The US and Iran have a new peace agreement — and lots of unresolved questions about Iran’s nuclear program, the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, and whether Israel’s war in Lebanon could still scuttle things.
But one thing is clear: The war has transformed Iran and remade the balance of power in the Middle East.
“Rather than breaking Iran, the crucible of war has transformed it in unanticipated ways,” Iran experts Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr wrote recently for a forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. “To survive and establish new strategic advantages, the Islamic Republic had to adapt and innovate, changing how it waged war, ran the state, and managed society.”
Bajoghli, a professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, recently joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain how the war has remade Iran’s capacity to govern at home and flex its power globally — and how it diminished the United States’ standing in the region.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Let’s talk about how this war was sold to the American public and what the initial aims were. It was so supposedly to prevent Iran from securing a nuclear weapon and to deliver some kind of death blow to the Islamic Republic. What did we get instead?
Part of the problem is that we didn’t really ever know what this war was about.
There were a few days when this war was about, “Let’s bring freedom to the Iranian people.” Then there were a few days when this war was about, you know, the death blows to the Islamic Republic. And then there were also, you know, this is going to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon, even though in June [2025] we supposedly obliterated their nuclear weapons program.
It was never really clear what this was really about. We had huge decapitation strikes that happened across Iran on the first days of this war that took out essentially the founding generation of the revolution. We thought the Islamic Republic was on its last legs, and all we had to do was push it a little bit more.
Now, in June 2026, three and a half months after this war started, we have a completely new and younger generation in charge in Iran that is bolder, that is not as afraid of the United States. And then have the Strait of Hormuz, which was not under necessarily this kind of Iranian control before. Now it is, and you have Iran again putting its will and basically saying Israel needs to pull back from Lebanon.
These were conditions that Iran could have never made in February 2026. What we have coming out of this war is a stronger and more entrenched political establishment that leans heavily towards the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the Iranian military, that is bolder and that now has sort of shown itself as being a key pillar of West Asia. That’s going to create a fundamentally different Middle East going forward.
Tell us more about this new regime. I think everyone’s kind of heard, yeah, new ayatollah, even more hardline than the previous ayatollah. Does that sum up this new generation that’s in charge of Iran now, or is there more to it?
There’s a lot more to it. First of all, one of the problems we’ve always had with Iran is we think about it as a dictatorship — as a country led by one man at the top. That was part of the reason why they thought that they could kill Ali Khamenei and then the system would crumble under him.
You do have the leader at the top, but you have a lot of discussion and debate all throughout the political system and throughout society in Iran. It is a highly dynamic system and a highly dynamic society. What we now have is the son of the former leader, Moshtaba Khamenei, who is now in charge, but what he represents is a whole-scale generational shift that’s happened in Iran. We have a younger generation that, first of all, grew up pretty much after the revolution in Iran had already happened. Their side was already in power. That brings a certain kind of confidence and swagger to it.
This generation fought the United States and Israel in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon. And from their calculations, they won in those theaters. So they are also a generation that is not afraid of confronting the Americans and the Israelis. They experienced for themselves on the battlefield how they were able to push back the US military, for example, from Iraq. So there’s a boldness to this generation.
Their father’s generation came about in the ’60s and ’70s. Yes, they were anti-imperialists, yes, they fought against the shah and having the United States involved in Iran’s affairs, but still there was a level of respect for what US power meant, and psychologically a sort of inferiority complex. You’re now dealing with a generation that doesn’t have that. That’s fundamentally different.
What has happened in Iran is now you have Gen Xers and elder millennials now running the show. This is one of the reasons they were able to beat out the propaganda game.
Are you talking about like the Lego AI videos?
Which were funny. Who are we kidding?
Which were really funny and they’re still putting them out, right? And they’re utilizing trap songs and like rap lyrics, and you can tell it’s young.
I mean, if anyone spends enough time on the internet, this is not contrived. This is a generation that grew up online. There is a particular kind of shift that has happened that now Iran is being led by people who are of the 21st century, whereas a lot of these other countries are still being led by people who are fundamentally formed in the 20th century.
How does the fact that Iran is now being led by Gen Xers, millennials, and not boomers like it was before, or like our country currently is, affect the new state of affairs in the country? What does that mean for the way the country’s being governed internally?
This generation is not interested in advancing the revolution anymore, right? The revolution happened, it’s a fact, and now they’re interested in governing a state.
What this war has done is shown that there’s a technocratic class in Iran that is of the younger generation that has now come to the forefront that was able to execute this war in a very efficient way that made sense to people and they could see what was happening. And you hear from Iranians over and over again that besides the sounds of the bombs, we didn’t feel like we were in war. There was no shortage of anything. And so now what this new generation is attempting to do is to say we will bring that technocratic expertise to not just our military affairs, but to running the country itself. And that is the big question right now: Can they deliver on that?
How has this new government shifted the balance of power in the region?
The United States began to set up its security architecture in the Middle East, starting with the first Gulf War, in which it really began to establish its permanent military bases in the Arab Gulf regions.
The promise was: bring in US military bases. We will guarantee your safety, and we will also bring you into the American fold. You’ll have great business opportunities; you’ll make a ton of money.
What we now see is that the Gulf understands that having American bases is actually a liability because the United States started a war without consulting them. It was not able to protect any of these Gulf countries and their economies.
Iran is the size of Western Europe. I feel like we forget that a lot in the United States, but the reality is, Iran is a massive country geographically. It’s a massive country population-wise, and so the Gulf countries need to figure out a way to live with Iran. That is no longer guaranteed through a big-brother protection of the United States that actually didn’t materialize.
Moving forward, first of all, it seems like the Gulf Arab countries have come to this realization — some quicker than others — but in essence, they are making payments to Iran now. They’re figuring out ways to be able to co-live with them into the future, without Iran being isolated like it was in the past.
That’s a huge difference. The Persian Gulf region is fundamentally transformed. It will no longer be a place where the Americans can do whatever they want. It will now be a place where Iran will reassert its hegemony over that region.
Iran sees itself as having won this war. And because this generation is bolder, it’s actually going to be like, ‘We’re not going to budge. If that means your economy is going to hurt more, fine, you’ve been hurting our economy for 47 years. We’re going to play a game of chicken and see who blinks first.’ That’s this new generation that we’re dealing with.
