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Analysis
The Generation Iranian Hard-Liners Have Been Waiting for
How Israel’s strikes reshaped Iran’s political future.
By Narges Bajoghli, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

July 29, 2025, 12:31 PM {Foreign Policy Magazine}

In the weeks following the Israeli strikes on Iran in June, something unusual happened. For decades, Iranians had been among the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. They were skeptical—if not outright dismissive—of their government’s ideological framing of the United States and Israel as existential threats. Such official slogans were heard by much of the population, especially younger Iranians, as merely background noise or even as a source of eye-rolling embarrassment. The regime’s obsession with “resistance” often felt more like a relic than a real policy.

But this time, when the bombs dropped, the war didn’t stay far away. It came home. And it changed the conversation. The generation that once scoffed at the regime’s rhetoric is now learning—sometimes for the first time—why the government built a narrative of resistance in the first place.

Almost overnight, I heard a profound shift among my many contacts across Iranian society. Even Iranians who once dismissed official slogans from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei began repeating them. The strikes didn’t just spark a patriotic fervor. They ignited something more volatile: a widespread sense that foreign powers had crossed a line. Even among some of the most vocal critics of the regime, the anger turned not inward but outward.

In just two weeks, Iranians absorbed a new geopolitical reality. The slogans began to make more sense. Military elites were hardly unified on how best to protect Iran; now, those urging for diplomacy are being swamped by those demanding a hardened defensive stance. Even civilians—many of whom once opposed the regime’s security posture—are now calling for stronger defenses. Some are openly discussing the need for a nuclear weapon. “We need something that makes them think twice,” a journalist in Esfahan told me. “Otherwise, they will be able to target us every few years.”

For years, many Iranians saw the wars between Israel, the United States, and their own state as distant, abstract, or imposed. Those wars played out in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq—not at home in Esfahan or Tehran. Both outside and inside the country, the Islamic Republic’s regional strategy was criticized as wasteful, provocative, and isolating.


But the June strikes changed that perception. This wasn’t a war over some distant proxy front. It was direct. It was fast. And it made clear to ordinary Iranians that they were no longer spectators. Israel and the United States could now reach deep inside their borders with near impunity.

“I used to be one of those who would chant during protests to not send Iranian money to Lebanon or Palestine. But now I understand that the bombs we all face are one and if we don’t have strong defenses across the region, the war comes to us,” an artist in Tehran told me.

That new awareness spread quickly—but not just inside Iran. Much of the viral content explaining the history of Western interference in Iran, from the 1953 coup to the assassination of Iranian scientists, wasn’t made in Tehran. It came from the West, for Western audiences. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, young people—from both the left and right of the political spectrum—began questioning why Iran had been cast for decades as the permanent boogeyman in U.S. foreign policy. These weren’t regime loyalists; they were mostly Americans—millennials and Gen Z—trying to make sense of the forever wars that have shaped their lives.

Suddenly, Khamenei’s warnings about a United States that couldn’t be trusted and an Israel that was warmongering and expansionist didn’t seem so far-fetched—not because he had won moral authority but because the world was catching up to the strategic realities Iran had been pointing to for years. That shift, however partial or unexpected, is already reshaping how Iran is positioned—internally, regionally, and globally.

The West has long portrayed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a monolithic institution dedicated to nothing but aggression. But, in fact, the IRGC is deeply divided internally with competing factions. For the past decade, its older leadership—shaped by the trauma of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War—has often urged restraint. Though committed to regional deterrence and military expansion, many of these commanders saw open conflict with Israel or the United States as an existential risk, not a necessary confrontation.

But beneath them, a younger generation has risen at the IRGC: one forged not in defense but in projection. Some of these younger fighters are now in their 40s and primed to take on leadership. This new generation was trained with drones, missiles, and cyberwarfare; they’ve personally fought in Syria and helped organize militias in Iraq. Today, these rising members of the IRGC view confrontation as not only inevitable but productive. For them, deterrence is not just about survival: It’s about regional position, national pride, and reasserting sovereignty.


And in the general population, a generation born after the 1979 revolution—often disillusioned with state ideology—is now undergoing a profound shift. They aren’t embracing the regime, but they are rethinking everything they believed about Western power and security.

This moment of relative popular support for the security state is not guaranteed to last. But, for now, it’s shifting the balance of power within Iran’s policy circles. The IRGC’s younger hard-liners are gaining ground. Their allies in state media, parliament, and even the Intelligence Ministry are positioning themselves as the only actors capable of defending Iran from existential threat.

Such voices are now drowning out those in Iran—and there are many—who do not want war. Historically, those who favored negotiations with the West have emerged from the more pragmatic technocratic camp of officials, but now, those leaders sympathetic to peace are confronting a deeper shift in public perception. For years, even as Khamenei warned that the West could not be trusted, large segments of the population continued to vote for candidates who promised engagement. Diplomacy was seen, if not as idealism, then as realism: the only pragmatic path out of isolation. But the unprovoked Israeli strikes in June landed while negotiations with the United States were still underway. Now, among the very constituencies that once supported dialogue, there is a growing view that talks with the West are a shell game; no matter how Iran engages, it will be punished.

In the few weeks since the start of the strikes, the conversation in Iran has moved from whether diplomacy can succeed to whether it was ever sincere to begin with. Now, the idea that negotiations with the West will solve Iran’s problems sounds less like realism and more like capitulation.

Khamenei, ever the tactician, has used this moment to consolidate a narrative that supports the territorial integrity of Iran through defense. Specifically, it is the narrative of resistance, one that has endured since at least 1980, when Iraq—assisted by the United States, Soviet Union, and Western European countries—invaded Iran (if not earlier, when Washington and London staged a coup in Iran in 1953). For if Iran is surrounded on all sides by enemies that want to dominate the country, then resistance—including all the indigenously produced missiles and drones—remains the last best hope for survival. And the only entities capable of mounting this defensive resistance are the Islamic Republic’s armed forces.

The strikes certainly damaged Iran’s infrastructure, but they only strengthened Khamenei’s narrative. The regime survived. The leadership held. The streets didn’t explode in protest. Iran did not fragment. And internationally, Iran was no longer seen only as an aggressor but as a state under siege, once again resisting outside interference.

This legacy matters—not just for history but for succession. Whoever succeeds the 86-year-old Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader will be chosen in the context of these June attacks: where the doctrine of resistance was validated by events, not just ideology. That gives the IRGC—and especially its hard-line younger generation—greater leverage in shaping the next chapter of the Islamic Republic.

The challenge for Iran’s leaders—especially the younger IRGC generation—is how to capitalize on this moment without overplaying their hand. Calls for greater military expansion, or even nuclear breakout, may resonate for now. But they risk provoking more intense foreign responses and deepening economic isolation.

The Islamic Republic’s ability to survive the strikes does not mean it is immune to collapse—no state is immune. Iran’s economy remains strained. Public trust is low. And the lines between support for deterrence and support for the governing establishment are thin. If the leadership mistakes strategic validation for unconditional legitimacy, it may trigger the very unrest it temporarily defused.

Still, the internal political landscape has changed in very fundamental ways. Hard-liners who once struggled to justify “resistance” against Israel and the United States now argue that history has proved them right. “Resistance” is no longer the monopoly of the Islamic Republic and its loyalists—it is now a rallying cry for a defense of the homeland that crosses social and political boundaries. That’s a powerful narrative—especially when it’s echoed by former skeptics and legitimized by events on the ground.

Whether they can institutionalize that narrative—through succession, legislation, or broader social consensus—will determine the future shape of the Islamic Republic. But for now, they are ascendant.

The international conversation around Iran often swings between extremes: either the regime is moments from collapse or it is an unstoppable regional menace. What’s missed is how flexible and responsive the system has become: how it learns, adapts, and incorporates shocks into its narrative of survival and resistance. The Israeli strikes did not destroy that system. They strengthened it. And no one really knows what lessons that narrative will now offer Iranians—both those hoping for peace and those seeking war.

The strikes also reshaped how Iranians see themselves. Once, even under sanctions, Iranians viewed themselves as passive observers of distant wars; now, they are direct targets of regional aggression.

Perhaps the most consequential shift is generational. This is not the 1979 generation reaffirming old positions. It’s their children and grandchildren—raised with internet access, Western media, and often pro-Western attitudes—now questioning the legitimacy of the global order they grew up believing in. The slogans they once dismissed as propaganda are being reinterpreted as realism. That shift, if it holds, will shape Iran’s domestic and regional politics for decades.

That shift—more than any tactical success or failure—may have the most lasting impact. For years, Iranians asked why their country needed a missile program or regional proxies or a doctrine of military resistance. Now, they are asking how to make these defenses stronger, so as to keep Iran sovereign and independent.

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While many Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the end of the short but dramatic 12-day war with Israel in June, Abdullatif, 23, couldn’t join the joyful crowds. As an undocumented Afghan in Iran, he couldn’t risk running into the Iranian security forces, whose presence was heavier than usual.

“I’m afraid they’ll arrest me as a spy. I can’t leave the house,” he told Foreign Policy at the time. Abdullatif was referring to the common claim that Afghans collaborate with the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. In the 12 days following Israel’s large-scale attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities on June 13, more than 700 people were extracted from Afghans among them, creating fertile ground to accelerate what has become one of the biggest mass deportation campaigns in modern history.

For more than four decades, Iran provided refuge to millions of Afghans fleeing conflict and the poverty of their own country, creating the largest Afghan diaspora and one of the biggest refugee populations in the world. The estimated number of refugees currently residing in Iran ranges from around 4 million to 6 million, according to Iranian officials—the vast majority of them from Afghanistan.

On June 24, Abdullatif became one of more than half a million Afghans deported since the war’s start. Many were brutally taken—seized by security forces at home, sometimes while asleep, at workplaces, or at mosques, with families torn apart in the process.

Abdullatif was arrested outside the bakery where he’d been buying bread. “The Iranian police treated us extremely badly,” he recalled, speaking to Foreign Policy from his family home in Kabul. “They took me to a refugee camp where they beat us and kept us hungry and thirsty. Those who gave money to the Iranian police were able to leave easily. After a lot of beatings, I paid 3 million tomans and was deported. They tore up my passport and humiliated us nonstop.” (The 3 million tomans, roughly $70, is a “municipality fee” Afghans have reportedly been asked to pay before deportation.)

Abdullatif’s story isn’t abnormal. According to Arafat Jamal, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative in Afghanistan, refugees arrive back in Afghanistan incredibly shaken. “At every step, more and more degrading things are happening to them,” Jamal said. “Everything from being woken up in the middle of the night to leave to having their belongings taken, having employers not paying salaries, landowners not refunding the deposit.”

Jamal monitors the situation at the Islam Qala border crossing in western Afghanistan’s Herat province, where thousands of forcibly returned Afghans cross every day. The recent deportations are unprecedented not only in scale—around 1.6 million Afghans have been returned to Afghanistan from Iran in 2025 alone—but also in intensity. “That’s what makes it a humanitarian crisis,” Jamal said. “Normally, Islam Qala border sees around 5,000 to 7,000 crossings a day, but we’ve seen peaks of over 50,000. While it has somewhat stabilized at around 20,000, that’s still four times the normal capacity.”

Tehran has always imposed numerous restrictions even on Afghans with regulated status: They are allowed to settle only in certain provinces, work in specific sectors—mostly low-skilled and low-paid jobs—and face difficulties obtaining bank cards or SIM cards, making it significantly harder to use public transport and pushing more people into the underground economy. The majority of those who fled to Iran after August 2021, when the Taliban returned to power, only obtained a census slip allowing for temporary stay and limited access to basic services such as education and health care. As a result, many families are unable to legalize their stay, leaving them on the margins of society with no access to essential services.

Amid Iran’s economic crisis, long-standing discriminatory and xenophobic anti-Afghan sentiment has become more prevalent, fueled by government officials’ rhetoric and echoed by many ordinary Iranians, from hateful social media posts to bakeries refusing to sell bread to Afghans.

Turning blame outward is a convenient outlet for public anger and official deflection, said Arash Azizi, a writer and historian who focuses on Iran. “It’s a replacement for people’s problems,” Azizi said. “People don’t have electricity, water, enough wages. They have shortages in goods, and the government says it’s because of Afghans.”

Worsening economic conditions are hitting the most vulnerable populations, including refugees, particularly hard. “Our work is hard, but the pay is low. With housing costs skyrocketing, do you think we had time to spread hatred or spy?” Sahar, a 24-year-old Afghan woman who lives in Iran with her mother and sister, asked via WhatsApp.

If mass deportations continue at this scale, they could backfire on the economy. Afghans make up 65-75 percent of the agriculture, construction, and service workforce in Iran. Abrupt deportations drive up labor costs, disrupt supply chains, and shrink Iran’s informal economy—without addressing unemployment among educated Iranians, who typically avoid manual labor.

Despite present hardships, Sahar is more concerned about how her all-female household will survive if forced back to Afghanistan. “How will we stay safe if people find out that three women are living in a house without a father or brother?” she asked, alluding to the Taliban’s extreme restrictions on women and their movement.

U.N. experts have strongly condemned the mass deportations of Afghans, who face “very real risks of persecution, threats, and violent reprisals.” Possible consequences could include arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and inhuman treatment “exacerbated by the Taliban’s restrictions on women humanitarian workers.”

Deportations of this scale also represent a threat to regional stability.

The de facto Taliban government, recognized only by Russia as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, is grappling with economic collapse and a humanitarian crisis made worse by Western sanctions and Trump administration aid cuts. Receiving thousands of returnees—often arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs—is a major challenge, said Suhail Shaheen, the head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha.

“The government has established around 13 committees to address all the essential needs, from transportation and registration to health services, education, and temporary shelter in the camps for a few days after their arrival,” he told Foreign Policy.

With the Taliban’s resources stretched—spending cuts recently forced a 20 percent staff reduction across the public sector—international humanitarian assistance is crucial. According to Shaheen, the Taliban are lobbying the Iranian government to allow Afghans to return voluntarily, not force them out.

Funding cuts have forced major agencies such as UNHCR to drastically reduce their operations. The absence of international organizations normally present at the border is striking. “Normally, in an emergency, you see organizations setting up camps, providing shelter, food, non-food items, water, and emergency first aid. But this time, none of that was in place—only a few organizations were present on the ground,” said Maiwand Rohani, the CEO of the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance, who works at Islam Qala.
It’s not just Iran that is deporting Afghans. Even European countries are exploring the possibility, with Germany recently allowing two Taliban officials into the country to coordinate deportation flights. One such flight carrying 81 Afghan men, many of whom were accused of violent crimes, landed in Kabul on July 18.

To make matters worse, Pakistan is also accelerating its deportation program, launched in 2023, to expel all Afghans. This intensified effort—aiming to pressure Kabul over its inability to control the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, a Pakistani militant group that operates from Afghanistan—risks fueling further cross-border insurgency.

“We are ready to accept our citizens, but this must be done under a proper framework,” Shaheen said. “Returnees need resettlement, employment opportunities, and in some cases medical treatment.”

Obaidullah Baheer, a transitional justice lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan, pointed out that with deportations at this scale, properly vetting individuals crossing the border is nearly impossible. Most returnees are likely to settle in already overcrowded, resource-stressed urban centers.

Mistreatment accompanying deportation and the dire economic situation at home may push returnees, especially young men, to join armed factions and militant groups operating in Afghanistan and conducting attacks on neighboring countries. “Countries deporting Afghans are trying to solve a short-term problem without considering the long-term consequences,” Baheer said. “It creates resentment, and even if someone doesn’t pick up arms themselves, they may become indifferent if others seek to harm a neighboring country. This is very dangerous for the entire region.”

Additionally, the demographic shock could disrupt Afghanistan’s fragile and recently regained stability. In a country of roughly 40 million people, 75 percent of the population lives at subsistence level.

Many Afghan returnees from both Iran and Pakistan were born abroad and have never set foot in the country before, making the environment almost alien to them. Smugglers exploited the crisis during the recent Israel-Iran war, telling Afghans that they could cross into Turkey even though only Iranians with valid visas could enter. The market value of smuggling Afghans to Turkey was already $178.4 million per year before the war.

Despite increasing hostility in neighboring countries and rising pushback rates from Turkey, this trend of deportations is expected to continue and grow. For many Afghans, migration remains the only viable way to ensure their families’ survival. “Families are sending one, two, or even three young members—whichever they can afford—across borders, hoping they’ll reach Europe and be able to support their families back home,” said Ibraheem Bahiss, a senior Afghanistan analyst at International Crisis Group.

That’s the future Abdullatif—now living in Kabul with his impoverished older parents and siblings—envisions for himself. He has been considering paying a smuggler to take him on a perilous journey to Belarus and then Poland, where migrants experience violent pushbacks at the border. Afghans are among the largest groups attempting to cross the eastern European Union border, facing increasingly drastic security measures along the way.

Despite being aware of the risks and deaths of his compatriots in the forests along the Poland-Belarus border, Abdullatif is still willing to take his chances. “I’m trying to leave Afghanistan by any means possible,” he said. “There is no hope or life for us here.”

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