In the final weeks before his death, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cast the mounting hostility of U.S. President Donald Trump in religious and explicitly Shiite terms. Rejecting calls for capitulation, he invoked the example of Imam Hussein—the third imam, or spiritual leader, of the Shiites—refusing to pledge allegiance to Yazid, the Umayyad ruler widely associated in Shiite memory with tyranny and injustice. Defiance, in this light, was not simply a strategic imperative but a value rooted in history and identity. That framing did not disappear with Khamenei’s death. Instead, Shiite political figures, clerics, and communities across the region have taken up this rhetoric and symbolism, a measure of their growing disquiet and sense of vulnerability. In Lebanon, the weakening in recent years of the Shiite political and military movement Hezbollah had already altered the country’s sectarian balance.…