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.

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........

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