More recently, Iran has been a regular opponent in cyberspace—and although it has not demonstrated the acumen of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of its capabilities,” says Jeff Green, former acting assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, was famous for a series of distributed-denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that alarmed financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
Today, of course, Iran is considering which of these devices, networks and operators it might respond to – and, indeed, where that response might come from. Given its history of terrorist campaigns and cyberattacks, there is no reason to think that Iran’s countermeasures options are limited to missiles alone – or even to the Middle East.
Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
5. How will it end? There is an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader – variously reported as Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French Revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “It’s too early to tell.” The story almost certainly didn’t happen, but it’s especially useful in speaking to a larger truth in older societies like the 2,500-year-old Persian Empire: History has a long tail.
While Trump (and the world) may have been hoping that democracy would break out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced by radicals from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the deaths of several senior regime officials – including reportedly the defense minister – deflated hopes that the regime was close to collapse.
The history of post-World War II Iran certainly hinges on three moments and its intersections with US foreign policy – the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah, and now the 2026 US strikes that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent bestselling book king of kingsOn the fall of the Shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to list the small revolutions that in the modern era inspired change on a truly global scale, leading to a paradigm shift in the way the world works, the Iranian one might be added to the American, French, and Russian revolutions.”
Today it is hard not to think that we are living through an equally critical moment that we cannot yet fathom or imagine – and we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declaration of success, given how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoil has been.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly touted how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “FAFO,” playing on slang. Now, however, it is the US doing the “FA” part in Iran’s skies – and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we are a long way from the “FO” part, where we understand the consequences.
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