The Islamic Republic has often benefitted when domestic anger is displaced by external threat. In peacetime, its failures are exposed: Corruption, repression, economic decline, coercive rule. In wartime, especially under foreign, unlawful attack, it can recover an older image: Not the incompetent authoritarian state, but the embattled guardian of resistance.

This does not mean the Islamic Republic’s theology is universally persuasive. Reports suggest that Iran’s next leadership faces a fraying loyalist base and serious long-term questions about legitimacy. Many Iranians have long ceased to believe in the state’s sacred narrative. But political theology does not need universal belief in order to function. It needs enough believers, enough institutions, enough ritual, enough fear and enough war to turn suffering into cohesion.

US President Donald Trump’s own rhetoric has not helped. His demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”, which pushes war away from limited strategic ends and towards humiliation and absolute defeat, does more than escalate; it gives the Islamic Republic exactly the kind of external enemy it knows how to narrate.

In a secular strategic imagination, violence weakens by destroying capacity. In a political-theological imagination, violence can strengthen by confirming sacred purpose. An ideological state that sees itself through the lens of sacred resistance may lose commanders, infrastructure and territory, yet still gain something symbolically vital: Renewed access to the language of martyrdom. This is one of the tragedies of war against ideological states. The more one attacks them from the outside, the easier it can become for them to recover the myths that sustain them from within.