Before the coming of Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidates always adopted a harsh line toward the Islamic Republic. If elected, they softened their approach. Ronald Reagan established the pattern. In the baptismal moment for U.S. policy, Reagan failed to respond meaningfully to the Iranian-orchestrated attack on U.S. Marines and the embassy in Beirut in 1983. The caution of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and his senior military officers won the day against Secretary of State George Shultz, who wanted to punish Tehran directly. Two years later, a national security decision directive, penned for National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, claimed that “dynamic political evolution is taking place inside Iran.” In part, the Iran-Contra mess grew out of this hopeful analysis. At Langley, the principal Central Intelligence Agency officers in the Near East Division of the operations directorate who were advising the director, William Casey, saw the possibility of an Iranian Thermidor.
Like a communicable disease, these sentiments circulated through each subsequent administration, inevitably fed most by those who saw foreign policy as a “realist” endeavor of competing nationalist and personal interests (to wit: the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon). This mindset climaxed in Barack Obama’s presidency, where the 2015 nuclear deal was meant to normalize the Islamic Republic so that the sunset clauses in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action wouldn’t really matter since the clerical regime would evolve into something less threatening.
Easily the most unorthodox, histrionic, and fickle president since World War II, Trump has discarded most of the establishment’s Iran restraint even while putting “realism” into transactional overdrive. From his decision to kill the Revolutionary Guard dark lord, Qassem Suleimani in 2020, to his bombing run against the clerical regime’s nuclear sites in the 12-Day War, to the American-Israeli bombing campaign today, Trump has done things that only the most ardent hawks in Washington ever dreamed of.
This sharp divergence from American practice has certainly surprised the clerical regime, which, though fearful of U.S. power, had wanted to believe that the Islamic Republic was too formidable to attack. It’s a bit mystifying that Ali Khamenei, the now late supreme leader, was so casual about a national security council meeting in a compound without bunker-like protection. Since the 12-Day War if not earlier, when the Israeli assassinations of nuclear scientists started to pile up, the Iranians have been well aware of Jerusalem’s in-country intelligence assets. They knew that Israelis were damn good at co-opting telephonic and other electronic equipment. They have known for decades about America’s intercept capacity. The kind of hubris that once was typical of the clerical regime—the assumption that the country’s long-range ballistic missiles, well-armed proxies, and fondness for terrorism gave the regime sufficient immunity against an American or Israeli assassination campaign—should have evaporated.
And yet Khamenei and many of the senior players in the national security establishment perished in the opening round of the latest installment of what might most accurately be described as the Israel-Iran wars. (Because Washington, until Trump, did its bipartisan best to avoid conflict with the Islamic Republic, a trifold appellation doesn’t work.)
The clerical regime will likely remain in a bit of disarray even if the newly established triumvirate of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and Guardian Council jurist Alireza Arafi, who are supposed to provide temporary leadership until a new supreme leader is chosen, functions. This transitional disarray will remain even if the reports are true that Khamenei’s second son, 56-year-old Mojtaba, now has the inside track to soon become the next supreme leader, perhaps with the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Hereditary succession doesn’t appeal to many in the Islamic Republic since the rahbar, as the Iranians call the supreme leader, isn’t an imam, that is, he doesn’t have the divine charisma of the direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad via his son-in-law and cousin, Ali ibn Ali Talib, the first Shiite imam and, for Sunnis, the fourth caliph. When Mojtaba was rumored to be the primary contender for the job two years ago, voices within the regime started attacking the succession’s legitimacy. Hereditary succession is what irreligious kings and some Arab dictators do.
Nonetheless, it’s possible that the regime could pick him, clearly signaling to Iranians and foreigners that the theocracy intends to remain philosophically and operationally essentially what it is now: hardcore and aggressive. Or as a longtime, close student of the Revolutionary Guards, Ali Alfoneh, put it: “You killed one [Khamenei], here you get another.” If Mojtaba succeeds his father, in reality the odds are good that for the foreseeable future, rulership will still remain a collective, comprising the key lay, clerical, and Revolutionary Guard VIPs.
If the triumvirate manages to become a primary forum where governance is debated, right alongside the Supreme National Security Council, where the big decisions now seem to be happening, the cleric to watch is Eje’i, a former prosecutor-general and intelligence minister, whom my colleague Ray Takeyh aptly described as the “junkyard dog of Iranian politics.” He is quick and decisive (he went a little wobbly on the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, as almost everyone did). He likes to dole out pain. And the cleric has a lot of blood on his hands—a likely requirement for any serious candidate for the rahbari, the office of the supreme leader. (Alireza Arafi is virulently anti-American and anti-Western but bloodless; at his father’s side, Mojtaba undoubtedly contributed to the decisions that left thousands of Iranians dead in January.)
Given his past jobs as the prosecutor general and the intelligence minister, Eje’i has had serious experience where it matters most: internal oppression. He’s hardly a cosmopolitan Islamist, not in the manner of the current foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, or the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, a seriously bright hardliner who has a knack for seducing European statesmen as well as surviving Khamenei’s occasional lashings. But Eje’i’s intelligence background gives him insight into the Arab world, where the Islamic Republic has always placed most of its chips (and lost them). The Revolutionary Guards probably wouldn’t have a problem with the 69-year-old Eje’i, who hasn’t so far suggested, as some mullahs have, that the Guards’ many dispensations given to them by Khamenei are too generous and harmful to clerical supremacy.
We are sure to see in the coming months some scurrilous backbiting among the many players in the ruling elite; we often saw nasty squabbles during Khamenei’s years. Khamenei’s most ardent followers may asperse more than a few VIPs for insufficient fidelity to the late supreme leader and his legacy. That may not matter. After what happened to the Islamic Republic’s influence in the Middle East since October 7, 2023, many members of the Iranian elite may be quietly happy that Khamenei has departed. At the end of this war, assuming the regime doesn’t fall to reanimated protests, we may see the ruling elite expand the tent for revolutionaries even if Mojtaba is the new supreme leader. The regime, or as it’s called in Persian, the nezam, may want to increase the numbers of those willing to crush dissident Iranians.
The nezam is surely gambling that it can outlast Trump, that without the threat of a ground invasion, it can absorb whatever the United States and Israel throw at it. Trump has said the bombings could last another four or five weeks; the ruling elite may be thankful it now has a timeline. Iranians have had a hard time analyzing Trump (who doesn’t?) since in his first term he showed both aggression and restraint—the former in his decision to walk away from Obama’s nuclear deal and, more frightening, the lethal attack in Baghdad on Suleimani, and the latter with no military response to Tehran’s 2019 attack on Gulf shipping and Saudi oil facilities.
Iranian revolutionaries have never been brilliant analysts of the United States. But some do learn. Former foreign minister and international gadfly Mohammad Javad Zarif, who spent nearly three decades in the United States, can mimic the American left, which he did well during the nuclear negotiations that led to the JCPOA. Much to the dismay of the French JCPOA diplomatic team, Zarif seemed to have cast a spell over Secretary of State John Kerry. The layman who circulated easily in conservative Iranian religious circles developed a wide array of American journalists, scholars, and even U.S. officials who made his points when needed. With Khamenei’s death, however, Zarif may be in trouble. The late supreme leader always protected him, undoubtedly because he knew his value and his loyalty to him and the revolution. Others, especially among the Revolutionary Guards, did not.
After the repeated Israeli-American onslaughts, a ruling-elite consensus is developing that Khamenei made a serious, and for him personally terminal, error in not advancing the nuclear-weapons program faster. Zarif’s rhetorical gifts won’t overcome his association with the nuclear deal. In all probability, a lot of senior Revolutionary Guard officers, including Suleimani, who was always respectful toward Zarif, approved of the 2015 atomic accord. They thought they’d reap a lot of financial rewards while protecting the expansion of Iran’s uranium enrichment. They will forget their own culpability but remember Zarif’s—and the other Iranians, like former president Hassan Rouhani, who were closely associated with the JCPOA.
Larijani is also decent on America, usually keeping his hot Islamist core from plain sight. His recent tweet—“Trump has betrayed ‘America First’ to adopt ‘Israel First’”—is an effective divisive approach to take in the West, playing to both the left and right and the skyrocketing anti-Zionism and antisemitism among Europeans and Americans, let alone among Muslims everywhere. Those who don’t know the man but nevertheless want to hope for some kind of Venezuela model for Iran—decapitation followed by a somewhat subservient, transactional strongman rising to the top with the blessing of chastened, more pragmatic Revolutionary Guards—won’t find that man in Larijani. (They won’t find the Revolutionary Guards playing along, either.) Of all the VIPs still alive, the 67-year-old layman, who can’t become the supreme leader, would be the man best suited to revive the Islamic Republic as a force to be reckoned with. Given his demeanor—he doesn’t suffer fools or the undereducated—and the many questions about him and his family (they are their own mafia), the regime is unlikely to give him the latitude that he would need to start to neutralize the United States, play Europe, and make the Islamic Republic a bit more profitable.
The revolutionary faithful in Iran today may well come out of this war more energized and committed. Shiism in the Islamic Republic has always revolved around the idea that Iranian believers are the vanguard for the Muslim world and nothing good ever happens without a big dollop of martyrdom. That’s important for the regime since the first priority will be, after the bombs have stopped falling, internal repression. The regime will need to preempt the return of nationwide street demonstrations. The required awe for that will in part come from the regime depicting itself as a survivor, too strong for even the Great Satan to take down. That depiction, combined with the memory of the blood-soaked streets in January, may have enough truth in it to paralyze for a few years the Iranian people, the vast majority of whom unquestionably want to off the Islamic Republic. For this regime, that’s effectively a lifetime.
Hundreds of Americans have died because of Tehran’s malevolent actions since 1979. Add on the Islamic Republic’s acts of terrorism against others and the many thwarted operations worldwide, and it’s a brazen, perhaps unparalleled, history of aggression. Only the Soviet Union, with its “anti-colonial wars” and extensive support to radical left-wing terrorist groups, is in the same league. America’s retribution is long overdue. And because it’s so late in coming, and being delivered by a president whose attention span may waver, it may not bear the fruit that could have developed earlier.
