The War That Changed the Iran Question

by Siyavash Shahabi*

The war against Iran was supposed to simplify the problem: military pressure, Tehran’s retreat, negotiations from a position of weakness, and perhaps even regime change. But war rarely obeys the fantasies of those who launch it. Instead of simplifying the Iran question, it has changed it.

Iran after the war is not the same Iran as before. The United States is not the same controlling power it imagined itself to be. The Strait of Hormuz has moved from being a geopolitical chokepoint to becoming a central bargaining instrument. Distrust is no longer just rhetoric in Tehran; it has become part of the structure of decision-making. And the Islamic Republic, wounded by foreign attack, has also used the atmosphere of war to rebuild and intensify its internal security logic.

But this is only part of the reality. Amnesty International’s recent report offers a more brutal description: people in Iran are trapped between unlawful US/Israeli attacks and deadly internal repression. This is not merely a human rights formulation. It is the political structure of the current moment. The issue is not only that Washington has lost control of the war, or that Tehran has found new leverage. The issue is that Iranian society is being crushed between two machines of power: the external war machine and the internal security state.

A war that escaped its planners

One of the persistent illusions of US and Israeli policy toward Iran is the belief that war can be used as a precise and controllable instrument. In this view, military force is imagined almost as surgery: strike selected targets, weaken command structures, push the other side back, and then reopen negotiations from a position of strength.

But war, especially in Iran and West Asia, does not remain inside the map drawn by its planners. After a certain point, war develops its own logic. The first strike matters, but what matters more is how the targeted state absorbs the blow, converts damage into leverage, and extends the crisis into energy markets, regional alliances, internal politics and global economics.

This war did not simply hit Iran. It changed the terrain. The table to which Tehran was supposed to return no longer exists in the same form. On the new table are not only centrifuges and uranium, but Hormuz, oil, sanctions, reparations, regional security, Russia, China and the future of deterrence. But when war escapes control, this is not only a strategic matter. On the ground, it means dead civilians, destroyed infrastructure, fear, displacement, broken communications and exhausted everyday life.

Amnesty International has described the US and Israeli attacks between 28 February and 7 April 2026 as unlawful under the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. According to official Iranian figures cited by Amnesty, the attacks killed at least 3,375 people, including 383 children, and injured 25,000. In one case, Amnesty documented a US strike on a school in Minab, Hormozgan province, which killed 156 people, including 120 children. These figures should not appear as a humanitarian footnote to a geopolitical analysis. They should be at its centre. If the war is understood only through oil prices, shipping lanes and military balance, then the first thing erased is the human body: children, schools, families and a society forced to pay for decisions made by states.

Hormuz has replaced the JCPOA

Before the war, Iran was mostly discussed through the language of the nuclear deal: enrichment levels, centrifuges, inspections, sanctions relief and whether Washington would return to the JCPOA. That framework has not disappeared, but it is no longer the centre of gravity. After the war, the Strait of Hormuz has become political. In the JCPOA era, Iran negotiated with centrifuges. In the post-war situation, it negotiates with Hormuz.

This is not a celebration of Iranian state power. It is a warning. The war has pushed a crisis that might once have been contained within a political and technical agreement into the terrain of the global economy. Once energy flows, shipping insurance, oil prices, aviation fuel, fertilisers and global supply chains enter the equation, we are no longer dealing with a narrow nuclear file.

Tehran’s logic is clear: if Iran’s security, economy and infrastructure are turned into a battlefield, then the route of global energy can also become a field of calculation. Hormuz is no longer merely a threat. It is being transformed into a guarantee. Tehran is saying that a US signature is not enough, a UN resolution is not enough, promises of sanctions relief are not enough. If commitments are violated, there must be an immediate and tangible cost. This makes the crisis more global and more explosive.

When “agreement” no longer means the same thing

A major misunderstanding today is the assumption that the issue is simply a return to negotiations. But the two sides no longer mean the same thing by “agreement”.

For the United States, a desirable agreement means irreversible Iranian concessions: removal or destruction of enriched uranium, stronger limits, wider inspections, and perhaps restrictions on Iran’s regional capabilities. For Iran, an acceptable agreement now means practical guarantees: sanctions relief, compensation for damage, recognition of Iran’s role in regional energy security, and the preservation of tools that can punish the other side if commitments are broken. This is not a dispute over details. It is a dispute over the meaning of agreement itself.

The US withdrawal from the JCPOA, military attacks, assassinations, the failure of the UN Security

Council to prevent aggression, and repeated threats against Iran’s political and territorial integrity have moved distrust from rhetoric into decision-making. Tehran no longer merely expresses distrust; it acts through it.
The lesson Tehran has drawn is dangerous but real: international law without power is not a shield; the Security Council without balance of power is not protection; an agreement without enforceable costs is only paper. This conclusion is dangerous because it pushes the world further into the language of force. But it is also real because the powers that launched the war imposed that language on the table.

A wounded state is not necessarily a powerless state

Another trap is the binary of victory and defeat. Tehran’s propaganda presents every sign of survival as victory. War advocates abroad present every military strike as proof that collapse is near. Both pictures are incomplete.

The Islamic Republic has been damaged. Iran’s economy was already exhausted, rentier, securitised, corrupt and sanctioned before the war. The war has deepened this condition. Livelihoods have been hit, infrastructure has been damaged, fear has spread, internet access has been restricted or shut down, and global attention has shifted from internal repression to oil maps and shipping lanes. The war has not improved people’s lives. It has made them harder.

But the regime is not necessarily without leverage. Some old tools have been damaged, but new or harsher tools have become more central: Hormuz, the regionalisation of crisis, closer ties with non-Western powers, the ability to affect energy markets, and the use of wartime conditions to discipline society at home.
This is the contradiction: Iran can be more damaged and more dangerous at the same time. Society can become weaker while the security state gains harsher instruments of bargaining. This is not a victory for the people, nor a complete defeat for the regime. It is a new form of deadlock.

The fantasy of quick collapse

One of the most dangerous beliefs among advocates of war is that the Islamic Republic can collapse if several leaders, commanders or command centres are removed. This imagines Iran as a building: destroy the roof, and the walls will fall.

But the Islamic Republic is better understood as a layered security network with parallel institutions, overlapping chains of command and emergency mechanisms of reproduction. This should be said without admiration. The institutional durability of the Islamic Republic is not democratic rationality or social legitimacy. Much of it is the result of decades of repression, parallel power structures, securitisation and the removal of public accountability.

Next to every formal institution, there is a higher or parallel body. Next to the government, there are security councils and unelected centres of power. Next to the army, there is the Revolutionary Guard. Next to the Intelligence Ministry, there is IRGC intelligence. Next to elections, there are vetting bodies. Next to law, there is the logic of security and expediency.

The society buried under geopolitics

The greatest danger is that analysis remains trapped at the level of states, straits, oil, uranium, Russia, China, the United States and global markets. This level is necessary, but not enough. If we stop there, Iran is once again separated from its society.

In many international debates, Iran is either a threat or a victim, a regional power or a target for intervention, a nuclear file or an energy chokepoint. But Iran is first of all a society: workers, women, teachers, students, pensioners, political prisoners, families of the dead, children, migrants, marginalised communities and millions of people who are invisible in Washington, in Tehran’s security rooms and in global oil maps.

This erasure is not only analytical. It is produced materially. Internet shutdown is the forced silence of society. In January 2026, Amnesty International warned that Iranian authorities had deliberately blocked internet access to hide the scale of human rights violations during protests. Amnesty also described the January protests as the deadliest period of repression it had documented in Iran for decades, with the main killings taking place on 8 and 9 January and the death toll reaching into the thousands.

When the world speaks about Hormuz, it must also speak about digital darkness. When it speaks about uranium, it must speak about families searching for the arrested and the dead under an internet blackout.

When it speaks about control over energy routes, it must also speak about control over news, images, testimony and memory. Foreign war and internal securitisation are not the same thing, but they reinforce one another. War allows the state to silence dissent in the language of national security. Internal repression deprives society of the ability to form an independent anti-war voice. The result is an emptied political field in which only two voices become louder: the sound of bombs and the voice of the security state.

This is the missing piece in much of the international conversation. Iran is discussed through Hormuz, uranium, missiles, oil, Russia, China, Israel and US power. These are real forces, and ignoring them would make the analysis weaker. But they do not exhaust the reality of Iran.

Any serious account of Iran after the war has to begin there. Not only with what states can extract from each other, but with what this new balance of force is doing to the people who have the least control over it.

* Siavash Shahabi, writer and independent journalist, is a political refugee in Athens, Greece. He regularly writes about Iran, the Middle East, and the condition of refugees in Europe