The latest round of the Israel-Iran war is over, and the immediate outcome appears decisive. In just 12 days, Israel eliminated the leadership of Iran’s military, air force, and intelligence agency; bombed the country’s nuclear sites; and took out dozens of missiles and launchers on the ground before they could be used. Iran, by contrast, was unable to take down a single Israeli jet, and was reduced to firing decreasing volleys of ballistic missiles at Israel’s population centers, killing 27 civilians and one 18-year-old soldier at home with his family. All active-duty military deaths were on the Iranian side.

Israel’s achievements were made possible by their stunning intelligence penetration of the Iranian regime’s highest ranks. In the first hours of the conflict, Mossad agents reportedly launched drones from inside Iranian territory to neutralize air defenses, and lured much of Iran’s top brass to a supposedly secret bunker that was then pummeled by Israeli forces. These early coups enabled Israel to achieve air dominance over Iran, a country some 1,500 miles away. To understand how the regime’s leaders could have failed so utterly to suss out Israeli spooks, one needs to understand another time when Israel was alleged to have taken control of Tehran’s skies.

In the summer of 2018, Iran was experiencing a drought. This is not an uncommon occurrence in the Middle East and would not have made international news if not for the response of a regime functionary, who blamed the weather on Israel. “The changing climate in Iran is suspect,” Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali said at a press conference. “Israel and another country in the region have joint teams which work to ensure clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release rain.” He went on to accuse the Jewish state of “cloud and snow theft.”

This story seems like a silly bit of trivia until one realizes that Jalali was also the head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization, tasked with combating sabotage. In other words, a key person in charge of thwarting Israeli spies in Iran was an incompetent conspiracy theorist obsessed with Jewish climate control. About a week after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Jalali celebrated the massacre and boasted in state-run media that Israel’s “military and intelligence dominance has collapsed and will not be repaired anymore.” Unsurprisingly, it was on his watch that Israel executed an escalating campaign of physical and cybersabotage against Iran’s nuclear program, culminating in the war this month.

Jalali is but one of many high-level Iranian functionaries who seemingly believe their own propaganda about their enemies. Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani once told Fox News that Israel supported the Islamic State, despite ISIS executing attacks against Israelis. His predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suggested at the United Nations that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the U.S. government.

It would be easy to dismiss Iran’s wartime failures as unique to the country’s dysfunctional authoritarian system. But that would be a mistake. Jalali and other top Iranian officials were unable to defeat Israel not just because their own intelligence capabilities didn’t match up, but because their adherence to regime-sanctioned fantasies made grasping Israel’s actual abilities impossible for them. As a result, once Israel decided, after October 7, that it could no longer tolerate the risks of constant aggression from Iran and its proxies, the regime’s defenses quickly folded. In this way, Iran’s predicament is a cautionary tale about what happens when loyalty to a ruling ideology—rather than capability—determines who runs a society, and when conspiracies, rather than reality, shape decision making.

Although the Iranian theocracy presents an acute case of this phenomenon, the early symptoms are beginning to manifest in democratic societies, including our own. Consider: Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who has cast doubt on decades of scientific research on the effectiveness of vaccines. He recently fired the entire membership of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and appointed several vaccine skeptics to the panel, which is now planning to review childhood vaccination standards. Kennedy attained his position as a reward for endorsing Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has suggested that the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons against his own people in 2017 and 2018, despite extensive documentation of the attacks, including by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the previous Trump administration. A former Democrat, she also attained her position after endorsing Trump. Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who worked on Trump’s 2024 campaign, is now the interim director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, despite having no apparent experience in counterterrorism. And that’s to say nothing of Congress, where people such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a conspiracy theorist who once speculated that the Rothschild banking dynasty was setting wildfires with a space laser, now sit on the powerful House Oversight Committee.

Politicians have long rewarded their allies with plum positions. But when allegiance replaces proficiency as the primary qualification for advancement, and conspiracism replaces competency, disaster looms. Flunkies guided by regime ideology lack the capacity to understand and solve national crises. Just look at Iran.

When Jalali blamed his country’s drought on Israel, Iran’s chief forecaster pushed back, but tentatively, seemingly afraid to upset those in charge. The general “probably has documents of which I am not aware,” Ahad Vazifeh, the director of forecasting at Iran’s Meteorological Organization, said. “But on the basis of meteorological knowledge, it is not possible for a country to steal snow or clouds.” He then offered a warning that is as applicable to America today as it was then to Iran: “Raising such questions not only does not solve any of our problems, but will deter us from finding the right solutions.”

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