Israel’s relentless war on Iran is likely to fundamentally reshape the trajectory of the latter’s history. But this is not likely to be a regime change as it’s typically imagined, a swift replacement of the Islamic Republic with a democracy. More plausibly, the war will accelerate a process that was quietly underway long before Israeli jets took off on June 13 to bombard Iran.
In this transformation, Iran will turn from an ideological actor to an interest-focused authoritarian state. It will be defined not by Islam, but rather by Iranian civilization. It will stop obsessing about how Islamic its citizens are and instead try to provide them with basic services. It will seek economic development, not ways to export its revolution. It will try to trade with the West, not fight it. It will be led by oligarchs and generals, not clerics and ideologues. In short, it will resemble most of its neighbors in the Arab world.
Iran has gotten to this point because of the utter failures of the man who has led it since 1989, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A devout revolutionary since his days as a bohemian poet and activist in the 1960s, Khamenei long dreamt of changing the world. Unlike many other veterans of the 1979 revolution, he never moderated or adapted to the times, instead continuing to use an entire country for his hopeless cause.
The ongoing conflict with Israel is only the latest stage in the long litany of Khamenei’s failures. His goal has long been to fulfill the double ambitions of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In their vision, Iran was to be a puritan Islamic society where men and women happily chose to live a Muslim lifestyle. On the world stage, Iran was to spearhead an uncompromising anti-American and anti-Israeli crusade of resistance, arming its ideological allies everywhere and pursuing self-reliance even to the point of isolation.
Both of these dreams have failed manifestly and spectacularly. Iran today is among the least religious societies in the Muslim world. Iranians are among the most avid consumers of global pop culture and have little time for the Islamic sensibilities. Although the compulsory veiling rule is still on the books, the regime has decided not to enforce it as seriously, and millions of women now walk around with bare heads. Tehran does not look like an Islamic model city.
On the foreign policy front, Khamenei used to be able to claim a few successes, even if they came at the high cost of international isolation for Iran. Pro-Tehran forces controlled four Arab capitals, and Israel was surrounded by the so-called Axis of Resistance, a network of militias funded, armed, and inspired by Iran. But the combined force of Arab diplomatic initiatives, Israel’s battering of the axis, and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria have destroyed all that the old man had built. The fall of the axis vanquished not just Khamenei’s ideological achievement, but also the Islamic Republic’s defense doctrine against Israel. With it gone, Israel was able to take the war to Iran. Khamenei will be now known as a leader who brought his people economic misery, domestic repression, and a murderous war.
The leader’s failure has long been apparent to many in the Iranian economic, military, and political elite. The old man has stuck to power but, at 86, his demise is not far and the battle over his succession is already raging. Among the factions jockeying for power in the post-Khamenei Iran, most are led by pragmatically oriented figures who share none of Khamenei’s revolutionary doctrine. If they have an ideology, it’s a mixture of Iranian nationalism and technocracy. They watch with envy as Iran’s neighbors put old conflicts to bed and seek economic development.
These pragmatic elites have been party to Islamic Republic’s fractious internal politics for decades. Their godfather was Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful president in the 1990s, who was gradually sidelined by Khamenei before dying a suspicious death in 2017. Rafsanjani’s main disciple, President Hassan Rouhani, led the diplomatic talks with the Obama administration that resulted in the 2015 nuclear deal, which was intended to lift the sanctions on the Iranian economy and open it up to the West. Rafsanjani and Rouhani were part of the founding generation of the 1979 revolution who had undergone a fundamental shift and concluded that the revolution’s ideals were best pursued by prioritizing good governance and prosperity.
Had U.S. President Donald Trump not left that deal in 2018, it could have ended in a historic victory for the pragmatic elites vis-à-vis the Islamist hard-liners. Trump’s scuttling of the deal was a massive blow that weakened them for years. But the hard-liners weren’t able to win the internal battle. Khamenei himself knows that he is alone at the top. In a landmark 2019 speech to mark the 40th anniversary of the revolution, he said that the future Iran must be led by “devout and revolutionary youth,” knowing full well that the established elites did not match the criteria.
In recent years, Khamenei’s continued failure has emboldened the pragmatists. It helps that their ideas are more in tune with the Iranian public. Since 1997, any time that Iranians have been given a meaningful choice at the ballot box, they have voted against the hard-liners and for the pragmatists. Last summer, they chose the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian as president and snubbed arch-hard-liner Saeed Jalili.
Hard-liners have been marginalized at most levels of power. In addition to Pezeshkian, the heads of two other branches of the government—the parliament and the judiciary—don’t sympathize with the hard-liners, either. The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps often have little time for the hard-liners who are seen as bookish, doctrinaire, and dangerous to Iran’s social equilibrium due to their insistence on enforcing social puritanism by the force of arms.
Changes in the region have helped put wind in the sails of the pragmatists. They look up to Saudi Arabia and its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, due to the swiftness of social changes that he brought to his country and his impressive leveraging of his relationship with Trump. The Iranian-Saudi reconciliation process started in 2023 and has gathered pace since. In April, a large Saudi military delegation visited Iran. The establishment in Tehran now jealously guards its good ties with Riyadh and has tried to resume diplomatic ties with Saudi allies Egypt and Bahrain.
The conflict with Israel will only accelerate a process that was already underway. The Iranian elites are now hard at work defending their country against foreign attacks. But they are likely livid at Khamenei for having brought them to this point by his disastrous lack of strategy and his long-lasting crusade against Israel. Faezeh Hashemi, an outspoken former lawmaker and a daughter of Rafsanjani, spoke for many when she said that, in facing Israeli attacks, Iran was “reaping what it had sown.”
When the pragmatists find their composure, they will take the reins and attempt to bring about a truce, including by promising the West and Israel that they’ll give up on permanent hostility toward them. They’ll give the necessary concessions on the nuclear program to preserve their privileges and prevent further destruction of Iran and its infrastructure.
This could take a few different forms. Rouhani could make a comeback and be given the informal command of the country. Perhaps he could be declared deputy commander in chief, a title held by Rafsanjani during the 1980-88 war with Iraq, when Rafsanjani effectively ran the war effort because Khomeini was too old and frail. Perhaps a group of military commanders could formally depose Khamenei and take power for themselves. Candidates for military leadership include Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, or Ali Shamkhani, a powerful former national security advisor who was almost killed in the Israeli strikes.
But whatever form it takes, the contours of this likely scenario are clear: Iran’s 1979 revolution will be finally put to rest. Iran will surrender its long hostility toward the West.
Iran’s long history is filled with many a martial hero, but even as it finds itself in one of its worst wars ever, Iranians are looking for a diplomatic hero instead. They are asking if their country could have another Abbas Mirza, the Qajar crown prince of early 1800s. Abbas Mirza was traditionally reviled in Iranian historiography due to the controversial peace treaties that he signed with Russia, giving up Iranian territory in the Caucasus. But he is now praised by many as a man who was able to keep Iran’s sovereignty intact. Yes, Iran lost a lot, but it lived to fight another day. That will be the task of Iranian pragmatists today.
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