US Sutra | How the fate of the Ayatollah regime was sealed long back

Just a week back, in the spring of 2026, American and Israeli jets streaked across Iranian skies. Before you could say Jack Robinson or, what is more appropriate in the present context, pronounce the Supreme Leader’s name, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei lay dead. With over 40 of his closest associates.

Pundits and commentators scrambled to explain the sudden collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They spoke of “recent provocations,” “the Twelve-Day War,” or “Trump’s decisive strike.” They treated the regime’s fate as a bunch of headlines written yesterday.

They are wrong.

Perhaps the comparison is inept, far-fetched, or unfortunate. But remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I would say that the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, US retaliation become a foregone conclusion. That it turned nuclear is calamitous and regrettable, of course. But that a decisive, even disproportionate strike, would follow was inescapable.

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Similarly, the fate of Iran’s mullah regime was sealed, not a few days, weeks, or months ago, as many think. But some 46 years back when they took 66 Americans hostage and held 52 of them for 444 days. Retaliation was bound to come. The only question was when.

The parallel is uncomfortable precisely because it is true. On December 7, 1941, Imperial Japan struck a sovereign American territory in a surprise attack that killed 2,403 people. The United States did not respond with a limited raid or diplomatic protest.

It mobilised the greatest industrial war machine in history, island-hopped across the Pacific, firebombed Tokyo, and ultimately dropped atomic weapons on two cities. The logic was merciless but simple: an existential challenge to American power had been issued; the response would over-match the scale of the insult.

On November 4, 1979, a mob of Iranian revolutionaries, acting with the blessings of the nascent Islamic Republic led by the fiery Ayotallah Khomeni, stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. They seized diplomats, staff, and Marines, paraded them blindfolded before cameras, and subjected the United States to 444 days of national humiliation. Night after night, Americans watched their countrymen paraded on television. A rescue attempt collapsed in the desert. And Jimmy Carter’s presidency died with it.

The new regime in Tehran had declared open season on American sovereignty. That was not a student prank. It was an act of war by a government against the world’s superpower. The revolutionaries understood exactly what they were doing. They were founding their brave new Islamist Republic on their defiance of the “Great Satan.”

They also openly declared their ultimate objective: to destroy and obliterate, not only from their region, but from the face of the earth, the nation of Israel.

Every subsequent outrage including the Hezbollah bombings in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983, the Khobar Towers attack, the arming of militias that killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq, the nuclear program that brought Iran to the threshold of a bomb, the chants of “Death to America” at Friday prayers, flowed from that “original sin.” The last slogan, incidentally, became even more closely identified with the regime, at least in foreign eyes, than their own national anthem.

For four decades the United States tried containment, sanctions, diplomacy, and, of course, the JCPOA. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, is a 2015 agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, UK, US) and the EU.

Each time, Tehran pocketed concessions and doubled down on Uranium enrichment far beyond the requirements of “peaceful purposes”. The regime survived because America, exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan, lacked the stomach for another Middle Eastern war. But patience is not forgiveness. Nor is it forgetfulness. History teaches that great powers do not forget, let alone forgive, direct assaults or affronts to their power. They merely choose the hour of reckoning.

That hour arrived on February 28, 2026. What began as targeted strikes on nuclear facilities metastasized into a campaign against the regime’s command structure. Now: Khamenei is gone. The IRGC’s senior generals are gone. Not just Iran’s missile capabilities and navy, but its propaganda apparatus is being dismantled in real time. Soon its oil reserves and storage tanks will burn and its oil wells may have to cease pumping.

True, the protests that erupted in December 2025, long suppressed, have not yet resulted in a seizure and transfer of power. But the internal opposition certainly breathes easier on new-found oxygen in the regime’s current paralysis. Iranian women suffocating under veil and repeated assaults on their dignity have breathed a sigh of relief. The jubilation of the Iranian diaspora also more than makes up for relative silence of its citizenry still crushed under the iron heal of the IRGC.

Whether the Islamic Republic formally dissolves tomorrow or lingers on for years in a weakened form is, for the purposes of my argument, beside the point. Its myth of invincibility is shattered. The mullahs who once held Americans hostage, those that are not already dead, are now the ones hiding in bunkers.

(Concluding Part II to follow.)

(The writer is Sri Aurobindo Chair ([Hon.] at Vedere University and formerly Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)