Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, made a rare appearance at Friday Prayers in Tehran on 4 October. It was his first sermon in four years. The last followed the assassination of IRGC Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani on 2020. Now, as then, the intention was to reassure and stiffen the resolve of a no doubt anxious population.

It has been a bad few months for the Islamic Republic. The assassination of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, at the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was followed by the catastrophic security failure that led to some 4,000 Hizbollah pagers being booby trapped and then the death of its leader, Hasan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike. Nasrallah’s death was the highest profile of a number of targeted killings that have decimated the Hizbollah leadership and dramatically breached Iran’s strategic ‘ring of fire’ around Israel.

Quite how Iran might respond is a matter of some conjecture. Its options have become more limited by the day, and the famed ‘strategic patience’ that characterised the response to Haniyeh’s death no longer seems feasible. Hardliners in the regime argued, not without reason, that the Islamic Republic was not only being made to look weak, but foolish, and some response was required. For the Iranian leadership, convinced Iran is a great power on the make, it is imperative that something had to be done. Such are the burdens of power.

The only viable option for Iran was to repeat the missile strike that occurred in April. Aware of the previous attempt’s limited impact, Khamenei had even reassured his commanders that it was the ‘taking part that counted’. There was much jingoism at the time from the regime and its supporters who forecasted that the April attack was a taster for more serious actions that could follow. If many Iranians were anxious about the leaderships’ enthusiasm for war this does not appear to have deflected its personnel. The time for the follow up attack had arrived.

A repeat of April’s performance would risk much for no real impact on Israel’s capacity for action, however. Too much would risk a full throttled retaliation complete with US support. As with last time this, the missile launch on 1 October was meant to be punitive strike that, above all, would sound the right note.

Therefore, learning from past errors, out went the drones and instead Iran launched a more substantive missile attack on Tuesday – some 180 missiles, including some of the latest in Iran’s inventory, though perhaps not the ‘hyper-sonic’ missiles it has long claimed to possess. There was a less obvious telegraphing of intent and the window between the signal and the launch of the missiles was considerably shorter. Indeed, Iran didn’t even shut its own airspace and some civilian flights were caught unawares. After a few hours, Iran’s foreign minister proclaimed the mission complete and the episode over.

The respective spin rooms, on social media and elsewhere, went into overdrive discussing the consequences of this latest performance with the Iranians triumphantly proclaiming victory and the Israelis pointedly noting that the one casualty was a Palestinian by-stander in Jericho who had the misfortune of missile debris landing on him.

Relatively few of the missiles that did make it hit their targets, and still fewer hit anything consequential. One airbase was struck but not anywhere near the aircraft, while the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv appears to have been missed by 500m. Iran’s missiles are not high precision and it’s only option was to launch ever more in the hope that this will compensate for their variable quality.

The revolutionary regime in Iran is not known for its realistic appraisal of the political environment it inhabits. It tends to exaggerate its own strengths and diminish those of its rivals. Convinced that the ‘West’ is on the verge of some sort of collapse it has double downed on a series of miscalculations that are poorly disguised by the overbearing bombast that all too frequently accompanies it.

If there are many in the West who sympathise with the plight of the Palestinians, this is not a sentiment that extends to Hizbollah, a paramilitary force that is hated across much of the Arab world, to say nothing of the United States. Launching a missile strike in defence of Hizbollah has opened up Iran to a retaliation that many are only too happy to endorse. Iran has unwittingly changed the rules of a game it frequently flouts but expects the West to adhere to.

This is the more dangerous environment that Iran now faces, and which prompted Khamenei’s appearance at Friday Prayers. If his appearance was intended to reassure, his words will have done little to calm fears. Calling for Islamic unity and urging fellow Muslims to wake up to the threat before it was too late, this was a sermon directed at the Arab street, large portions of which were delivered in a language – Arabic – that few attendees in Tehran would have understood. Reiterating his uncompromising stance on the illegality of the state of Israel, Khameini sought to justify Iran’s actions and those of the ‘axis of resistance’. There was little on offer to the people of Iran who seemed of marginal importance to the Muslim ‘umma’ that Khamenei aspired to lead. It was a curious speech, characteristically bombastic, but underlain by a deep seam of anxiety.