressure. A state telegraphs what it aims to become through the habits it tries to impose.

This is why many Syrians reacted more strongly to the alcohol decree than authorities seem to have expected. The outcry was not limited to Christians, nor to secular elites. Damascus is full of Muslims who drink, Muslims who do not drink but still reject moral policing, and Syrians of all backgrounds who understand perfectly well what is at stake when the state begins sorting rights and restrictions by communal geography. AP reported that even some protesters who do not drink joined in because they saw the issue as one of personal liberty rather than consumption.

The constitutional dimension is impossible to ignore. Syria’s March 2025 Constitutional Declaration states in Article 12 that the state shall protect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and that rights guaranteed by the international human rights treaties ratified by Syria are an integral part of the declaration. Article 13 guarantees freedom of opinion and expression and protects private life. Critics of the Damascus decree, including the Bab Touma committee and legal advocates cited in recent reporting, have argued that the measure violates both the spirit and the text of those guarantees.

There is also a sectarian danger here that should be obvious to anyone exercising even minimal political judgment. By confining alcohol sales to Christian-majority districts, authorities are not “respecting diversity.” They are drawing a target on specific neighborhoods and implicitly assigning them responsibility for supposed violations of “public morals.” This is stigmatization by regulation. It invites resentment, fuels suspicion, and imposes symbolic burdens on communities already anxious about their place in the new Syria. Reuters, AP, DW, and regional outlets all captured this point in different ways: the backlash was driven not only by concerns over freedom, but by fears that the decision was recasting Christians as a tolerated exception and Damascus itself as a city to be managed through sectarian compartments.

This is where the defenders of the decision are most disingenuous. They invoke old laws as though reviving or enforcing neglected restrictions were somehow politically neutral. But laws that sat on the books for decades without shaping daily life are not the same as laws deliberately activated by a new political class seeking to redefine the public sphere. Historical continuity in text does not equal continuity in intent. The real question is not whether some old decree once existed. The real question is why this government, at this moment, chose to make this an administrative priority.

And that question leads to a larger one: what kind of state is Syria trying to become?

Syria is not entering a period of calm consolidation in which symbolic culture-war gestures can be treated as marginal. It is emerging from state collapse, civil war, sanctions, economic devastation, and deep social trauma. The European Union moved in 2025 to lift economic sanctions, and the United States formally terminated its Syria sanctions program effective July 1, 2025, while keeping measures on Assad-linked actors, rights abusers, jihadist groups, and Iran-linked networks. The EU has also pledged fresh recovery support. But none of this means reconstruction has suddenly arrived in any practical, transformative sense. Syria still faces enormous institutional weakness, political uncertainty, and the kind of administrative drag that makes actual recovery painfully slow.

In that context, decisions about alcohol, makeup, and dress are not distractions from “real” issues. They are among the real issues because they reveal the governing ethos of the people who make them. They show whether power understands itself as limited by citizenship or entitled to mold society in its own image. They show whether the state sees itself as an administrator of pluralism or as a guardian of virtue.

Syrian rulers, present and future, need to understand something simple: Muslims, as citizens, have the same right as everyone else to buy, sell, and consume alcohol if they choose. The state is not the custodian of their piety. Nor is it the custodian of women’s faces, clothing, or bodies. A government may regulate commerce, licensing, noise, nuisance, and genuine public disorder. But once it starts using these tools to impose a moral vision aligned with a particular ideological current, it leaves the terrain of neutral regulation and enters the terrain of coercive social transformation.

And that terrain is far more dangerous than some officials appear to realize.

There is a wider lesson here for Syria’s rulers. When governments push too far in an ideological direction, they not only provoke their own citizens; they also unsettle neighbors, alienate investors, and raise doubts among the very states and institutions whose support they need. At a time when Gulf states are trying to make their own societies more attractive to investors, tourists, and global capital by removing religious strictures, and when Iran’s model of religiously driven rule is under growing regional and international pressure, few will be eager to bankroll a Syrian order that appears to be drifting toward moral authoritarianism under an Islamic banner.

This does not mean that the world will require Syria to adopt secularism in the French sense, but it will expect pluralism to be real, rights to be meaningful, and ideology not to be smuggled into public life through municipal decrees and administrative circulars. The leaders of the United States, France, and Germany, among others, have made that clear. Syria’s priorities should be securing the country, restoring order, and creating an environment that feels safe, open, and predictable—not engaging in social engineering.

This is why the Damascus controversy struck such a nerve. For though the country witnessed over the last two years several horrific episodes of inter-communal violence, many Syrians still interpret it through the language of insecurity, militias, revenge, and state weakness. This issue felt different. It was unmistakably about power reaching into everyday life and telling citizens that their rights, habits, and neighborhoods would now be rearranged according to a moral hierarchy they had not chosen.

Syrians were not really taking to the streets for a cup full of arak. (A traditional, clear, anise-flavored spirit from the Middle East, known for its licorice-like taste and milky-white appearance when mixed with water.) They were taking to the streets for something larger and far more precious: the right not to be ruled as minors or categorized by sect, and to insist that citizenship in Syria must mean equal dignity, equal liberty, and real limits on state power.

Ali Larijani spent most of his career helping build and maintain the Islamic Republic.

He was a regime loyalist who seemed to surface at every center of power. Born into a powerful clerical family, he served in the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq War, went on to run state broadcasting and propaganda networks, became secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, later served as speaker of parliament, and remained close to the system’s core as an adviser to the supreme leader and a senior security official. In his final period, he was also reported to have been central to the January 2026 crackdown, in which tens of thousands of Iranian protesters were killed.

Larijani was killed last week in an Israeli airstrike near Tehran, along with his son and bodyguards. By then, the war had already torn through the upper ranks of the Iranian state. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was also assassinated in a strike on his compound in February, followed in subsequent weeks by a series of senior political and military figures, including intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, defence minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, armed forces chief Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani.

Multiple sources, including the Associated Press and the Jerusalem Post, reported that Larijani had effectively been running Iran after the earlier decapitation of its leadership. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of Ali Khamenei—remains hospitalized and reportedly in a coma following an Israeli strike on the first day of the war.

As of this morning, Israel is reporting Alireza Tangsiri, a chief naval officer charged with overseeing the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, has been killed. Iran has not commented on the claim.

The effect of these killings has been significant.

The Islamic Republic was built to survive shocks. It is, of course, a revolutionary movement designed for conflict against the West, including America. Power is dispersed across the Supreme Leader’s office, the Revolutionary Guards, the clerical establishment, the intelligence services, parliament, and a maze of councils.

On the military side, this overlaps with what the Iranian leadership calls the “mosaic defense” doctrine. The basic idea is simple: do not build a system that depends too heavily on one headquarters or chain of command. Instead, spread power, weapons, command structures, and local units across the country. If the center is hit, the rest of the system can keep fighting. The Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) developed this doctrine in the early 2000s to make Iran harder to defeat through airstrikes, decapitation attacks, or a conventional invasion. It relies on decentralization, redundancy, provincial commands, and the ability of local forces, especially the Basij and IRGC militias, to keep operating even if senior leaders are killed or communications are disrupted.

But as a consequence of losing so many leaders in a short span of time, the system is withering. The Israeli and American strategy is to decapitate the regime, and then to knock it back down if it tries to rebuild.

Ultimately, the United States and Israel are not likely to settle for less than regime change in Iran. The risks of a radicalized jihadist regime gaining a nuclear weapon are existential. Not only to Israel, but to the entire region and world. The Iranian regime—by indiscriminately attacking their neighbors, including Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan at the start of the war—illustrated that they are a rabid force, striking at anyone and everyone. Muslim or not. Zionist or not. American or not.

So far, Washington and Jerusalem have heavily degraded Iran’s navy and air force, destroyed large amounts of military infrastructure, and killed many of the men who coordinated the system from the top. Missile and drone launches by the regime have dramatically fallen since the start of the war.

The question now is whether the United States and Israel will spearhead a ground invasion of Iran or whether they will continue with air attrition and purported negotiations while waiting in hope for an internal coup or revolution.

A ground invasion was always going to be difficult. Iran is a massive and mountainous country. Any force entering Iran would have to deal with mountain ranges, long supply lines, and potential attacks from those who are still loyal to the regime. Or even those who are just anti-American.

But the prospect for an internal coup or revolution also remains uncertain. The regime has been badly damaged. But a state like this can lose ministers, commanders, and even a Supreme Leader and still keep functioning. At the end of the day, the IRGC has a lot of weapons, and the anti-regime protestors do not have any real military capacity.

One prospect is a targeted invasion at the coast to free the Strait of Hormuz and reduce any further threat to international shipping. And with Alireza Tangsiri reportedly out of the picture, this seems all the more likely.

That kind of operation would be easier to imagine—at least for now—than an imminent march on Tehran. The aim would be to seize or neutralize the parts of Iran’s military geography that give the IRGC leverage over the Gulf: islands, missile sites, drone bases, coastal batteries, naval facilities, and command nodes tied to the strait.

Such an operation would still be dangerous, of course. Iran has lost much of its conventional naval strength, but it still has mines, drones, anti-ship missiles, fast boats, coastal batteries, and dispersed IRGC units.

A regional coalition would make such an operation far more thinkable. If Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, Jordan, and perhaps Saudi Arabia concluded that Iran had already crossed the line from a hostile power to an immediate threat, then the political and logistical burden would no longer fall solely on Washington and Jerusalem.

The military path forward is uncertain, whether through limited operations or continued attrition. But the outcome will not be decided by geography alone. It will depend on how much strain the system can absorb internally.

The Islamic Republic was built to withstand the loss of individuals. But that capacity depends on depth—on enough experienced figures to connect institutions, manage crises, and keep the system coherent under pressure. Larijani was one of those figures. His death, alongside so many others, raises the pressing question of how many more losses it can absorb before that durability begins to give way.

Spend enough time in human rights conferences or policy discussions on the Middle East, and you hear the same assumption again and again: if enough people are angry at a government, it will eventually fall. It sounds reasonable, and it is politically convenient, but it does not hold up in practice or in history.

Across multiple cases from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and now the Islamic Republic of Iran, this expectation has persisted despite contrary evidence. Public anger, even when deep and widespread, does not by itself beget into regime failure. The more consistent predictor of regime change is not popular sentiment but the cohesion, incentives, and beliefs of those within the system who control the use of force.

This distinction is central to understanding both the durability of regimes and the limits of external influence.

Syria is often cited as proof that extreme violence can bring down a system, but the process is usually misunderstood. Large-scale defections from the Syrian army did not come from organized opposition or outside coordination. It began with individual decisions, made in specific moments, when soldiers refused to carry out orders.

Early in the uprising, there were accounts of soldiers being ordered to fire on crowds and hesitating when they recognized people in front of them. One former conscript described seeing his own neighborhood among the protesters. Another recalled lowering his weapon and walking away—not because he had joined the opposition, but because he could no longer carry out the order. These were individual decisions made under pressure, and together they began to weaken the system from within.

The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was a loose alliance of armed opposition groups formed in 2011 during the Syrian Civil War by defectors from the Syrian military. It sought to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s government, acting as a moderate, decentralized insurgent force supported by Western and regional powers. It emerged as a structure to organize men who had already crossed a personal threshold.

Defections are rarely ideological at the outset. They are typically driven by a combination of lines individuals won’t cross, perceived risk, and expectations about the regime’s future viability.

Iran, by contrast, has been deliberately structured to prevent such moments from cascading into systemic breakdown. The Islamic Republic has developed a layered security architecture in which responsibilities for repression are concentrated within ideologically committed units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As Afshon Ostovar, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, put it, “The IRGC… is tasked with both the defense of Iran and the much more amorphous safeguarding of Iran’s theocratic system.” This mandate goes beyond conventional military functions and is rooted in political and ideological objectives.

The implications are significant. A force designed to defend a system rather than merely a state is structurally more resistant to break down. Its durability is further reinforced by the IRGC’s expansive role beyond the military sphere. It is, as Ostovar describes, “a security service, an intelligence organization, a social and cultural force, and a complex industrial and economic conglomerate.” In effect, it embeds the regime across multiple layers of society, aligning political loyalty with economic interest and institutional belonging.

The regime’s approach to dissent reflects a similar degree of institutional learning. Following the protests of 2009, Iranian security forces refined their methods of control, developing a calibrated response that combines selective repression with managed tolerance. Large-scale protests are met with organized and often forceful responses, yet the system also demonstrates the capacity to shape and channel mobilization in ways that reinforce its authority. In some instances, actors affiliated with regime institutions themselves participate in demonstrations, blurring the line between opposition and state-sanctioned expression. This capacity to manage dissent stands in contrast to the early Syrian response, where indiscriminate violence accelerated divisions within the security apparatus.

The historical case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein provides a complementary but distinct model. There, regime sustainability was achieved primarily through coercion and fear, reinforced by overlapping security institutions and collective punishment mechanisms, including reprisals against family members, the destruction of homes, and the use of detention or execution to deter dissent within entire communities.

For years, this system held not because people believed in it, but because they feared the consequences of stepping outside it. To defect was not just to risk one’s life, but to endanger one’s family. That calculation kept the system intact far longer than many expected.

And then, in 2003, it crumbled all at once.

Soldiers abandoned positions, not because they had coordinated a defection, but because the system they feared no longer appeared unflappable. I was there. I remember entire units removing their uniforms and returning home within hours, as if the entire structure had been held together by belief in its inevitability. Once that belief disappeared, so did the system.

Systems built solely on fear may suppress defection, but they are vulnerable to sudden failure once the credibility of that fear is eroded. Systems that combine coercion with ideology, institutional integration, and material incentives, as in Iran, tend to be more resilient.

Robert Ames, a senior CIA officer whose career focused on the Middle East, approached the region with a disciplined curiousity that is often missing from policy debates. He understood that influence required engagement with the actual holders of power, not idealized versions of the opposition.

Ames spent years building relationships with figures many in Washington viewed only as adversaries. He believed that understanding how they saw the world was essential to predicting their behavior. Those who worked with him recall that he listened far more than he spoke, and that he treated even his adversaries as rational actors operating within constraints.

That approach came at a cost. Ames was killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, a reminder that understanding a system does not make it less dangerous. But his work powerfully illustrates that misreading how power operates in the region can be far more dangerous than engaging with it.

This lens is particularly relevant when assessing contemporary Iran. While public dissatisfaction is well documented, the critical variables, elite cohesion, control over coercive institutions, and the absence of a credible alternative center of power, remain largely intact. The IRGC and its associated networks continue to function as both a security apparatus and a socio-economic system, embedding the regime within key sectors of society.

It is also important to recognize that the emergence of an armed opposition is not solely a function of popular sentiment. The Syrian case demonstrates that such formations arise from defections within the security apparatus, not from external sponsorship or political leadership in isolation. Without armed defectors, territorial separation, and accessible supply networks, the conditions necessary for a sustained insurgency do not materialize.

In Iran, these preconditions are currently absent.

Strategies predicated on the assumption that economic pressure, public dissatisfaction, or external signaling will directly lead to regime change are unlikely to achieve the intended outcomes. While such factors may contribute to long-term stress on the system, they do not by themselves generate the internal fissures required to overthrow the regime.

A more realistic framework focuses on monitoring indicators of elite fragmentation, shifts in the behavior of security institutions, and changes in insiders’ perceptions of the regime’s durability. These variables, rather than public opinion alone, are more reliable predictors of systemic change.

The central analytical takeaway is therefore straightforward but often overlooked: regimes do not fall when they lose popularity; they fall when they lose their internal cohesion.

Until that threshold is crossed, even deeply unpopular systems can persist for extended periods, adapting to pressure while maintaining control. When it is reached, however, change tends to occur rapidly and unpredictably, often appearing inevitable only in retrospect.

Understanding this distinction is not just an academic exercise. It shapes how governments, analysts, and activists approach real-world crises. Misreading how power operates—assuming that anger in the streets will translate into change at the top—leads to flawed strategies, misplaced expectations, and, in some cases, prolonged instability and increased violence.

If change is to come, it will begin when those inside the system no longer believe it can endure.

On the first day of Eid, the festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, a quiet dread settled within me as I sent my usual “Eid Mubarak” greetings to family and friends across the region. The responses were heart-wrenching, matching this heaviness I’ve been feeling of late. “It is Eid, but it’s neither happy nor is it mubarak [blessed],” responded one friend. My Iranian friends in the U.S. and across the region are also marking Nowruz, the Persian New Year, either mourning for the losses they’ve witnessed in their country or with so much unease and mixed emotions as the U.S.-Israel-led war in their homeland marks its third week. To date, more than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, tens of thousands injured, and more than 3 million Iranians forcefully displaced. The Iranian people are cut off from the rest of the world as the regime continues its near-total internet blackout, unable to reach families and friends in the diaspora who are desperately waiting for proof of life.

In Lebanon, where Israel is determined to eliminate Hezbollah, around 1,000 people have been killed, and a million Lebanese citizens are now internally displaced. The Lebanese diaspora, which outnumbers the country’s population, is glued to the news. For some, it’s déjà vu as Lebanon has tragically lived through so many wars and crises, but that certainly doesn’t take away the anxiety of worrying about loved ones. Across the region where this war has extended, including the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, Northern Iraq, and Israel, the Islamic Republic’s attacks have crossed all red lines, damaging infrastructure, killing civilians (primarily in Israel, UAE, Bahrain, and Iraq), and destabilizing their daily lives and sense of security and peace. And all of this is unfolding after more than two years of war in Gaza that has devastated the strip and killed over 70,000 people, following the Hamas attacks on Israel that left 1,200 dead and more than 250 taken hostage.

For many of us with roots in the Middle East working in foreign policy and national security, the fog of war—seemingly without end—extends far beyond the battlefield. It weighs heavily on me as an Arab American with family in Jordan and friends and colleagues across the region, from Dubai to Doha. Showing up to work each day and maintaining dispassionate analysis carries a weight of its own. In conversations with counterparts and friends—Arab American, Iranian American, and Jewish American alike—that weight is both emotional and mental.

We wake with unease, compelled to check the headlines before anything else, and then to reach out to loved ones in the region. Social media fills with images of families sleeping in the streets in Lebanon, the sound of sirens echoing across cities from Manama to Erbil, and the visible grief of those mourning and those simply trying to survive.

These are images and sounds that stay with you, regardless of where you stand on the war. As psychologist Dalia Halabi wrote, “Distance changes how the brain experiences war,” noting that “the brain processes direct reality and distant uncertainty in different ways.” This does not diminish the devastation people are living through, but it helps explain why those on the ground can sometimes appear steadier, more accustomed to the rhythm of conflict. For many, this is not the first war they have lived through.

At the same time, social media offers glimpses of life continuing as it can—from Kuwait City to Doha to my hometown of Amman. Today, images of Palestinian children celebrating Eid with balloons felt bittersweet: bright colors set against grey rubble. As a friend in Dubai wrote to me, “We’re all carrying more than we show…different lives, different roles, but it’s there, and most of it goes unseen.”

It’s a privilege to receive such a message and fully understand it. It just clicks. And that’s why being from the region has its perks. It broadens our perspectives and enriches our analysis, given our connections to the textures of society, the culture, and the sociopolitical dynamics at play. As a native Arabic speaker, I access news coverage of the conflict across the varying Arab news outlets across the region, allowing me to better understand the geopolitics, the socio-politics, and the pulse of the people. It makes me a better analyst as it does others with roots in the region.

For my Iranian American friends and colleagues, their Farsi tongue enables them to see and understand the day-to-day in Iran, whether on social media or newscasts. It gives them the power to relay and translate the sentiments of the people, providing context for how perceptions form and why they matter in policy analysis. Our roots in the region empower us not only to understand complexity and nuance, but also to unpack it in the face of binary narratives that dominate the airwaves and the digital space, often steering audiences towards maximalist positions.

As my Iranian American journalist friend reported in Sky News a few days ago, many things can be true at the same time: “Iranians can oppose this brutal regime and celebrate the killing of its leaders, but also be wary and anxious of the war and what ‘day after’ scenario these bombings will bring.”

One truth we in the policymaking community and foreign policy sector should be aware of is that, while we are far removed from the battlefield, we’re all very much operating in an environment far from immune to the political divisions, tensions, and polarization unfolding in the region. To say it is tense is an understatement. More of a reason to not just hold steady, but to stay true to the mandate of non-partisan analysis, while also elevating diverse voices across the region and valuable expertise that brings in the necessary historical, sociopolitical, and cultural context.

Today, I am grateful to friends and colleagues who check in as I do with so many whose families have been affected. What proves challenging at times is operating outside of the working environment, in my interactions with those in our midst who either do not understand the nature of this work or, frankly, those who do not understand the implications beyond how it is reflected at the gas stations in America. I am sometimes shut down when I try to share what is going on—or met with aching silence.

I have come to understand, however, that people have their own capacities, and I let it be. Holding steady has proven to be a journey of self-rediscovery. When I feel the pressure, the sadness, and the frustration of uncertainty, as many of my colleagues working in this space do, I reach out to my community. It’s how the people of the region are coping, with solidarity and togetherness.

After a long day’s work following developments in the region, I get to come home to my sweet children and my loving husband. I am even more grateful and more energized to do the work—in an endless search for the hope for a better future that the people of the region so deserve.

As wars spread across the Middle East and great-power rivalry intensifies, talk of redrawing borders has returned with surprising confidence. Analysts and commentators are increasingly discussing the potential for a significant restructuring of the Middle East, with discussions centering on the possible division of Iran along ethnic lines, the emergence of a more defined Kurdish state, and the continued instability of a Syria divided among rival factions.

But borders are rarely redrawn simply because regimes fall or populations rebel. They change when powerful countries and neighboring states allow it. In other words, new states do not appear simply because a population wants independence. They emerge when internal upheaval, regional interests, and the decisions of major powers all point in the same direction.

When those forces align, borders can change. When they do not, revolutions may topple governments—but the map stays the same.

This dynamic can be seen in other conflicts. Kosovo, a former province of Serbia with a majority Albanian population, declared independence in 2008 and was recognized by the United States and most European countries. Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia that separated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, declared independence as well—but it is recognized by only a handful of states, mainly Russia and its allies.

The difference was not simply the will of the population. Kosovo gained broad international support, while Abkhazia did not.

The same logic explains why Syria still officially exists as a single state despite more than a decade of civil war, foreign intervention, and competing zones of control. Kurdish ambitions for autonomy, Israeli preferences, and regional rivalries have not led to a recognized partition because no major international agreement supports breaking the country apart. In fact, recent developments in northeast Syria suggest that many outside powers still prefer a re-centralized Syrian state to the risks of the permanent partition of the country.

Iran may soon test this same principle again.

Recent reports of Kurdish fighters preparing to launch operations from Iraqi territory into western Iran, combined with signs of military mobilization along Iran’s northern border with Azerbaijan, have fueled speculation that the Islamic Republic could face simultaneous pressure from multiple directions. Such developments would represent the first genuine multi-front external and internal challenge to the Iranian state in decades.

Yet even if the regime were to weaken dramatically, the fate of Iran’s borders would remain far from predetermined.

Iran is ethnically diverse. Persians form the majority, but large communities of Azeris, Kurds, Lurs, Arabs, Baloch, and Turkmen populate the country’s outer regions. Many observers, therefore, imagine territorial breakup along ethnic lines if central authority falters.

But Iran’s geography complicates that scenario.

Most of these populations lie along what might be called Iran’s northern arc—a strategic corridor stretching from Iraqi Kurdistan across the Kurdish regions of western Iran to the Azeri provinces of the northwest and onward toward the Caspian basin. Mountainous terrain, porous borders, and long-standing insurgent networks make this belt the most plausible entry point for outside forces.

But instability along this corridor would not automatically produce independent states. It would more likely trigger overlapping interventions and competing spheres of influence.

Turkey’s red line remains Kurdish territorial consolidation. Ankara has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use cross-border operations, proxies, and intelligence networks to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish corridor linking insurgent regions across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Kurdish advances inside Iran would almost certainly provoke Turkish countermeasures.

Even the Kurdish factor—often treated as the most obvious driver of territorial division—is more complex than it appears. Iranian Kurdish society is politically divided and geographically uneven, with strong nationalist currents concentrated in specific regions rather than across the entire Kurdish belt.

Azerbaijan presents a different but equally complex scenario. Nationalist narratives about “Southern Azerbaijan” have existed on the margins of Azerbaijani politics for a long time. If Tehran weakens, pressure may grow in Baku to assert influence over Azeri-majority regions across the border. More importantly, the unresolved question of a land connection to the Nakhchivan exclave has long driven Baku’s strategic thinking. While the proposed Zangezur corridor through Armenia remains the preferred solution, instability inside Iran could theoretically reopen other possibilities.

Yet outright annexation of Iranian Azeri territories would be a strategic gamble. The Azeri population in Iran is larger than the population of Azerbaijan itself, is deeply embedded in Iran’s religious and political structures, and is far more religious than Azerbaijan's staunchly secular population. Absorbing millions of new citizens could transform Azerbaijan itself into a far larger but less stable state.

Rather than seeking major territorial incorporation, Baku would more likely pursue influence or protectorate arrangements along the borders and in the region around Tabriz, securing strategic advantage without absorbing a politically complex population.

Other actors would also see opportunities in an Iranian crisis.

Another region that could draw external attention is Khuzestan, Iran’s oil-rich southwestern province along the Iraqi border. Home to a significant Arab population and the center of much of Iran’s energy infrastructure, Khuzestan is an economic lifeline and a political vulnerability for Tehran. Arab activists occasionally speak of “Ahwaz” as a separate entity, but local identities there are complex and deeply intertwined with the Iranian state. Even so, in a scenario of prolonged instability, neighboring actors could be tempted to influence events in the province—not necessarily through outright annexation, but through political patronage, proxy networks, or economic leverage. Given that a large share of Iran’s oil production and export facilities are concentrated in this region, any contest over Khuzestan would carry consequences far beyond Iran’s borders.

Control over Khuzestan has been contested before. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 began with an attempt to seize precisely this province, a reminder that Khuzestan sits at the intersection of ethnic politics, energy resources, and regional power competition. Iraq’s splintered political landscape today makes such an ambition unlikely. Yet as Ahwazi political movements begin positioning themselves amid the current crisis, prolonged instability could revive old strategic temptations around Iran’s most valuable province.

In Iranian Balochistan, local politics rarely align neatly with ideological movements. Tribal structures, cross-border trade networks, and long-standing patterns of state patronage often produce pragmatic alliances that complicate any straightforward narrative of separation. Indeed, some Baloch tribal leaders have reportedly pledged support for the central authorities even as separatist movements may seek to exploit the current instability.

The United Arab Emirates has never relinquished its claim to the islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, seized by Iran in 1971 at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. A severe weakening of Iranian authority could tempt Abu Dhabi to press its claim more assertively.

Qatar’s calculations would be economic rather than territorial. The world’s largest natural gas reservoir—the North Dome/South Pars field—is shared between Qatar and Iran. Because the reservoir functions as a single geological system, disruption on the Iranian side could allow Qatar to consolidate a larger share of its long-term value.

Yet the same actors who might exploit Iranian weakness also have strong reasons to prevent the country’s complete disintegration.

Turkey fears Kurdish statehood. Pakistan fears Baloch separatism. Gulf states fear maritime instability and the emergence of new militant actors along the Persian Gulf. Russia, preoccupied with Ukraine, would still seek to block Western geopolitical gains along the Caspian basin. China depends heavily on Iranian energy exports and would prefer a stable supplier.

This creates a profound paradox.

Many powers might welcome the fall of the Iranian regime. Almost none want the Iranian state itself to disappear.

That paradox echoes an older historical precedent. In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was famously labeled the “Sick Man of Europe.” For decades, observers predicted its imminent demise. Instead, the empire endured long periods of instability, losing influence along its periphery while its core structures endured.

Iran today may represent a similar case—the “Sick Man of West Asia.”

The Islamic Republic is weakened. Peripheral regions could become contested. External powers might cultivate influence along the northern arc. Yet the Iranian state itself could prove far more resilient than those predicting rapid partition expect.

In the emerging multipolar world, borders are rarely redrawn cleanly. More often, they blur, entrench, and reassert themselves through messy negotiations among competing powers.

The Islamic Republic may fall, but like the “Sick Man of Europe” before it, Iran may prove far harder to dismantle than the obituaries of its regime would suggest.

The war now unfolding in Lebanon, as Iran comes under direct attack, has forced a question the country spent decades postponing: what comes after Hezbollah? In recent days, the Lebanese government moved to ban the group’s independent military actions after it launched attacks tied to the Iran conflict—an extraordinary step in a country where the state has often behaved like a tenant living under an armed landlord.

Let’s call the project what it is. I am not neutral on Hezbollah. It is a terrorist organization—an armed apparatus built on violence, intimidation, and a command relationship with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It may cloak itself in the language of “resistance,” but its record, structure, and outcomes tell a different story: a militia that captured the state and used Lebanon’s people as its shield.

I like to call what is unfolding the “de-Hezbollahification” of Lebanon—a national hygiene project that dismantles a parallel sovereignty, removes the militia’s grip from institutions and streets, and restores the basic principle that only the state can declare or engage in acts of war. But one condition must be stated plainly before Lebanon repeats its mistakes: de-Hezbollafication cannot be driven by the desire for vengeance against the Shiʿa for supporting Hezbollah’s rise. It must rest on their equal citizenship—otherwise it will recreate the very vacuum that Hezbollah was born to fill.

Hezbollah rose from a long history of neglect. Before the civil war, Lebanon’s political system and economic priorities were structured around a hierarchy that left entire regions underdeveloped. Shiʿa communities in the south and the Beqaa faced some of the country’s worst poverty, the weakest public services, and the greatest exposure to border violence. They were Lebanese on paper but treated as peripheral in practice. Lebanon’s sectarian political system reinforced this pattern by dividing power along religious lines, making it harder for citizens to hold their leaders accountable.

Into that abandonment stepped Imam Musa al-Sadr, a progressive Shiʿite cleric with rare political instincts. He spoke about Shiʿa deprivation not as a sectarian grievance but as a national scandal—arguing that the neglect of Shiʿa communities was not just a problem for one religious group, but evidence that the Lebanese state itself was failing large parts of its population.

In 1974, he helped give marginalized Shiʿa communities a collective voice by co-founding what became the Amal Movement, linked to the “Movement of the Deprived.”

Al-Sadr mattered because he offered a different future to an already desperate community. His message was that the Shiʿa were citizens with rights, not a population meant to passively absorb the consequences of everyone else’s wars.

In 1978, he traveled to Libya with two companions at the invitation of Muammar Gaddafi—and then disappeared. They were last seen in Tripoli and never returned. Many Lebanese Shiʿa believe he was killed by the Gaddafi regime, though the full details are still unresolved.

His disappearance created a political and religious vacuum—the kind of vacuum external powers are quick to exploit.

Armed Palestinian organizations operated from southern Lebanon for years, launching attacks into Israel and drawing Israeli retaliation onto Lebanese villages. The “south” became a strike zone where civilians paid the price for decisions they had no hand in making.

Israel’s 1982 invasion unfolded amid that cycle, and the chaos of civil war created the conditions for a new actor to rise. In the early 1980s, with Iranian support, especially through the Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah seized the opportunity.

The group built its legitimacy by exploiting the state’s failure and offering an alternative system of security, welfare, enforcement, and discipline. It fought and absorbed rivals, monopolized “resistance,” and turned the border into its exclusive political terrain. Over time, the South learned a terrible lesson: the state cannot protect you, but the militia might. Hezbollah institutionalized that belief and benefited from it.

Here is the part Lebanon likes to say with moral superiority and little self-awareness: “The people supported Hezbollah.”

Yes. Many did. And the support carried responsibility because Hezbollah is not a neutral social service provider. It is an armed organization with a transnational agenda aligned with Iran, and it has a long record of violence and extremism.

But Lebanon cannot pretend that support was chosen from a menu of equal options.

This is the moral root of the trap.

When a community is treated as an afterthought for generations, it begins to internalize that citizenship won’t protect you. So when Hezbollah presented itself as the only force able to defend their villages from the next invasion, many embraced it—even if that protection came with a cost.

That does not absolve the decision to empower a terrorist militia, but it explains why the decision was socially understandable, even though it was nationally catastrophic.

The most unforgivable part is this: The same actors—Lebanese, Arab, and international—who later demanded change tolerated the conditions that made Hezbollah inevitable when change was still possible. By the time they discovered their principles, the Shiʿa were already trapped inside a structure where leaving Hezbollah would be social suicide and put you and your family at risk.

Everyone is responsible. Hezbollah’s supporters are responsible for enabling its ascent. Lebanon’s ruling class is responsible for creating the vacuum. And the far-right political narrative that governs Lebanon’s imagination—treating Muslims, and particularly Shiʿa, as a demographic problem rather than citizens—helped poison the soil long before Hezbollah planted itself in it.

Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 was Hezbollah’s coronation. Hezbollah claimed victory; much of the south idolized the “resistance” as proof that its model worked.

But the state still did not return. Neglect persisted. The south and the Beqaa remained underdeveloped. And Hezbollah—already armed, already organized—grew into a parallel sovereignty that increasingly dictated national decisions.

Over time, Hezbollah treated Shiʿa support as strategic cover. It embedded military infrastructure in civilian environments and wrapped its agenda in the bodies of its own people. It used the community as a human shield for a project that ultimately answered to Iran’s priorities, not Lebanon’s.

And now, in a war where Iran is directly targeted, Hezbollah has been pulled back to its core identity: defending Iran, even at the cost of Lebanon.

Lebanon already has a roadmap for change written into its postwar settlement, the Taif Agreement, which explicitly frames the abolition of political sectarianism as a fundamental national objective.

But Lebanon never implemented the spirit of that text. It implemented the mechanics that preserved the sectarian marketplace.

As long as Lebanon’s political system is based on sectarian quotas, citizens will continue to rely on their sect for protection rather than on the state. The constitution divides parliament equally between Christians and Muslims, and political power is still organized along sectarian lines.

The uncomfortable truth is that some of the biggest obstacles to change are the actors who benefit most from the existing privileges—particularly parties rooted in far-right Christian narratives that treat demographic equality as a threat to their existence.

The Lebanese Forces leadership (a civil war militia turned political party) has publicly questioned or cast doubt on calls to eliminate political sectarianism in the past, challenging the timing and motives. In broader electoral debates, major sectarian parties have repeatedly fought over reforms that could dilute sectarian leverage, including proposals linked to a single constituency and a senate, as discussed in Taif’s logic.

So yes, the same Lebanese Forces that loudly demand Hezbollah disarmament also benefit from the current system. Their anti-Hezbollah posture is often correct on the militia question. But the deeper national cure requires more than opposing an armed Hezbollah.

A truly equal civil state would reduce every sect—including historically privileged sectarian gatekeepers—to equal status. That is not an attack on Christians. It is the only way to build national unity without requiring armed patrons.

Complete De-Hezbollahification requires:

• dismantling Hezbollah’s armed capacity and parallel security apparatus;

• restoring state monopoly on war decisions and border policy;

• integrating social services into accountable state institutions rather than militia patronage;

• protecting Shiʿa communities during transition so they are not punished for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time;

• abolishing political sectarianism in practice—not only in speeches—by building institutions where the citizen is not filtered through sect.

Without that, Lebanon risks repeating its original sin: creating a vacuum, then watching a new armed “protector” rise from it.

The war has forced the question. Lebanon must answer it.

The Shiʿa made a disastrous political bargain with Hezbollah. They are responsible for the consequences. They are also the product of a state that failed them, a region that exploited them, and a political class that left them with the impression that the only reliable roof was a militia.

Lebanon now faces a choice it has avoided for decades. It can dismantle Hezbollah’s military power while leaving the political system that created the vacuum in which it rose, or it can confront the deeper structures that turned entire communities toward armed protection in the first place.

Hezbollah filled a void created by state failure. If Lebanon removes the militia without finally filling that void with equal citizenship and accountable institutions, history will eventually produce its replacement.

When the war in Iran began last week, no one really thought the United States would put boots on the ground.

That assumption was grounded in several obvious realities. A ground invasion of Iran would carry enormous military, political, and strategic risks. It could transform what some in Washington may have imagined as a swift decapitation campaign into a drawn-out and costly conflict, more like Afghanistan than a limited punitive strike. It would also expose President Donald Trump to profound political consequences. He rose to prominence condemning America’s endless wars and promising to avoid the kind of open-ended military adventures that defined much of the post 9/11 era.

But that assumption is being tested in real time.

On Monday, Trump signaled that he may be more open to a ground offensive than many expected. In remarks to the New York Post, he suggested that, unlike previous presidents, he does not share the same hesitation about sending troops into combat. Around the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also refused to rule out the possibility. Neither man explicitly committed the United States to an invasion, but both helped move the conversation into territory that, only days ago, seemed politically and strategically off limits.

The basic reason a ground invasion now looks more plausible than it did a week ago is simple. The two outcomes that Trump likely preferred at the start of this conflict appear less likely today.

The first was a Venezuela-style outcome: the death of the supreme leader followed by the emergence of a more pragmatic insider willing to stabilize the system and cut a deal with Washington. The second was regime change from within, driven by a wave of popular protests strong enough to overthrow the regime.

At the moment, neither seems close to coming to fruition.

If a regime insider takes power, the leading possibility appears to be Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late supreme leader. That is hardly reassuring for anyone hoping for de-escalation. Mojtaba is widely seen as more hardline than his father and, for ordinary Iranians, potentially even less competent. A figure like that is not likely to negotiate with the governments that just killed his father. Israeli officials have signaled that any successor would become a target regardless of his identity. In practical terms, that severely limits the space for an internal transition that preserves the Islamic Republic while simultaneously making it more pliable.

The protest scenario looks equally uncertain, at least in the short term.

Yes, the regime remains deeply unpopular, with 80% of Iranians opposing it. But war often changes domestic political psychology. The death of a national leader, even a deeply controversial one, can rally parts of society that were previously passive, fearful, or disillusioned. Social media footage suggests that pro-regime and anti-American demonstrations are, for now, more visible than anti-regime mobilization. That does not mean the regime has regained legitimacy, but foreign bombardment may be strengthening nationalist reflexes at the very moment Washington hoped to trigger internal revolt. Even if the citizenry wanted to depose the regime, the fact remains that they are unarmed.

This is the danger that external military action often creates. Instead of breaking a hated government, it can temporarily fuse state survival with national identity. Reports of strikes hitting civilian infrastructure, including a school and a hospital, only deepen that effect. Even many Iranians who loathe the regime may become less willing to rise up if they feel their country is under external assault.

So if neither a cooperative successor nor mass protest is likely to deliver quick results, Washington needs to make clear exactly what the military objective is and how it plans to achieve it.

Trump has now spoken of four major objectives: destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, annihilating its navy, ensuring Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon, and preventing Tehran from funding, arming, or directing proxies abroad.

Taken together, these goals amount to a project of total strategic neutralization. In plain terms, they imply that Iran must be demilitarized and stripped of its ability to project power beyond its borders. That is the kind of agenda that usually requires the enemy state to capitulate.

And that is where escalation becomes dangerous.

Air campaigns have a long historical record of producing dramatic tactical results. Air power can destroy infrastructure, eliminate commanders, degrade logistics, and disrupt communications. But it has a poor record of achieving broad political transformation on its own. Bombing can punish, weaken, and signal. It can rarely compel a deeply entrenched regime to surrender its core ambitions, especially one built around ideological commitment, corrupt institutions, and a long history of surviving pressure.

If Washington’s aims are truly maximalist, then air power alone may not be enough.

During the 1991 campaign against Saddam Hussein, the United States inflicted enormous damage from the air and encouraged Iraqis to rise against the regime. But the uprising was crushed, the regime survived, and Saddam remained in power for years. Air superiority did not automatically yield political victory. If anything, it exposed the limits of military force when not paired with a coherent, sustainable endgame.

That lesson hangs heavily over the current war.

There are signs that both Washington and its allies may already understand this. Reports suggest that outside actors are exploring whether Kurdish militias or special forces operations could do some of the work on the ground without requiring a full-scale American invasion. That would be the preferred option for any administration trying to avoid the domestic backlash of another major war. But if proxy forces prove inadequate, and if special operations cannot achieve strategic objectives on their own, then the pressure to consider a larger US ground role will grow.

Iran is one of the most difficult countries in the region to invade. It is vast, mountainous, heavily populated, and far more complex than the states where the American military has operated before. Any invading force would face immense logistical burdens, rough terrain, and the near certainty of prolonged resistance. Even a successful initial campaign could quickly turn into a brutal occupation with no clean off-ramp.

That is why the odds may still be below 50%. The regime could still be deposed from within. Iran could descend into a messy civil conflict, altering the strategic equation. Or Trump could simply decide that the cost of pursuing total victory is too high and declare partial success before stepping back.

But the important point is this: the probability of boots on the ground is now higher than it was just days ago.

That alone should alarm anyone who took Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric seriously. A president who built his brand attacking forever wars is now, at the very least, entertaining the possibility of entering one of the most dangerous and complex battlefields in the Middle East.

And once a war begins to outgrow its original ambitions, it often develops its own momentum that is difficult to contain. That is the true danger now. Not only that Washington may actively choose a ground invasion, but that it may drift into one because every other path to victory has begun to close.

After airstrikes by the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the Islamic Republic’s so-called “Supreme Leader”—on day one of the war, the world expected a response.

Israelis braced for missile fire, and Americans braced for attacks on their bases across the Gulf.

What fewer people expected was Tehran lighting up the entire neighborhood: missiles and drones not just toward Israel, but over and into Gulf capitals and “neutral” airspace too—Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, with blasts reported around Abu Dhabi and Dubai, including drone attacks on both the Burj Al-Arab hotel, and the Burj Khalifa, the tallest manmade structure in the world. To be clear, these are all American allies that host American military bases. But Iran has gone beyond targeting these bases, and has also attacked skyscrapers, airports, and other civilian infrastructure that have nothing whatsoever to do with the war.

This even included attacking states that have spent the last decade trying not to be at war with Iran, and in Oman’s case, acting as the region’s designated mediator.

Qatar—a sponsor of Hamas, and which has in the past provided the Islamic Republic with relatively favorable media coverage via its state-run Al-Jazeera network—has said it intercepted Iranian attacks aimed at targets including its international airports. Doha’s foreign ministry spokesperson didn’t dress it up as “miscalculation” or “spillover.” He framed it as a hostile action and said Qatar is not currently engaging Iran diplomatically. Multiple other states, including Saudi Arabia, have threatened a military response against Iran.

And Oman—which until a few days ago was trying to act as a mediator between the United States and the Islamic Republic, and even framed the negotiations as still going well right up until the last minutes before the war—has reported its first Iranian attack of this war, with a drone strike on Duqm port.

Meanwhile, Iran’s paramilitary proxy Hezbollah launched rockets and drones into northern Israel, explicitly framing it as retaliation for Khamenei’s assassination and in defense of the “axis of resistance.”

If you’re thinking, “that makes no sense; it just unites the entire region against Iran,”—you’re not alone. That was my first thought, too. And it seems to have done precisely this: the Gulf Cooperation Council has already issued a ministerial statement condemning Iran’s attacks on Gulf states (and Jordan) as a serious violation of sovereignty and international law. Even the UK prime minister has described Iran as increasingly “reckless” and warned of rising danger to civilians.

One way to make sense of Iran’s behavior is to treat it as a deliberate attempt to make the region feel ungovernable and unsafe unless Washington and Israel stop. The Islamic Republic may be trying to appear unstable and insane as a way to ward off the Americans and Israelis, and their foes across the region.

In that reading, Iran is trying to make the war operationally and politically unsustainable from the Gulf—by forcing airports to pause, ports to slow, cities to shelter, and air defenses to burn through interceptors. Even if every government condemns Tehran, the bet is that their first instinct may still be to pressure the Americans to wind down the strikes on Iran.

And then there’s the escalation that’s designed to frighten absolutely everyone: Hormuz. Iranian officials have now issued their most explicit warning yet that the narrow Strait—through which roughly 20 million barrels a day of oil flowed in 2024 (about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption)—is “closed” and that Iran will fire on any ships attempting to pass.

But here is the problem for Iran: chaos is not a precise instrument. The same missile-and-drone campaign that is meant to terrorize Gulf capitals into pressuring Washington toward de-escalation can just as easily push them into the opposite posture—treating Iran as the common enemy that must undergo regime change.

To me, Iran’s posture looks like a bad bluff that, far from de-escalating, will simply burn bridges with any states in the region and unify them with the Americans and Israelis.

As one viral tweet from a Palestinian critic of Hamas put it: “Iran has attacked more Arab countries in the last 24 hours than Israel in the last 10 years.”

In some respects, this is the best outcome that Israel and America could possibly hope for. The biggest problem that the Islamic Republic is facing is that it is losing the actual war really heavily.

Alongside Khamenei, a whole cadre of senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and political officials were killed in the initial wave of US–Israeli strikes.

Within the first days of the war, the U.S.–Israeli coalition had already achieved air superiority over key areas of Iran, including Tehran, meaning IRGC air defenses were no longer able to reliably challenge repeated coalition airstrikes and combat flights.

Just as importantly, Tehran is also taking punishment at sea. On March 1st, the U.S. military said it sank an Iranian Jamaran-class warship while it was docked at a pier in Chah Bahar, on the Gulf of Oman. President Trump has claimed the U.S. has sunk nine Iranian naval ships.

Hezbollah’s attempted retaliation has not gone well either. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s rockets by bombing Hezbollah targets in Southern Lebanon. But the bigger news is that Hezbollah’s attempt to enter the war triggered Lebanon’s government to reportedly move to ban Hezbollah from conducting military actions and force the paramilitary group to surrender its weapons.

So what does the Islamic Republic have left? Chaos, derangement, and unpredictability.

If Tehran’s goal was to stop the region uniting against it, it seems to have failed. If its goal was to make the war unsustainable, it may instead be making its own position untenable: burning the last bridges with states that once tried to mediate, and inviting the kind of regional alignment that turns a regime’s strategic problem into an existential one.

Rumors are now swirling that the Gulf states could join the war against Iran within 24 to 48 hours. And as of a few hours ago, breaking news suggests that as regime officials convened to appoint a new supreme leader, the gathering was hit by an airstrike. The building of Iran’s Assembly of Experts was reportedly destroyed.

A new Abrahamic alliance is coming into view—Jews and Arabs coming together to resist a common foe. The Islamic Republic of Iran is actively manufacturing the conditions for it—one drone, one missile, one burning skyline at a time.

On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the elimination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in a joint U.S. and Israeli airstrike on his leadership compound in central Tehran.

For large segments of Iranian society and many Shiite Muslims, Khamenei embodied the Islamic Revolution that began in 1978, led to the exile of the Shah, and culminated in the return of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. A national referendum soon followed, formally establishing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yasser Arafat, the preeminent leader of the Palestinian national movement for over four decades, was among the first regional leaders to congratulate the new revolutionary leadership on its success.

From 1979 onward, Iran transformed into an Islamist state driven by revolutionary ideology and ambitions to export its model beyond its borders—not only to Shiite communities but also to Sunni groups. Central to this vision was opposition to the existence of Israel and hostility toward the United States.

To advance this agenda, the Iranian regime began backing militias in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Hezbollah was founded in Lebanon in 1982 by Shia Islamist militants, with support from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, in direct response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Emerging during the Lebanese Civil War, the group aimed to fight Israeli occupation and create a Shiite Islamic state modeled on the Iranian Revolution. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s, the concept of an “axis” of aligned forces gained prominence, later formalized after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011 as the “Axis of Resistance.”

This period coincided with the Palestinian leadership’s signing of the Oslo Accords in pursuit of a two-state solution—an approach the Iranian regime strongly opposed.

In response, Tehran invested heavily in Palestinian armed factions that shared its rejectionist stance toward Israel and the United States, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Iran promoted to these groups the vision of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” rooted in armed confrontation. That position stood in direct contrast to the unfolding peace process, particularly the 2000 Camp David summit, which centered on establishing a two-state solution. The negotiations focused on resolving core final-status issues: borders, the future of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, security arrangements, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. While imperfect and deeply contentious on all sides, they were a last-ditch effort to move from armed struggle toward negotiated statehood.

As talks faltered and eventually failed, the region was plunged into the Second Intifada. Waves of suicide bombings carried out by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targeted buses, cafes, and public spaces inside Israel. Each attack hardened public opinion, eroded trust, and pushed diplomatic compromise further out of reach—aligning with Tehran’s broader strategy of sustained confrontation over incremental agreement.

At present, Khamenei’s elimination does not automatically dismantle the ideological system he helped entrench. The Islamic Republic was structured around a doctrine that views confrontation as a source of legitimacy. That doctrine shaped the so-called Axis of Resistance and folded the Palestinian issue into a wider regional struggle.

For Palestinians, this moment offers an urgent opportunity for reflection. The lesson lies in the dangers of expansionist, maximalist fantasies—ideas that have repeatedly failed and risk distorting a legitimate national cause when they become consumed by rigid, absolutist ideology.

Equally important is the revolution’s framing of compromise and negotiation as weakness or betrayal. This mindset influenced factions within Palestinian politics, encouraging the rejection of incremental gains in favor of absolute demands. The cost of that approach is evident today. There is nothing noble about walking away from every negotiation, rejecting every imperfect proposal, or branding advocates of pragmatism as traitors.

Refusing incremental progress—declining to build institutions where possible, secure limited gains, and improve daily life where feasible—has not produced total victory. It has produced the reality before us: Gaza devastated, the West Bank subsumed, and Palestinian political representation weakened and divided.

No state can be built without a monopoly on force. When armed power is ceded to militias, institutional authority erodes. The pattern has played out in Iraq, in Lebanon, and in Palestine.

Once these militias adopted Iran’s ideological framework, they became deeply dependent on Tehran—financially and militarily—morphing from national actors into instruments of Iranian foreign policy.

That dependency undermined the Palestinian cause internationally and obliterated any serious efforts at state-building. Internal cohesion and institutional accountability matter more than ideological alignment with distant capitals. Without unified governance and transparent institutions, even the most powerful rhetoric cannot produce durable political outcomes.

From Hezbollah in Lebanon to Shiite militias in Iraq, from the Assad regime in Syria to the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran constructed a network designed to project power asymmetrically. These groups were not identical in origin or composition, but they shared a common function: to extend Iranian influence without triggering direct conventional war. Rockets in southern Lebanon, drones launched from Yemen, militias embedded in Iraqi politics, and weapons pipelines into Gaza were all nodes in a single architecture.

The Axis of Resistance allowed Tehran to surround Israel and challenge U.S. influence across multiple fronts, and entrench itself in vulnerable states where governance was already weak. In Iraq, militias integrated into formal politics while retaining parallel armed authority. In Lebanon, Hezbollah evolved into a state-within-a-state, holding veto power over national decision-making while maintaining its own military force. In Yemen, the Houthis’ growing missile and drone capabilities turned a local civil war into a regional crisis.

Wherever militias superseded state authority, instability followed.

Now, with Khamenei gone, the question facing the region is whether this network will hold together or begin to change. Proxy systems depend on funding, coordination, ideological cohesion, and a clear strategic center. Leadership transitions in Tehran will test that cohesion. Some actors may double down, seeking to demonstrate continuity through escalation. Others may recalibrate, prioritizing survival within their own domestic arenas.

For Palestinians, the implications are especially dire. If militias remain the dominant vehicle of political expression, the cycle of dependency and decay will continue. But if this moment initiates a long-needed reassessment—if armed alignment with external powers gives way to internal political reconstruction—there may yet be space for a different trajectory.

The future of Iran’s proxy network will shape the political futures of Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Sanaa, and Gaza. The architecture Khamenei helped construct won’t disappear overnight. But it is now entering its most uncertain phase since its inception.

States now have a real window and valid reason to reclaim the monopoly over force. We’re already seeing a shift in Lebanon, where the prime minister has just announced a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities.

Khamenei built a system that thrived on managed chaos and calibrated escalation. His absence creates a vacuum across the web of actors that depended on his strategic direction.

The coming months will test whether regional leaders are prepared to move beyond proxy warfare and ideological maximalism—and finally break a cycle that has denied generations the chance at stability, dignity, and shared prosperity.

In the United States, sovereignty is typically framed in military and territorial terms. Far less attention is given to intellectual sovereignty, even though influence over ideas, information, and innovation can be equally consequential.

American universities sit at the center of the country’s policy formation ecosystem. A student enters Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, Harvard’s Kennedy School, or Columbia’s SIPA. That student studies international relations, security policy, and Middle East affairs. They intern at a Washington think tank. They move into the State Department, the National Security Council, or a congressional foreign policy office.

This is the pipeline that produces the American governing class.

If the institutions feeding that pipeline are financially entangled with foreign governments and heavily shaped by donor incentives, the unavoidable question is: how independent is American policy formation?

According to U.S. Department of Education disclosures, American universities have reported more than $67 billion in foreign gifts and contracts since 1986. In the most recent reporting cycle alone, over $5.2 billion in foreign funds was disclosed. Qatar accounted for more than $1.1 billion, placing it among the largest foreign funders of U.S. higher education. China, Saudi Arabia, and other governments have contributed hundreds of millions more.

While this falls short of proving corruption, it reveals significant structural exposure.

In Authoritarians in the Academy, Sarah McLaughlin describes how authoritarian governments infiltrate countries of interest through what she calls “censors without borders.” These efforts involve visa denials, blacklists, pressure campaigns, harassment of dissidents abroad, and the use of diplomatic channels to influence academic institutions. She notes that demarcation lines on maps “mean little when it comes to the actual reach or secondary effects of censorship regimes.”

The real tension lies in the way incentives are aligned, which can shape outcomes even in the absence of overt censorship on American soil.

Universities have globalized aggressively. They depend on international tuition flows, foreign partnerships, and overseas programs. They cultivate relationships with foreign ministries and state-linked institutions. When institutions become financially reliant on global funding streams, they inevitably develop risk sensitivities.

McLaughlin poses the central question directly: “What price tag do you affix to your values?”

When a university establishes large-scale partnerships in Qatar or opens major programs connected to governments with restrictive political environments, it necessarily operates within those political realities. Even in the absence of formal restrictions, administrators must consider diplomatic consequences, funding stability, and reputational exposure should they cross a line drawn by a patron. Research agendas, speaker invitations, and institutional responses to controversy are shaped by these calculations.

No formal instructions from foreign authorities are necessary. Institutional caution can produce the same effect.

McLaughlin makes a broader point that authoritarianism does not function solely through coercion. It relies on “the willingness of institutions to comply, silence, and self-censor, sometimes even in the absence of orders to do so.” The risk is gradual normalization of constraint rather than dramatic suppression.

This matters because American universities are not isolated cultural institutions. They are training grounds for future policymakers.

Graduates from institutions receiving significant foreign funding move into think tanks. Many think tanks receive funding from foreign governments. These institutions produce research that informs congressional hearings and executive branch deliberations. That research shapes legislation and diplomatic postures.

This vulnerability is not limited to foreign governments. Domestic money also shapes institutions. Billionaires, corporations, defense contractors, and ideological donors fund research centers, academic chairs, and policy initiatives. Their funding creates incentives that can narrow debate or favor certain viewpoints.

If the goal is intellectual sovereignty, the same standards should apply across the board. Foreign funding should be transparent. Domestic donor influence should be transparent as well. Corporate support deserves the same scrutiny as funding from foreign states.

The underlying issue is dependency. When institutions rely heavily on any concentrated source of funding, influence follows, regardless of where the money comes from.

When universities increasingly resemble multinational enterprises with diversified revenue streams and global partnerships, they adopt corporate risk management logic. When think tanks rely on donor portfolios to sustain operations, they align research priorities with funding stability.

The United States remains militarily dominant—its defense capacity is not in question. Its intellectual independence, however, depends on institutional integrity.

American higher education has historically been one of the country’s strongest soft power assets. Its credibility rests on the perception of academic freedom and independence from political manipulation. If that credibility weakens because institutions appear financially dependent on foreign governments or major donors, the long-term strategic cost is real.

Policy formation depends on intellectual independence, just as diplomatic strategy depends on analytical credibility; national sovereignty ultimately requires both. In a connected world, engagement with foreign governments and global partners is unavoidable. The aim, however, should be to build institutions strong enough to engage outwardly while remaining insulated from undue influence.

Greater transparency in funding, clearer conflict-of-interest disclosures, independent oversight of foreign partnerships, and stronger firewalls between donors and research agendas are basic standards of good governance. Sovereignty extends beyond the defense of territory; it also depends on the protection of independent judgment.

When the institutions that educate and supply the American governing class become structurally vulnerable to funding-based influence, the country faces a gradual erosion of intellectual autonomy.

Military power protects borders, yes, but intellectual independence shapes a nation. A country that cannot safeguard the integrity of its institutions will eventually find that strength alone is not enough. Preserving intellectual autonomy is a long-term national security imperative—one that demands sustained and serious scrutiny.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with being overworked or burned out.

It is the kind that keeps you awake until nine in the morning, staring at the light breaking through the window, knowing you have not slept at all. Not because you were building something or celebrating. But because you were waiting—holding your breath as the rest of the world cheers on a war you know will have far-reaching implications for those you love… for the place you call home.

Mostly just waiting for messages that say, “I’m safe.”

Over the past few weeks, as the possibility of a strike by the United States against the regime in Iran has hung in the air, my nights, and the nights of countless others who have family and friends in the region, have stretched into mornings. Two a.m. becomes four. Four becomes seven. By nine, the city around me is starting its day while I am still refreshing my phone, scanning headlines, checking encrypted chats, and looking for signs that the people I care about are still intact.

This is what it means to be born in a place where geopolitical decisions carry real costs.

Family, friends, and the neighborhood you grew up in are all at risk of being swept into violent conflicts they had no hand in initiating or perpetuating.

My people are those who have started free speech book clubs in Iraq instead of joining a militia. The people working toward building a better life for themselves and their communities, despite the odds being stacked against them.

And here is the uncomfortable truth. Mixed with fear, there is also something else. A nervous, restrained sense that if something does happen, maybe this time, it will break the paralysis. Maybe it will shake structures that have calcified and obliterated innocent lives for decades. Maybe the day after could open space that the day before never allowed. But hoping for that hypothetical reality from the safety of a New York apartment feels wrong. Sure, I joined U.S. forces in the fight against Al-Qaeda in Baghdad. Have dedicated my professional career to equipping people across the Middle East with the knowledge, resources, and skills to build a freer and more prosperous future.

But it feels almost wrong to admit that. Anyone who has lived under entrenched systems understands the paradox. War is catastrophic. Economic and ideological stagnation is suffocating, most of all for the everyday man or woman simply pursuing a better life. When nothing moves and cycles seem unending, even drastic, risky moves sometimes feel like oxygen. Or the potential for it.

Still, reality intrudes quickly on romantic thinking.

When escalation in the Middle East begins, the first people exposed are not the generals, the officials with bunkers and security details, or the states with advanced air defenses.

They are the civilians who dared to think independently.

They are civil society organizers. The journalists working to document the truth without protection. The young men and women who started podcasts, small nonprofits, translation projects, and entrepreneurship networks. The people whose only weapon was an idea.

It is difficult to strike a fortified military base and intimidate a country with fighter jets and aircraft carriers. It is difficult to touch those who can retaliate immediately and decisively.

It is very easy to target someone who cannot fight back.

Very easy to accuse them of being foreign agents.

Very easy to make them disappear as collateral in the fog of a national emergency.

I work with people who are not trained for combat. They are trained to build. They build institutions slowly, create platforms for debate, and make it easier for young people to start businesses rather than join militia factions. They insist that national identity can transcend sect and ethnicity.

In moments of calm, their work feels like a light at the end of a tunnel.

In moments of escalation, it feels dangerously exposed—and those of us who have supported and encouraged them lie awake at night, remembering their names. Hoping it will pop up across our WhatsApp chats again in the morning, all the while knowing it very well may not.

That constant awareness that your community is among the least protected reshapes your sense of responsibility. I can’t afford naïveté or abstract hypotheticals. Every headline is personal. Every rumor is measured against a list of names in your head.

And yet, that vulnerability sharpens our purpose. We did not dedicate our lives only to escaping the regimes that tried to kill us, but to helping make the places we fled safer for those who come after us.

If the weakest are the easiest targets, then their survival cannot depend on chance. It must depend on visibility, networks, and international partnerships. Targeting civil society is not cost-free.

When no one is watching, people become easier to silence. When attention continues, it becomes harder to make them disappear.

So by nine in the morning, when exhaustion finally hits, I often ask myself why I continue this work. Why stay connected so closely to places that rob you of sleep? Why carry the psychological weight of two worlds at once?

The answer is simple.

Because the Middle East is not only a region of militias and missiles. It is also a region of courageous minorities. People who believe in economic opportunity over external patronage. In critical thinking over conspiracy. In sovereignty over proxy control.

They do not have air defenses. But they do have conviction.

History shows that the groups that appear weakest in moments of escalation often shape the long-term direction of their societies. Militaries win battles and armed actors dominate headlines, but ideas determine what survives when the smoke clears.

But only if the people carrying those ideas survive, too.

There is fear. Fear of retaliation. Fear that the doers will once again be squashed between larger forces. Fear that in a confrontation between states, civilians will pay the price.

But there is also hope. Hope that any rupture in the existing order could create space for reform, recalibration, even renewal.

Hope alone, however, is not a strategy.

If policymakers truly care about stability in the Middle East, they must understand that protecting regimes is not the same as protecting the people they rule. Stability built only around hard power is brittle. Stability that includes a resilient civil society can be long-lasting.

By the time nine in the morning arrives, I am reminded of something else.

The fact that I am awake is not only a symptom of anxiety, but a reminder of connection.

To stay awake worrying about people thousands of miles away means you still believe their lives matter. It means you refuse to treat them as collateral in someone else’s strategic game.

What keeps me going is not the prospect of war, but the conviction that the most vulnerable voices in the region are also the most necessary ones to safeguard. The people building alternatives to extremism, corruption, and sectarianism are not collateral to be written off in the name of strategy. They are the foundation of any future worth defending.

If policymakers claim to care about long-term stability, they must understand this: when civil society is crushed, the vacuum will not be filled by moderates. Militias, strongmen, and those who thrive in chaos will step into the gap.

If the easiest people to target are the ones trying to build something better, then protecting them is the most imperative charge.

And until that is understood in Washington, Tehran, and every capital where maps are redrawn by force, some of us will keep watching the night turn into morning. And hoping—working—toward something better.

In Iran, weeks of sustained protests and a harsh government crackdown have exposed deeper strains within the regime, strains now compounded by reports of imminent U.S. military action. That backdrop invites a close look at where Tehran is failing to maintain influence abroad—not least in Venezuela, where its once-strategic role in the country’s oil sector is unraveling.

Iran’s access to Venezuelan crude has weakened not because Caracas has broken with Tehran politically, but because legal and financial changes in Venezuela are closing the operational space that once sustained their energy partnership. New oversight and regulatory structures mean Tehran can no longer participate in oil management, access the resource, or funnel revenues through the opaque channels that defined the alliance—effectively cutting Iran out of one of its few remaining footholds in the Western Hemisphere.

The prior oil relationship between Venezuela and Iran followed a specific and functional logic. Both regimes, under international sanctions, developed systems based on opaque exchanges, non-standard payments, and parallel financial circuits. Iran provided diluents, technical assistance, and logistical support; Venezuela supplied heavy crude and offered a political and operational platform in the Western Hemisphere. The relationship was not grounded in economic efficiency or market integration, but in the shared capacity to operate outside regulated global systems.

That arrangement depended on three conditions: closed state control of the oil sector, legal opacity, and financial autonomy from the international system. Each of those conditions has now been dismantled through decisions taken by the Venezuelan regime itself. What once functioned as a sanctioned ecosystem has been replaced by a legal and financial system incompatible with Iran’s mode of external engagement.

The turning point was the reform of the Organic Hydrocarbons Law, promoted by the de facto government of Delcy Rodríguez and definitively approved by the illegitimate National Assembly of the dictatorship on January 29, 2026. The reform does not constitute a democratic opening or a legitimate institutional modernization, but a survival strategy aimed at restoring cash flow, stabilizing production, and partially normalizing oil exports under a new legal framework.

The law alters the rigid control structure of the sector, allows greater private participation, relaxes contractual conditions, and reduces the direct political weight of the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. In practical terms, oil ceases to function as an ideological instrument serving sanctioned geopolitical alliances and becomes part of a regulated system conditioned by external constraints. This change reforms the operational logic of the entire sector, though without any genuine constitutional foundation.

Venezuelan oil is once again being sold at international market prices. The discounts, barter arrangements, and opaque formulas that characterized exchanges with sanctioned partners have been abandoned. Revenue from these sales no longer flows freely into the discretionary control of the regime. Instead, it is channeled through accounts subject to external oversight, fundamentally reshaping access to and control over oil rents.

For Iran, this is bad news. The Iranian regime does not operate comfortably within relatively transparent regulatory frameworks or financial systems subject to international scrutiny. Its external projection relies on legal gray areas, informal political arrangements, and parallel payment mechanisms. The new Venezuelan legal and financial architecture eliminates that space. Energy cooperation between the two nations is now unviable, not because of a declared political break, but because the operational framework no longer permits it.

The decisive factor is not the oil fields themselves, but the revenue they generate. Control over sales mechanisms, shipping, insurance, payments, and access to final markets determines who can participate in the sector. Actors unable to operate within those channels are automatically excluded. Without access to those systems, Iran has been effectively removed from Venezuela’s oil economy without the need for a formal rupture or diplomatic escalation.

Venezuela previously served as Iran’s primary foothold in the Western Hemisphere. Not only as an energy supplier, but also as a logistical, diplomatic, and symbolic platform. From Caracas, Tehran projected influence beyond its immediate region and demonstrated an ability to operate in a strategically sensitive environment close to the United States. But not anymore.

The strategic consequences have not gone unnoticed in Washington. On January 28, 2026, in testimony before the U.S. Senate, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear that Venezuelan oil is no longer viewed as simply a commercial issue. It is now treated as a matter of regional security, sanctions enforcement, and limiting the reach of adversarial regimes.

Rubio made clear that Washington’s concern over Venezuela’s oil is not about commercial markets alone, but about preventing its revenues from being used to support hostile actors and authoritarian networks—a stance that underpins broader U.S. policy toward Caracas.

He emphasized that U.S. objectives do not include governing Venezuela, but ensuring that the country’s principal economic resource is managed under financial oversight and market transparency, conditions that effectively exclude Tehran from the energy sector.

The recent overhaul of Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law, the return to market pricing, and stricter revenue controls have stripped away the opaque mechanisms that once made cooperation with Iran possible. In practical terms, Venezuela no longer functions as an operational theater for Tehran in the Western Hemisphere.

Without access to Venezuelan crude or control over oil revenues, Iran loses a key foothold in the region. In global politics, external partnerships like this offer authoritarian regimes a strategic advantage; when they disappear, so too does a significant source of leverage.

For Tehran, the loss of access to Venezuelan oil is a strategic blow at a time when the regime can least afford one. Venezuela was a rare operational lifeline that helped Tehran bypass sanctions, sustain revenues, and project influence beyond the Middle East. The opaque systems of barter, shadow shipping, and informal financial networks that once underpinned that relationship are now unraveling as Venezuela moves toward regulated markets and external oversight, effectively shutting Iran out.

That loss compounds a series of pressures on the Islamic Republic—domestic protests that have shaken its legitimacy, economic strain from prolonged sanctions, and the looming possibility of military action against its infrastructure. Without Venezuelan oil revenue and the mechanisms that once sustained it, Tehran has fewer tools to mitigate those pressures and less flexibility to absorb external shocks. In geopolitical terms, losing Caracas means losing a rare arena where the Islamic Republic could operate with relative autonomy; without it, the regime’s strategic margins narrow further, leaving it more exposed to economic isolation and regional containment.

February 11th marked the 47th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which deposed the late Shah Reza Pahlavi and replaced the monarchy with the clerical leadership system in place today. The upheaval unfolded alongside parallel developments in neighboring Afghanistan. In April 1978, Soviet-backed factions within the Afghan military toppled Afghanistan’s first democratic republic and established a so-called “people’s state” in a pro-communist coup. What many people don’t know is that it wasn’t until 1979, possibly due to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, that we saw massive uprisings against the regime in Afghanistan.

Major political upheavals rarely remain confined within national borders. The war in Syria reshaped demographics and security dynamics across neighboring states. The Rwandan genocide destabilized much of Central Africa. The Iraq War altered political calculations throughout the Middle East. Even disasters such as Chornobyl carried consequences well beyond their point of origin.

In the Middle East today, we often see revolutions, coups, and uprisings that encourage, instigate, and even incite change in countries with similar mindsets.

Afghanistan, like Iran, is governed by clerical and hardline Islamist authorities that exert broad control over political and social life. The systems differ in style and structure—Tehran presents a formal state with electoral trappings, while the Taliban rule through a more rigid emirate—but both draw legitimacy from an uncompromising interpretation of political Islam. That ideology has shaped much of the region’s turmoil over the past century and continues to influence its trajectory today.

During last week’s festivities and ceremonies across Iran and its embassies, acting ambassador to Kabul Ali Reza Beikdel signaled the Islamic Republic’s interest in formally recognizing the Taliban. He said, “At the right time, we will make this legal decision and, to strengthen our ties, we will take the initiative in recognition, which all of you will admire.” Other Iranian officials also leaned toward formal recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan despite their clear lack of support among the people.

If these rumors are taken at face value, we may be looking at another major shift in the region’s geopolitics. Iran is now mostly isolated, and its proxies are heavily damaged. The Twelve-Day War and the prior dismantling of the Hezbollah and Hamas networks by Israel and then the United States have left the country desperately in need of strategic alliances. Who else to turn to than your next-door neighbor to the east, where, despite some prior clashes, an ongoing refugee crisis, and water disputes, you still see value in strengthening ties. Both governments are bound by a hardline ideological worldview that defines itself in opposition to the West and to Israel. That posture has been accompanied by well-documented human rights abuses, including severe restrictions on women’s rights and the suppression of political dissent.

Of course, Iran would not be the first country to recognize the value of normalizing relations with the Taliban. Russia did it first just a year ago in July. Questions of legitimacy aside, the Taliban control Afghanistan’s territory and state institutions. That reality carries strategic weight. Governing a country at the intersection of South and Central Asia—while relations with Pakistan remain strained—gives the Taliban leverage and opens the door to new regional partnerships.

Based on the recent clashes between Pakistan and the Taliban, we can assume that their longstanding relationship has come to a bitter end. After tensions peaked, including clashes and border shutdowns, the Taliban government has pivoted toward deeper engagement with Iran, especially on trade and economic cooperation. Iran has signed cooperation agreements with the Taliban on commerce, offered mediation in Afghanistan–Pakistan disputes, and hosted diplomatic contacts that signal cooperation beyond mere neighbor-to-neighbor relations. Tehran has also engaged in multilateral discussions on regional security involving the Taliban.

Public opinion inside Afghanistan increasingly favors closer economic engagement with Iran over reliance on Pakistan, particularly as tensions with Islamabad persist. Expanded trade and transit links could offer practical benefits for both sides. But deeper political alignment carries heavier implications.

Iran’s recent crackdown on protesters remains fresh in public memory, just as the Taliban’s record during their insurgency continues to shape how they are viewed internationally. Both governments face longstanding allegations of serious human rights abuses, including violence against civilians and systematic restrictions on women. Any formal alignment between them will inevitably be judged against that record.

The United States is continuing to build up its military presence around Iran while simultaneously pressing the regime to make a deal. Tehran has publicly downplayed the prospect of military escalation, but the possibility of imminent strikes hangs over the heads of the regime, and the Taliban have taken notice. Their chief spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said this week that the group would be prepared to “cooperate and show sympathy” with Iran in the event of a U.S. attack—an unusual statement that signals more than routine diplomatic courtesy.

Whether that rhetoric translates into formal recognition or deeper strategic coordination remains to be seen. What is clear is that two internationally isolated governments are drawing closer at a moment of shared pressure. Iran is seeking partners as its regional network comes under strain. The Taliban, governing a landlocked state with limited recognition, are looking for economic access and political legitimacy.

An official alignment would anchor cooperation across trade routes, border security, and potentially intelligence coordination. It would also bind together two regimes widely criticized for systematic repression, particularly against women and political opponents.

The consequences of such a partnership are difficult to predict. But if Tehran moves forward with recognition, it will not read as confidence. It will look like consolidation under duress: two sanctioned governments scrambling to tighten ranks as uncertainty grows around them. In that sense, the emerging alignment suggests that the fear these regimes have long inflicted on their own people is now driving their own decisions.

Hezbollah is confronting a deep strategic dilemma. For decades, its cohesion has been anchored in obedience to Tehran and to the broader ideological framework set by the Islamic Republic. But as Iran itself faces mounting geopolitical pressure and setbacks, that source of authority is being strained. The question for Hezbollah now isn’t just how many fighters it can field, but how a movement built on emulation of and loyalty to the Iranian regime adjusts when the patron it has long looked to as its model is grappling with internal and external challenges. The narratives that bind the two are under intense stress.

For decades, Hezbollah’s power rested on a tightly integrated model. Its doctrine provided the why (obedience and religious legitimacy), its weapons provided the how (deterrence and coercive leverage), and politics provided the cover (institutional influence in Lebanon). The arrangement held because it appeared internally consistent: loyalty to Tehran was cast as a source of strength rather than as evidence of its role as a strategic pawn in Tehran’s regional ambitions.

Coherence weakens when the center of gravity becomes unstable. As Iran becomes more directly exposed, Hezbollah’s operating model faces strain. The group is caught between preserving its alignment with Tehran and protecting its own position in Lebanon. This tension is not primarily about resources or battlefield capacity; it is rooted in doctrine—the framework that governs its strategic choices.

Several dynamics explain why Hezbollah now finds itself under structural strain:

1. The doctrine that once unified the movement now limits its flexibility.

Hezbollah’s ideological foundation is Wilayat al-Faqih—the guardianship of the Islamic jurist—operationalized as organizational obedience to Iran’s Supreme Leader. Academic analyses of Hezbollah’s conceptual framework describe this doctrine as a source of legitimacy and internal cohesion because it establishes a non-negotiable hierarchy of authority.

That hierarchy strengthens discipline, but it also constrains adaptation. A movement built on clerical authority cannot pivot as freely as one grounded in electoral accountability or national sovereignty.

Even if Hezbollah were disarmed tomorrow, the structural issue would remain. The doctrine asks Lebanese constituencies to accept a transnational chain of authority as superior to Lebanese political institutions. In a pluralistic society, the relocation of ultimate legitimacy outside the state is inherently destabilizing.

2. If Iran is directly attacked, Hezbollah faces a no-win scenario.

The doctrine creates a decision tree with limited exits.

Hezbollah’s leadership has publicly warned that if Iran is attacked, it would “ignite the region” and has stated the group is “not neutral.” Iranian officials have likewise signaled that an attack on the Supreme Leader would trigger escalation framed in religious terms.

If Hezbollah does not intervene in such a scenario, it undermines the obedience framework it has promoted for decades. A movement built on loyalty to a clerical center cannot remain passive if that center is threatened without damaging its core identity.

If Hezbollah does intervene, it reinforces the argument that it functions as an extension of Iranian power rather than as a Lebanese political actor with external alliances. Intervention would risk severe retaliation and further domestic isolation at a moment when its internal legitimacy is already contested.

Inaction weakens its identity. Action increases the risk of strategic overextension. The doctrine narrows the organization’s survivability options.

3. The Iranian model is harder to market in its current state.

Hezbollah has long presented itself as the Lebanese extension of a successful revolutionary model. Foundational texts frame Iran as the vanguard state that established authentic Islamic governance. That narrative carries weight when the center appears stable and ascendant, but becomes harder to sustain when the center appears pressured, reactive, or strategically exposed.

This creates a messaging dilemma. Downgrading the Iranian model weakens Hezbollah’s ideological coherence. Doubling down ties its legitimacy to a center whose durability is increasingly questioned.

In other words, Hezbollah can’t credibly tell its people, “our project is to replicate the model,” while simultaneously asking them to ignore the evidence that the model itself is under siege. The result is a familiar authoritarian reflex: they stop trying to persuade people and start demanding compliance. When the story loses its power, surveillance and coercion fill the gap.

4. Organizational restructuring suggests consolidation, not expansion.

Recent restructuring within Hezbollah has centralized administrative authority and elevated political and parliamentary figures into more prominent executive roles. The shift emphasizes managerial governance over symbolic revolutionary posture.

You can read this two ways, but both are bleak:

• Scarcity management: Administrative consolidation is consistent with managing constraints—rationing resources, protecting patronage networks, and limiting fallout potential.

• Contingency planning: If Iran’s ability to project power becomes more conditional, Hezbollah requires a Lebanese political infrastructure capable of absorbing pressure without publicly severing ideological ties.

In either case, the posture is defensive. It reflects perimeter management rather than strategic expansion.

5. Overseas safe havens are becoming less reliable.

Venezuela has not just been a source of funding for Hezbollah. It has also provided a relatively permissive environment where financial networks and logistical arrangements could operate with limited interference. Recent political upheaval there has increased scrutiny of those networks and drawn greater international attention to associated financial activity.

When countries that once offered this kind of operating space become unstable or less permissive, Hezbollah’s room to maneuver shrinks. Activities that could be managed remotely are pushed back to Lebanon, where oversight is tighter, and the political and security risks are higher.

6. The core problem is the ideology, not Hezbollah’s military strength.

Hezbollah’s danger is not only that it is armed or that it is widely designated as a terrorist organization. The greater danger is its doctrinal architecture: a framework that legitimizes external guardianship over national politics and sacralizes a chain of command that cannot be voted out.

This is why Hezbollah’s crisis is eerie. The model upon which it was built is now increasingly looking like the Achilles heel of the once almighty militia. If the obedience center in Tehran is to be militarily targeted in the foreseeable future, Hezbollah’s doctrine will ultimately become its death trap. And the theological rupture it will suffer may be fatal.

A young Iranian woman dances to Around the World by Daft Punk, wrapped in the Lion and Sun flag. (It symbolizes Persian heritage, sovereignty, and strength, and is now primarily used as a symbol of opposition to the current Iranian regime.) She looks straight into the camera, confident and unapologetic. The text in the video reads: “When the username @love_muhammad calls me a Zionist and puppet of Israel because I stand against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

But what does opposing the Islamic Republic have to do with Israel?

The answer might seem complicated, but in reality, it follows a pattern repeated throughout history. When hatred is built on conspiracy theories, the list of enemies never stops growing. First, Jews are targeted. Then those accused of cooperating with them. Eventually, even unrelated groups are swept into the same accusation. Today, many Iranians are caught inside that expanding circle.

Across history, anti-Jewish hostility has rarely stopped at the Jews. People seen as protecting Jews, trading with them, or simply refusing to hate them often find themselves targeted. As historians like David Nirenberg have shown, “the Jew” operated not only as a real, marginalized community but also as a symbolic construct used to represent perceived social decay, moral threat, or political instability. Once this conceptual enemy was established, suspicion and exclusion could easily extend to others.

In medieval Europe, Jewish communities often lived under royal protection because rulers valued their economic roles. But when crises struck—plagues, economic strain, wars—anger that should have been directed at authorities instead fell on the Jewish people. And suspicion did not always stop there. Officials or neighbors accused of protecting Jews or benefiting from cooperation with them could also become targets. Later, accusations of being too close to Jews, or of “Judaizing,” became powerful political weapons. Entire groups were condemned not because they were Jewish, but because they were portrayed as corrupted by Jewish influence or sympathetic to Jewish interests.

Modern political antisemitism expanded this pattern even further. Jews were blamed simultaneously for capitalism, socialism, liberalism, and global finance—contradictory accusations united by conspiracy underpinnings. Anyone seen as cooperating with Jews or defending their rights could be portrayed as complicit. Antisemitism, in other words, is flexible.

Growing up in Iran, this pattern was evident long before I was old enough to understand it. Teachers and officials regularly spread hostility toward Bahá’ís. (Bahá’ís advocate for gender equality, the elimination of prejudice, and world peace.) A teacher once used an entire math class not for algebra but to explain that the Bahá’í World Center is located in Israel. Later, on the football field, classmates would shout, “Pass the ball, Jew!” at me.

As a child, this made no sense to me. Why would the location of a temple turn someone into a Jew? Why should that justify hostility? Later, I would come to understand that we were treated as guilty simply because of where we came from or who we knew. That alone was enough to make us targets.

In Germany, scholars use the term Israelbezogener Antisemitismus—Israel-related antisemitism—to describe how hostility toward Jews often appears today through hostility toward Israel. Israel becomes a symbolic stand-in, and anyone associated with it becomes suspicious.

This same pattern now ensnares Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic. The regime positions itself as the leader of “resistance” to “white colonialism.” Under that frame, opposition becomes collaboration, and critics are cast as serving Israel. Once accused, everything else is dismissed.

More than 36,000 Iranians were killed in recent protest crackdowns. Videos circulated endlessly of black plastic bags carrying the dead, drowned out by the cries of grieving families. Many were forced to pay for the bullets that killed their children. Some injured protesters were shot again in hospitals, while others stayed home for days, too afraid to seek treatment. Some still live with shotgun pellets in their bodies because removing them safely was never an option. And yet, the world remains eerily quiet. No flotillas. No campus occupations. No city centers brought to a halt. Once protesters are labeled as agents of Israel, public empathy vanishes.

Solidarity today often comes with conditions. Influencers who built their platforms around anti-Zionist narratives quickly faced backlash when they criticized the Iranian regime. Some were labeled “Zionists” simply for expressing support for Iranian protesters. The message was unmistakable—challenging certain regimes aligns with the narrative; challenging others crosses a line.

What often passes for activism follows trends rather than principles. Supporting fashionable causes elevates social standing, and defending inconvenient victims risks it. For Iranians, this contradiction has become painfully obvious. The ideology that some activists defend elsewhere is the same ideology currently crushing Iranian society.

It’s even more surreal when narratives that echo regime talking points are repeated abroad by influential figures. When prominent figures like Huda Kattan or Roger Waters amplify positions that align with the regime’s framing while tens of thousands of Iranians face repression, imprisonment, and death, many Iranians feel erased from the conversation. Geopolitical narratives eclipse the suffering inside Iran, rendering the victims inconvenient to the story being told.

The Islamic Republic knows how to weaponize this framing. Shortly after recent protest crackdowns, Mehr News Agency declared that rioters and protesters were “agents of the Zionist regime” who must be punished without leniency. The logic that follows is brutally straightforward: protests are framed as foreign plots, plots become acts of treason, and treason becomes a justification for violence. A young Iranian rapper summarized it perfectly days before the massacre: “You protest, they label you Israeli and have you killed.”

Something else has also happened. The regime’s obsession with enemies has unintentionally united many Iranians. People with different beliefs and backgrounds are starting to recognize the pattern. They’re witnessing in real time how propaganda divides societies. Iranians who once received widespread support during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement are now confronting a painful truth: parts of the progressive world have unknowingly adopted elements of the regime’s narrative.

History shows that antisemitism rarely remains confined to its first targets. Jews are attacked first. Then come those accused of cooperating with them. Over time, entirely new groups are absorbed into the same conspiracy. Today, Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic are increasingly cast in that role—labeled agents, puppets, or Zionists, not because of real ties, but because conspiracy thinking demands a constant supply of enemies.

The young woman dancing with the Lion and Sun flag was not thinking about geopolitics. She was asserting dignity, identity, and the right to an ordinary life. Yet even that is turned into something political within an environment shaped by conspiracy. The tragedy is that once propaganda takes hold, innocent Iranians fade from view, left defenseless against a regime that kills them for peaceful protest.

Propaganda works like blinders on a horse—you see only one path and nothing else. History has shown, time and again, that hatred rarely stays where it starts. It spreads—crossing borders, turning inward, and consuming those who once felt distant from its reach. Today, many Iranians are living through exactly that.

Syria’s tragedy was not born of its inter-communal diversity. What proved catastrophic—during the civil strife and the long, corrupt authoritarian rule that paved the way to it—was the moment this diversity was weaponized and wielded as an instrument of domination, mobilization, and mutual annihilation. Once communal identities and belief systems became instruments of power, violence acquired a moral vocabulary, and restraint was recast as betrayal.

Over the past fifteen years, Syria has demonstrated how easily communal identities can be activated by malevolent actors, whether from within the country or beyond its borders. Sectarian rhetoric lowered the cost of killing, justified collective punishment, and invited foreign actors to insert themselves as protectors, patrons, or avengers. The result was not the defense of community or faith, but the erosion of trust, sovereignty, and social cohesion—costs borne disproportionately by ordinary Syrians and passed on to future generations.

The challenge Syria currently faces is not how to erase communal differences, but how to prevent them from being continually mobilized against the country and its people. This is especially difficult in an environment where all communities—regardless of size or political position—can point to genuine experiences of victimhood, and where clinging to communal identity has become one of the only options to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.

Communal identity in Syria isn’t necessarily destructive. For long stretches of the country’s modern history, religious and sectarian belonging functioned primarily as markers of social continuity, cultural inheritance, and local solidarity. What changed was the way it was activated, framed, and instrumentalized during the rule of the Assad dynasty—from father to son—both by the regime and by segments of its Islamist opposition, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its affiliates. Over time, communal affiliation was deliberately distorted from a lived social reality into a political resource, invoked to secure loyalty, suppress dissent, and legitimize violence.

As state authority eroded and violence became commonplace, this manifestation closed off alternatives for ordinary Syrians. In the absence of reliable institutions, impartial justice, or credible protection, individuals and families sought safety where it still seemed available—within their immediate communal networks. What began as a defensive cemented into a defensive consensus. Having cross-communal ties or claiming neutrality became dangerous. Many Syrians did not align along sectarian lines out of conviction, but out of necessity.

This dynamic helps explain the near absence of inter-communal sympathy during much of the conflict. Many refused to acknowledge even the evidence of their own eyes when members of their community were implicated as perpetrators. Facts were reinterpreted, justifications manufactured, and responsibility deflected through whataboutism. Some went further, using both traditional and social media to mock victims or incite further harm. In this regard, there is ample guilt to go around—and little innocence to claim.

Recognizing this reality does not mean accepting it as permanent, nor does it require moral amnesia or the abandonment of pursuing future accountability. It means recognizing that a society recovering from long, violent internal conflict can’t start by judging who was right or wrong, or by comparing whose suffering was worse, until it first dismantles the systems that allowed the violence to happen in the first place. Where fear, collective guilt, and communal defensiveness still dominate, attempts at moral arbitration are more likely to reproduce division than to heal it. Before a society can reconcile, it must first show restraint—and before passing judgment, it must agree that differences should never again be used as a justification for violence.

Political arrangements alone will not achieve this. Religious language—invoked by state and non-state actors alike—provided justifications, absolutions, and red lines that politics alone could not supply. This is why representatives of religious authority have a role to play in dismantling what was built in their name.

This is not a call for clerical rule, nor an appeal to install religion over the state, but a recognition of social reality. In a society where religious affiliation continues to shape moral intuitions and communal boundaries, silence from those regarded as moral authorities leaves a vacuum easily filled by extremists and opportunists. When violence has been sanctified, its repudiation must also be articulated in a moral register that communities recognize as legitimate.

At the same time, this role must have clear limits. Religious leaders aren’t being asked to settle theological debates, assign blame for the past, or get involved in politics. What’s needed is something simpler but essential: a shared statement that doctrinal differences must never again be used to justify violence.

The proposal is straightforward. Religious leaders from Syria’s various communities, speaking for themselves, would issue a short joint statement committing to three key principles: leaving doctrinal judgment to God and the Day of Judgment; rejecting all forms of inter-communal violence and formally revoking any religious rulings that support it; and affirming equal citizenship, legal protection, and the right of every community to worship, teach, and manage its internal affairs freely and without fear. The aim isn’t to erase disagreement, but to promote peaceful coexistence.

Such a declaration would not heal Syria overnight, erase past wrongdoing, or absolve responsibility. Its purpose is more modest—and more urgent.It would make violence in the name of religion morally unacceptable, close the ethical loopholes that have allowed identity to be weaponized, and strip future extremists of the religious language they rely on to justify fear and bloodshed.

For this to work, the declaration must be deliberately narrow and resist becoming a forum for historical reckoning or collective confession. Syria’s wounds are too deep, and trust too tenuous, for any document at this stage to bear the weight of assigning blame or litigating the past. Its purpose would be solely to prevent renewed violence before settling accounts.

Within the moral language familiar to many Syrians, the preservation of life ranks highest. The Qur’anic—and earlier Talmudic—principle that saving a single life is akin to saving all of humanity establishes a clear ethical ceiling no doctrine can override. Any religious ruling that justifies violence between communities should be seen as a betrayal of faith.

The same logic applies to diversity itself. Human difference is not presented as a failure to be corrected, but as part of divine wisdom: “O mankind, We have created you from a male and a female and made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” (The Quran 49:13).

From this perspective, internal strife in the name of faith is a transgression against divine authority. It substitutes human certainty for divine judgment. Deferring judgment to God while committing to protect life and coexistence honors both the limits of human authority and the priority of mercy over domination.

Recent efforts, such as the Marrakesh Declaration (a landmark, scholar-led declaration issued in Morocco by over 250 Muslim leaders, scholars, and officials, advocating for the protection of religious minorities in Muslim-majority nations), have shown that religious authorities can draw meaningful moral boundaries against violence. But Syria’s experience exposes the limits of approaches that address pluralism outwardly (non-Muslim communities) while leaving intra-communal violence unresolved. A Syrian initiative, shaped by Syrian realities and voiced by those directly concerned, would not replace such efforts, but extend their logic to the fault lines that proved most lethal.

Syria’s problem isn’t that there’s too much diversity—it’s that there have been repeated failures to set limits on how identity and difference are used. When identity becomes a constant tool for political or social mobilization, violence is never far behind. Ending this cycle doesn’t require religious agreement or forgetting the past. It requires restraint—clearly defined, publicly affirmed, and grounded in shared moral principles.

This isn’t a call to forget the past or to give up on justice. It’s a call to focus on the right steps, in the right order: protect life before settling scores, practice restraint before seeking reconciliation, and show humility before making judgments. In a country worn down by the cost of moral certainty, choosing to leave ultimate judgment to God may be the most responsible way to begin living together again—and to spare future generations from repeating inherited conflict.

Nouri al-Maliki already had his chance. He governed Iraq from 2006 to 2014, when the country desperately needed reconciliation, institutional rebuilding, and national leadership. What he delivered instead was sectarian consolidation, institutional decay, and a slow but unmistakable slide toward state failure.

Rather than govern as a leader tasked with rebuilding a country after years of conflict, he governed like someone who believed the state belonged to him.

I lived in Iraq during the most formative and violent years of Maliki’s rule, from 2006 to 2009. I watched his model of governance play out in real life. Neighborhoods grew fearful and divided. Public institutions became empty shells, loyal to sectarian interests rather than the people. Slowly, Iraqis came to understand that the promise of a shared future was being stolen from them.

From the beginning, Maliki ruled through a sectarian lens. His party, Da‘wa, believed Shi‘a dominance in politics was not only justified but long overdue. In this view, Iraq was not a shared national project after dictatorship, but a prize finally taken. That mindset defined his two terms and explains much of the damage that followed.

Emma Sky, who worked closely with Iraqi and U.S. leadership throughout this period, offered one of the clearest insider assessments of Maliki’s rule. She wrote that the United States “took the risky gamble of betting on Nouri al-Maliki,” believing he would use the post-surge decline in violence to build a sovereign and democratic Iraq. Instead, Maliki used that moment to centralize authority, bypass parliament, weaken independent institutions, and place the security forces under his personal control.

The consequences were profound. Maliki’s Iraq became increasingly polarized, not only between Sunni and Shi‘a, but within the Shi‘a community itself. Many Shi‘a Iraqis who suffered under Saddam saw fear and exclusion return in a new form. Under Maliki, loyalty mattered more than competence, institutions mattered less than proximity to power, and politics was consumed by identity struggles.

Patrick Cockburn documented how, after the 2010 elections, Maliki deliberately abandoned reconciliation efforts. Peaceful Sunni protests that began in 2012 were met with repression, mass arrests, and lethal force. The Hawija massacre was the logical outcome of a system that treated dissent as treason. Cockburn was explicit that Maliki “played a central role in pushing the Sunni community into the arms of ISIS,” contributing to the violent escalation of political grievances.

This is where the claim that Maliki offered stability falls apart. His “experience” should render him wholly unqualified to hold office in Iraq ever again.

ISIS emerged in Maliki’s Iraq, during Maliki’s second term, within a political environment he shaped. His defenders often portray ISIS as an external invader or an unavoidable regional spillover, but the historical record suggests otherwise. Extremism flourished because the Iraqi state lost legitimacy.

The most damning verdict on Maliki’s rule came in June 2014, when the Iraqi army was defeated by ISIS in Mosul. Cockburn describes a force of hundreds of thousands that “melted away without significant resistance,” abandoning cities, weapons, and uniforms almost overnight.

The blame doesn’t lie with the Iraqi soldiers, but in the breakdown of a government weakened by corruption, political interference, and sectarian loyalty imposed from above.

Maliki’s response made things worse. Instead of rebuilding national institutions or pursuing reconciliation, he leaned further into militia politics. The government increasingly relied on Shi‘a militias—many closely tied to Iran—to defend Baghdad. Sectarian death squads returned, and bodies started appearing overnight. Iraq found itself slipping back toward the chaos we had barely survived years earlier.

All of this is the direct legacy of Maliki’s years in power.

So when Maliki is presented today as an experienced statesman or a stabilizing figure, the question must be asked plainly: experienced at what, and stabilizing for whom? Iraq already tested his model of governance. The result was a country torn apart, its institutions drained of strength, and the rise of the most dangerous extremist movement in modern Iraqi history.

Can the United States prevent Maliki’s return? Not entirely. Washington retains influence, but Iraqi politics ultimately belong to Iraqis. What has changed is the tone of the discussion. American preferences are now stated more openly, while Iran continues to intervene with little subtlety, backing figures aligned with its agenda through political and militia networks.

In today’s climate of U.S.–Iran confrontation, Iraq has a choice to make. Bringing back Maliki would not signal balance or sovereignty, and would risk alienating key Western partners and further entrenching Iraq’s dependence on militias and external patrons.

Iraq’s survival after 2014 depended not only on battlefield support but on sustained international political and economic engagement. That engagement was premised on the expectation that Iraq would move beyond sectarian capture of the state, not return to the man most associated with it.

Iraq does not need to relive the years that brought it to the brink, and it doesn’t need a leader whose record is defined by empty barracks, shattered trust, and cities that fell without a fight.

The consequences of ignoring these lessons would be immediate, destabilizing, and costly. History has already delivered its verdict: Maliki is unfit to hold office.

Financial tyranny rarely announces itself with tanks or decrees. It arrives through laws, committees, and press conferences, speaking the language of necessity and stability. In Lebanon today, it has identifiable political leadership. President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam stand at the center of a project that recasts state failure as a burden imposed on citizens.

The Financial Gap Law represents a decisive break with liberal governance.

The recently approved draft legislation is purportedly designed to resolve the country's deep banking crisis by distributing massive losses (around $80 billion) between the state, central bank, banks, and depositors, aiming to return frozen funds through structured repayment plans, bond conversions, asset-backed securities, and audits.

In practice, it declares that private property exists conditionally and assigns state-created losses to citizens who lack power, access, or decision-making authority, securing compliance by exploiting economic vulnerability.

The purpose of an accountable, just government is to protect citizens’ rights and property. When it violates them, it becomes tyrannical. The seizure of private property without consent erodes legitimate authority and undermines the rule of law. Lebanon’s current leadership has embraced that outcome.

The president and the prime minister preside over a state that exhausted public funds through decades of mismanagement. They inherited a failing system and chose to preserve it rather than hold anyone accountable.

This approach is blatant financial authoritarianism.

The law targets deposits of $100,000 or more. That threshold carries no economic logic and is purely political, dividing society into those whose losses matter and those whose losses can be swept under the rug. People who worked abroad for decades now face the depletion of their life savings with executive approval.

Nurses, doctors, engineers, contractors, entrepreneurs, and workers sent money home believing the law protected ownership. The government now legitimizes a framework that strips them of that protection retroactively and treats their savings as expendable.

Financial tyranny always begins with retroactivity. Rules change after trust has been extended, and authorities rewrite the terms once they secure power.

The law also erases distinctions essential to any market-driven economy. It treats current business accounts and high-interest savings accounts as identical. Businesses have used current accounts to operate—to pay wages, rent, and suppliers. These accounts earned nothing and carried no speculative upside.

Savings accounts that earned extreme interest reflected different incentives and carried different risks. But the law ignores this entirely and imposes losses indiscriminately. That choice reflects corrupt politics rather than liberal governance.

Under classical liberal economic theory, the government exists to enforce contracts and protect property. The Lebanese executive endorses a law that does the opposite. It nullifies contracts and reallocates property by decree, converting executive power into an instrument of what essentially amounts to state-sanctioned burglary.

This law affects more than personal finances and weakens the separation between political power and economic activity, signaling that businesses, depositors, and citizens are to bear the cost while the political class remains untouched.

The president and the prime minister present themselves as managers of an unavoidable crisis, but that claim does not withstand scrutiny. Both are responsible: they approved financially illiterate policies, defended the system, and delayed reform until sweeping economic failure became unavoidable.

Financial repression has never stabilized an economy, as history has repeatedly demonstrated. It drives capital out, pushes activity into informal markets, erodes trust, and leads governments to rely on greater coercion. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle of failure and government overreach.

The private sector is already under heavy strain from informal capital controls, currency instability, and regulatory paralysis. The Financial Gap Law adds another layer to these constraints.

This move should be firmly rejected. Political authority exists to protect liberty and property, not to override them. When governments reverse that relationship, dark times lie ahead. Lebanon, once described as the “Switzerland of the East,” now risks a far more unstable trajectory.

The law also sets a precedent and signals how future crises will be handled. That expectation undermines any prospect of Lebanon’s economic recovery. Capital does not return where ownership is uncertain, entrepreneurs do not invest where rules are rewritten, and growth does not occur under sustained financial pressure.

Lebanon once claimed a liberal economic identity defined by openness, entrepreneurship, and a robust banking sector. The current government is abandoning that legacy. Financial authoritarianism does not require ideology—only opportunity. The current ruling class has that opportunity and is seizing it through lawfare.

The Financial Gap Law warrants rejection because it formalizes coercion and consolidates unaccountable power. It shifts the burden of state failure onto citizens while shielding those responsible.

Tyranny often hides behind procedure, but it becomes harder to defend once clearly identified. Lebanon’s crisis has many causes—and its financial authoritarianism now has identifiable authors.