For decades, coercive campaigns against Iran have rested on the assumption that sufficient economic pain would eventually force political surrender. That assumption has been repeatedly confounded. This article argues that coercive statecraft carries implicit assumptions about political time, and that the Islamic Republic developed a politics of endurance designed to contest them. Rooted in the Iran–Iraq War and deepened through decades of sanctions adaptation, this politics of endurance worked not through passive survival, but through active contestation of the coercer’s time horizons. However, it preserved the revolutionary system rather than Iran as a country: the costs fell disproportionately on Iranian society. Military strikes launched in 2025–26 and the deadliest state crackdown since the 1979 revolution pose the sharpest test yet of whether a system built to endure can also renew and stabilise itself over time.

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