For some 46 years, until 2025, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, self-destructive, nihilistic and inevitably, one day, nuclear.
But was it really ever all that formidable?
The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and subsequently the interim secular socialists.
They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters and transforming the most secular and modern of the Middle East Muslim nations into the most medieval — one that routinely hanged homosexuals, adulterers and almost anyone who questioned the authority of the ayatollahs.
In other words, these were gruesome people, but they didn’t necessarily have a competent military.
The theocracy’s only link with monarchical Iran was that it inherited near limitless oil and natural gas reserves, sophisticated arms and the Shah’s modernized cities.
It controlled the key strategic chokepoint at the Strait of Hormuz and enjoyed a geostrategically critical location between Asia and the Middle East.
It fueled Iran’s historical chauvinism and pique that the millennia-long historical preeminence of Middle Eastern Persia was not fully appreciated by its Arab neighbors.
So there were lots of natural advantages — for the most part squandered.
Under the camouflage of Shiite puritanism and otherworldliness, the ayatollahs proved even more corrupt (and far more incompetent) than the Shah’s entourage.
They fought a destructive eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s overrated Iraqi dictatorship and showed they were mostly just as militarily incompetent.
Over decades, they killed and wounded thousands of Americans by bombing US embassies, barracks and bases in the Middle East — without directly confronting the American military.
For years, they sent lethal shaped-charge IEDs to the Shiite insurgents to slaughter and maim thousands of Americans and their allies in Iraq, and to the Taliban to do the same in Afghanistan.
At the first sign of popular unrest, the regime never hesitated to gun down thousands of unarmed protesters.
And of course they were abject hypocrites — hating the West, damning the Great Satan, yet sending their pampered children to universities in America.
The apparat proved quite earthly in its desire for money, estates, foreign travel and the good life.
Their general strategies were never hard to follow.
One, the theocrats’ prior familiarity with Americans under the Shah and in exile in Europe bred an irrational fixation with and hatred of the West that made them useful proxies for the grand designs of communist and then oligarchic Russia, and later an ascendant communist China.
Iranian realpolitik alliances with secular communists were based on the quid pro quo of granting Russia and China access to the Gulf while selling oil to China, and buying arms from both.
Two, they were endlessly chagrined that the Persian Shiites had been overshadowed by more populous Sunni Arab neighbors that supposedly lacked Iran’s historical sophistication and more legitimate claims of speaking for global Islam.
They aimed to correct that historical travesty by mobilizing clients and proxies to bully, isolate and weaken Arab autocracies, especially pro-Western ones.
Three, they believed their eventual destruction of Israel would regain their country’s lost prestige and honor, by finally accomplishing what the Sunni world had failed to do.
By arming murderous clients in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, the West Bank and Yemen, they fashioned a global network of death that terrified Western leaders and many of their Arab neighbors.
Fourth and finally, they sought to diminish the role of the United States in the Muslim world, drive it from the Middle East and wage an opportunistic war against American citizens and soldiers, via their terrorist surrogates.
By 2017, Iran was considered all-powerful in the Middle East with its missiles, soon-to-be nuclear status and client killers who would murder Westerners and Israelis year after year.
For the last seven American presidents, the very thought of challenging Iran militarily was taboo, all the more so after the American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No one, perhaps not even the Israelis, actually calibrated the true status of Iranian arms.
Despite its huge advantages in population, Iran could not defeat Iraq and was reduced to sending 10-year-olds as human pawns to clear minefields.
It never directly confronted Israel but always used surrogates to murder Jews — either abroad, as in the 1994 slaughter in Argentina, or through its “ring of fire” terrorist cliques that surrounded the borders of the Jewish state.
In sum, no one — with the exception of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — apparently realized that beneath its shell, theocratic Iran was rotten and decayed.
Its corruption and hatred of its own people ensured that not even huge revenues and sophisticated Chinese and Russian weapons could translate into a modern, lethal military.
And in summer 2025, the Israelis and Americans first proved that Iran was indeed hollow.
Its Arab partner in Syria imploded in weeks.
The supposedly goose-stepping Hezbollah shock troops were decimated.
Scary subterranean Hamas may have been deadly in surprise attacks against unarmed women, children and the aged, but they were nearly obliterated by the IDF.
The Houthis mimicked Iran’s madness as they sent drones and missiles to shut down the Red Sea, but the US and Israel finally demonstrated the ease with which their Western opponents could destroy their airfields, ports and power generation.
So here we are in 2026, watching the systematic destruction of the entire five-decade façade of a supposedly invincible Iranian military, the elimination of its theocratic leaders, and the dismantling of the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard terrorists.
The regime has no military ability to ensure its survival.
All it has is a rope-a-dope strategy that assumes a White House attuned to domestic criticism, the looming midterms, the price of gas, and pressure from allies to end the war before the global economy sinks into recession.
We are left somewhat confused.
Why did prior presidents not hold Iran accountable for its killing, thus nourishing the myth of Iranian invincibility?
Why did Israel not respond earlier to Iran itself, rather than just its terrorist clients?
And what now are the remaining theocrats thinking? What is their strategy of survival?
They intend to ride out the bombings and, at some point in extremis, expect an armistice via “negotiations.”
They plan to wait out the tenures of both Trump and Netanyahu and hope for a sympathetic president like Obama, or a non compos mentis Biden, or someone ideologically akin to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
With Trump and Netanyahu out of office, they dream of using their oil to re-arm and resume their role as Chinese and Russian proxies, eventually getting the bomb — and this time perhaps using it.
Theocratic Iran, in its fantasies, still believes that if it ever destroyed Israel, the world, especially given the recrudescence of Western antisemitism, would be appalled — for a day or two.
Then it would resume business as usual.
And with a dozen or so deterrent nuclear-tipped missiles at their backs, the Iranian ritual boilerplate of crazed pronouncements would follow.
Thus, we would go full circle back again to a “crazy” Iran, its murderous clients and its unhinged — but effective — threats.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
