Iran's Long Game

Iran has been weakened, but it remains dangerous. Facing military setbacks, leadership trauma and domestic pressure, Matthew Redhead explains why Tehran is likely to fall back on what it does best: covert action, deniable proxies and sub-threshold hostility, conducted at range and below the threshold of war.

The immediate puzzle is obvious. After US and Israeli military action in 2025 and 2026, the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameinei, the degradation of its military infrastructure, and the continuing standoff around the Strait of Hormuz, why has Tehran not sought a way out?

In Washington, D.C., policymakers are perplexed: Iran has lost. Its economy is weak, sanctions remain punishing, the Axis of Resistance (especially Hamas and Hezbollah) have been badly mauled, and the regime needs relief more than it needs confrontation. President Trump has framed Iranian defiance as irrational - the behaviour of a regime that cannot read the balance sheet of power. As he has said in various ways in recent months, “we have all the cards, they have none!”

However, what appears irrational in the West might not seem strange in Tehran. Indeed, Iran's stance is not inexplicable. It is the product of history, ideology, regime insecurity and strategic calculation. And above all, it suggests that Iran is unlikely to abandon its established approach. On the contrary, it is likely to recommit to state threats - covert, deniable, sub-threshold hostile acts - as a central pillar of its grand strategy.

A Long Memory

Iran's leaders do not see their country as a defeated client waiting to be brought to heel. They see it as an ancient, proud and independent state, with a long and well-tended memory of foreign interference. The 1953 CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh, Western support for the Shah, the indulgence of Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, decades of sanctions - these are not historical footnotes in Tehran. They are living grievances, routinely invoked, and they underpin a strategic culture that prizes resistance to outside diktat. Iran’s leaders are also ideological at root. They can be pragmatic when required, making deals with enemies when expedient, but their theocratic version of Shia Islam is intrinsically hostile to the United States, Israel, and the Sunni Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf. This is not a temporary policy position. It is part of the regime's political DNA.

Regime Trauma

These long-term dispositions are now reinforced by the acute pressures of the present. The assassination of the previous Ayatollah has been an enormous emotional and psychological shock. A regime processing that kind of trauma does not usually respond by making concessions, especially when the new leader is the son of the old. It responds by projecting strength - towards domestic opponents who might be emboldened by perceived weakness, and towards remaining external supporters and partners. Visible capitulation, in these circumstances, would not be pragmatism. It would be dangerous.

Nor is it obvious that Tehran reads its own position as bleakly as its enemies do. The regime has survived. It retains enriched uranium, missile and drone capabilities, loyal security institutions, and the ability to impose costs through regulation of the Strait of Hormuz. Its leadership may also read President Trump's impatience and repeated deadline extensions as evidence that the United States needs a way out more than they do.

Sticking With the Plan

The practical question is what follows. Will Iran shift away from the asymmetric grand strategy it has pursued for four decades - missiles, proxies, covert action, with a nuclear threshold capability kept in reserve?

Probably not. Recent setbacks have damaged the strategy but not discredited it. Hamas and Hezbollah have been reduced before and revived with time, resources and political opportunity. Israel needs these groups to be definitively defeated; Iran only needs them to survive - to persist, impose costs, consume attention, and erode willpower over the long term. That is a much lower bar, and attrition of adversary resolve has always been the objective, not battlefield victory. The Houthis and Iraqi militias, meanwhile, remain potent instruments of pressure in arenas where the US and its partners remain exposed. The external architecture of Iranian power has been damaged, but its underlying logic remains intact.

Strategic Instruments

It is in the domain of covert and clandestine activity, however, that the Islamic Republic is likely to invest most heavily in the period ahead. As outlined in my SOC ACE synthesis paper “The Logic of Resistance” Iran has long used state threats, making a virtue out of the regime’s weaknesses while bypassing enemy strengths. They allow Tehran to act at a distance from its own border, often deniably, and below a threshold that would trigger a serious military response. Assassination plots against dissidents, attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets, cyber operations against critical national infrastructure, harassment of shipping, the use of criminal intermediaries - all sit within a well-practised repertoire. State threats cause pain without necessarily inviting war, signalling that the regime remains undefeated. They reassure hardliners at home and sympathisers abroad. They also provide chips to trade, if Western powers calculate that imperfect bargain is preferable to an open-ended Iranian problem.

Iran's Maximum Pressure

The maintenance of this full suite of capabilities - missiles, proxies, covert action, nuclear hedging - is perhaps, in its own terms, Iran's version of “maximum pressure”. It is the leverage Tehran brings to any future negotiating table. Surrendering it without substantial reciprocal concessions - genuine sanctions relief, security guarantees, recognition of Iran's regional role - would be strategically illiterate. The Islamic Republic's leadership, whatever its other failings, is not strategically illiterate.

Western governments should therefore resist the temptation to treat the Iranian problem as principally a nuclear or maritime crisis. Those dimensions matter enormously, but they are not the whole picture. Iran's use of state threats is not an adjunct to its grand strategy. It is one of the primary means by which that strategy is conducted. The harder truth is this: a weaker Iran is not necessarily a safer Iran. A wounded regime, convinced of its own righteousness, anxious about its survival, and equipped with a proven repertoire of covert and semi-covert tools, may be considerably more dangerous in the shadows than it ever was on the battlefield. The West should expect more of the same - and be honest with itself about whether it is prepared for it.

Matthew Redhead is a senior associate fellow at RUSI. He is a former civil servant, management consultant and senior leader in financial crime intelligence in the private sector.

He has served as a government official at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), and on secondment at the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) at the Home Office. He also has extensive experience in financial services, having trained as a ‘front office’ banker for HSBC in the 1990s, and worked for seven years in various senior roles in that same bank’s financial crime risk function, leaving as Global Head of Strategic Intelligence in April 2018. He is currently a freelance writer and consultant on issues relating to national security, intelligence and economic and financial crime and security.