When US and Israeli jets went over Tehran on February 28, it was not another round of shadow warfare. It was a daytime assault on the core of the Iranian state, designed around the working day on Pasteur Street so that the leadership would be at their desks when the missiles hit. Within hours, reports from Tehran, Washington, and Jerusalem converged on one blunt fact: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was dead, killed in the first wave of strikes on his office compound. Iranian state media later confirmed what Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump had already said in their statements and social media posts.
For those familiar with the Middle East, this moment did not come out of the blue. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has built its foreign and security policy around two linked goals: survival of the revolutionary regime at home and expansion of its influence abroad. On the other side, Israel has spent decades trying to prevent an ideologically anti-Israel regime from ever reaching nuclear capacity, while preserving its own military superiority over any regional rival. Washington’s approach has shifted across administrations, but the basic priorities have remained stable: maintain a regional order friendly to US interests, protect Israel and key Arab partners, secure sea lanes and energy routes, and prevent nuclear proliferation. From Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal to Trump’s 2018 withdrawal and “maximum pressure” campaign, to Biden’s stalled attempt to revive diplomacy amid the Gaza and Red Sea crises, US policy has shifted in tactics but consistently sought to contain Iran and protect its Gulf assets while avoiding a full-scale regional war.
The new joint offensive changes the scale and ambition. According to detailed accounts from Washington-based analysts and journalists, the operation—dubbed “Epic Fury” by the US and “Roaring Lion” by Israel—was months in the making. It was not just about punishing Iran for its regional activities or slowing its nuclear and missile programmes, but has been openly described by Trump as a “regime change” operation. US and Israeli leaders have addressed the Iranian public directly, urging them to “take back” their country once the bombing eases.
Washington and Tel Aviv have three overlapping goals in this war. First, they want to remove what they see as an intolerable security threat by crippling Iran’s near-nuclear capacity and restoring deterrence. Second, they aim to break the backbone of Iran’s regional network by degrading the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its missile and drone industries, and the wider “axis of resistance” that stretches from Lebanon to Yemen. Third, both leaderships are using the confrontation to shore up their domestic standing, projecting strength to answer internal critics and the trauma of recent wars. In that sense, the campaign targets Iran’s capabilities abroad, its regime resilience at home, and the political vulnerabilities of US and Israeli leaders at the same time, raising the question of whether these goals are strategically coherent or if they simply deepen a long conflict with no clear exit.
Tehran, in turn, is fighting for its life. The Islamic Republic has always presented itself as the anti-imperialist alternative in the region: a state that stands up to Israel, resists US domination, and champions “the oppressed.” It is an ideological project sitting on top of a very real power structure: the Supreme Leader’s office, the IRGC and its economic empire, the security services, and a network of loyalist clerics and bureaucrats. Khamenei’s killing does not automatically erase that structure. Instead, it forces it into emergency mode.
Within hours of the Tehran strikes, Iran launched waves of missiles and drones at Israel as well as US bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. Gulf cities like Doha saw their skies lit up as air defences intercepted incoming projectiles. Iranian officials have since declared all US and Israeli assets in the region as legitimate targets and warned that there are now “no red lines” in their response. In other words, the regime is signalling that if its survival is on the line, it will treat the entire US security architecture in the Middle East as fair game.
The Iranian regime wants to preserve deterrence. Iran’s missile and drone arsenal is the main tool that allows it to threaten Israeli cities, Gulf infrastructure, and shipping lanes without having a modern air force. If that capability is destroyed or heavily degraded, the regime loses both leverage and prestige.
It may be recalled that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding leader, died in 1989 and handed power to Khamenei through a controlled succession. This time, the Supreme Leader has been killed by foreign missiles in his own compound. For many Iranians, including those who protested against his rule, this will feel like the end of an era. For the system, it is a security nightmare with at least two consequences. One is that space for any internal reform will almost certainly shrink—a leadership that has just survived a decapitation attempt is not going to suddenly relax repression or open up genuine political competition. More arrests and more securitisation of everyday life should be expected, all justified in the name of national defence. The second is that the nuclear file may move in a darker direction. Before these strikes, there were still debates within Iran’s elite about the costs and benefits of openly pursuing a bomb. Now, after seeing the limits of deterrence without nuclear weapons, the argument for crossing the nuclear threshold as an “insurance policy” will gain strength in some circles. A campaign launched to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran may end up making that outcome more likely.
Shift one’s gaze from Tehran, Washington, and Tel Aviv to the Gulf capitals, the mood is less triumphant and much grimmer. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman spent months urging the US not to go down this path because they knew they will be on the front row when Iran retaliates. This is why we see the same dual message from Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha: criticism of Iranian strikes and expressions of solidarity with the victims, combined with urgent calls for a ceasefire and diplomacy, and clear signals that they do not want their territory to be used for an open-ended campaign of regime change. There have been contradictory reports of prior lobbying for an attack on Iran. But the bigger question is, where does it leave the region now?
One scenario is a short, brutal war that ends with a shaky ceasefire, leaving a militarised Iran still in place, more tied to Moscow and Beijing, and less willing to talk to Washington. A second is a drawn-out regional war in which Iran’s allies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen are fully activated, turning the conflict into a long, uncontrollable bleed across the Middle East. The third is internal fracture in Iran, with protests and elite splits leading to a messy transition, fragmented power centres, and dangerous uncertainty over who controls nuclear and missile assets.
Across all three, the core risk is miscalculation: Washington and Tel Aviv believe they can “solve” the Iran problem. Tehran believes it can still absorb the blows and spread the pain across the region. History suggests that none of them is as in control as they think.
Asif Bin Ali is an Atlanta-based geopolitical analyst and a doctoral fellow at Georgia State University. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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