The Islamic Republic of Iran is motivated by a desire to bring about the end times and usher in an everlasting Islamic imperium.
T he past month’s Israeli strikes, combined with a single American bombing mission, have undermined the essential purpose of Iran’s mullahcracy: destroying the Jewish state and its ally in Washington. Since then, the regime has been licking its wounds, trying to maintain its authority and reputation, and promoting the idea that its nuclear program was peaceful.
These pursuits are intended to strengthen the line that the Iranian regime would not be exceptionally dangerous if it gained nuclear status. Those in the West who believe this point to the nuclear states of North Korea and Pakistan and argue that we could manage Tehran as we have these nations. Forget that both countries foment regional chaos and thwart American interests. Would America actually be able to live with a nuclear Iran? The answer is a resounding no.
Yes, North Korea and Pakistan are (to varying degrees) adversarial regimes. They are locked in serious, long-running conflicts with their neighbors. They have supported terrorism. They destabilize their regions. They are militaristic powers with deeply ingrained hierarchies. All are also true of Iran.
But Tehran is different in important ways. The most significant concern is the regime’s ideological and theological basis. The regimes in Pyongyang and Karachi were not founded on a theology, even if Pakistan was created as a Muslim nation and the regnant Kim dynasty is near-deified in North Korea. In Iran, the Islamic revolution of 1979 installed a regime composed of Islamic jurists who control the government. This regime thus has priorities other than its own survival — very much unlike the governments of Pakistan or North Korea.
The religious motivation of the Iranian regime, moreover, is millenarian. The mullahcracy holds to a Shia eschatology revolving around a messianic figure known as the Mahdi. To those who subscribe to this belief system, also known as Twelver Shi’ite Islam, the Mahdi is the twelfth in a line of imams dating back to the ninth century. He is divinely appointed and infallible, but has been supernaturally hidden for over a millennium. He will eventually return to destroy injustice and bring about a global peace under an Islamic empire.
Iran’s version of this worldview requires not only faith in the return of the Mahdi, but direct action to effect his return. The primary targets of this action have been the Great and Little Satans: the United States and Israel, respectively. For believers, the “liberation” of Jerusalem and the final destruction of Israel are necessary prerequisites for the Mahdi’s return. This lends an air of messianic destiny to Iran’s antipathy toward the Jewish state. Accepting that the Islamic Republic of Iran is, at root, motivated by a desire to bring about the end times and usher in an everlasting Islamic imperium is essential to understanding the threat it poses.
Since the 1979 revolution that brought it to power, the Iranian regime has sought to export its own ideological mission across the region to help usher in the age of the Mahdi. Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution’s lodestar, organized the entire regime around this concept and promoted it as the state religion.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the powerful military guardians of the revolution and a growing presence throughout Iran’s economy and society, is the most fervent votary of this ideology. The organization has fully embraced Mahdism. It inculcates its younger cohorts, newly empowered after the upending of Iran’s military hierarchy, in the religious motivation for its work. This theme is repeated in IRGC messaging. In a 2015 speech, for example, an influential regime cleric said that IRGC members must “remove the obstacles to the emergence of the Imam of the Age, the most important of which is the existence of the usurper regime of Israel.”
The IRGC controls the country’s ballistic missile arsenal. It is responsible for exporting the Islamic revolution and the cult of Mahdism across the region, stoking conflicts and terrorism throughout the Middle East. It is in charge of Iran’s vaunted, but now crippled, proxy network by which it executed that plan. And it runs the nation’s clandestine nuclear weapons program — the ultimate means to annihilate Israel and inaugurate the Mahdist age. The IRGC has dedicated all of these various military activities toward that single goal. This explains the regime’s actions far better than a simple calculus based on national interest can. The launch of a multifront war against Israel in October 2023 exemplified the danger of this ideology.
The war started by Hamas on October 7 quickly spread to the rest of Iran’s proxies. It even involved the military leadership in Tehran directly, a shift from prior Iranian attacks on Israel, all of which were carried out indirectly. Tehran mobilized Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other regional terror groups within days of the initial Hamas attack. It promoted disruptive assaults not only on Israeli targets, but also on neutral parties passing through the combat zone. It launched some of the largest-ever ballistic missile and drone attacks directly from Iranian territory and targeted Israeli population centers and civilian infrastructure.
Israel has struck back fiercely. As a result, it has neutered much of the mullahcracy’s military assets, both at home and abroad. But Tehran has remained intractable. Its aim of ending the Jewish state remains non-negotiable and foundational. The IRGC’s focus on martyrdom as a necessary and noble sacrifice — personified by the veritable cult that has grown around its former commander Qasem Soleimani — has enabled this recalcitrance. The martial hierarchy of the Islamic Republic will accept many deaths for the sake of its ultimate goal.
The IRGC, in particular, makes Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons different. Allowing this millenarian anti-American organization to have such weapons would almost guarantee their use. The IRGC is not worried about the consequences of nuclear war. In fact, given the martyrdom cult, they may welcome those consequences. This entirely upends the theory of nuclear deterrence that has maintained Great Power peace for nearly 80 years — with ominous potential for humanity.
Even after the U.S.-Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuclear program, the regime has refused to renounce its final aim. The IRGC, now dominated by younger cadres more heavily indoctrinated into Mahdism, has not laid down its arms. Rather, it has only become more rhetorically belligerent.
Apocalyptic ideologies are always dangerous. But they rarely consume a modern nation’s entire military apparatus. This has been the case for Iran since 1979. It will remain the case as long as the regime survives. America and its allies must remain vigilant.