As American forces strike Iranian command centers, missile sites and maritime capabilities, Washington cannot focus only on the visible battlefield. The Islamic Republic has spent years developing another one: networks capable of targeting American officials, Jewish communities, journalists and Iranian dissidents through proxies and criminal gangs. A new call for global revenge from Iran’s supreme leader suggests that these networks could become the next front.

At the burial of his father, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, pledged to avenge “your pure blood and the blood of all the martyrs of these two wars.” He called revenge a national demand that “must definitely take place.” Then came his most consequential sentence: “Whether we are here or not, this will be realized, and soon individuals among the free people throughout the world will each carry out part of this divine mission.”

His language should not be dismissed as funeral hyperbole or read solely as a promise of missile retaliation. It evokes a model the Islamic Republic has used before: end or pause a conventional conflict while creating a borderless mission that sympathizers, proxies or hired criminals can pursue for years.

After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted the 1988 cease-fire with Iraq—a retreat he compared to drinking from a poisoned chalice—he could no longer offer victory on the battlefield. Months later, he gave his followers a new global mission: kill Salman Rushdie and those knowingly involved in publishing his novel.

The consequences were concrete. Rushdie’s Italian translator was stabbed, his Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher was shot. In 2022, Rushdie himself was nearly killed in New York. Tehran could........

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