On February 28, after three inconclusive rounds of nuclear talks in Geneva, coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes targeted senior figures of the Islamic Republic’s political and security leadership as well as key command-and-control infrastructure. In the days prior, Donald Trump had publicly invoked January’s mass killings and the regime’s repression of protesters, framing military action as both a strategic necessity and a historic opportunity.
Within hours, state media confirmed what had seemed unthinkable weeks earlier: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader since 1989, was dead. Several high-ranking officials within the security establishment were reportedly killed alongside him. Iranian retaliation followed, including strikes on U.S.-aligned regional states hosting American military facilities. The war, already widening, has become unmistakably regional. No one—not Washington, not Tehran—can predict how it will unfold.
Within the first few days, Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and J.D. Vance each offered a different war objective—nuclear disarmament, regime change, preemption, and liberation—with no authoritative account of which, if any, would be prioritized. There is good reason to doubt whether the twice-impeached U.S. president who unleashed ICE on Minnesota and the Israeli prime minister living under an ICC arrest warrant are allies of Iranian civil society.
Trump has even lamented that early strikes killed Iranians that his administration had earmarked as potential successors, with a candor that reveals his logic more plainly than any official statement. The historical record suggests that for Washington, the operative question has not been what kind of ruler governs a nation-state, but whether they are compliant with, or in defiance of, the American security imagination.
For many Iranians, however, the news produced a conflicted reaction: relief, even joy, that a man long associated with massacre and repression was gone, mixed with fear that war from above would bring devastation of its own, and uncertainty about what would follow.
The crisis surrounding the U.S.–Israeli bombardment threatens to eclipse the crisis that preceded it this winter, when Iran was rocked by massive protests and government repression. This latest cycle exposed both the fragility of the Iranian governing elite and the organizational weakness of Iranian civil society, dynamics that will continue to shape the country’s future.
