In the weeks following the Israeli strikes on Iran in June, something unusual happened. For decades, Iranians had been among the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. They were skeptical—if not outright dismissive—of their government’s ideological framing of the United States and Israel as existential threats. Such official slogans were heard by much of the population, especially younger Iranians, as merely background noise or even as a source of eye-rolling embarrassment. The regime’s obsession with “resistance” often felt more like a relic than a real policy.
But this time, when the bombs dropped, the war didn’t stay far away. It came home. And it changed the conversation. The generation that once scoffed at the regime’s rhetoric is now learning—sometimes for the first time—why the government built a narrative of resistance in the first place.
Almost overnight, I heard a profound shift among my many contacts across Iranian society. Even Iranians who once dismissed official slogans from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei began repeating them. The strikes didn’t just spark a patriotic fervor. They ignited something more volatile: a widespread sense that foreign powers had crossed a line. Even among some of the most vocal critics of the regime, the anger turned not inward but outward.
In just two weeks, Iranians absorbed a new geopolitical reality. The slogans began to make more sense. Military elites were hardly unified on how best to protect Iran; now, those urging for diplomacy are being swamped by those demanding a hardened defensive stance. Even civilians—many of whom once opposed the regime’s security posture—are now calling for stronger defenses. Some are openly discussing the need for a nuclear weapon. “We need something that makes them think twice,” a journalist in Esfahan told me. “Otherwise, they will be able to target us every few years.”
For years, many Iranians saw the wars between Israel, the United States, and their own state as distant, abstract, or imposed. Those wars played out in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq—not at home in Esfahan or Tehran. Both outside and inside the country, the Islamic Republic’s regional strategy was criticized as wasteful, provocative, and isolating.
But the June strikes changed that perception. This wasn’t a war over some distant proxy front. It was direct. It was fast. And it made clear to ordinary Iranians that they were no longer spectators. Israel and the United States could now reach deep inside their borders with near impunity.
“I used to be one of those who would chant during protests to not send Iranian money to Lebanon or Palestine. But now I understand that the bombs we all face are one and if we don’t have strong defenses across the region, the war comes to us,” an artist in Tehran told me.
That new awareness spread quickly—but not just inside Iran. Much of the viral content explaining the history of Western interference in Iran, from the 1953 coup to the assassination of Iranian scientists, wasn’t made in Tehran. It came from the West, for Western audiences. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, young people—from both the left and right of the political spectrum—began questioning why Iran had been cast for decades as the permanent boogeyman in U.S. foreign policy. These weren’t regime loyalists; they were mostly Americans—millennials and Gen Z—trying to make sense of the forever wars that have shaped their lives.
Suddenly, Khamenei’s warnings about a United States that couldn’t be trusted and an Israel that was warmongering and expansionist didn’t seem so far-fetched—not because he had won moral authority but because the world was catching up to the strategic realities Iran had been pointing to for years. That shift, however partial or unexpected, is already reshaping how Iran is positioned—internally, regionally, and globally.
The West has long portrayed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a monolithic institution dedicated to nothing but aggression. But, in fact, the IRGC is deeply divided internally with competing factions. For the past decade, its older leadership—shaped by the trauma of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War—has often urged restraint. Though committed to regional deterrence and military expansion, many of these commanders saw open conflict with Israel or the United States as an existential risk, not a necessary confrontation.
But beneath them, a younger generation has risen at the IRGC: one forged not in defense but in projection. Some of these younger fighters are now in their 40s and primed to take on leadership. This new generation was trained with drones, missiles, and cyberwarfare; they’ve personally fought in Syria and helped organize militias in Iraq. Today, these rising members of the IRGC view confrontation as not only inevitable but productive. For them, deterrence is not just about survival: It’s about regional position, national pride, and reasserting sovereignty.
The June strikes, compounded by Iran’s limited but pointed counterstrikes, have emboldened this generation. They argue that the state’s restraint over the past two decades—not to mention its misguided commitment to the 2015 nuclear deal—has only invited further attacks. The fact that Israel could strike so deep, so efficiently, only strengthens their case: Iran needs a credible deterrent, and it needs it now.
And in the general population, a generation born after the 1979 revolution—often disillusioned with state ideology—is now undergoing a profound shift. They aren’t embracing the regime, but they are rethinking everything they believed about Western power and security.
This moment of relative popular support for the security state is not guaranteed to last. But, for now, it’s shifting the balance of power within Iran’s policy circles. The IRGC’s younger hard-liners are gaining ground. Their allies in state media, parliament, and even the Intelligence Ministry are positioning themselves as the only actors capable of defending Iran from existential threat.
Such voices are now drowning out those in Iran—and there are many—who do not want war. Historically, those who favored negotiations with the West have emerged from the more pragmatic technocratic camp of officials, but now, those leaders sympathetic to peace are confronting a deeper shift in public perception. For years, even as Khamenei warned that the West could not be trusted, large segments of the population continued to vote for candidates who promised engagement. Diplomacy was seen, if not as idealism, then as realism: the only pragmatic path out of isolation. But the unprovoked Israeli strikes in June landed while negotiations with the United States were still underway. Now, among the very constituencies that once supported dialogue, there is a growing view that talks with the West are a shell game; no matter how Iran engages, it will be punished.
In the few weeks since the start of the strikes, the conversation in Iran has moved from whether diplomacy can succeed to whether it was ever sincere to begin with. Now, the idea that negotiations with the West will solve Iran’s problems sounds less like realism and more like capitulation.
Khamenei, ever the tactician, has used this moment to consolidate a narrative that supports the territorial integrity of Iran through defense. Specifically, it is the narrative of resistance, one that has endured since at least 1980, when Iraq—assisted by the United States, Soviet Union, and Western European countries—invaded Iran (if not earlier, when Washington and London staged a coup in Iran in 1953). For if Iran is surrounded on all sides by enemies that want to dominate the country, then resistance—including all the indigenously produced missiles and drones—remains the last best hope for survival. And the only entities capable of mounting this defensive resistance are the Islamic Republic’s armed forces.
The strikes certainly damaged Iran’s infrastructure, but they only strengthened Khamenei’s narrative. The regime survived. The leadership held. The streets didn’t explode in protest. Iran did not fragment. And internationally, Iran was no longer seen only as an aggressor but as a state under siege, once again resisting outside interference.
This legacy matters—not just for history but for succession. Whoever succeeds the 86-year-old Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader will be chosen in the context of these June attacks: where the doctrine of resistance was validated by events, not just ideology. That gives the IRGC—and especially its hard-line younger generation—greater leverage in shaping the next chapter of the Islamic Republic.
The challenge for Iran’s leaders—especially the younger IRGC generation—is how to capitalize on this moment without overplaying their hand. Calls for greater military expansion, or even nuclear breakout, may resonate for now. But they risk provoking more intense foreign responses and deepening economic isolation.
The Islamic Republic’s ability to survive the strikes does not mean it is immune to collapse—no state is immune. Iran’s economy remains strained. Public trust is low. And the lines between support for deterrence and support for the governing establishment are thin. If the leadership mistakes strategic validation for unconditional legitimacy, it may trigger the very unrest it temporarily defused.
Still, the internal political landscape has changed in very fundamental ways. Hard-liners who once struggled to justify “resistance” against Israel and the United States now argue that history has proved them right. “Resistance” is no longer the monopoly of the Islamic Republic and its loyalists—it is now a rallying cry for a defense of the homeland that crosses social and political boundaries. That’s a powerful narrative—especially when it’s echoed by former skeptics and legitimized by events on the ground.
Whether they can institutionalize that narrative—through succession, legislation, or broader social consensus—will determine the future shape of the Islamic Republic. But for now, they are ascendant.
The international conversation around Iran often swings between extremes: either the regime is moments from collapse or it is an unstoppable regional menace. What’s missed is how flexible and responsive the system has become: how it learns, adapts, and incorporates shocks into its narrative of survival and resistance. The Israeli strikes did not destroy that system. They strengthened it. And no one really knows what lessons that narrative will now offer Iranians—both those hoping for peace and those seeking war.
The strikes also reshaped how Iranians see themselves. Once, even under sanctions, Iranians viewed themselves as passive observers of distant wars; now, they are direct targets of regional aggression.
Perhaps the most consequential shift is generational. This is not the 1979 generation reaffirming old positions. It’s their children and grandchildren—raised with internet access, Western media, and often pro-Western attitudes—now questioning the legitimacy of the global order they grew up believing in. The slogans they once dismissed as propaganda are being reinterpreted as realism. That shift, if it holds, will shape Iran’s domestic and regional politics for decades.
That shift—more than any tactical success or failure—may have the most lasting impact. For years, Iranians asked why their country needed a missile program or regional proxies or a doctrine of military resistance. Now, they are asking how to make these defenses stronger, so as to keep Iran sovereign and independent.