Is Anyone Actually Talking?: The Iranian Conundrum, Part Two

As far as announcements go, this one was pretty earth shattering, but to observers of Middle Eastern politics, it was not entirely unexpected. After all, Israel had a tradition of decapitation attacks.

“After a lifetime of struggle,” a state newsreader declared, “Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei drank the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom and joined the Supreme Heavenly Kingdom.” The broadcaster praised Khamenei for being “unceasing and untiring” and for his “lofty and celestial spirit.” As he read the announcement, people offscreen wailed. When he finished, he, too, broke down in tears. That was March 1st, 2026.

It’s probably a sure bet that many – if not most -- Iranians probably didn’t shed tears when they learned of Khamenei’s passing. For over 35 years, Iran’s supreme leader ruled with nothing less than an iron fist, repressing women, minorities, and anyone who dared challenge him or the theocracy he led. But the dramatic wording of the death announcement was, in a sense, warranted: more than anyone else, Khamenei was the architect of the Islamic Republic and all it has entailed. Although it was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who established the ruling faction by seizing power during Iran’s 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah, it was his successor who actually transformed it into the country it is now.

It was Khamenei who ensured that the supreme leader remained Iran’s paramount authority in practice, not just in principle. It was Khamenei who pushed Iran to pursue regional hegemony, thus committing it to a state of semi-perpetual conflict with Israel and the U.S. (the ‘Great Satan’). And it was Khamenei who transformed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), once a group with an uncertain future, into the central pillar of the government, almost a state within a state and the power base for the mullahs.

The Iranian elite (what’s left of it) moved quickly to name a replacement. Just over a week after his death, the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body tasked with appointing the supreme leader, announced that Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, would assume the position. Notwithstanding the rumors swirling about his exact state of health, speed and lineage will not prevent a power vacuum in Iran. Only the elder Khamenei had the experience and standing required to keep the regime’s various camps in check. As a result, Iran’s top officials are now lining up to chart the country’s future.

At the time of this writing, the actors best positioned to succeed are those affiliated with the IRGC, Mojtaba Khamenei (if indeed only wounded or even alive) included. As Iran’s strongest armed actor, it alone has the resources to impose its will on the country’s populace. This bodes poorly for the country. The IRGC’s leaders are, for the most part, hard-liners who thrive in perpetual conflict with both external and internal forces. If they solidify power, Tehran will remain reflexively antagonistic toward Israel, the United States, and pro-democracy elements inside the country for some time to come.

Yet the future is never written. The IRGC’s inflexible policies have clearly failed to protect the country, much less benefit its people, and have long been seen by the regime’s reformists as a dead end. And there are many reformists, including current officials and former presidents, who could chart a more accommodating course. If they can get onto a position to shape the state, the regime might agree to trade its nuclear program and policy of regional aggression for economic relief and development.

The pragmatists have their work cut out for them. Unlike the hard-liners, they have little armed power, with the actual armed forces and the constabulary not on side. They have also lost trust with the Iranian people for either weakly condemning or outright backing the regime’s brutal suppression of popular protests. But Iran is in chaos, and reformist insiders have the experience needed to guide the government onto more stable ground. They can capitalize on the fact that the hard-liners’ ranks have been decimated by U.S. and Israeli strikes to seize the reins of power. To do so, however, they must appeal to Iran’s frustrated, long-suffering citizens by promising a more peaceful, prosperous, and politically free future. In short, they need a clear, compelling vision and the means by which to disseminate it.

Not the Chosen One

Ali Khamenei was never supposed to be Iran’s supreme leader. During the country’s revolution, he was just one of many Khomeini’s acolytes. His status as a midlevel cleric, one more interested in politics than scholarly production, put him beneath the lofty religious standards Khomeini demanded of future rulers. Khamenei quickly made powerful allies and gained prominence, and he was elected president in 1981. But at the time, the charismatic rule of Khomeini had rendered the presidency a tertiary position. Indeed, it was Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of parliament, who was Khomeini’s most trusted hand.

Khomeini and his inner circle sidelined clergy who could challenge his religious authority. Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari, for example, was removed as the head of the Qom Seminary, a major center of Shiite clerical authority, and placed under house arrest by Khomeini’s deputies. The supreme leader likewise turned against his original appointed successor, the more progressive-minded Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, for openly defying him on a number of issues, including by opposing the execution of thousands of political prisoners at the end of the 1988 Iran-Iraq War. As his health failed in 1989, Khomeini thus found that there were no viable potential successors who had the requisite religious credentials, the correct politics, and sufficient support among the rest of the regime. He then had the constitution rewritten so that any midlevel cleric who backed Iran’s Islamist system of rule and was knowledgeable about the country’s geopolitical conditions could succeed him. These changes allowed Khomeini’s younger lieutenants to contend for his throne—Khamenei among them.

Even then, Khamenei’s ascension remained far from assured. Instead, the leading candidate was Rafsanjani. Indeed, Rafsanjani probably could have secured the position had he not decided that he would rather be Iran’s president after Khomeini died. In Rafsanjani’s view, the supreme leader’s office would become far less consequential after Khomeini’s death, and the presidency would become the position with the most authority. He was thus happy to cede the supreme leader’s office to his friend Khamenei, and indeed lobbied Khomeini and the Assembly of Experts on Khamenei’s behalf.

It worked. Khomeini died on June 3, 1989, Khamenei was appointed his successor the day after, and Rafsanjani was elected president the following month. But if Rafsanjani thought he was on a set path toward becoming Iran’s uncontested authority, he was woefully mistaken. The two senior officials were soon at odds over postwar policy and locked in a power struggle.

At first, Rafsanjani had the edge. He was the most capable of Khomeini’s disciples and arguably the most cunning politician in Iran. He also had a clear agenda for rebuilding the country’s crumbling economy and infrastructure. By comparison, Khamenei neither had a clear plan nor little legitimacy. Whereas Rafsanjani became president by winning an election and Khomeini became supreme leader by leading a revolution, Khamenei gained his position through backroom dealing. He had no popular support.

But Khamenei recognized his weak standing and set about finding a group that could shore him up. He did not need to look long: the IRGC was similarly searching for a new political partner. The organization had helped Khomeini defeat his rivals after the revolution, but the destruction and high costs of the war with Iraq had damaged its standing, and Rafsanjani was moving to curb its influence. Khamenei, however, was all too happy to help it maintain and expand its position. Thus, he threw his weight behind the Revolutionary Guards’ domestic agenda, which sought to refocus society around conservative Islamic mores. He used the authority of his office to give IRGC commanders a bigger voice in domestic politics and more power in Iranian society. In turn, the IRGC used its armed might to coerce and arrest reformist figures, including those aligned with Rafsanjani. When Rafsanjani left office after two terms, the presidency had lost much of its luster and much of its influence.

By the start of the millennium, the symbiotic relationship between Khamenei and the Guards had fully secured the rule of hard-liners in Tehran. The IRGC repeatedly put down pro-reform demonstrations and student protests. It blocked Rafsanjani’s reformist successor, Mohammad Khatami, from making any meaningful changes to the country. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner who served as president from 2005 to 2013, was marginalized by Khamenei and the IRGC for attempting to restore influence to the executive branch. Only Khamenei and the Guards could be allowed to hold real power.

L'État, c'est moi

The supreme leader’s partnership with the IRGC worked, in part, because of their shared conservative Islamist domestic agenda. But it also worked because of their comparable perspectives on global affairs. Both sought to make Khomeini’s view of the world—in which the United States was the leading enemy of Islamic civilization and Israel was the primary tool of American influence—central to Iran’s foreign policy. The “liberation of Jerusalem”—that is, the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state—and the overturning of the American-led international order, became their chief causes.

At first, progress proved fitful. Iran’s drive to export its Islamist revolution lost momentum amid the long war with Iraq. The 1990s turned into a period defined by domestic concerns, and the IRGC’s foreign operations were mostly reduced to carrying out acts of terrorism. Yet the IRGC remained ambitious, and when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, their fortunes changed. Both American operations created open-ended conflicts ripe for exploitation, and Iran, which borders both states, was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the regional upheaval. The IRGC thus quickly began clandestine interventions.

In Afghanistan, it played both sides of the conflict but ended up supporting factions of the Taliban, providing them with funds and arms. In Iraq, Tehran cultivated new militias to fight American forces. When U.S. troops finally left Iraq in 2011, these linkages remained, and Tehran became the most powerful external player in Baghdad. The success in both locations gave Iran a template for future export of its state-sponsored troublemaking. As the Arab Spring swept across the region in the 2010s and set off new conflicts, the IRGC exploited that instability to forge relationships with various armed actors, intervening in Syria to save Bashar al-Assad’s government from collapse and later helping the Houthis rise to power in Yemen.

Khamenei’s assertive foreign policy was matched by his ambition to make Iran a great military power. The regime invested heavily in Russian, Chinese and North Korean weapons that allowed Iran to threaten its enemies from a distance, leading to the development of sophisticated missile and drone programs. The regime also worked to master nuclear enrichment. Although Tehran consistently denied it was trying to produce nuclear weapons—Khamenei even issued a religious edict banning them—the program’s advancement went well beyond what was needed for civilian use. At a minimum, Iran’s nuclear endeavors gave the country the material and know-how needed to build a bomb.

For a time, this strategy proved effective. By the early 2020s, Iran had become the dominant political actor across a wide swath of the Middle East, with Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen within its sphere of influence. Iran’s expansionism and the conflicts it produced further empowered the IRGC inside the regime, transforming it into the dominant voice in foreign affairs. Its expansive security-related schemes also allowed it to control an outsize portion of the Iranian economy.

The costs of this approach, however, were extraordinary. Massive military outlays, for example, prevented Tehran from investing in Iran’s people and improving their lives. The country’s nuclear and missile programs resulted in severe U.S. sanctions. Iran’s economy thus declined while inflation soared. Iranians started protesting against their unelected dictator—first in 2009, then sporadically from 2017 to 2022, and, most recently, in December and January.

Eventually, Tehran’s overreach became apparent, and the regime began facing international setbacks. After Hamas, another Iranian proxy, struck Israel on October 7, 2023, the Jewish state dispensed with its previous reluctance to destroy the Islamic Republic’s capacities. The gloves came off in a big way. Over the next two years, it repeatedly and systematically struck at Hezbollah, IRGC positions in Syria, and the Houthis. Finally, it took out many of Iran’s air defenses and missile production sites and, with the help of the United States, bombed many Iranian nuclear facilities. In February 2026, the two countries attacked again, killing Khamenei and other prominent officials and massively degrading Iran’s entire military and security apparatus.

Bad and Less Bad

Khamenei’s death has opened the door to change within Iran. But so far, its main consequence has been the empowerment of the IRGC. By the time he was killed, Khamenei was the only remaining check (albeit an aging and ailing one) on the group’s whims, ensuring that although the IRGC got what it wanted most of the time, it was never totally triumphant. Now, it has no peer in what’s left of the power structure. Whether Mojtaba Khamenei lasts or not (as of this writing, U.S. officials say he is at least injured), the supreme leader’s office will no longer have the standing to impede the Guards’ agenda. The new supreme leader will be as much a creature of the IRGC as its overseer.

This, in turn, could mean that Iran’s elected officials have less power than ever. Under Khamenei, Iran’s executive branch would occasionally defy the IRGC; the supreme leader, for example, let President Hassan Rouhani, a reformist who served from 2013 to 2021, negotiate and sign the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States over the Guards’ objections. Today’s reform-minded president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is in a much weaker position, even to the extent of retracting his earlier apology for launching missiles at the Gulf states.

Iran’s most likely future is thus a military-controlled authoritarian state with a theocratic figurehead. Such a government would almost certainly be belligerent to U.S. and western interests. The IRGC is dominated by hard-liners, so it is primed to keep confronting Israel and the United States and to steer what’s left of the country’s economy into rebuilding the military. To help, these officials would likely continue to seek assistance from China and Russia, Iran’s two main patrons.

But this path comes with serious challenges. Beijing and Moscow are preoccupied with their own foreign policy challenges and must balance their connections to Iran with their relations to Arab states, which are now furious with Iran for attacking them in retaliation for the U.S./Israeli strikes. They are unlikely to help Iran reclaim its lost regional influence. Tehran, meanwhile, is essentially broke. It cannot afford to quickly build back its military, create new subterranean infrastructure to restart its nuclear program, or rearm its proxies, particularly all at once. In the meantime, its aggression and its allergy to compromise will only invite future attacks. And as much as the regime finds comfort in its unimaginative rhetoric of resistance, tough talk will not address the extreme disaffection of the Iranian people or quell future episodes of unrest. To stay in power, regime officials will have to keep relying on violence, and that is a tactic that cannot sustain itself forever.

The IRGC doesn’t mind this. To its leaders, staying in power on their own terms is all that matters; the lives of ordinary Iranians are unimportant. They are energized by their anger at Israel and the U.S., and that anger has grown exponentially thanks to the war. But not everyone in the regime wants Iran’s future to look like its past, especially given that its policies helped lead to disaster in the first place, and some of them are willing to push for a different trajectory. That includes Pezeshkian. In March, in the midst of the war, the president asked the IRGC to work with his government to preemptively address Iran’s dire postwar economic situation. According to reporting by IranWire, when a young IRGC officer brushed Pezeshkian off during a meeting, declaring that a perpetual state of emergency would be good for Tehran because it would ensure that no Iranians “dare to voice dissatisfaction,” the president was incredulous. “That is no answer!” he shot back. “Does it mean that once the war is over, we must kill another round of protesters? Is this what you call planning?”

That doesn’t mean prying Iran away from the IRGC’s hands will be simple, given its raw coercive capacity. But although the Guards’ relative power within Iran has increased since the attacks began, their absolute power has been diminished. It was, after all, the IRGC’s strategy and policies that led Iran to the brink of defeat, bankrupted its economy, and turned vast swaths of the Iranian people against the government. That has cost the corps internal political capital, making it vulnerable to attacks from critics within the regime. It has gained authority now that Ali Khamenei is no longer around to serve as a check. But his death also costs the IRGC its biggest and most powerful supporter.

The IRGC may also struggle to muster its coercive capacities. The war has ravaged its ranks, including by killing many of the most capable personalities, such as Ali Larijani, a top security official, and Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to the elder Khamenei. Meanwhile, the most competent reform-minded leaders were mostly spared. That includes Pezeshkian, Rouhani, and Khatami, the last of whom remains the country’s most prominent reformist. It also includes Ahmadinejad, who has reinvented himself as a critic of the status quo after his presidency and was effectively placed under house arrest. (The U.S. and Israeli strikes may have helped free him from confinement, though he may have been injured in the assault).

Lastly, it could include outwardly hardline associates of the IRGC who are less dogmatic, such as the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who has tried to brand himself as a pragmatic manager and has enough clout inside the system to change it, though his public rhetoric has been fiercely anti-American and Israeli. To have lasted as long as they have, these officials are all canny operators, and they could exploit the newfound looseness in Iran’s regime to push for change. They could do so by unifying the state, working behind the scenes to galvanize support for a different path forward, and taking their case to the public. If these figures can come up with a clear plan to improve the country’s economy, resolve its insecurity, and ease social pressures—all in service of preserving the theocratic system—the IRGC might struggle to ignore them.

Or they could, as Mark Carney so artfully put it when speaking in Davos at the World Economic Forum, default to what Vaclav Havel wrote in his seminal essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ labelled as putting a metaphorical pro-regime sign in their windows and choose to go along with the old order. The human instinct for self-preservation can never been underestimated.

People Power is More a Hope than a Reality

There is a final group that could force Tehran to change course: ordinary Iranians. They are the most powerful potential source of national legitimacy. They have not yet had a true champion within the government, but there has never been a better opportunity for someone inside the regime to seize the opportunity and act as one. In fact, the best chance for an enterprising regime insider to either circumvent the IRGC or force it to change would be to appeal directly to the people.

The mass protests of the past have not brought about substantial reforms. But Iranian society still has classes with real influence. One is the country’s small merchants, or bazaaris, who make up a small percentage of Iran’s population but otherwise control the traditional economy and important urban centers. During the first two decades of the Islamic Republic’s history, these bazaaris were the theocracy’s most important constituency, yet years of economic instability have worn away their support for the regime. Similarly, Iran’s many trade unions and guilds have influence over Iran’s energy and transportation sectors and have suffered from the country’s decline. If the bazaaris and the labor groups united, they could bring much of the economy to a halt through strikes and boycotts.

Iran’s younger generation could also prove to be a potent force The young have no connection to the 1979 revolution and know the regime only for corruption and cruelty, with their lives have been shaped by decades of conflict and privation. They have led most of the recent protests and have suffered the most from the regime’s violent campaign against dissent. Yet they are still the most politically energized demographic. An enterprising and courageous politician pushing for change could gain millions of enthusiastic followers by successfully motivating this cohort.

If Iran’s pragmatists or reformists do somehow manage to gain power, the country’s future could look markedly different from its past. Its new leaders would likely focus on improving the economy and broadening the government’s base of support, a task that would force them to search for ways out of perpetual conflict with Washington. They might therefore pursue either a grand settlement with the U.S. or a series of compromises that together produce concessions on the nuclear and military fronts in exchange for sanctions relief. Doing so would give Iran’s people a reason for hope and, by extension, less desire to rebel.

The United States should try to help empower these more pragmatic elements in ways beyond simply killing their hardline competitors. Washington should, for example, engage diplomatically with whoever is willing to talk. Having a direct line to Washington would by itself give pragmatic elements more potential to exert influence inside the system. The United States could also proactively offer measured inducements to Iran, such as targeted sanctions relief, in exchange for its willingness to compromise on key areas. Even the more moderate Iranian leaders are unlikely to accept Trump’s maximalist demands, but they could agree to incremental steps that initially focus on the nuclear issue and later expand to the military and foreign policy. U.S. officials could also push Iran to allow for greater social freedoms and to end the persecution of religious minorities—steps that would reduce anti-regime sentiment within Iranian society. Under such circumstances Trump would be justified in declaring victory.

Such measures would be the political equivalent of choosing to engage the less bad as opposed to the truly awful. Whoever can be seen as pragmatists are hardly advocates of democracy at least as western powers see it and it must be kept in mind that even though it was the hard-liners who drove Iran into the ground, the country’s moderates were just as fully complicit. But despite all the bombings, the regime remains essentially intact, and there is no viable alternative that is ready to replace it. Bereft of choice, this is the moment for pragmatic, realpolitik to assert itself. As a result, the most effective way to transform Tehran for the better is to work with insiders who support change. Keeping in mind the mistakes of America’s Iraqi adventure when President George W. Bush allowed the displacement and removal of that country’s entire governmental apparatus and by doing so inadvertently ushered in the chaos and confusion which ultimately led to radical movements filling the power vacuum, the Iranian pragmatists who may indeed be keeping in contact with the U.S. (either directly or via intermediaries) know how the system works and how to work the system. And after decades of dominance by ultraconservatives, Iran’s tumult means these moderates finally have a shot at enacting change.

And this could truly afford President Trump the off ramp he’s been so obviously looking for.