For nearly half a century, Washington has treated the Islamic Republic primarily as a problem to be managed: Contain its nuclear ambitions, deter its proxies, sanction its institutions, disrupt terrorist networks, and periodically negotiate when escalation appears dangerous. That framework is increasingly inadequate. The more consequential national-security question is no longer simply how the United States should deal with the Islamic Republic while it survives, but what political and security landscape will emerge if the system begins to disintegrate.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Washington — now led by the Trump administration — still has not fully absorbed one of the central lessons of modern national security: Political Islamism is not merely a regional ideology; when institutionalized by a state, it can become an engine of transnational instability.

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Iran’s catastrophe was produced by an especially destructive historical convergence. The revolution of 1979 brought together two ideological currents that otherwise appeared irreconcilable: Revolutionary Islamism, ultimately dominated by Khomeinism, and radical currents profoundly influenced by Marxism, anti-capitalism, and Third World revolutionary politics. Their alliance did not survive intact, but their combined assault on Iran’s previous political and social order helped create the revolutionary environment from which the Islamic Republic emerged. The collision of revolutionary Islamism and communist-inspired radicalism helped devastate Iran; over time, the world discovered that the political theology of the revolutionary Shiite cleric could prove at least as destabilizing as the revolutionary doctrines once associated with Marx and Engels.

Khomeinism subsequently attempted something far larger than governing Iran. It sought to transform Shiite political identity into a revolutionary project transcending national borders. The........

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