A year of conflict in the Middle East has destroyed the foreign-policy approach of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His strategy was always implausible, but its collapse has led Iran to the brink of its first international war since 1988.

What I like to call the Khamenei Doctrine—those close to him have variously dubbed it “strategic patience” or, more to the point, “no peace, no war”—rests on a duality that has remained constant through Khamenei’s 35 years in power. Iran refuses any public dealings with Israel, clamoring instead for the Jewish state’s destruction and surrounding it with Arab militias that seek to destroy it. Iranian officials deny the Holocaust and chant “Death to America” at events and ceremonies. And yet, at no point does Khamenei intend to get into a direct conflict with Israel or the United States—because he knows very well that such a confrontation could be fatal for his regime.

So what is the point of holding this contradictory posture? Khamenei is a true fanatic. He forged his beliefs as a revolutionary in the 1960s, when he read Sayyid Qutb and Mao Zedong. But he isn’t blind or stupid. Rather, he is patient and pragmatic. He appears to have accepted that his dream of destroying Israel won’t be realized in his lifetime, but he remains ideologically committed to it as a long-term goal for Islamists across generations. He has declared that Israel won’t exist in 2040—a year he will see only if he lives to be more than 100. But he seeks to advance the cause to the extent he can, building the strength of Israel’s enemies, and then handing off the task to his successors.

Khamenei knows that his extreme worldview is not popular among most Iranians, or even among much of the country’s ruling elite. And so he adjusts the institutional balance among the Islamic Republic’s various political factions, using the competition among them to gain breathing space when necessary, but never wavering from his objectives.

He makes international adjustments with similar strategic caution. He pursued the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers to alleviate the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran. But during the negotiations, Iran made clear that its support for regional militias, and its anti-Israeli and anti-American orientation, was nonnegotiable. Iran would talk only about its nuclear program, despite the concerns that Western negotiators expressed over Iran’s “regional behavior.” Then President Donald Trump tore up the deal in 2018 and brought a policy of maximum pressure to bear on the Islamic Republic. Khamenei delivered his response in a sermon in 2019: “There will be no war, and we won’t negotiate.” He was referring to the United States, but the phrase was an apt summary of his approach to Israel as well.

From the point of view of many Iranians, Khamenei’s policies have been disastrous, bringing international isolation, economic ruin, and political repression. But for his own purposes, before October 7, 2023, the leader might have seen his policy as a great success.

When Khamenei ascended to power in 1989, most of the region’s Arab states had long since given up the fight against Israel; Khamenei picked up the anti-Zionist mantle and made Iran the sole supplier for anti-Israeli militias across the region. He built a so-called Axis of Resistance, uniting armed groups in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to shoot at Israel, call for its destruction, and occasionally skirmish with U.S. forces in the region. All of this was a win for Islamist internationalism. In the service of that agenda, Khamenei has shown little compunction about sacrificing Iran’s potential as a country for its nearly 90 million inhabitants.

But the Khamenei Doctrine was always untenable, and the events of the past year have shown why. The strategy—build up anti-Israeli forces incrementally, without getting into a direct confrontation—required a certain adroitness. At times, Khamenei has had to restrain the Axis forces with calls for prudence. And the Axis is itself a problem—unwieldy, sometimes insubordinate, and unpopular at home and abroad.

[Read: Iran’s proxies are out of control]

Most of the Axis militias are Shiite (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are the exceptions), and some have participated in the region’s sectarian civil wars, which claimed thousands of Sunni Muslim victims—Iraqis, Syrians, and Palestinians. For this reason, not even anti-Israeli populations in the region are unreservedly enthusiastic about the Axis. Within Iran, meanwhile, Khamenei has a hard time selling his animus against Israel to a populace that largely does not share it, and that holds him to account for problems closer to home. When Iranians rise up against their regime—as they did in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022—they often use slogans that signal their displeasure with Iran’s support for the Axis. Probably the best-known is “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, I give my life to Iran!”

The October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed at first looked like a gift to Khamenei. The conflict would foreclose the possibility of a Saudi rapprochement with Israel and disrupt what Israelis had taken to calling their “growing circle of peace” with Arab countries (Khamenei has long sought to prevent such normalization). But a year later, Khamenei’s doctrine has never looked weaker. Iran and its Axis claim to be the defenders of the Palestinian cause—but they have so far avoided directly intervening in a war that they themselves call “genocide.” At the beginning of the conflict, Iranian hard-liners expressed anger that Tehran was not joining the fight. “Children die under rubble while our missiles rot in their silos,” tweeted a well-known anchor on Iranian state television. Hezbollah, some regional analysts grumbled, was being held back by Iranians consumed by their own narrow interests.

In April, Israel attacked an Iranian consular building in Damascus, and Iran finally did what it had not done in its entire history: It fired missiles and drones directly at Israel. Far from being deterred, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has since only upped the pressure on the Islamic Republic, killing Iranian and Axis commanders wherever it can and intensifying the war in Lebanon. It is pummeling Hezbollah with special intensity, killing dozens of its top commanders, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and, most probably, his would-be successor, Hashem Safieddine. After much reticence, Khamenei launched another round of missile attacks on October 1. And Israel has vowed to retaliate.

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Khamenei has thus brought his country to the brink of a war that he has long sought to simultaneously suggest and avoid. Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based security expert who supported the Iranian attacks in April and October, assured me that Iran was prepared for whatever force Israel might bring to bear. The country has readied itself with “all of its defense capabilities” on alert, he said; it has invested in domestic air defenses and acquired Russian-made S300 surface-to-air missile systems. Still, Najafi conceded that Iran’s size will make it difficult to defend. Other experts I spoke with took a bleaker view. “It is not clear how Tehran can climb out of this situation,” Mojtaba Dehghani, an Iranian expert with a close understanding of the regime elites, told me. “They are not ready for this war.”

Many in the Iranian opposition argue that Tehran should stop stoking hostilities with Israel and the United States and prioritize economic development instead. The stipulation is found in most opposition political platforms, including those of leftist groups, many of which support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Dehghani agrees with the demand and thinks that some in the regime leadership might concur. But he says that such a big “paradigm shift” will be difficult to pull off with Khamenei still in power. The leader is 85, and no one really knows who will succeed him, or whether that succession will bring in new outlooks and commitments; such uncertainty complicates planning for anything beyond the visible horizon.

In the meantime, Khamenei holds his nation hostage to a doctrine that courts the conflict it also seeks to avoid. Iran needs to make a historic shift if it is to avert a disastrous war that few Iranians want—and begin building a better future instead.

Iran’s attack on Israel yesterday evoked a sense of déjà vu. On April 13, too, Iran targeted Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones—at that time marking a first-ever in the history of the two countries. The latest strikes were notably similar: more show than effect, resulting in few casualties (April’s injured only a young Arab Israeli girl, and today’s killed a Palestinian worker in Jericho, West Bank). No Israeli civilians were hurt in either attack, although it’s likely that Iran’s use of more sophisticated missiles brought about greater damage this time.

Now, as then, my sources suggest that Iran has no appetite for getting into a war and hopes for this to be the end of hostilities. And yet, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to take the risk. In the past month, Iran has had to watch while Israel made quick work of destroying Hezbollah’s command structure and killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Tehran was fast losing face, and Khamenei apparently made up his mind to shore up his anti-Israel credibility. History will show how consequential this decision was.

Shortly after the missile barrage, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced that Iran had made a “big mistake” and would “pay for it.” Israel’s dedicated X account echoed this threat in Persian. The former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called on Netanyahu to attack Iran’s nuclear and energy sites, claiming that this could lead Iranians to rise up and bring down their regime at last. Israel has had no better chance in half a century to change the region fundamentally, Bennett said.

[Read: Iranians don’t want a war with Israel]

This is a terrifying moment for Iran. Khamenei has long pursued what he calls a “no peace, no war” strategy: Iran supports regional militias opposed to Western interests and the Jewish state but avoids actually getting into a war. The approach was always untenable. But Iran is not ready for an all-out war: Its economically battered society does not share its leaders’ animus toward Israel, and its military capabilities don’t even begin to match Israel’s sophisticated arsenal. Iran lacks significant air-defense capabilities on its own, and Russia has not leapt to complement them.

“We don’t have a fucking air force,” a source in Tehran close to the Iranian military told me, under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Of the attack on Israel, he said,  “I don’t know what they are thinking.”

Iran’s diplomats have said that the attacks were an exercise of self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran targeted “solely military and security sites” that Israel was using to attack Gaza and Lebanon (an odd fit for ‘self-defense’ claims since neither of these are Iranian territory). He added that Iran had waited for two months “to give space for a cease-fire in Gaza,” and that it now deemed the matter “concluded.” Other regime figures have contributed more bluster. “We could have turned Tel Aviv and Haifa to rubble, but we didn’t,” said Ahmad Vahidi, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force. “If Israel makes a mistake, we might change our decision and turn Tel Aviv into rubble overnight.”

For Israel, a war is worth avoiding for strategic reasons. “Israel has no choice but to retaliate,” Yonatan Touval, a senior policy analyst at Mitvim, a Tel Aviv–based liberal-leaning foreign-policy think tank, told me. But the Axis of Resistance is on its back foot, and for this reason, he said, Israel has a stake in not escalating: “Israel should ensure that, whatever it does, it does not reinforce an alliance that is remarkably, and against all odds, in tatters.”

In the past couple of weeks, Israel’s blitzkrieg actions against Hezbollah have neutralized Iran’s most potent threat—that of Hamas and Hezbollah missiles pointing at Israel from two directions. Some observers have compared the moment to 1967, when Israel decisively defeated Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. Israel seemingly holds all the cards; it could still choose to “take the win,” as President Joe Biden urged Netanyahu to do back in April, and carve a new place for itself in the region through diplomacy. In one sign of the possibility for goodwill, in October as in April, Arab states such as Jordan intercepted some of the Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.

But Biden has remained strangely silent for the past two days, and one wonders whom Netanyahu is listening to now.