As the dust settles across Iran after two weeks of Israeli and American air strikes, fear and panic will turn to anger. How could Iran, a country of 90 million people, rich with oil and gas, heir to a great civilisation and empire, be so weak? The responsibility lies with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader since 1989, who has steered away from every off-ramp that the Iranian people have offered him over the last 36 years to transform the country from an international pariah to a normal nation, where Iranians can live normal lives. Now at the end of his life and his reign, Khamenei may well have to accept responsibility for the catastrophic failures of the Islamic Republic.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, many thought that the ‘thermidor’ of the Iranian Revolution had arrived. Mercifully, Khomeini was an old man when he came to power. After his decade of rule many hoped that he would take his regime’s Islamic fundamentalism and violent anti-Americanism with him to the grave. He had transformed a once prosperous and powerful country into a global pariah. The Tehran hostage crisis and the eight-year Iran-Iraq War had devastated the country’s economy and exhausted the country’s revolutionary fervour. Iran’s prisons were full of revolutionaries of various political stripes who had once hailed Khomeini as their leader, only to discover the age-old truth that the revolution eats its own children.

To get the country out of this quagmire, Iranians turned to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the consummate pragmatist who saw himself as Iran’s answer to Deng Xiaoping. Rafsanjani had been behind the secret arms deals with Israel and the United States in the Iran-Contra scandal. His two terms as president, from 1989 to 1997, would be a period of reconstruction at home and détente with the West. Rafsanjani was no dove. He ordered assassinations of dissidents abroad and restarted the Shah’s mothballed nuclear programme. At the same time, however, Iran’s economy recovered and the country seemed to have turned a corner.

Iranians hoped that the Islamic Republic would start to act like a normal country, pursuing its rational national interests, rather than Khomeini’s Orwellian nightmare. What they craved was peaceful reform and openness to the world. In 1997 they overwhelmingly elected Mohammad Khatami, a modernist cleric who called for liberalisation at home and détente with the United States, as president. For a moment it seemed the Tehran Spring had arrived. It was not to be. From the moment that Khatami took office, Khamenei and the hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) violently thwarted every one of his domestic and foreign policy initiatives. Iranian voters had offered Khamenei a peaceful path to reform, and the supreme leader had rejected it. Khamenei would not allow Khatami to be Iran’s Gorbachev. The Islamic Republic would not suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union.

Khamenei’s hubris reached its peak in the years after the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The removal of two of Iran’s historic enemies – Saddam Hussein and the Taliban – opened the door to Iranian influence across the region. When the Iranian electorate gave Khamenei yet another opportunity in the 2009 presidential elections to back peaceful reform by electing Mir-Hossein Mousavi, he again thwarted their ambitions by supporting the conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the face of massive protests against election rigging, Khamenei put Mousavi under house arrest and instituted a brutal security state that continues today.

The Arab Spring of 2011, to which the Islamic Republic was a bystander, only seemed to fuel Khamenei’s hubris. As one Arab leader after another fell, Iranian influence stretched from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to Sanaa. Overconfidence invited yet another crisis. Ahmadinejad’s calls for Israel to ‘vanish from the page of time’, his calamitous economic mismanagement at home, and crippling international sanctions all brought the country to the brink of disaster. Again, the Iranian people offered Khamenei an off-ramp. Despite their deep scepticism, they turned out to vote for Hassan Rowhani, a pragmatist protégé of Rafsanjani, to pursue détente with the West and return economic stability to the country. He did both, including reaching the 2015 nuclear deal with the West.

The Iranian people’s reprieve was short-lived. Donald Trump’s decision to rip up the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 and impose ‘maximum pressure’ was a hint of what was to come. Filled with hubris following the IRGC’s victory over the Islamic State in Iraq, Khamenei went on the offensive against American interests in the region. The IRGC launched a series of provocative attacks that culminated in the destruction of key ARAMCO facilities in September 2019, which cut Saudi oil production in half and roiled oil markets.

Trump responded by assassinating General Qassim Soleimani, the head of Iran’s expeditionary forces in the Middle East. The world was shocked. No American president had been willing to risk plunging the Middle East into another regional war. Trump had no such qualms. Khamenei’s response was more repression at home to safeguard his regime. He imposed Ebrahim Raisi, a murderous yes-man, on Iranians as their president in 2021. Khamenei would no longer tolerate even the pretence of contested elections. The Iranian people and their wishes were irrelevant. The anger and frustration of young Iranians, who saw no future for themselves in Khamanei’s Iran, burst into the open with the nation-wide protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.

Another crisis has now come for Khamenei, this time on Iran’s own territory at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s evisceration of Hezbollah and the fall of Bashar Assad removed Khamenei’s leverage over Israel. The billions that he has spent in Lebanon and Syria have been wasted. Iran’s airspace is a playground for Israeli jets and drones. The country’s nuclear industry lies in ruins. The responsibility lies squarely with Ali Khamenei. He has spurned every opportunity that the Iranian people have given him for peaceful change. His hubris has finally brought war to the Iranian homeland.

It remains to be seen if, once again, moderates and pragmatists like President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi can save Khamenei from this latest crisis. Nor is it clear if the new commanders of the IRGC (their predecessors are dead) will continue to take their orders from the 86-year-old supreme leader. What is certain is that, however much longer he has left in power, Khamenei is now an enormous liability for a hated regime that will try to appeal to Iranian nationalism to save itself. Khamenei’s day of reckoning may finally have arrived.