The U.S.-Israel-led strikes on the Iranian regime – Operation Epic Fury and Rising Lion – counter 47 years of terror emanating from the most ideologically radical messianic regime the modern era has known. But the longer, more dangerous war is the one Western policymakers have been least willing to recognize: Iran’s ideological warfare against the West.
For nearly half a century, Tehran has been telling us what it is. Iran’s ruling ideology is the radical Shi’ite cousin and adversary of the Sunni jihadi death cult that gave us Osama bin Laden and 9/11. Both believe in a never-ending struggle — jihad — leading to martyrdom until Islam is victorious. The Islamic Republic and its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iraqi and Syrian militias — have demonstrated this theological fixation for decades. Western policymakers have long refused or at least hesitated to take them at their word. We are paying the price.
The October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and massacre in Israel was not a Palestinian territorial grievance event. It was an Iranian-orchestrated jihadist operation that triggered a globally synchronized assault uniting Islamists and radical Western activists. What followed across campuses, capitals, and digital platforms activated a long-prepared ideological infrastructure — the Red-Green alliance: the convergence of Marxist radicals and Islamists. Since October 7, the alliance has embraced the “Browns” – the neo-Nazis and common anti-Semites of the far-right. The three groups share hostility to America, Israel, and the liberal democratic order.
The alliance’s ideological scaffolding was built across decades. Soviet “Zionology” repackaged classical antisemitic tropes as a Marxist-Leninist critique of Zionism and exported the product through Arab clients and Third World nations as “racism.” The neo-Marxists and Palestinian-American professor Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism racialized Islamists into a protected progressive identity, allowing Hamas and Hezbollah to be folded into Western coalitions of “the oppressed.” American academia and prestige media have been so captured that Hamas atrocities are framed in the language of liberation. When the U.S. went to war against the nuclearizing Iranian regime — once a bipartisan goal — far-right isolationists splintered from President Trump’s MAGA coalition to depict Israel as a bloodthirsty warmonger in a modern blood libel.
Tehran does not merely fund proxies; it speaks directly to Western audiences. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ English-language social media output — including LEGO animations targeting MAGA figures like President Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk — aims past its nominal targets at young American progressives and conservatives alike. Iranian state media, MOIS-linked cyber units (Handala, Homeland Justice, Storm-0842), and bot networks flooded Western platforms after October 7 with content designed to fragment American consensus. Researchers found that roughly one in four accounts posting about the war in its early days were inauthentic — the largest foreign influence operation against U.S. opinion in the digital era. Iran is not lobbying the West. It is recruiting it.
The Islamic Republic is the lynchpin, but not the only player. Russia and China amplify these narratives as a matter of doctrine — Beijing’s “Three Warfares” (public-opinion, psychological, legal) and Moscow’s gibridnaya voyna (hybrid warfare) treat anti-Western information operations as core capabilities. Qatar supplies the long-term soft-power architecture, with disclosed and undisclosed donations to U.S. universities estimated at $6–20 billion that correlate with the post-October 7 capture of campus discourse. For Moscow and Beijing, anti-Israel rhetoric is the wedge that fragments Western alliances and accelerates a multipolar order.
The negotiate-and-attack pattern is part of the same ideological warfare. When Tehran offers talks while its proxies fire missiles, that is doctrine, not strategic confusion. To Iran’s adversaries in the West, the diplomatic table signals possible compromise. To Iran’s followers across the region, the simultaneous violence signals that the revolution endures. Two messages, two audiences, one campaign. A hudna is not peace; it is an interval for military recovery in a continuous jihad. Western leaders who treat ceasefires as endpoints are reading from a script Tehran discarded in 1979.
This is why military and counterterrorism successes of the past two years are insufficient. Israel and the United States can degrade Iran’s nuclear program, dismantle Hezbollah's command, and sever Hamas’s spine, but if they do not also confront the ideological war Tehran has been waging inside Western institutions and the political and public discourses, the regime will reconstitute its influence faster than the West can reconstitute its own moral and strategic clarity. The Mamdani mayoralty in New York is the Red-Green Alliance’s canary in the coal mine: a committed Islamic socialist winning America’s largest city through the same intersectional playbook Tehran has been writing since the communist Tudeh party stood with Grand Ayatollah Khomeini 47 years ago.
The lesson of October 7 is what Israel’s enemies have been teaching us since 1979: they are prosecuting a forever war. The West must finally internalize that the main battlefield is ideological. Naming the threat is the precondition for winning the war and ensuring security and freedom for Israel, the Arab Muslim Middle East, and the U.S.-led Western alliance.
Dr. Dan Diker is President of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, former Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress, and a Research Fellow of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism at Reichman University.