Is Iran a Rational Actor? We're About to Find Out
Khamenei's sole objective is to preserve his power. But he’s as likely to be informed by paranoia in his Soleimani response as he is by pragmatism.
Ideology as much as logic.
Photographer: Anadolu Agency/AnadoluCaveat emptor: Anybody who claims to know how Iran will respond to the killing of Qassem Soleimani is either a liar or a fool. The history of the Islamic Republic provides few meaningful pointers, because it has never been here before. None of its foreign enemies has taken out a figure of comparable importance to the Tehran regime.
No Iranian military commander of Soleimani’s standing was killed in the 1980-88 war with Iraq. The nuclear scientists assassinated — presumably by Israel — in the 2010s were important to the regime, but hardly as influential as the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Force.