What the Selection of Iran’s New Leader Might Mean for the War
In his treatise on Islamic governance, Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, raged at the idea of political leadership passing down through family lines. Monarchy and hereditary succession were “sinister” and “evil” and “invalid,” he wrote. They “have no place in Islam.” The revolution that he led, in 1979, centered on ending dynastic rule in Iran, specifically of the U.S.-backed Pahlavi family. The Islamic Republic has, nevertheless, just created a new dynasty.
Early on Monday morning, amid the pounding of U.S. and Israeli bombs, Tehran defiantly announced, on state-controlled television, that the Assembly of Experts had selected Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the previous Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—to succeed his father, who was killed in an air strike on the first day of the war. Mojtaba, as he is commonly referred to, is a fifty-six-year-old cleric who was his father’s closest adviser. He wears frameless glasses, a salt-and-pepper beard manicured to proper clerical length, and a black turban, signifying his descent from the Prophet Muhammad. During his father’s thirty-seven-year reign, he kept a low profile and was rarely photographed or quoted. He married well; his wife was the daughter of a former speaker of parliament. She was killed, along with other family members, in the same strike as the former Supreme Leader.
Mojtaba had never held a government title or elected position until, on Monday, he became, for those who still believe in the principles of the Revolution, God’s representative on earth. Among Iran experts, he was not considered an important scholar or thinker, although he was educated in the élite seminaries of Qom, the center of theological learning, and taught religious classes. But Mojtaba, who will now assume the role of commander-in-chief, has long cultivated a base of support in the military, notably among the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as his father had, too, to solidify his own prominence, four decades ago. Alan Eyre, a former senior Iran watcher at the State Department, who is now at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, told me, “Before the tsunami of analysis drowns us all, let’s flag the most important fact about this appointment: he is ‘Putin light’ in clerical garb, and his appointment marks the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the beginning of Iran as an I.R.G.C.-dominated police-military-security state.”
The selection—by eighty-eight aging scholars and jurists, who are popularly elected every eight years—was a defiant rejoinder to President Donald Trump, who recently demanded the right of refusal over Iran’s next Supreme Leader. Just hours before the announcement, Trump told ABC News, “If he doesn’t get approval from us, he’s not going to last long.” The President had previously dismissed Mojtaba as a “lightweight.” Late last week, he had said, “We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran.” Instead, the Middle East is reeling from the war that Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started, with countries across the region getting sucked into the conflagration. Thousands have been killed, air travel has been grounded, and oil-and-gas exports have been blocked from transiting through the Strait of Hormuz.
Mojtaba’s appointment “is a final act of resistance by the late Khamenei from his grave,” Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “It also sends a strong message to Trump that his bombings and threats are not delivering the regime change he seemingly wants.” Before the war, in December and January, nationwide protests had pushed the Islamic Republic toward a political cliff. The regime ruthlessly cracked down on those protests, killing thousands and detaining tens of thousands who were shouting “Death to the dictator.”
So this transition will not be the kind of change that the majority of Iranians had hoped for, or expected, especially after U.S. military intervention. John Limbert, a former diplomat who was held, for fourteen months, at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the hostage crisis in the Revolution’s early days, told me, “The same clique that’s been in charge since 1979 is neither going to leave nor pay any attention to the demands of eighty-five per cent of Iranians who are asking for a government that treats them decently and doesn’t lead the country into bloody disaster.” If the younger Khamenei does survive, he could have veto power over Iran’s political, military, economic, and social policy for decades to come. The message to other Iranians, and to the world, Limbert added, is “However much you hate us, we’re not going anywhere without a fight. We enjoy our power too much to give it up.”
The elder Khamenei had warned the past six Iranian governments to be wary of the United States, which the theocracy’s faithful dubbed the Great Satan. In 2015, as Iran was negotiating a nuclear deal with the Obama Administration, he told his diplomats “not to be fooled by their smiles, not to trust their promises because, when they have achieved their objectives, they will laugh at you.” In 2018, he may have felt vindicated, after Trump abruptly abandoned the nuclear deal and instead imposed sweeping economic sanctions. His son might feel the same way—and follow the same strategy, based on suspicion and enmity, in both domestic and foreign policy. Geranmayeh told me that loyalists will likely “expect Mojtaba to endorse a path of resistance, potentially with more defiance to restore deterrence against the U.S. and Israel.” More urgently, he will have to prove himself capable of saving the Islamic Republic, while “facing the lowest legitimacy from the ground up, and confronting a war against two nuclear powers. And he must do this while trying to stay alive.”
Shortly after Mojtaba was formally designated, Ali Larijani, the current head of the Supreme National Security Council, and a former speaker of parliament, called on Iranian factions to put aside past disagreements and unite under the new leadership. He also, however, put the country’s ninety-two million people on notice that Mojtaba will govern “with firmness” amid the war. Political and military leaders quickly pledged allegiance. The Revolutionary Guards heralded “a new dawn and a new phase for the revolution and the Islamic Republic’s rule.” On Monday, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, congratulated the new Supreme Leader. “I would like to reaffirm our unwavering support for Tehran and solidarity with our Iranian friends,” he said. Iran provided thousands of Shahed kamikaze drones in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
In an analysis for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Patrick Clawson and Farzin Nadimi predicted that Mojtaba, “driven by raw, vengeful feelings,” may try to carry out purges that strengthen the theocracy’s “ideology of existential confrontation with America and Israel” and the I.R.G.C.’s central role in governance and the economy. The tentacles of the I.R.G.C. reach deep into politics and the economy, especially telecommunications and construction. Mojtaba reportedly served with the I.R.G.C. in the final phase of Iran’s grisly eight-year war with Iraq, in the nineteen-eighties, which claimed more than a million casualties. Many veterans of that war, including Larijani and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the influential speaker of parliament, have already risen to senior government positions.
Limbert said, “The Islamic Republic has now proved that it varies little from the kind of dynasties that had ruled old Persia for more than two millennia.” The uncertainties spawned by the war has led Tehran, at least for now, to revert to a pattern of the past. Limbert told me that the revolutionaries “had originally rejected the entire principle of dynastic rule. Now the son succeeds the father, and they repeat what Iranian kings have done for millennia.”
The new war in Iran, now in its second week, has shown no signs of letting up. On Sunday, the U.S. announced its seventh fatality, a service member on a military base in Saudi Arabia. (The first six died at a port in Kuwait.) In a reflection of the increasing threat to U.S. interests across the Middle East, the State Department ordered American diplomats at the Embassy in Riyadh to leave the kingdom; two drones fell on the Embassy last week. NATO forces in Turkey intercepted a ballistic missile from Iran, the second in a week. Allison Hart, a spokeswoman for the U.S. alliance of thirty-two Western nations, said, “NATO stands firm in its readiness to defend all Allies against any threat.” A drone was also intercepted near Iraq’s international airport in Erbil, where U.S. forces are based. Iranian drones and missiles are also targeting other U.S. allies in the oil-rich Gulf.
The war between Israel and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, also escalated in Lebanon, where U.S. envoys had already been evacuated. More than ten per cent of the people living in Lebanon have fled the fighting. The Lebanese government condemned the war, but amid the chaos and destruction its parliament announced a two-year delay in national elections. Meanwhile, over the weekend, Israel struck dozens of fuel depots in Tehran, setting off massive fires. Images and video from the capital looked apocalyptic, with black clouds consuming the horizon, and oil droplets raining down. The price of oil surged to more than a hundred dollars a barrel, sparking fears of a global economic crisis. Trump dismissed the price spike as a “little glitch.”
Last week, Trump was asked what the worst-case scenario would be, as Iran sorted through the candidates to be the Supreme Leader. “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” he said, in the Oval Office. “Right, that could happen. We don’t want that to happen.” So far, the war has not had the political impact that Trump expected. ♦