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Iran’s next generation is taking over.

The US and Iran have a new peace agreement — and lots of unresolved questions about Iran’s nuclear program, the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, and whether Israel’s war in Lebanon could still scuttle things.

But one thing is clear: The war has transformed Iran and remade the balance of power in the Middle East.

“Rather than breaking Iran, the crucible of war has transformed it in unanticipated ways,” Iran experts Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr wrote recently for a forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. “To survive and establish new strategic advantages, the Islamic Republic had to adapt and innovate, changing how it waged war, ran the state, and managed society.”

Bajoghli, a professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, recently joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain how the war has remade Iran’s capacity to govern at home and flex its power globally — and how it diminished the United States’ standing in the region.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Let’s talk about how this war was sold to the American public and what the initial aims were. It was so supposedly to prevent Iran from securing a nuclear weapon and to deliver some kind of death blow to the Islamic Republic. What did we get instead?

Part of the problem is that we didn’t really ever know what this war was about.

There were a few days when this war was about, “Let’s bring freedom to the Iranian people.” Then there were a few days when this war was about, you know, the death blows to the Islamic Republic. And then there were also, you know, this is going to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon, even though in June [2025] we supposedly obliterated their nuclear weapons program.

It was never really clear what this was really about. We had huge decapitation strikes that happened across Iran on the first days of this war that took out essentially the founding generation of the revolution. We thought the Islamic Republic was on its last legs, and all we........

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