The Iranian moment: A leap into the unknown | US-Israel war on Iran

Since the 1920s, Iran has lived through two defining political moments that have reflected two distinct civilisational identities. They have shaped not only the country’s internal character but also its relationship with the wider world.

Today, with the Islamic republic under unprecedented strain, a third Iranian moment may be approaching.

Modernity on the shah’s terms

The first Iranian moment was the reign of the Pahlavi monarchy, which began in 1925 with Reza Khan Pahlavi, an army officer, being instated to the throne and ended in 1979 with the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution. It was built around a particular vision of Iran: secular, modernising, and firmly anchored in the dominion of the Western-led camp during the Cold War.

Tehran recognised Israel after it was created in 1948, supplied oil to Western markets, and served as Washington’s chosen guardian of the Gulf. The shah projected power across a region fraught with ethnic and sectarian rivalries, leading a country that posed a challenge to its Arab neighbours, but also served as a model of state-driven development.

Central to the Pahlavi project was a deliberate attempt to anchor the monarchy’s legitimacy not in Islam, but in the Persian imperial past. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi consciously linked his rule to the ancient Achaemenid Empire — the dynasty of Cyrus and Darius that forged the first great Persian civilisation in the fifth century BC.

The grandiose celebrations of 1971 at the ruins of the ancient capital of Persepolis, marking 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, were the most theatrical expression of this claim: a declaration that the Pahlavi throne was not a modern construction but the inheritor of an unbroken imperial tradition. In doing so, the shah sought to place himself above religion — a king of kings in a lineage older than Islam itself.

Yet beneath the surface of modernisation and imperial grandeur, the monarch was nakedly authoritarian. SAVAK, the feared secret police, was synonymous with torture and repression. When the mass protests of 1978 and 1979 erupted, every geopolitical partnership the shah had cultivated proved worthless.

No foreign ally moved a muscle to save him. A monarch that had prioritised strategic utility over popular legitimacy found himself entirely alone. The first Iranian moment ended not with a war, but with a revolution — and the lesson went unlearned by those who followed.

The Islamic republic

From the ashes of the shah’s rule emerged something genuinely novel: the Islamic Republic of Iran, founded under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. It became only the second Shia state since the Safavid Empire (1501-1736), which had itself made Twelver Shiism Iran’s defining identity.

The new republic was built on the premise that Islamic principles should govern not just religious life, but also politics, economics and even social life. The public sphere was to be controlled, morality enforced, and Iran’s cultural identity explicitly de-Westernised.

Where the Pahlavis had embraced the United States and Israel, the Islamic republic constructed its identity in explicit opposition to both. Its foreign policy became defined by resistance: support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias across Iraq and Syria — a web of proxies Tehran called the “axis of resistance”. This eventually caused the ongoing crisis in Iran’s neighbourhood.

In terms of economic governance, the regime looked eastwards, aspiring to a model not unlike China’s: authoritarian in politics, state-directed in economics, independent of Western institutions.

That independence came at an enormous price. More than 3,600 different sanctions have been imposed on the republic — a cumulative siege that devastated the lives of ordinary Iranians. The decline of the regional influence of Iran emerged following two major shocking events: the Arab Spring, which raised questions about the credibility of Iran’s claim of defending the oppressed, and the October 7 attacks, which set up Iran as a potential military target for Israel.

Three major armed conflicts scarred its existence: the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988, in which hundreds of thousands died; the 12-day war involving Israel and the United States in June 2025; and the ongoing conflict beginning on February 28.

Each war deepened the siege mentality at the core of the regime’s identity — the conviction that today’s Iran is perpetually encircled and its very survival is under threat.

Moment of precarity

One can understand, in retrospect, how the first moment ended. The Pahlavi monarchy lost its domestic legitimacy, and its foreign patrons looked away. The revolution followed. But the trajectory of the second Iranian moment is far less clear — and that opacity is itself a source of regional and global anxiety.

The Islamic republic today is neither the confident revolutionary power it was in the 1980s, nor a stable religious state capable of indefinitely managing its contradictions. Mass protests over the past two decades have raised social, economic and political questions about the nature of the social contract that the Islamic republic offers.

Simultaneously, its regional influence is declining, its nuclear programme has brought about direct military confrontation, and its economy – devastated by sanctions and endemic corruption – cannot deliver the prosperity needed to buy popular acquiescence.

There are several scenarios for what happens next. The regime could survive in its current form. A reformed Islamic republic might retain its Shia theological identity, while abandoning its most confrontational postures, though such a transition would require a political class willing to negotiate, and an opposition capable of receiving and holding onto power responsibly; neither condition is clearly present.

There is also a more turbulent scenario: fragmentation, civil conflict and a power vacuum. This cannot be ruled out in a country that encompasses Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis, held together increasingly by coercion alone.

Iran’s next chapter will not be written by foreign powers alone, or by the clerical establishment alone, or by the protest movement alone. It will emerge from the collision of all these forces — internal and external, historical and immediate.

This new Iranian moment is a leap into the unknown: for Iranians most of all, but also for the region and the world that will feel its consequences. Precarious and perplexed, Iran stands at the edge. What lies beyond remains to be seen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.