Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic.

All that said, was it really ever all that formidable?

The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and, subsequently, the interim secular socialists. They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters, and transforming the most secular and modern of the Middle East Muslim nations into the most medieval that routinely hung homosexuals, adulterers, and almost anyone who questioned the authority of the ayatollahs. In other words, these were gruesome people, but they didn’t necessarily have a competent military.

The theocracy’s only constant with the prior monarchical Iran was that it inherited near limitless oil and natural gas reserves, sophisticated arms, and the Shah’s modernized cities. It controlled the key strategic chokepoint at the Strait of Hormuz and enjoyed a geostrategically critical location between Asia and the Middle East. It fueled Iran’s historical chauvinism and pique that the millennia-long historical preeminence of Middle Eastern Persia was not fully appreciated by its Arab neighbors. So there were lots of natural advantages — and all for the most part squandered.

Under the camouflage of Shiite puritanism and otherworldliness, the ayatollahs proved even more corrupt (and far more incompetent) than the Shah’s entourage. They fought a destructive eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s overrated Iraqi dictatorship and showed they were mostly just as militarily incompetent.

Over decades, they killed and wounded thousands of Americans by bombing U.S. embassies, barracks, and bases in the Middle East — without directly confronting the American military. For years, they sent lethal shaped charge IEDs to the Shiite insurgents to slaughter and maim thousands of Americans in Iraq and to the Taliban to do the same in Afghanistan.

At the first sign of popular protests, the regime never hesitated to gun down thousands of unarmed protesters. And, of course, they were abject hypocrites — hating the West, damning the Great Satan — and sending their pampered children to universities in America. The apparat proved quite earthly in its desire for money, estates, foreign travel, and the good life.

Their general strategies were never hard to follow.

One, the theocrats’ prior familiarity with Americans under the Shah and in exile in Europe bred an irrational fixation with and hatred of the West in general that made them useful proxies for the grand designs of communist and then later oligarchic Russia, and later ascendant communist China.

Iranian realpolitik alliances with secular communists were based on the quid pro quo of granting Russia and China access to the Gulf, selling oil to China, and buying arms from both.

Two, they were endlessly chagrined that the Persian Shiites had been overshadowed by more populous Sunni Arab neighbors that supposedly lacked their own historical sophistication and more legitimate claims of embodying and speaking for global Islam.

So they would correct that historical travesty by doing their best to mobilize their clients and proxies to bully, isolate, and weaken Arab autocracies, especially those that are pro-Western.

Three, their planned eventual destruction of Israel would ensure that theocratic and Shiite Iran regained its lost prestige and honor by finally accomplishing what the Sunni world had failed to do. By arming murderous clients in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen, they fashioned a global network of death that compromised European foreign policy toward the Middle East and terrified Western leaders and many of their Arab neighbors.

Fourth and finally, they sought to diminish the role of the United States in the Muslim world, drive it from the Middle East, and wage a virtual 47-year opportunistic war against American citizens and soldiers, with help from their terrorist surrogates.

Iran’s zenith in power and prestige came during Obama’s presidency (2009-17), and the so-called “Iran Deal” that they believed would guarantee them eventual nuclear power status.

But far more importantly, their massive acquisitions of air, land, and sea weapons and the empowering of terrorists, coupled with their passive-aggressive claims to victimhood, both scared and enticed former President Barack Obama into dropping sanctions. Soon, he was apologizing for supposed past sins and nocturnally sending them millions of dollars in Danegeld.

But worse by far, Obama thought he had squared the circle of neutralizing the supposed Middle Eastern Iranian juggernaut by envisioning it as an empathetic victim — and eventual friend if not ally.

Iran was to be rebooted as the Persian and Shiite righteously aggrieved underdog — bullied unfairly by Western imperialists and their surrogate corrupt Arab petro-kingdom clients for its asceticism and courage in fighting the West since its own birth in 1979.

Obama would remedy this “injustice” by bolstering Iran as a counterweight to not just the Sunni Arab world but to Israel itself. The reset would include an American detente with the murderous pro-Iranian Assad regime in Syria, the supposedly benign neglect of Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon, and the championing of the “Palestinians,” which de facto had insidiously become indistinct from Hamas terrorists.

Such creative tension between the Iranian Shiite crescent and a diminished Arab world would be adjudicated from time to time by Obama himself, whose America would go from oppressor to ally of the oppressed.

So by 2017, Iran, for some reason, was considered all-powerful in the Middle East with its missiles, soon-to-be nuclear status, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi killers who would murder Westerners and Israelis year after year. For the last seven American presidents, the very thought of challenging Iran militarily had been considered taboo, all the more so after the American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No one, perhaps not even the Israelis, actually calibrated the true status of Iranian arms or diplomacy. Despite its huge advantages in population, Iran could not defeat Iraq and was reduced to sending 10-year-olds as human pawns to clear minefields. It never directly confronted Israel but always used surrogates to murder Jews, either abroad, as in the slaughter in Argentina, or through its “ring of fire” terrorist cliques that surrounded the borders of the Jewish state.

In sum, no one apparently realized — with the exception of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — that beneath its rough, ugly shell, theocratic Iran was rotten and decayed inside. Its corruption and the hatred of its own people ensured that even its huge revenues and sophisticated Chinese and Russian weapons could never translate into a modern, lethal military.

And in summer 2025, the Israelis and Americans first proved that Iran was indeed hollow.

Its Arab partner in Syria imploded in weeks. The supposedly goose-stepping Hezbollah shock troops were decimated.

The scary subterranean Hamas may have proved deadly in surprise attacks against unarmed women, children, and the aged, but they were nearly obliterated by the IDF.

The Houthis mimicked Iran’s madness as they sent drones and missiles to shut down the Red Sea and hit Israel. But the U.S. and Israel finally taught them that while the Houthis had no power to harm their enemies’ interior, their Western opponents easily could destroy their airports, ports, power generation, and modern economy in days, and would happily do so if the terror continued.

So here we are, in March 2026, watching the systematic destruction of the entire five-decade facade of a supposedly invincible Iranian military, the systematic elimination of its theocratic leaders, and the dismantling of the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard terrorists.

The regime has no military ability to ensure its survival. Instead, its rope-a-dope strategy assumes that the U.S. will be attuned to domestic criticism, the looming midterms, the price of gas, and pressure from allies to end the war before the global economy sinks into recession.

We are left somewhat confused. Why did prior presidents not hold Iran accountable for its killing, thus nourishing the myth of Iranian invincibility? Why did Israel not respond earlier to Iran itself rather than just its terrorist clients?

And what now are the surviving theocrats thinking? What is their strategy of survival?

The remnants of the theocracy intend to ride out the bombings and, at some point in extremis, expect an armistice from “negotiations.” Their ultimate strategy is to wait out the tenures of both Trump and Netanyahu and hope for another sympathetic president like Obama, or a non compos mentis Biden, or someone ideologically akin to Mamdani or AOC.

When Trump and Netanyahu are out of office, they dream of using their oil to rearm and resume their role as Chinese and Russian proxies, eventually getting the bomb, and the second time around, perhaps using it.

Theocratic Iran, in its fantasies, still believes that if it ever destroyed Israel with a bomb or two, the world, especially given the recrudescence of Western antisemitism, would be appalled — for a day or two.

Then it would resume business with it. And with a dozen or so deterrent nuclear-tipped missiles, the Iranian ritual boilerplate of crazed pronouncements would follow of supposedly welcoming a nuclear pathway to an eternal virginal paradise.

And thus, we would go full circle back again to a “crazy” Iran, its murderous clients, and its unhinged — but effective — threats.

©2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.