Donald Trump said his greatest concern about the US-Israeli strikes on Iran would be the emergence of a new leader “as bad as the previous person”.
At an Oval Office news conference, he described that outcome as the “worst case” scenario, but acknowledged that it “could happen”. Many experts believe that, whoever replaces the assassinated Ayatollah, the tenor of the Iranian regime will change little, if at all.
Iran’s regime is “built to handle shocks” like the Ayatollah’s assassination, said Ali Hashem, of Royal Holloway University of London’s Centre for Islamic and West Asian Studies, on Foreign Policy. The supreme leader sits at the top of “a dense network of institutions”, including the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, the Expediency Council and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “When under pressure, its structure is designed to pull together rather than fall apart”. Iran’s constitution even “explicitly anticipates sudden leadership loss”, with a clear process for transfer of authority.
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“So far, the coercive and administrative state apparatus” is standing solid and “can be expected to survive this crisis”, said Amin Saikal, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Australian National University, on The Conversation.
Trump has taken a gamble by claiming he’d be “able to topple a bloodthirsty regime, which is fighting an existential war, without putting troops on the ground”, said historian Justin Vaïsse, founder of the Paris Peace Forum, in Le Monde. The US president hopes that “simply by providing an external shock to make it fall”, internal opposition forces will “take over and stabilise power”.
But “this scenario would need not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands or millions on the streets” from “a cross section of Iranian society”, Urban Coningham of the Royal United Services Institute told Channel 4 News. The protests would have to happen at a scale that the regime couldn’t suppress, causing “senior government figures to flee, leaving a vacuum of power in the country”.
As for Israel, “there is a question of how invested” it is in “ensuring that regime change in Iran is smooth”, said Simon Speakman Cordall on Al Jazeera. Most of Israel’s leaders privately “regard that as a kind of fairy tale”, former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy told the broadcaster. They are “more interested in regime, and state, collapse”.
What next?
Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali Hosseinei Khamenei, has been widely tipped to be named his father’s successor. He’s “viewed within the regime as a capable and forceful leader”, and “is said to be close to” senior leaders in the Revolutionary Guard, according to a leaked US intelligence briefing quoted in the Daily Mail.
Should the regime fall, dissident-in-exile Reza Pahlavi, the oldest son of the country’s shah, has long been staking his claim to have the support of millions of Iranian people. His “pitch to the White House” is “MIGA: Make Iran Great Again”, said Gregory Svirnovskiy on Politico. He’s been telling US broadcasters that, as leader of Iran, he could bring “over a trillion dollars worth of impact and revenue to the American economy”.
As things stand now, Trump will probably “abandon his earlier calls for regime change” and try to strike a “Venezuela-scenario” deal with whomever replaces Khamenei, said Sharan Grewal on Brookings. “If so, then for Iran, all Trump’s attacks will really have done is to accelerate” their aged supreme leader’s “already looming death”.
