How the US and Israel are making the Islamic republic stronger

The war is feeding into a theological narrative of martyrdom and sacrifice that is helping maintain the Islamic Republic

The United States-Israel war against Iran is usually described in the language of strategy: Deterrence, escalation, military pressure, missile capacity, nuclear risk. All of these matter, but they do not tell the whole story.

To understand how Iran may fight and survive this war, we need to look beyond military calculations and into the moral world through which the Islamic Republic understands power, loss, and, above all, endurance. This is not merely a state under attack, but one whose ideological core has long been shaped by a Shia political theology of martyrdom, sacrifice and sacred resistance. That matters because wars are not fought only with weapons, but with narratives and values; meaning itself can become a political resource.