We’ve written a lot about how the war in Iran is changing the Middle East and geopolitics. We’ve written less about how it’s changing Iran.
That’s partly because reporting on an authoritarian country at war is extremely challenging. But this week, my colleague Farnaz Fassihi had a remarkable story that took us behind the scenes of Iran’s supreme leader succession fight. What she found suggests the war has had a profound impact — and not the one President Trump was hoping for.
Today I write about the incredible inside story of Iran’s internal power struggle, and how regime hard-liners found assistance from an unlikely source: America and Israel.
How the war is empowering Iran’s hard-liners
It was the Islamic republic’s version of “Game of Thrones”: a slain leader, a council of clerics, and two dynasties — Khamenei and Khomeini — competing. All this as American and Israeli bombs rained down on the realm.
It ended, we now know, in the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s next supreme leader. He’s a man many consider to be just as hard-line as his father, who was taken out by Israeli airstrikes.
But an outcome that from the outside may have seemed “straightforward, even predestined,” as Farnaz wrote, was neither. Instead, it was the product of a dramatic fight between regime factions in which the hard-liners prevailed. They were aided by a mood of defiance and anger fueled by the war.
We’ve heard different visions from the U.S. and Israel about how they imagine the war ending. Some involve wholesale regime change. Others point to the idea that the war will produce a more cooperative, conciliatory Iran.
For the moment, that’s not how things are going.
Hard-liners vs. moderates
Before the war, analysts say, Iran might have been on an organic path to more moderate leadership. There had been successive mass protest movements that had already led to some societal change. The aging Ayatollah Khamenei had limited years left in power. He had given close advisers the names of three potential successors. His son was not among them.
Farnaz’s reporting reveals how the war has changed all that. And the death this week of Ali Larijani, the de facto interim ruler of Iran who was on the side of the moderates in the succession fight, only reinforces that dynamic. Larijani was also killed in an Israeli airstrike.
The succession fight was fueled by rage against the U.S. and Israel. But it was also a fight that revealed just how hard moderates were pushing for a different kind of Iran.
The hard-liners rejected any internal and external calls for regime change. Khamenei’s son, their preferred candidate, had the backing of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s ideologically driven military force.
The moderates, meanwhile, were arguing for a new face, a new style of governing and an end to hostilities with the U.S. Their two preferred candidates were Hassan Rouhani, a former president who oversaw the negotiations leading to the 2015 nuclear deal, and Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founding father of the Islamic republic who is close to reformist parties.
But with American and Israeli bombs falling from the skies, the clerics in charge of appointing a supreme leader grew less interested in a pragmatic leader able to rescue the country from its state of acute crisis, Farnaz wrote. They wanted to avenge the death of a leader they view as a martyr.
On March 3, Mojtaba Khamenei received the necessary two-thirds majority from clerics. But even then the moderates did not give up.
Larijani’s “coup” attempt
The man central to a last-ditch effort to challenge Khamenei’s ascension, officials and clerics told Farnaz, was Larijani.
Larijani was concerned the younger Khamenei would be a polarizing figure and had argued for a more unifying leader. And when his side lost, he tried to play for time.
First, he called off the announcement, arguing it would be a risk to Khamenei’s life. Then, he said the vote was invalid because Iran’s Constitution mandates that clerics vote in person.
The delay gave other moderates time to organize a more substantial challenge: an argument that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hadn’t wanted his son or any family member to succeed him. A written will specified why: Hereditary succession would violate the essence of the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the Shah.
These plays didn’t work. The Revolutionary Guards, who accused moderates of staging a “coup,” swiftly mounted a counteroffensive and ultimately prevailed, electing Khamenei a second time.
“The war undermined the moderates, who wanted to start a process of structural change,” Farnaz told me. “And the war killed the man,” — Larijani — “who could have helped make that happen, and might have been able to negotiate peace.”
Larijani’s death is likely to radicalize and militarize the regime further, Farnaz said. He himself might be replaced by what she called an “ultra-hard-liner.”
Hamidreza Azizi, an expert on Iranian security issues, called the U.S.-Israeli approach to the war “elite-thinning,” and said it was going to make negotiating to end the war more difficult.
“Every layer that you remove, the next layer is going to be more hard-line,” he told my colleagues. (The Israeli military announced yesterday that it had also killed the Iranian intelligence minister in an overnight strike.)
His quote made me think of a news conference just a few days into the war, shortly after Ali Khamenei was killed. Asked whom he wanted to see rule in his place, Trump acknowledged he wasn’t sure. They had some names when the war started. But, he said, “most of the people we had in mind are dead.”
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Katrin Bennhold is the host of The World, the flagship global newsletter of The New York Times.
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