On September 18, the Iranian supreme leader gave a speech to officers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps arguing that investment in the military must take precedence over allocating funds toward economic development. He then cited the example of Germany and Japan, both of which, after suffering from a crushing and humiliating defeat in 1945, were forced by the victorious Allies to disarm. Eran Lerman comments:

As far as Khamenei is concerned, the bad guys won and the good guys lost in 1945, and the time has come to overthrow the entire post-war dispensation.

This position is, after all, in line with Iran’s denial of the Holocaust (recall the caricature competition designed to denigrate and diminish it) and exterminatory stance toward Israel. [These attitudes are] not personal quirks of the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [They are part and parcel of] the position of Khamenei himself and of Ayatollah Khomeini before him. . . .

According to [the ayatollahs’ ideology], Iran has a religious imperative to reject all Western mores. For this to be possible, the revolution, even more than the state as such, must position itself as a strong military power in regional and global affairs. The alternative is unthinkable. . . . Military weakness, [the reasoning goes], would lead to moral weakness, a “cultural invasion,” and the loss of all that Khamenei and Khomeini have sought to establish.

There could be an opportunity here. Neither candidate for the U.S. presidency seems to have bought into the strange notion, implicit (and at times explicit) in the positions taken by President Obama and his inner circle, that Iran can serve as a useful counterweight to other forces in the region. Nor have they bought (yet) into the delusion that Iran’s revolutionary impulse can be assumed to be benign. The U.S. is thus still able to think of Iran as an enemy, which it is.

If so, the domestic tension and turmoil over the unfulfilled promise of economic relief, and over Khamenei’s demand for more and more sacrifices by the people (a “resistance economy,” as he calls it) can provide fertile ground for destabilization of the Iranian regime. Such an opportunity was lost in 2009. It need not be lost again.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.