On April 21, a week after Iran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met with his military commanders to gloat. The assault had failed to cause much damage in Israel, but Khamenei claimed victory and tried to give it a patriotic color.

“What matters most,” he said, “is the emergence of the will of the Iranian nation and Iran’s military forces in an important international arena.”

Such national chest-thumping is to be expected from any head of state. But something stood out about the Iranian attacks that made this nationalist reading suspect. Technically speaking, the strikes had been carried out not by Iran’s military but by a militia, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization whose name doesn’t even include Iran: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The IRGC’s Aerospace Force, one of its six divisions, was what fired 300 drones and missiles at Israel.

This is not some bureaucratic “fun fact.” Rather, it illustrates a fundamental truth about Iran: the duality of its institutions, many of which are explicitly defined to be autonomous of both the nation and the state. That duality, in turn, leads to much  head-scratching and confusion about Iran. Is the Islamic Republic a rational and potentially pragmatic actor, like most other nation-states, or is it an ideologically motivated actor, bent on pursuing mayhem in support of its goals?

The charged nature of Washington debate about Iran often leads partisans to give simple, binary answers to this question. But those who follow Iran more closely realize that the dilemma has produced a tough, protracted battle within the regime itself. In 2006, a journalist asked Henry Kissinger about the future of Iranian-American relations. The doyen of American strategy responded, “Iran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause. If a nation, it must realize that its national interest doesn’t conflict with ours. If the Iranian concern is security and development of their country, this is compatible with American interests.”

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

Khamenei, the man who holds ultimate power in today’s Iran, has himself been inconsistent on this point. He is after all not just Iran’s commander in chief but also a revolutionary in chief who heads the Axis of Resistance, an international coalition of anti-West and anti-Israel militias.

Not all Iranians are happy to lend their nation-state to such a coalition. Thus a continuous battle rages, in Iran’s society and its establishment, not only over what Iran’s foreign policy should be, but over the more fundamental question of whom it should serve. Should it be the vehicle for the pursuit of Iran’s national interests—or of an Islamist revolutionary agenda that knows no borders?

The IRGC is an instrument of the latter conception. That Iran is nowhere in its title is no accident: The IRGC was formed in 1979 from a variety of Islamist militias, precisely because the revolutionaries who had just overthrown the monarchy didn’t trust traditional institutions, such as Iran’s powerful military, and wanted to serve goals beyond Iran’s borders. The IRGC’s founders saw themselves as loyal first and foremost to the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who couldn’t have been more explicit about rejecting Iranian nationalism in favor of a transnational revolutionary Islamism.

Doing so meant reorienting Iran’s foreign policy entirely. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran had maintained ties with Israel as well as its Arab neighbors, even proposing to mediate between them. The monarchy had christened Iran’s position a “national independent policy” and positioned Iran as Western-leaning but nonaligned, touting the country’s long and proud tradition as a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations.

Khomeini wanted both to do away with this tradition and to burnish his credentials as an international revolutionary leader. He began by fully embracing the anti-Israeli cause, declaring the last Friday of the month of Ramadan to be Quds (Jerusalem) Day, an occasion for global rallies in opposition to the Jewish state. In a televised message on Quds Day 1980, Khomeini stated forcefully: “Nationally minded people are of no use to us. We want Muslim people. Islam opposes nationality.”

As Islamist revolutionaries took over Iran and built their Islamic Republic, some envisaged erasing Iran’s national identity altogether. A faction close to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi dreamed of fusing Iran and Libya into a new revolutionary state. A cleric took a group of goons to vandalize the tomb of Ferdowsi, Iran’s cherished medieval national poet, near Mashhad. Many regime leaders were openly contemptuous of pre-Islamic Iranian traditions, even the single most important one: the Iranian new year, or Nowruz. In 1981, Khomeini explicitly asked Iranians not to put much emphasis on “their so-called Nowruz.”

But Khomeini’s radicalism soon collided with reality. Few people anywhere would willingly give up their national identity; Iranians are famously patriotic, and for them, the demand was a nonstarter. Nowruz would stay, as would Ferdowsi’s tomb. But the battle over whether revolutionary Iran would behave as a nation or as an Islamist cause never ceased.

When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, masses of Iranians mobilized to defend their country, in what was clearly a patriotic effort. Former pilots of the Shah’s imperial armies were released from prison to fly sorties. From his exile, the recently overthrown crown prince offered to come back to join the armed forces (he was denied). Iran’s war dead included many non-Muslims—Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha’is. And yet, Khomeini conceived of the war not as one of national defense but as a “holy war” to spread the revolution.

Iran liberated all of its territory from Iraqi forces in 1982, but Khomeini declared that the war had to go on “until all sedition has been eliminated from the world.” He sent Iranian forces into Iraq, where they kept pushing for six more futile years, until at last he accepted a UN-mandated cease-fire in 1988. That same year, Iran reestablished diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. By the time Khomeini died, in 1989, the country appeared to be setting a more moderate course, even shedding its internationalist revolutionary pretensions.

Shadi Hamid: The reason Iran turned out to be so repressive

Whether it would really do so would be up to Khomeini’s successor. Khamenei was a hard-line revolutionary activist, known for translating into Persian the works of Sayyid Qutb, the notorious ideologue of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. But he owed his ascent to the leadership in part to the new president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose pragmatism many thought would rub off on Khamenei as well. Rafsanjani came to represent something of an Iranian Deng Xiaoping, more interested in technocracy than in ideological purity.

The alliance turned out to be one of convenience, and from the 1990s to 2010s, Iran became the scene of a ferocious struggle among three broad factions: conservatives led by Khamenei, reformists (led by Mohammad Khatami, who would succeed Rafsanjani as president in 1997) who wanted to democratize, and centrists (led by Rafsanjani) who wished to maintain the closed political system but make the country’s foreign policy less ideological and more practical. As Khamenei sought to strengthen his faction against the other two, he realized that the IRGC was his best cudgel. He used it to repress and exclude from power both the reformists and the centrists. Khamenei extended the state’s largesse to his allies in the militia as it pursued its most ambitious project: that of building up an Axis of Resistance in the region, including groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shiite militias.

With the help of these proxies, the IRGC conducted a campaign of terror against its ideological enemies, Israel above all. It helped bomb Israel’s embassy in 1992 and, two years later, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The latter action killed 85 people, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. Starting in 2003, wars and crises in the Middle East allowed the Axis to spread and strengthen—and, as it did so, to capture Iran’s regional foreign policy.

Khamenei understood that the rise of the IRGC’s regional power risked dangerously isolating Tehran and putting it on a collision course with Washington. And so he attempted to balance out the IRGC’s radicalism by giving some ground to the pragmatism of the centrists who favored ties with the West. Hassan Rouhani, a Rafsanjani acolyte, was elected president in 2013 with a popular mandate to conduct direct negotiations with the West over Iran’s nuclear program. He and his U.S.-educated foreign minister, Javad Zarif, had the support of both reformists and centrists. They bitterly opposed the IRGC, and the militia in turn opposed their talks with the United States.

The Rouhani government finally inked a deal with the United States and five other powerful countries in 2015, only for it to be thrown out three years later by President Donald Trump. The anti-IRGC coalition was severely weakened, and Khamenei swung heavily in the other direction—which better fit with his own politics in any case.

The long-lasting battle over Iran’s foreign policy has now been largely settled in favor of the octogenarian supreme leader and his allies. Since 2020, only pro-Khamenei conservatives have been permitted to run for office in major elections. The IRGC openly operates Iranian embassies in most of the Middle East, and ideological commitments, rather than national interest, drive Iranian foreign policy. This turn is most evident in Iran’s shameful support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which only makes sense as an expression of Khamenei’s anti-Western zeal. In fact, Khamenei’s men have broken with the country’s traditional nonalignment by repeatedly favoring ties with China, Russia, and North Korea. The facade of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran is still emblazoned with the revolutionary slogan “Neither Western nor Eastern”—but pro-Khamenei foreign-policy hands now speak of a “Look East” policy to justify their new orientation.

Khamenei never made the transition from Islamist activist to Iranian statesman. Having hijacked the Iranian nation for a cause, he hitched its fortunes to those of militias that wreak havoc in every country where they operate. With the IRGC's attacks on Israel, he has now put the country on the path to a war most Iranians neither want nor can afford. Having just turned 85 years old, Khamenei has lost the respect of most Iranians and even many establishment figures. Iran is worse today in every single way than it was 20 years ago: socially repressed, politically closed, diplomatically isolated, and economically destroyed.

Many Iranians are now simply waiting for the leader to die. His cause-centered foreign policy has brought only disaster. Those who want Iran to once more act like a nation are politically marginalized, but in a post-Khamenei Iran, they will fight for a country that pursues its national interests, including peace with its neighbors and the world.

Joe Biden has an Israel problem. According to recent polls, more than half and as much as two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how he’s handled the conflict in Gaza. In a February primary in Michigan, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” after critics urged voters to protest his Israel policies. Democratic donors have warned the president that his support for the Israeli operation could cost him in November’s election.

Will it? Most academics and pollsters tend to be skeptical that foreign policy can swing elections. Americans almost always care more about domestic issues than international ones. Their views on foreign events tend to be weakly held and malleable: Voters will typically align them to match those of their party or favorite candidate. Their opinions may be more solid when American lives are at stake, but that’s not the case in Gaza.

This year, however, may be different. Or maybe Israel is different. Because even the academics and pollsters are saying that the war in Gaza could be electorally significant in 2024, in a way that other international issues—including the conflict in Ukraine—will probably not be.

“I think Gaza could matter for a number of reasons,” Michael Tesler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, told me. The war, he explained, had produced a powerful brew of political forces—all of which bode ill for Democrats.

It is a divisive issue within the party, which is home to both dedicated pro-Palestine constituencies and committed pro-Israel ones. It is prominent enough, across news platforms and social media, that people are thinking about the conflict when they focus on current affairs and politics. For many younger progressives, protesting against Israel has become part of a fight for social justice: To them, the Palestinian cause is tied up with such domestic issues as racial discrimination.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]

The war in Gaza has also helped create a perception that Biden is hapless. The conflict is a humanitarian catastrophe that the White House has been unable to stop, leaving millions of American voters frustrated with the president. It compounds perceptions that the United States is losing its international position. A majority of American voters now have a poor estimation of Washington’s global standing under Biden’s leadership.

These electoral hazards are amplified by the fact that the contest is likely to be close. In 2016, Donald Trump’s winning margin was so tight that the combined 77,744 additional voters from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who chose him could fit in MetLife Stadium. In 2020, Joe Biden eked out his Electoral College advantage by wins in three swing states that totaled fewer than 45,000 votes. Most national polls now have Biden and Trump effectively tied. In this context, one can easily imagine Gaza moving enough ballots to determine the 2024 election—even if it shifts only a percentage point or two of the vote.

“There’s enough there to cause the White House to be worried,” Andrew Payne, a political scientist at City, University of London, told me.

The conventional wisdom is that voters care more about pocketbook issues at home than about what’s happening overseas, a view largely confirmed by the findings of major pollsters such as Pew and Gallup. According to those who study this field, foreign policy is likely to have even less influence in an era of hyper-partisan polarization because voters tend not to cast ballots for candidates from a different party even if they dislike some of their own candidate’s positions.

“Elections matter much more to foreign policy than foreign policy matters to elections,” Payne said, describing the default.

But the supremacy of domestic issues is not an iron law. A meta-analysis published in the 2006 Annual Review of Political Science concluded that voters held “reasonably sensible and nuanced views” on international topics and that their opinions “help shape their political behaviors.” More recent research supports that conclusion. In 2019, a group of political scientists recruited thousands of Americans and asked them to choose between hypothetical presidential candidates with a mix of international, economic, and religious positions, as well as with different partisan affiliations. The researchers found that participants were just as likely to select the candidate they agreed with most on international policies as they were the candidate they agreed with most on domestic matters. Perhaps more telling, the researchers found as well that “Democrats and Republicans were also willing to cross party lines on the basis of foreign policy.”

[Ronald Brownstein: Gaza is dividing Democrats]

Not all international issues carry equal weight, of course. But when an issue is prominent enough that Americans tune in and have a defined opinion, it can make a difference. The Iran-hostage crisis bedeviled President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 reelection bid, and Ronald Reagan got significant mileage out of casting Carter as soft on communism. Foreign policy can certainly hobble parties if it divides them. In 1968, a split between Democratic progressives and centrists over the Vietnam War harmed their nominee, Herbert Humphrey, in what was a narrowly decided contest for the White House. In 2016, Trump made trade a major campaign issue, driving a wedge between many working-class, anti-free-trade Democrats and the party’s pro-globalization elite.

Candidates can lose despite foreign-policy triumphs. Voters in 1992 did not reward George H. W. Bush with a second term even though he had overseen the resounding defeat of Saddam Hussein by U.S.-led coalition forces in the Gulf War. By the same token, candidates can win despite international blunders. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a morass by the time of his 2004 reelection bid, and he nonetheless prevailed. But the war still exacted an electoral cost. According to a 2007 study by two professors at UC Berkeley, the losses taken by U.S. forces deprived Bush of roughly 2 percent of the vote. Without that bloodshed, the authors wrote, “Bush would have swept to a decisive victory,” instead of a narrow win.

As the 2008 election loomed, about one in three voters told Gallup that they rated the Iraq War as “extremely important”—and the explicitly anti-war Senator Barack Obama won both his party’s nomination and the presidential election in that cycle. His victory helped show that, although very few people vote on international topics alone, foreign problems can acquire a domestic quasi-significance.

Gaza could be another moment when a foreign conflict has major domestic repercussions. Several academics have told me that, in their view, liberals who disapprove of Biden’s approach to the conflict will still ultimately turn out for him: Americans do not typically vote according to a single issue, and stopping Trump is a powerful motivator for even strong critics of Israel. But plenty of more left-leaning Americans were disenchanted with Biden before the war in Gaza broke out. For these voters, the conflict could be a tipping point. “They might not show [up],” Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at MIT and the author of In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion From World War II to Iraq, told me.

Biden might be able to increase his support among such voters by taking a harder line against Israel. The Democratic Party appears to be growing rapidly more pro-Palestine than pro-Israel. According to a Quinnipiac poll last month, 48 percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians, while 21 percent sympathized more with the Israelis. This represents an almost perfect reversal from October 17, shortly after the bloody Hamas attack on Israel, when 48 percent sympathized more with Israelis and 22 percent sympathized more with Palestinians.

The trend suggests a logic for Biden to make such a pivot. “Biden will need to cobble together every vote of the last coalition to win,” Dina Smeltz, a senior fellow on public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council, told me.

But the president’s party is still starkly divided over the war in a way that the Republican Party isn’t. The issue may not have reached the level of divisiveness that Vietnam had for the Democratic Party in 1968, but as the momentum of controversial campus protests picks up, the parallel grows stronger. “It’s a great wedge issue for Republicans,” Tesler told me.

[David Frum: The plot to wreck the Democratic convention]

Party divisions are not the only way that Gaza could undermine Biden. According to research by Jeffrey Friedman, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, presidential candidates benefit from looking muscular on international issues. In 1960, the then-candidate John F. Kennedy proposed an enormous military buildup, even though polls showed that just 22 percent of voters thought defense spending was too low. Afterward, he steadily gained ground with voters concerned with issues of war and peace.

Weaker-seeming candidates can try to shift conversations away from international issues, but unfortunately for Biden, the war in Gaza will make that hard. And as unpopular as Biden’s approach is, he appears reluctant to gamble on a major shift and is unlikely to do so. He might benefit politically if the United States was able to press successfully for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, getting the conflict out of public discourse and showing that the U.S. has some leverage and authority. But if U.S. pressure failed, Biden might come off as even more ineffectual.  

Although Trump has some isolationist instincts, he is adept at projecting strength in a way that voters associate with American power. Meanwhile, poll after poll suggests that voters see Biden as weak—his job approval on foreign policy is some 10 points lower than Trump’s during his presidency—and the specter of wider conflict in the Middle East is unlikely to change that.

“It reinforces perceptions that the world is in crisis,” Friedman told me. “And generally speaking, when voters feel that there is a crisis, they are much more inclined to vote for candidates they see as strong.”