Analysis: Khomeini, Khamenei and Iran’s War on the Gulf

 ROME -- Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution was never just about seizing the Iranian state but rather a bid to export a political ideology based on hyperactive political Islam that would consume the entire Middle East. Almost half a century later, US-Israeli bombings of Iran, and Iran’s retaliatory strikes against it, may be best understood from the context of Khomeini and his subsequent regime (including his direct successor, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) which views confrontation as legitimacy and deploys violence, overt and covert, as policy.

 Iran’s immediate response focused on dragging the Gulf Cooperation Council states into the melee. Iranian missiles and drones targeted key GCC infrastructure, with the Gulf countries revealing interceptions, casualties and disruption at prominent air and sea ports. The GCC Secretary-General, Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi, publicly condemned Iran’s ‘blatant and nefarious’ targeting of GCC territories, a remarkably blunt collective framing that shows just how seriously Gulf leadership is taking Tehran’s intentions.

 Nonetheless, the most effective Iranian retaliation may not be the launches we can count, track, and intercept. They are likely to be the attacks that can be denied. Under the most extreme pressure, the regime has every incentive to expand the battlefield, blurring responsibility and making things easier. Iran’s strategic advantage for decades has been the ability to outsource violence, to use proxies, facilitators and shadowy networks that create distance between the IRGC and the strike.

 Iran will continue to signal that Gulf prosperity is contingent, that investment, tourism and air connectivity can be interrupted in short order if the Gulf is perceived to support American activities.

 It is not only physical damage, it is reputational shock. The mass closures of airspace and cancelled flights, in regional hubs, were a preview of the economic leverage conflict can exert without protracted kinetic bombing.

 Iran will also no doubt continue to show willingness and exercise its Khomeinist terror-export model. An attempt to deploy its middlemen, including criminal networks, to hit targets in far-flung regions and make it hard to respond politically. The aim will not always be a mass-casualty spectacle, but a disruption attack, a thwarted plot or a targeted assassination attempt can still deliver on Tehran’s intentions, to show reach, instill uncertainty and deter third countries from alignment.

 Iran’s asymmetric warfare, using terrorism as a state-sponsored policy instrument will continue to present a perennial security problem for the Gulf region. The Islamic Republic will continue to default to its belief that it can intimidate neighbouring societies through fear, sabotage and proxy violence. None of this requires every Iranian decision‐maker to favour a full regional war. In fact, it is the other way around, the regime’s preferred posture is calibrated instability, sufficient escalation to maintain deterrence and the resistance narrative on the home front but not so much that it invites decisive military defeat. That’s why deniable operations are attractive to Iran. They are scalable, deniable, and politically corrosive.

 While ‘de-escalation’ has remained the preferred posture for the Gulf region to date, it must also be balanced with the need to demonstrate clear resilience and disruption of Iran’s terror network. Gulf countries can adopt stronger GCC intelligence-sharing, and continued unified crisis messaging that denies Tehran psychological impact.

 Tehran’s proxy playbook is looking for gaps, between GCC countries, and between Gulf partners and Western security frameworks. The GCC's public unison on condemnation is a start, sustaining operational unity is the more difficult challenge. The current clash of strikes is dramatic, but in a way it is the visible part of the iceberg.

 The risk from a deeper perspective is that a regime born of Khomeini’s revolutionary promise to export its model will now want to export pain, both in the GCC and, if the regime estimates benefit, to distant theatres, through the same apparatuses it has built in the decades before, through its proxies, dark web of networks and terror.

  Matthew Robinson is Director of the Euro-Gulf Information Centre (EGIC).