Outside the Beltway

More on Post-Khamenei Iran

More excerpts from excellent columns I've read.

James Joyner · Sunday, March 1, 2026 · 4 comments

I commend them in full.

Karim Sadjadpour, The Atlantic (“The Death of Khamenei and the End of an Era“):

Khamenei’s death by the hand of a nation he worked very hard to kill is a hinge moment in the history of the 47-year-old revolution. He was the last of the regime’s first-generation founders.

[…]

Khamenei’s lack of clerical legitimacy, and his general insecurity, led him to cultivate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as his praetorian force; he handpicked commanders and rotated them to prevent rivals from accumulating power. The IRGC eclipsed the clergy as Iran’s most powerful institution—politically expedient for Khamenei and financially expedient for the Guards, which became the dominant economic force in the theocracy it defended. Khamenei wielded Iran’s elected institutions as facades, allowing just enough political theater to project legitimacy. 

[…]

Khamenei treated the relationship between the state and its citizens not as a social contract but as a predatory lease—nonnegotiable, imposed by the landlord, long since expired. The regime micromanaged the personal lives of more than 90 million people, dictating whom they were allowed to love, what they drank, what women wore on their heads. It preached austerity while the Guards operated as a tax-exempt conglomerate. It built a digital wall around the country, blocking global platforms while regime officials posted propaganda on X. It charged protesters with “waging war against God” and maintained the world’s highest execution rate per capita. When even that was not enough to quell dissent—last month, as protests again swept the country—Khamenei ordered what may prove to be one of the deadliest episodes of state violence in modern history.

[…]

In the end, he was felled by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, an American president and an Israeli prime minister whom he loathed. He lived by “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” He died by death from America and Israel.

The Economist (“With the supreme leader dead, power in Iran hangs in the balance“):

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.”

[…]

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.

Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic (“Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People“):

The administration’s apparent lack of interest in the Iranian opposition adds a layer of surreality to the video that Trump posted early this morning. He called on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian Armed Forces, and the police to “lay down your weapons.” But to whom should they surrender? He almost taunted the Iranian people to take charge. “Let’s see how you respond,” he said. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

But who is “you”? The civil-society and women’s-rights activists who want to build a rule-of-law society, with transparency, accountability, and independent courts? The ethnic minorities—Kurdish, Baluchi, Azerbaijani, and others—who want a decentralized state and more autonomy? The sometimes-fanatical supporters of a new monarchy, who have tried in recent months to push others to the sidelines? Breakaway groups inside the IRGC who might be interested in creating a military dictatorship?

The answer matters. As one opposition insider told me at the time of the previous American attack, the mere act of bombing Iran will not by itself create a stable regime. “If there was ever a fantasy that a leader would fly in under the wings of foreign aviators,” he told me, “that is definitely not going to happen.” Another Iranian activist texted me this morning: “This is one of the best days of my life, Anne; also I am very worried about what comes next.” (Both the opposition insider and the activist requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.)

The point is not that the U.S. should promote democracy for its own sake. The goal, rather, must be to help Iranians achieve normalcy. For the region to be at peace, Tehran must transform itself from the headquarters of an insurgency back into the capital of a country seeking to build peace and prosperity for its own citizens. A stable, law-abiding Iran will help build a stable, law-abiding Middle East. But in order to achieve that, Iran needs not a new dictatorship but self-determination and a pluralist government that respects basic rights. Right now, the Trump administration is not trying to build one.

The Economist (“War in Iran could cause the biggest oil shock in years“):

Faced with an existential threat, Iran’s leadership—or what remains of it—may see dragging its Gulf neighbours into the crisis as one of its few means of forcing America back to the table. Several oilfields in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait are within range of Iranian missiles and drones, notes Carlos Bellorin of Welligence, a consultancy. They are sprawling and so hard to defend.

Taking aim at oilfields would be reckless. An Iranian attack on Gulf oil would invite retaliatory strikes from neighbours, which first called for de-escalation. In the early hours of the campaign explosions were heard near Kharg Island, from which most of Iran’s oil exports depart, though they appear to have targeted infrastructure other than oil terminals. Things could get much noisier there.

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What happens to prices in the longer run is contingent on the third and biggest unknown—whether Mr Trump can achieve his stated aim of engineering regime change in Iran. With the mullahs and the IRGC gone, the country would cease to be a source of regional instability. It could count on relief from sanctions which curb its participation in global markets. A combination of rising Iranian exports and ebbing geopolitical risk could reinforce the superglut and make crude even cheaper. Although Mr Trump seems to be ruling out American ground troops in Iran, and no country has ever been liberated from tyranny by air power alone, the situation is uncertain enough to allow for such a happy outcome.

The alternative scenario is that the hardliners remain in charge. Whoever claims Khamenei’s robes may feel compelled to make a show of force by keeping Hormuz closed and sowing chaos in the Gulf. With rival factions of the IRGC jostling for power, Iran would remain a regional menace. Its oil output could decline and buyers such as China would be unsure who in Iran controls the spigots. A risk premium of $8-12 a barrel could remain a feature of global markets indefinitely.

Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Nancy A. Youssef, Ashley Parker, Jonathan Lemire, and Michael Scherer, The Atlantic (“‘The Worst-Case Outcome Is Complete Chaos’“):

The prospects for a popular revolt in Iran seem dim, at least in the short term. Former U.S. officials told us that there is no obvious element within the Iranian regime that could take power and steer Iran toward a more U.S.-friendly approach, as occurred in Venezuela last month. The Iranian people are unarmed, so it’s not clear how they would mount a credible opposition to the security forces that recently killed as many as 30,000 civilians, according to some estimates, after protests erupted in late December. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, one of Iran’s main power centers, has a decentralized hierarchy and is trained to maintain control in the face of strikes.

But Trump was convinced that the odds of a successful popular revolt were not going to get better over time and that this was the best moment to strike. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged him to act. Netanyahu, like Trump advisers including Senator Lindsey Graham, believed that if Khamenei and Iran’s president were killed, some of the people lower down in the IRGC who are “mid-market businessmen” rather than zealots could be persuaded to work with the Americans, one U.S. official told us.

[…]

For years, the U.S. military rehearsed the strike plan carried out today, former defense officials told us. It was considered the “maximalist” option: After an initial bombardment of hundreds of targets, the decisive phase would come in the following few days.

At various points when officials weighed this “maximalist” option, military planners also projected what might happen further out, with the possibility that strikes may continue for weeks.

[…]

But the planners concluded that military strikes alone would not produce regime change, which may help explain why Trump specifically called on the Iranian people to overthrow the government once the bombing campaign stops. Now the question is how long the strikes will continue. The U.S. may have to sustain operations until alternative leadership emerges. But that risks exposing protesters to further brutality if the regime doesn’t collapse. Tehran has long prepared for such a challenge and almost immediately shut down internet access, leaving state media the primary source of information.

Stopping strikes too soon could leave the current regime intact and foreclose future nuclear negotiations. Continuing until the costs become unbearable—even for the existing leadership—might force Iran to negotiate from a position of weakness. “The next time we sit down with Iran, it must not be as equals,” one former defense official told us. “It must be as victor and vanquished.” Achieving that outcome, planners believed, could require weeks of sustained attacks.

A prolonged campaign could also produce a failed state with enriched uranium, destabilize crucial oil routes, threaten Gulf allies, trigger a refugee crisis, and disrupt the global economy. “The worst-case outcome is complete chaos,” Dana Stroul, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, told us, warning of regional spillover.