The System May Endure

Now gone to his reward, a wise man once told me always to read The Economist and the Financial Times, since they were where the Establishment talked to itself on the assumption that no one else was listening. Yet even in The Economist, we now read this:

During the 12-day war with Iran in June last year, President Donald Trump said he would spare the life of the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, “for now”—even as American bombers “obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities and Israeli jets smashed its air defences and killed senior officials. In the second act of the war, which began on February 28th, America and Israel have killed Mr Khamenei. “One of the most evil people in History is dead,” Mr Trump declared on his Truth Social network. Iran confirmed his death a few hours later.

The lethal strike is the bloody climax of nearly half a century of enmity between America and Iran’s clerical regime. For decades the Islamic Republic’s devotees chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. Now they have brought death to its leader—and to many of its most senior military officials. On its face, it is a striking success for Mr Trump, who had long catalogued the regime’s aggression against America and its efforts to destabilise the region. He may have dealt a mortal blow to Iran’s theocracy.

The question is what comes next. Under the constitution a leadership council composed of the president, the chief justice and a senior cleric is meant to oversee the interregnum pending the selection of a new supreme leader. It is unclear whether all of them survived the attacks. Some had suggested that Mr Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, might assume power—though there are reports that he, too, has been killed. The surviving regime could designate a clerical successor, or perhaps a committee of them. Yet real power has long been assumed to reside with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard. The trouble is, many of its luminaries have also been eliminated. According to Israel, those killed include Ali Shamkhani, an IRGC veteran and senior adviser to Mr Khamenei, as well as Mohammad Pakpour, the IRGC’s commander.

Even so, the system may endure. “This is not a monarchy in which the shah is gone and you take out all of the male heirs,” notes Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think-tank in Washington. “This is a system—not a particularly popular system—but nevertheless one with a security establishment that is not dependent on a single person or a single family.” The regime may have delayed formally acknowledging Mr Khamenei’s death in order to consolidate the succession. Announcing a new leadership without at least tacit American acquiescence would place it directly in the crosshairs.

Many will worry about instability in a society battered by years of sanctions and misrule. A country of more than 90m people, Iran is a fissile, multi-ethnic polity. Arabs, Kurds, Azeris and Baluchis harbour varying ambitions of autonomy should a vacuum emerge. Days before the strikes Tom Barrack, Mr Trump’s envoy, reportedly visited Iraqi Kurdistan and urged Iranian Kurds to prepare to rise up. Memories of the violent chaos that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya in 2011 remain seared in the region’s memory.

Mr Trump may hope for a Venezuela-style outcome, in which America removes the head of the regime and negotiates with the remnants for a transition to a system more amenable to American interests. He said there were several “good candidates” to take power, but did not name them. Some regime stalwarts are thought to have survived, among them Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, and Ali Larijani, his predecessor. Yet both are steeped in the regime’s history and would struggle to win support beyond its dwindling base. A more plausible candidate might be Hassan Rouhani. Twice elected president, he negotiated a nuclear accord in 2015 in pursuit of détente with the West.

Should America and Israel opt instead for deeper eradication, they might support a lesser-known commander—or attempt to install Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah. The prince enjoys vocal backing from Israel. Mr Trump, however, has shown scant enthusiasm for a royalist restoration.

The risk for Mr Trump is that he becomes bogged down in an ill-defined military campaign to contain a weakened but still functional and hostile regime—precisely the sort of open-ended conflict in the Middle East he has long derided. Despite videos of some people in Tehran cheering Mr Khamenei’s death, there was little sign of Iranians heeding Mr Trump’s exhortation to take to the streets. Iran’s armed forces have fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel and at Arab states hosting American forces, and have announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a third of the world’s seaborne oil exports pass. Tankers are already diverting.

Last June Mr Trump joined Israel’s bombing campaign only at the end, dispatching B-2 bombers to neutralise enrichment facilities, impose a ceasefire and gain diplomatic leverage. When Israel continued striking, he fumed that the two sides had been fighting “so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”. This time America entered alongside Israel from the outset, determined to topple the clerical regime. The president says the bombing will continue for “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” If the gamble fails, Mr Trump would not be the first president to see glorious early victory disappear into the sands of the Middle East.

And this:

Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the relationship between America and Iran has often been one of competing myths. The Islamic Republic saw enmity with the “Great Satan” as crucial to its survival. America saw a regime perpetually on the brink of collapse and a country primed for change. Never mind that Iran’s fight with America was a source of constant woe, or that the regime survived for almost half a century. The myths endured.

The war that began on February 28th will test which one is correct. America hopes that it can quickly replace a regime weakened by years of protest, war and economic crisis. Donald Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government”. Israel and America assassinated a number of political and military leaders, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, among them. Iran, for its part, thinks it can endure once again: better to weather a war than to make concessions to its longtime foe.

This is only the second time post-revolutionary Iran has picked a new leader (the first was in 1989). Today it may have to navigate succession under sustained American and Israeli fire. After its previous war with Israel in June, the regime began preparing for the next round. The supreme leader designated backups for key jobs, and then backups for the backups. As for the ayatollah himself, the constitution spells out a clear process for succession: a three-man committee takes power after the supreme leader dies, and then a separate body chooses a replacement.

That process kicked into motion hours after Khamenei’s death was confirmed. Power now temporarily rests with the president, Masoud Pezeshkian; the judiciary chief, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei; and a cleric, Alireza Arafi. Mr Arafi had recently been mentioned as a possible candidate to succeed the supreme leader (perhaps his appointment is a stepping-stone to the top job). Mr Pezeshkian appeared on state television to refute rumours that he had been killed in an Israeli strike. Even so, it is unclear whether this triumvirate can safely meet in person, for fear of being targeted themselves.

If the regime hoped that war would produce a rally-round-the-flag effect, it may be disappointed. After Khamenei’s death there were scenes of Iranians cheering and dancing in the streets of Tehran, Isfahan and other cities. Still, the next morning also brought rallies to mourn the ayatollah. There has been no sign of Iranians heeding Mr Trump’s call to rise up. Plenty of them loathe the regime, but plenty of others support it, whether out of conviction or self-interest—and the latter camp is the one with weapons. America and Israel have struck at Iran’s security forces, including the basij, the regime’s brownshirts. But there are presumably many thousands still willing to fight for the Islamic Republic, arrayed against a disorganised opposition that has little to go on except the word of an unreliable American president.

At times Mr Trump has already backtracked on talk of regime change. In an interview on March 1st with the Atlantic he said Iran’s new rulers were eager to negotiate, and so was he. “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner,” he said. It was not clear who he plans to talk with, or about what. A nuclear deal—the focus of pre-war diplomacy—may no longer be enough to satisfy America.

The hope seems to be that America will find an Iranian version of Delcy Rodríguez, the pliable regime insider who took over Venezuela after America snatched its president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Yet that probably misreads the regime. No one person is strong enough to seize power, and it is risky to look too deferential to America or its allies.

Over the past few years Ali Larijani, a powerful regime apparatchik, has led Iran’s outreach to its Arab neighbours across the Gulf. Some officials in the region came to view him as a businesslike politician they could work with. In an Arabic social-media post on March 1st, though, Mr Larijani sought to excuse two days of Iranian strikes on Gulf states. “We are not seeking to attack you. But when bases in your country are used to attack us,” he wrote, “we will target those bases.” That was an exercise in gaslighting: the regime has lobbed drones at civilian airports, luxury hotels and high-rise residential towers. Perhaps he is telling them something different in private, but his comments led some Arab diplomats to wonder if pragmatists can ever hope to wield power in today’s Iran.

There are hints that the regime is already struggling to exercise control across the country. At the start of the 12-day war in June it was paralysed by an Israeli strike that killed and wounded top political and military leaders. It took the better part of a day to organise a meaningful counter-attack. When it came, though, the riposte was big and focused, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) firing around 200 ballistic missiles in several big waves over the course of one night.

The response this weekend has been substantial, but more scattershot: smaller volleys against Israel, random attacks on civilian targets in Gulf states. It looks to many analysts as if the regime has delegated decision-making to commanders in the field. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, admitted as much in an interview with Al Jazeera on March 1st. “Our military units are now, in fact, independent and somehow isolated,” he said.

That raises a larger question. The pre-war assumption was that the IRGC, the regime’s praetorian guard, might swoop in to take control after Khamenei’s death. The Guards are Iran’s strongest military force and preside over a vast economic empire. Yet their military record is hardly impressive. Over the past two years Israel sliced through their proxies in Lebanon and Gaza—none of which has yet joined the war. The Assad regime they propped up in Syria collapsed. And in 2024 they launched two ineffective ballistic-missile attacks against Israel, a strategic blunder that shattered their deterrence.

Diplomats in the Gulf fret about a “fragmented, unstable state” plagued by militias and chaos. The fear is that both myths about Iran prove incorrect: that a weak, unpopular regime is less durable than it thinks, and that America has no workable plan to replace it.