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For years, Iran has claimed to have limited the range of its ballistic missiles to 2,000 kilometers.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's then-supreme leader, said in 2021 that he had imposed this restriction despite opposition from military figures, presenting it as a deliberate choice.
That choice, according to Iranian military officials, was a signal that Europe was not Iran's target.
On March 21, two weeks after Khamenei's assassination during the United States and Israel's war with Iran, Tehran launched two ballistic missiles toward Diego Garcia, a joint US-UK military base in the Indian Ocean located about 4,000 kilometers from Iranian territory.
The restriction seems to no longer exist.
The missiles failed to hit their targets: one failed mid-flight and the other was shot down by a US warship. Analysts point out that striking Diego Garcia would require a drastic reduction in the explosive payload of Iran's most advanced long-range missile, the Khorramshahr-4, to a fraction of its normal weight, raising serious questions about the accuracy of a strike over the open ocean.
But, in this case, according to experts, the essence of this action was the signal.
"The rules of the game have changed," Michael Horowitz, an independent defense expert based in Israel, told Radio Free Europe.
“Iran is fighting for its survival and is making short-term decisions. For years, Tehran has treated its 2,000-kilometer limit as a way to calm the region while maintaining deterrence,” he said. “Now that logic is giving way to something more urgent: demonstrating that Iran can still inflict costs and that its capabilities extend beyond its immediate neighborhood.”
The collapse of this restriction within days of Khamenei’s death is hard to see as a coincidence. The 2,000-kilometer limit was never a technical limitation – Iran’s missile program exceeds it – but rather a political one, kept in place by Khamenei despite reported resistance from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Danny Citrinowicz, a security analyst at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, attributes the attack to the "shifting balance of power within Iran" and the "increasing dominance" of the Revolutionary Guard.
"The emerging Iran is likely to behave less as the cautious and calculating actor we have come to know it and more as a risk-tolerant system," he said.
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as supreme leader on March 8, has yet to consolidate his authority. In fact, he has not been seen in public since taking office. Whether the attempt to strike the Diego Garcia base was ordered by the new supreme leader or instigated by the Revolutionary Guard, which is no longer constrained by the old rules, the result is the same: the restriction that had been in place for years was lifted almost immediately.
Horowitz argued that the attempt to strike the Diego Garcia base demonstrates Iran's weakness as much as its capacity.
“The more its existing deterrent structure disintegrates, the more attractive nuclear capabilities and longer-range missiles become as substitutes,” he said. “Iran can no longer be seen as a threat limited to the Middle East. It is building capabilities that are intended to increase the cost to even more distant adversaries.”
For Europe, the consequences are significant. Iran has now shown a willingness – if not yet a credible capability – to strike targets far beyond its own region, while simultaneously threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, which would hit European energy markets and, consequently, strengthen Russia.
"If I were European," Horowitz said, "I would be worried."/REL
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