This Is the End

The Islamic Republic's Last Whimper

Khamenei is dead. The White House and Israeli officials confirmed it, and satellite imagery shows the compound in the heart of Tehran reduced to rubble. The man who ruled the Islamic Republic for thirty-six years, outlasted six American presidents, built and sustained the most consequential state sponsor of terrorism in the modern Middle East, and who oversaw the weekly chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” — that man is gone, killed on a Saturday morning by the joint force of the two nations he swore to destroy.

He was eighty-six years old. He had been the supreme leader since June 4, 1989, elected by the Assembly of Experts within hours of Khomeini’s death to a position for which he was, by the theological standards of Shi’a jurisprudence, never fully qualified. Khamenei was a hojatoleslam, a mid-ranking title of respect for Shiite Muslim clerics, translating to “Proof of Islam” or “Authority on Islam,” not a grand ayatollah. His authority, thus, was political, not scholarly. He compensated for this deficit with ruthlessness, patience, and an unbroken commitment to the revolutionary project that consumed his entire adult life. He was nineteen when he first began studying under Khomeini. He was a revolutionary before he was anything else, imprisoned under the Shah, wounded by an assassination attempt in 1981 that cost him the use of his right arm, and installed as president at forty-two in the chaotic aftermath of the republic’s founding. He served two terms, was elevated to supreme leader, and proceeded to outlast every rival, every reformist, every protest movement, and every American attempt at negotiation, containment, and coercion — until today.

Middle-aged Ayatollah Khamenei in Military Uniform in 1988

His career was the Islamic Republic. There is no separating the two. When the revolution’s founder, Khomeini, died in 1989, the system he left behind was volatile, factional, and untested. It was Khamenei who stabilized it — not through charisma, which he lacked, nor through theological authority, which he never fully possessed, but through the methodical cultivation of the Revolutionary Guard as a parallel state, an economic empire, and a praetorian class whose fortunes were indistinguishable from his own. He turned the IRGC from a revolutionary militia into the largest conglomerate in Iran, controlling perhaps a third of the national economy. He built the proxy network all over the region — Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias — into the most effective non-state military architecture in the world. He advanced the nuclear program through every diplomatic arrangement designed to restrain it, extracting sanctions relief from the JCPOA while preserving the knowledge base and centrifuge infrastructure that made breakout capacity a permanent condition rather than a future possibility. He crushed the Green Movement in 2009, the protests of 2019, the Mahsa Amini uprising of 2022, and — with a cruelty that hastened the end — the December 2025 protests, in which his security forces massacred thousands. He was, in the full sense of the word, the last man standing of the 1979 generation — the final link between the Islamic Republic and its founding revolutionary act.

And now he is dead, and the republic he held together through force, terror, and the sheer weight of fear faces the question it has spent forty-six years deferring: whether it can survive without a supreme leader, and whether anyone can command the loyalty that accrued not to the office but to the man.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was not merely another ideological state. It was, and I think many of our Ivy League leftist professors would agree, the most ambitious political-theological experiment of the twentieth century — the only successful revolutionary project to fuse modern state power and modern German ideology with premodern clerical authority and sustain it across nearly five decades. It outlived the Soviet Union, which fell twelve years after the revolution. It outlived Ba’athist Iraq, which Saddam took to war against it for eight years and which the Americans dismantled in 2003. It outlived Qaddafi’s Libya, Mubarak’s Egypt, and Assad’s Syria — the last of which fell in 2024, taking with it Iran’s most important Arab client state and the land corridor that connected Tehran to Hezbollah. It survived invasions, wars, sanctions, cyberwarfare, targeted assassinations, internal uprisings, and a twelve-day combined Israeli-American air campaign just eight months ago. It survived because Khamenei understood that revolutionary legitimacy is sustained only by the credible monopoly on organized terror and the systematic, violent elimination of alternatives. It was also the last successor state in the ideological lineage that descended from Nazi Germany through Arab Nationalism — the final regime to make the global propagation of antisemitism and the annihilation of Jews a matter of state doctrine.

And then there is the date.

Purim begins Monday evening. The festival that commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman’s plot to annihilate them — a story set, as it happens, in Persia. In Shushan, in the land that became Iran. The Book of Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible in which God’s name does not appear, and the rabbinical tradition has always understood this as the point: that divine action in history is sometimes most present precisely where it is most hidden, working through the decisions of men and women who do not fully understand what they are enacting. Khamenei, who fashioned himself the heir to an Islamic revolution against the enemies of God, was killed by the Jewish state on the eve of the Jewish festival that celebrates the destruction of a Persian enemy who sought to destroy the Jews. He would have appreciated the irony, perhaps. I certainly do.

Whether one reads this through providence or coincidence is a matter of faith. But no one can deny the resonance, and the symbolism will likely do political work that no policy can. For the Iranian diaspora celebrating in the streets tonight, for the protesters who survived January’s massacres, for the Israelis sheltering from Iranian missiles that can no longer be replenished by the man who ordered their construction, for the world Jews — this is not an amusing accident. It is a story to be told.

This is the end. Not the end of the war, but it is the end of the Islamic Republic, at least, as it has existed since 1979, if not at all. And whatever emerges from the rubble of Khamenei’s compound and the wreckage of his nuclear program and the ruins of his proxy empire will not be the same thing. It cannot be. The Ayatollah is gone. The last guardian is dead, and the guardianship dies with him.

Seventy-two hours will tell us a great deal about what follows. But what happened today is already momentous. The longest-serving autocrat in the modern Middle East, the architect of the region’s most destabilizing project or terrorism, the first enemy of America and of Jews, was killed by those two nations acting in concert on the eve of the festival that commemorates exactly such a deliverance. History is not ironic. But it rhymes — sometimes in bangs, sometimes in a whimper, today in both.

Khamenei is dead. The Islamic Republic is over. The Prussian utopian vision of political Islam is largely no more. The rest is politics.

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, shehecheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higiyanu laz'man hazeh!