Summary
The article portrays Iran’s leadership as engaged in a religiously driven and enduring conflict against Israel and the Western alliance, combining military force with ideological and information warfare. It argues that Hamas and other proxy groups operate within a larger Iranian strategy designed to erode Western unity and legitimacy. The discussion highlights the influence of propaganda, social media operations, campus activism, and international legal campaigns in shaping public opinion against Israel and the West. It concludes that defeating this challenge requires not only military strength but also sustained political, cultural, and ideological resilience.
Key Takeaways
- The piece argues that Iran’s regime has pursued a long-term ideological and geopolitical struggle against the West through military, political, and information warfare since 1979.
- It presents the October 7 Hamas attack as part of a broader Iranian proxy strategy aimed at weakening Israel and reshaping global opinion against Western democratic alliances.
- The article contends that military responses alone are insufficient and that Western societies must also confront ideological influence campaigns, propaganda networks, and political subversion efforts.
The U.S.–Israel-led strikes on the Iranian regime, Operations Epic Fury and Rising Lion, are definitive military responses to forty-seven years of religiously fueled terror carried out by the world’s foremost radical regime of the modern era. This long and formidable challenge to the West is compounded by the free world’s hesitation to acknowledge the jihad Iran has waged against Israel and the U.S.-led Western alliance since 1979.
Israel’s counterterror war, codenamed “Roaring Lion,” captured the post-war balance plainly: the campaign damaged Iran but did not defeat it, and Tehran’s ability to absorb a combined American–Israeli offensive may reinforce its sense of efficacy. The damage is consequential. Iranian unemployment has crossed the 50% mark, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) blocks every proposed political concession. In short, Tehran and Washington are both playing for time in a war of economic and strategic attrition. The regime is banking on American public pressure on the Trump administration to lower gas prices at the pump, food prices at the supermarket, and media and social network criticism of billions in defense spending, which is increasingly attributed to Israeli pressure. This regime subversion campaign has one goal: regime survival.
The regime’s subversion aims to buy time to rearm what it sees as its Islamic resistance force. General Ali Abdollahi, meeting with Mojtaba Khamenei, articulated the doctrinal posture: “All comrades in arms and soldiers of Islam possess a high combat spirit and full readiness on both defensive and offensive fronts, and they possess the necessary strategic plans, equipment, and weapons to confront the hostile moves of the American and Zionist enemies. Any strategic misstep, aggression, or attack from them will be met with a stunning, swift, and decisive response.”
The Iranian Regime’s Religious Forever War
The Islamic Republic’s dual political and military approach is underpinned by its own apocalyptic and radical brand of Twelver Shi’ism, which is both parallel to (and adversarial to) the Sunni jihadist death cult that produced bin Laden and 9/11. Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared in 1979: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei reaffirmed Khomeini’s approach in 2014: “Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist.” Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, who also inspired Iranian Islamists, defined jihad as “an unending state of war because truth and falsehood cannot co-exist on this earth.” Islamic warfare’s concept of hudna, a tactical pause for military reconstitution within a continuous jihad, is not a ceasefire, nor does it aim at lasting peace.
October 7 as an Iranian Operation
The Hamas October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre in Southern Israel was not driven by a Palestinian territorial grievance. Rather, it was an Iranian-orchestrated proxy jihadist operation. Approximately five hundred Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters had received training in Iran under direct IRGC Quds Force supervision, and Iranian officials provided the “green light” at a Beirut meeting on October 2, 2023. Years earlier, Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Deif had requested $500 million from Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani for “destroying the State of Israel.”
Recruiting the West
Immediately after the invasion, what followed across Western university campuses, capitals, and digital platforms was the political activation of the Red-Green alliance — Marxist radicals and Islamists. Since October 7, the Red-Green pact has also embraced the “Browns”: neo-Nazis and far-right antisemites, sharing hostility to America, Israel, and the liberal democratic order.
The ideological roots run deep. Soviet “Zionology” repackaged classical antisemitic tropes as a Marxist-Leninist critique of Israeli “settler colonialism” and “racism,” appealing to Arabs and Third World states. This political, diplomatic movement has allowed Hamas and Hizbullah to be folded into Western progressive coalitions. American academia and prestige media became so captured that Hamas atrocities have even been framed in the language of liberation.
Tehran has become the engine fueling the Red-Green alliance. The IRGC’s English-language social media output — including LEGO-style animations targeting President Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk — aims to dismantle the conservative pro-Israel coalition. The Tel Aviv–based firm Cyabra identified more than 40,000 inauthentic accounts originating largely from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq; researchers determined that roughly one in four accounts posting about the war in its early days were inauthentic, the largest foreign influence operation against U.S. opinion in the digital era.
The Islamic Republic is the lynchpin but not the only player. The West’s adversaries see themselves in a constant state of war against the West, even in times of military peace. Beijing’s “Three Warfares” doctrine (public-opinion, psychological, and legal) was formalized in 2003 to defeat adversaries before physical confrontation, and Moscow’s gibridnaya voyna (its interpretation of hybrid warfare) treats anti-Western information operations as a core capability, including against Israel after October 7. Qatar, considered the modern-day hub of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been supplying long-term soft-power architecture in $6–$20 billion in disclosed and undisclosed donations to U.S. universities. Qatar’s investments align with the post-October 7 capture of campus discourse: an ISGAP–Network Contagion Research Institute–Rutgers study found that institutions that accepted Middle Eastern funding between 2015 and 2020 recorded significantly more antisemitic incidents than those that did not.
The Inversion: Israel Securitized, Jihad Legitimized
The strategic effect has been to invert the moral architecture of the conflict. Hamas, its sponsors, and its supporters have framed Israel as an existential threat while presenting jihadist violence as legitimate resistance. The metric by which to judge their impact is the “October 8th Effect”: at least 20 states have recognized “Palestine” since April 2024, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Belgium, and Portugal in September 2025. In August 2025, Hamas’ senior political bureau member Ghazi Hamad asserted that the October 7 invasion of Israel paved the way for the Western recognition of a “Palestinian state,” convincing the world that defeating Israel “is now possible.”
The international community compounds the inversion. South Africa’s December 2023 International Court of Justice case, joined by 13 UN member states, advanced a genocide narrative built on figures supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant despite the absence of jurisdiction, and the September 2025 UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry leveled genocide accusations against Israel. Younger Western publics have followed: a Harvard-Harris poll found that 51% of Americans aged 18–24 agreed Palestinian grievance justified the October 7 killings, and by March 2025, 53% of American adults held an unfavorable opinion of Israel.
Negotiation as Tactical Pause
When Tehran offers talks while its proxies fire missiles, the conduct is doctrinal: the diplomatic table signals possible compromise to adversaries, while the simultaneous violence signals to followers that the revolution endures. Pakistan’s Chief of Staff Asim Munir has shuttled between Washington and Tehran with proposals on the Strait of Hormuz and a nuclear arrangement, yet each time the political echelon signals readiness, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership, which essentially rules Iran now by military law, blocks the move, awaiting fractures in the American coalition.
The apparent absence of Iranian-directed attacks on the U.S. homeland during the war should also be considered. Counterterrorism scholar Matthew Levitt has documented Tehran’s longtime investments in what U.S. counterterrorism officials describe as a “homeland option,” with 29 Iran-linked plots tracked in the United States since 2011. The current lull reflects degraded capability — Israeli airstrikes targeted Quds Force external operations leadership, including Unit 4000 chief Rahman Moqadam — and tactical caution: a successful homeland attack would invite American military escalation. IRGC planners are preserving the option for a moment when the calculus shifts.
Implications
American and Israeli military and counterterrorism gains of the past two years are necessary but only partial. Israel and the United States have degraded Iran’s nuclear and ballistic program substantially, disrupted Hizbullah’s command, and severed Hamas’s spine. The West needs to commit the same massive resources against the jihadi subversion of its Western society, and its political, media, diplomatic, and economic communities as it does on the counterterror and military battlefield. The ultimate battle is for the hearts and minds of the free world. The West requires strategic patience, resilience, and determination to overcome jihad’s “forever war.” Judging by the American and European public hesitation to support the U.S.-led military campaign to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, there remains a lot of work to do.
