How Iran’s new regime is very different to what came before

Trump is fond of saying that he’s achieved regime change in Iran. Vali Nasr doesn’t disagree, but says this has actually worked to Tehran’s advantage.

“A whole new generation has taken over,” he says. “They have a very clear agenda. They managed the war and now they’re going to manage the peace as well.”

The new leadership is not made up of the sort of people Washington is used to calling “woolly-brained apocalyptic ideologues”, says Nasr, but of generally post-revolutionary leaders ruthlessly focussed on preserving the state and willing to act more decisively than their predecessors.

At 56, the country’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei is 30 years younger than his father, Ali Khamenei, who was believed to be in frail physical condition when he was killed at the start of the war.

The president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is older at 71, but the generation that mounted the 1979 revolution are all gone.

Two key figures, the parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guard, Ahmad Vahidi, are both in their 60s.

Like the new supreme leader, both have close links to the all-powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

“They’re children of the revolution,” says Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at London’s Chatham House think tank.

“An 86-year old is no longer guiding the ship of the Islamic Republic. The big handbrake on evolution of the system was Ali Khamenei.”

For decades, the cautious Khamenei pursued a strategy sometimes dubbed “no war, no peace.” His successors have been bolder, launching attacks on US military bases across the region and then, a few short weeks later, willing to sit down and negotiate an end to the war on terms which, on the face of it, are far from humiliating for Tehran.

“They’ve shown that they’re willing to engage in war in a much more aggressive way than the previous generation,” Nasr says.

When Trump ordered the air strike that killed the former Revolutionary Guard commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020, Iran deliberately telegraphed its intention to retaliate before launching 12 ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq. No US service personnel were killed.