Israel’s Attacks Leave Iran’s Supreme Leader Exposed—With No Good Options

Tehran’s bruising fight with Israel has left its military weakened and unable to respond in kind to Israeli attacks

By Sune Engel RasmussenFollow

Updated June 14, 2025 12:00 am ETShareResize

Listen

(2 min)

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Photo: Vahid Salemi/AP

Israel’s devastating attack on Iran has put the Islamic Republic in existential peril and exposed deep vulnerabilities in the intelligence services that have kept Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in power for nearly four decades.

Tehran fired dozens of ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv Friday after Israeli warplanes carried out waves of strikes across Iran a day earlier, targeting the country’s nuclear facilities and killing several of its highest-ranking commanders and senior scientists.

Israel’s attacks amounted to the most serious blow struck in a confrontation that erupted between the two longtime foes on Oct. 7, 2023. Iran has so far been unable to respond in kind. Most of the missiles it fired at Tel Aviv were intercepted or caused little damage. 

Now, Khamenei faces stark choices—and no good options. Iran’s bruising fight with Israel has left its military weakened. Further retaliation risks being insufficient to deter future attacks and prompting Israel to hit back harder. 

Attacks on shipping in the Red Sea or other U.S. interests or personnel will likely draw an American response, something Khamenei has historically tried to avoid. Yielding to pressure and striking a nuclear deal with the U.S. that severely curbs Iran’s enrichment capability will be seen among Khamenei’s hard-line supporters, whom he has increasingly come to rely on, as an unacceptable capitulation. 

Iranian demonstrators chanted slogans as one of them held a poster of Khamenei in an anti-Israeli rally after the Friday prayer in Tehran. Photo: Vahid Salemi/AP

For decades, Khamenei was the architect behind Iran’s military and political expansion in the Middle East, using the Revolutionary Guard and its network of allied Shiite militias. He secured his rule at home by building fierce loyalty among those who supported him, and a pervasive surveillance state to suppress those who didn’t. 

Now, the octogenarian ruler who has led Iran since 1989 will likely spend the autumn of his life fighting—not to expand, but to salvage the Islamic Republic he helped build into a regional powerhouse. 

“If he is honest with himself, he will admit that he has lost. Everything he has worked for is crumbling before his eyes,” said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “The ship that he stewarded has run aground.”

Khamenei has flaunted Iran’s military might, but until recently, it remained untested. That changed with the attack by Hamas—an Iranian ally—on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.  

Since then, while waging war in Gaza, Israel has killed nearly a dozen senior Iranian military commanders, including, on Friday, the head of the Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces chief of staff and the commander who oversaw its ballistic missile program. Israel also crippled Iran’s chief regional allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, while a third, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was toppled in December.

Iranian Major Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was killed in Israel’s attack on the Islamic Republic. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters

After building up a military presence in the region, including heavily armed militia fighters on the border with Israel, Khamenei and his senior advisers gravely underestimated Israel’s willingness to confront it with force, said Hamidreza Azizi, visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP.

Even as tensions rose so high that the U.S. earlier this week withdrew diplomatic personnel from Iraq, the top echelon of Iran’s security establishment were apparently not placed in