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News Analysis
The Iranian regime finds itself in its most difficult position 46 years after the revolution that brought it to power. But does it mean the end?
By Roger Cohen
Roger Cohen reported from Tehran in 2009 as the country rose up to protest what was seen as a stolen presidential election and the Islamic Republic seemed to teeter on the brink.
June 19, 2025Updated 6:19 a.m. ET
Beneath Israel’s bombs lies an unpopular and repressive Iranian regime that has spent billions of dollars on a nuclear program and on projecting the Islamic Revolution through armed regional proxies, while presiding over a domestic economic disaster and stifling paralysis.
An 86-year-old autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rules this restive nation, as he has for 36 years, in his role as guardian of the revolution, a conservative calling at which he has proved adept. The supreme leader is no gambler. But his system, remote from a youthful and aspirational society, looks sclerotic to many, and he is now up against the wall.
Over six days of fighting, Israel has struck the Natanz enrichment facility where a majority of Iran’s nuclear fuel is produced, killed at least eleven of the regime’s top generals and several nuclear scientists, bombed oil-and-energy facilities, taken complete control of Iranian air space, and sent tens of thousands of people into flight from Tehran.
At least 224 people had been killed across Iran as of Sunday, a majority of them civilians, a spokesman for Iran’s ministry of health said. But the figure was sure to have grown as Israel’s bombardment continued in the days since. Iranian missiles have killed at least 24 Israelis.
“The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Khamenei is in the most difficult situation he has ever faced.”
The ayatollah has faced threats to his rule before, though, and come out with his supremacy intact. In 2009, when millions of people took to the streets of Tehran to protest what was seen as a stolen presidential election, I watched as state-licensed thugs repeatedly beat brave women demanding dignity and freedom. For a few days, the future of the regime stood on a knife-edge. But with utter ruthlessness it prevailed. Many demonstrators were dragged off to be tortured, sodomized, and in the case of several hundred of them, killed.
