To read the present conflict in Iran only through the categories of the Iran-Israel rivalry or the Tehran-Washington confrontation is to miss its most consequential dimension. For Israel, the central problem is the neutralization of a military and potentially nuclear threat. By the time of the military attacks of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that Iran had accumulated 9,247.6 kg of enriched uranium in total; by the time of the attacks in mid-June 2025, it had also accumulated 440.9 kg enriched up to 60 percent U-235, making it the only non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT to have produced and accumulated material at that level (IAEA 2025a; IAEA 2026). For the United States, the conflict is embedded in a broader calculus of regional security, alliance credibility, energy security, and escalation control. For several Arab states, it is principally a matter of balance, containment, and spillover management. Tehran, however, increasingly appears to read the war in a different register: not simply as another episode in a long regional struggle, but as a crisis touching the continuity of the state itself.

That proposition should not be overstated. Iran is not facing imminent disintegration, nor does every Iranian official statement amount to an explicit doctrine of existential war. Yet the cumulative effect of three developments has altered the strategic picture. First, the conflict has moved from covert contestation and proxy warfare toward repeated direct interstate exchanges, including Iran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel in April 2024 and the twelve-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025 (USIP 2024; House of Commons Library 2025; Bagheri Dolatabadi 2026). Second, Tehran’s long-standing model of “forward defence” or strategic depth through regional partners has been badly damaged by Israeli operations against Hezbollah and other aligned actors, as well as by the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 (Azizi 2021; SWP 2025; Chatham House 2024; Chatham House 2025a). Third, Iranian official discourse since June 2025 has placed growing emphasis on sovereignty, territorial integrity, national unity, and the fusion of domestic cohesion with external security (UN Security Council 2025a; UN Security Council 2025b; Khamenei 2025a; President of the Islamic Republic of Iran 2025a).

The argument of this article is therefore narrower, but also more precise, than the language of “regime survival” usually permits. Iran is no longer thinking about war only as a struggle for influence. It is increasingly framing it as a struggle for state continuity. That shift matters because it changes the political meaning of both escalation and compromise. It also helps explain why outside observers often misread Tehran’s calculations. When a conflict is coded as existential, the costs of attrition do not necessarily produce pressure for moderation. On the contrary, the costs of de-escalation can appear even higher if compromise is believed to reveal weakness, reduce deterrent credibility, expose internal vulnerability, or invite further coercion.

At the centre of this argument lies a more specific proposition about Iranian political and strategic imagination. In that imagination, the solidity of the political centre is treated as the precondition for territorial integrity and for the consolidation of a national identity capable of integrating a socially diverse country. A strong centre is assumed to generate centripetal dynamics: it holds the national space together, contains the peripheries, and makes political integration possible. Conversely, any weakening of the centre is liable to be read as the trigger for centrifugal pressures: fragmentation of loyalties, renewed particularisms, vulnerability along the margins, and, in the worst case, territorial dislocation. Within that representational framework, regime change is feared not simply as elite turnover at the top, but as a possible opening to the disintegration of the state itself. The existential charge of the current conflict follows from that equation between the fragilization of the centre and the possible disintegration of Iran as a territorial polity (CFR 2024; Britannica 2026a; Britannica 2026b).

A Binary Reading of War

Iran’s strategic posture cannot be understood if one simply projects onto it the categories used by its adversaries. In the Iranian view, the conflict is not merely about relative gains or losses within a regional balance of power. It is increasingly cast as an ordeal in which the relevant alternative is not victory versus compromise, but continuity versus degradation. That does not mean Tehran literally believes that every military setback will produce immediate collapse. It means that the leadership increasingly speaks and acts as if sustained military pressure, repeated attacks on Iranian territory, shrinking regional depth, and the erosion of deterrence could together threaten the state’s capacity to remain the uncontested political centre of a very large and socially heterogeneous country (Khamenei 2025b; President of the Islamic Republic of Iran 2025b; World Bank 2026; CFR 2024).

Put differently, the Iranian fear is not reducible to the loss of influence abroad. It concerns the durability of the centre at home. Once the centre is perceived as weakened – militarily, economically, or symbolically – external pressure can be read as feeding domestic fragmentation. In this sense, the language of existential war is tied not only to deterrence but also to a historically rooted anxiety about centre-periphery relations, borderland vulnerability, and the political management of diversity. The issue is not whether those fears are fully objective. It is that they structure how risk is imagined and therefore how policy is made.

This shift became more plausible after June 2025 because the conflict was no longer confined to deniable strikes, sabotage, or partner-based escalation. The House of Commons Library notes that the June 2025 war began with Israeli strikes on Iranian territory and ended with a ceasefire announced on 24 June 2025, while Bagheri Dolatabadi observes that no peace agreement – or even a signed ceasefire – followed, leaving both sides to prepare for the next round (House of Commons Library 2025; Bagheri Dolatabadi 2026). From Tehran’s perspective, this sequence matters. Once war repeatedly reaches Iranian soil, the conceptual distance between defending the regime and defending the country narrows considerably.

Iranian diplomatic language after the June 2025 attacks is revealing here, not because official rhetoric should be taken at face value, but because it indicates how Tehran wants the confrontation to be understood. In letters to the UN Security Council, Iran described the attacks as violations of its sovereignty and territorial integrity and framed its military response in the language of self-defence and deterrence (UN Security Council 2025a; UN Security Council 2025b). Khamenei, for his part, repeatedly tied the country’s security to “the unity and cohesion of the nation,” while President Masoud Pezeshkian similarly stressed national unity as a condition for resisting external pressure and preserving state security (Khamenei 2025a; President of the Islamic Republic of Iran 2025a). The important point is not that Tehran has abandoned ideological language. It plainly has not. The point is that ideological language is increasingly embedded within a vocabulary of sovereignty, territorial integrity, national cohesion, and the resilience of the political centre.

The Ceasefire as a Moment of Exposure

It is at this point that the Iranian suspicion of ceasefires becomes more intelligible. In many Western strategic traditions, a ceasefire is the first step toward negotiation,........

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