Foreign Affairs - The Real War for Iran’s Future Who Will Determine the Fate of the Islamic Republic? - Afshon Ostovar - March 31, 2026

Foreign Affairs

The Real War for Iran’s Future

Who Will Determine the Fate of the Islamic Republic?

Afshon Ostovar

March 31, 2026

iran illustration

Illustration by Ed Johnson; Photo source: Reuters.

On March 1, 2026, the Iranian government made it official. “After a lifetime of struggle,” a state broadcaster declared, “Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei drank the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom and joined the Supreme Heavenly Kingdom.” The broadcaster praised Khamenei for being “unceasing and untiring” and for his “lofty and celestial spirit.” As he read the announcement, people offscreen wailed. When he finished, he, too, broke down in tears.

Most Iranians probably didn’t cry when they learned of Khamenei’s passing. For over 35 years, Iran’s supreme leader ruled with an iron fist, repressing women, minorities, and anyone who dared challenge him. But the dramatic wording of the death announcement was, in a sense, warranted: more than anyone else, Khamenei is the architect of the Islamic Republic and all it has entailed. Although it was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who established the theocracy by seizing power during Iran’s 1979 revolution, it was his successor who transformed it into the country it is now. It was Khamenei who ensured that the supreme leader remained Iran’s paramount authority in practice, not just in principle. It was Khamenei who pushed Iran to pursue regional hegemony, thus committing it to perpetual conflict with Israel and the United States. And it was Khamenei who transformed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), once a military with an uncertain future, into the central pillar of the government.

The Iranian elite moved quickly to name a replacement. Just over a week after his death, the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body tasked with appointing the supreme leader, announced that Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, would assume the position. But speed and lineage will not prevent a power vacuum in Iran. Only the elder Khamenei had the experience and standing required to keep the regime’s various camps in check. As a result, Iran’s top officials are now lining up to chart the country’s future.

At the time of this writing, the actors best positioned to succeed are those affiliated with the IRGC, Mojtaba Khamenei included. As Iran’s strongest armed actor, it has the resources to impose its will on the country’s populace. This bodes poorly for Iran. The IRGC’s leaders are, for the most part, hard-liners who thrive in perpetual conflict with both external and internal forces. If they solidify power, Tehran will remain reflexively antagonistic toward Israel, the United States, and pro-democracy elements inside the country.

But this future is not foretold. The IRGC’s unbending policies have clearly failed to protect the country, much less benefit its people, and have long been seen by the regime’s reformists as a dead end. And there are many reformists, including current officials and former presidents, who could chart a more accommodating course. If they can shape the state, the regime might agree to trade its nuclear program and regional aggression for economic relief and development.

The pragmatists have an uphill fight. Unlike the hard-liners, they have little armed power. They have also lost trust with the Iranian people for either weakly condemning or outright backing the regime’s brutal suppression of popular protests. But Iran is in chaos, and reformist insiders have the experience needed to guide the government onto more stable ground. They can capitalize on the fact that the hard-liners’ ranks have been decimated by U.S. and Israeli strikes to take the reins of power. To do so, however, they must appeal to Iran’s frustrated, long-suffering citizens by promising a more peaceful, prosperous, and politically free future.

WATCH THE THRONE

Ali Khamenei was never supposed to be Iran’s supreme leader. During the country’s revolution, he was just one of many acolytes of Khomeini. His status as a midlevel cleric, one more interested in politics than scholarly production, put him beneath the lofty religious standards Khomeini demanded of future rulers. Khamenei quickly made powerful allies and gained prominence, and he was elected president in 1981. But at the time, the charismatic rule of Khomeini had rendered the presidency a tertiary position. It was Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of parliament, who was Khomeini’s most trusted hand.

But Khomeini and his inner circle sidelined clergy who could challenge his religious authority. Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari, for example, was fired from his position as the head of the Qom Seminary, a major center of Shiite clerical authority, and placed under house arrest by Khomeini’s deputies. The supreme leader likewise turned against his original appointed successor, the more progressive-minded Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, for openly defying him on a number of issues, including by opposing the execution of thousands of political prisoners at the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. As his health failed in 1989, Khomeini thus found that there were no viable potential successors who had the requisite religious credentials, the correct politics, and sufficient support among the rest of the regime. He then had the constitution rewritten so that any midlevel cleric who backed Iran’s Islamist system of rule and was knowledgeable about the country’s geopolitical conditions could succeed him. These changes allowed Khomeini’s younger lieutenants to compete for his throne—Khamenei among them.

Even then, Khamenei’s ascension remained far from assured. Instead, the leading candidate was Rafsanjani. Indeed, Rafsanjani probably could have secured the position had he not decided that he would rather be Iran’s president after Khomeini died. In Rafsanjani’s view, the supreme leader’s office would become far less consequential after Khomeini’s death, and the presidency would become the position with the most authority. He was thus happy to cede the supreme leader’s office to his friend Khamenei, and indeed lobbied Khomeini and the Assembly of Experts on Khamenei’s behalf.

Iran’s most likely future is a military-controlled authoritarian state.

It worked. Khomeini died on June 3, 1989, Khamenei was appointed his successor the day after, and Rafsanjani was elected president the following month. But if Rafsanjani thought he was on a glide path toward becoming Iran’s uncontested authority, he was mistaken. The two senior officials were soon at odds over postwar policy and locked in a power struggle.

At first, Rafsanjani had the edge. He was the most capable of Khomeini’s disciples and the most cunning politician in Iran. He also had a clear agenda for rebuilding the country’s crumbling economy and infrastructure. By comparison, Khamenei had no clear plan. More troubling, he had little legitimacy. Whereas Rafsanjani became president by winning an election and Khomeini became supreme leader by leading a revolution, Khamenei gained his position through backroom dealing. He had no popular support.

But Khamenei recognized his weak standing and set about finding a group that could shore him up. He did not need to look long: the IRGC was similarly searching for a new political partner. The organization had helped Khomeini defeat his rivals after the revolution, but the destruction and high costs of the war with Iraq had damaged its standing, and Rafsanjani was moving to curb its influence. Khamenei, however, was happy to help it maintain and expand its position. Khamenei thus threw his weight behind the Revolutionary Guards’ domestic agenda, which sought to refocus society around conservative Islamic mores. He used the authority of his office to give IRGC commanders a bigger voice in domestic politics and more power in Iranian society. The IRGC, in turn, used its armed might to coerce and arrest reformist figures, including those aligned with Rafsanjani. When Rafsanjani left office after two terms, the presidency had lost much of its luster.

By the start of the millennium, the symbiotic relationship between Khamenei and the Guards had fully secured the rule of hard-liners in Tehran. The IRGC repeatedly put down pro-reform demonstrations and student protests. It blocked Rafsanjani’s reformist successor, Mohammad Khatami, from making any meaningful changes to the country. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fellow hard-liner who served as president from 2005 to 2013, was marginalized by Khamenei and the IRGC for attempting to restore influence to the executive branch. Only Khamenei and the Guards could hold real power.

DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR

The supreme leader’s partnership with the IRGC worked, in part, because of their shared conservative Islamist domestic agenda. But it also worked because of their coalescing perspectives on global affairs. Both sought to make Khomeini’s view of the world—in which the United States was the leading enemy of Islamic civilization and Israel was the primary mechanism of American influence—central to Iran’s foreign policy. The “liberation of Jerusalem”—that is, the defeat of Israel as a Jewish state—and the overturning of the American-led international order became their chief causes.

At first, progress proved fitful. Iran’s drive to export its Islamist revolution lost momentum amid the war with Iraq. The 1990s turned into a period defined by domestic issues, and the IRGC’s foreign operations were mostly reduced to carrying out acts of terrorism. Yet the IRGC remained ambitious, and when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, their fortunes changed. Both operations created open-ended conflicts ripe for exploitation, and Iran, which borders both states, was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the regional upheaval. The IRGC thus quickly began clandestine interventions. In Afghanistan, it played both sides of the conflict but ended up supporting factions of the Taliban, providing them with funds and arms. In Iraq, Tehran cultivated new militias to fight American forces. When U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, these linkages remained, and Tehran became the most powerful external player in Baghdad. The success in both places gave Iran a template. As the Arab Spring swept across the region in the 2010s and set off new conflicts, the IRGC exploited the instability to forge relationships with various armed actors, intervening in Syria to save Bashar al-Assad’s government from collapse and later helping the Houthis rise to power in Yemen.

Khamenei’s assertive foreign policy was matched by his ambition to make Iran a great military power. The regime invested heavily in weapons that allowed Iran to threaten its enemies from a distance, leading to the development of sophisticated missile and drone programs. The regime also worked to master nuclear enrichment. Although Tehran consistently denied it was trying to produce nuclear weapons—Khamenei even issued a religious edict banning them—the program’s advancement went well beyond what was needed for civilian use. At a minimum, Iran’s nuclear endeavors gave the country the material and know-how needed to build a bomb.

A woman holding a picture of Mojtaba Khamenei, Tehran, March 2026

Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

For a time, this strategy proved effective. By the early 2020s, Iran was the dominant political actor in a wide swath of the Middle East, including Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. Iran’s expansionism and the conflicts it produced further empowered the IRGC inside the regime, transforming it into the dominant voice in foreign affairs. Its expansive security-related schemes also allowed it to control an outsize portion of the Iranian economy.

The costs of this approach, however, were extraordinary. Massive military outlays, for example, prevented Tehran from investing in Iran’s people. The country’s nuclear and missile programs resulted in severe U.S. sanctions. Iran’s economy thus declined while inflation soared. Iranians started protesting against their unelected dictator—first in 2009, then sporadically from 2017 to 2022, and, most recently, in December and January.

Eventually, Tehran began facing international setbacks. After Hamas, another Iranian ally, struck Israel on October 7, 2023, the Jewish state dispensed with its previous reluctance to destroy the Islamic Republic’s capacities. Over the next two years, it repeatedly struck Hezbollah, IRGC positions in Syria, and the Houthis. Finally, it took out many of Iran’s air defenses and missile production sites and, with the help of the United States, bombed and buried many Iranian nuclear facilities. In February 2026, the two countries attacked again, killing Khamenei and other prominent officials and massively degrading Iran’s entire military and security apparatus.

CRISIS OF FAITH

Khamenei’s death has opened the door to change within Iran. But so far, its main consequence has been the empowerment of the IRGC. By the time he was killed, Khamenei was the only remaining check on the group’s whims, ensuring that although the IRGC got what it wanted most of the time, it was never totally triumphant. Now, it has no peer. Whether Mojtaba Khamenei lasts or not (as of this writing, U.S. officials say he is injured), the supreme leader’s office will no longer have the standing to impede the Guards’ agenda. The new supreme leader will be as much an agent of the IRGC as its overseer.

This, in turn, could mean that Iran’s elected officials have less power than ever. Under Khamenei, Iran’s executive branch would occasionally defy the IRGC; the supreme leader, for example, let President Hassan Rouhani, a reformist who served from 2013 to 2021, negotiate and sign the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States despite the Guards’ objections. Today’s reform-minded president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is in a much weaker position.

Iran’s most likely future is thus a military-controlled authoritarian state with a theocratic figurehead. Such a government would almost certainly be belligerent. The IRGC is dominated by hard-liners, so it is primed to keep confronting Israel and the United States and to steer what’s left of the country’s economy into rebuilding the military. To help, these officials would likely seek assistance from China and Russia, Iran’s two main patrons.

But this path comes with serious challenges. Beijing and Moscow are preoccupied with their own foreign policy problems and must balance their connections to Iran with their relations to Arab states, which are now furious with Iran for attacking them in retaliation for the United States and Israel’s strikes. They are unlikely to help Iran reclaim its lost regional influence. Tehran, meanwhile, is broke. It cannot afford to quickly build back its military, create new subterranean infrastructure to restart its nuclear program, or rearm its proxies, particularly all at once. In the meantime, its aggression and its allergy to compromise will only invite future attacks. And as much as the regime finds comfort in its unimaginative rhetoric of resistance, tough talk will not address the extreme disaffection of the Iranian people or quell future episodes of unrest. To stay in power, regime officials will have to keep relying on violence.

Ordinary Iranians have not yet had a true champion within the government.

The IRGC doesn’t mind this. To its leaders, staying in power on their own terms is all that matters; the lives of ordinary Iranians are unimportant. They are energized by their anger at Israel and the United States, and that anger has grown exponentially thanks to the war. But not everyone in the regime wants Iran’s future to look like its past, especially given that its policies helped lead to disaster, and some of them are willing to push for a different trajectory. That includes Pezeshkian. In March, in the midst of the war, the president asked the IRGC to work with his government to preemptively address Iran’s dire postwar economic situation. According to reporting by IranWire, when a young IRGC officer brushed Pezeshkian off during a meeting, declaring that a perpetual state of emergency would be good for Tehran because it would ensure that no Iranians “dare to voice dissatisfaction,” the president was incredulous. “That is no answer!” he shot back. “Does it mean that once the war is over, we must kill another round of protesters? Is this what you call planning?”

That doesn’t mean prying Iran away from the IRGC will be simple, given its raw coercive capacity. But although the Guards’ relative power within Iran has increased since the attacks began, their absolute power has been diminished. It was, after all, the IRGC’s strategy and policies that led Iran to the brink of defeat, bankrupted its economy, and turned vast swaths of the Iranian people against the regime. That has cost the corps internal political capital, making it vulnerable to attacks from critics within the regime. It has gained authority now that Ali Khamenei is no longer around to serve as a check. But his death also costs the IRGC its biggest and most powerful supporter.

The IRGC may also struggle to muster its coercive capacities. The war has ravaged its ranks, including by killing many of the most capable personalities, such as Ali Larijani, a top security official, and Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to the elder Khamenei. Meanwhile, the most competent reform-minded leaders were mostly spared. That includes Pezeshkian, Rouhani, and Khatami, the last of whom remains the country’s most prominent reformist. It also includes Ahmadinejad, who reinvented himself as a critic of the status quo after his presidency and was effectively placed under house arrest. (The U.S. and Israeli strikes may have helped free him from confinement.) Last, it could include outwardly hard-line associates of the IRGC who are less dogmatic, such as the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who has tried to brand himself as a pragmatic manager and has enough clout inside the system to change it. These officials are all canny operators, and they could exploit the newfound looseness in Iran’s regime to push for change. They could do so by unifying the state, working behind the scenes to galvanize support for a different path forward, and taking their case to the public. If these figures can come up with a clear plan to improve the country’s economy, resolve its insecurity, and ease social pressures—all in service of preserving the theocratic system—the IRGC might struggle to ignore them.

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN

There is a final group that could force Tehran to change course: ordinary Iranians. They are the most powerful potential source of national legitimacy. They have not yet had a true champion within the government, but there has never been a better opportunity for someone inside the regime to act as one. In fact, the best chance for an enterprising regime insider to either circumvent the IRGC or force it to change would be to appeal directly to the people.

The mass protests of the past have not brought about substantial reforms. But Iranian society still has classes with real influence. One is the country’s small merchants, or bazaaris, who make up a small percentage of Iran’s population but control the traditional economy and important urban centers. During the first two decades of the Islamic Republic’s history, the bazaaris were the theocracy’s most important constituency, yet years of economic instability have eroded their support for the regime. Similarly, Iran’s many trade unions and guilds have influence over Iran’s energy and transportation sectors and have suffered from the country’s decline. If the bazaaris and the labor groups united, they could bring much of the economy to a halt through strikes and boycotts.

Iran’s younger generation could also prove to be a potent ally. The young have no connection to the 1979 revolution and know the regime only for corruption and cruelty. Their lives have been shaped by decades of conflict and privation. They have led most of the recent protests and have suffered the most from the regime’s violent campaign against dissent. Yet they are still the most politically energized demographic. An enterprising politician pushing for change could gain millions of enthusiastic followers by successfully motivating this cohort.

Burnt-out vehicles inside a car shop damaged by a strike, Tehran, March 2026

Burnt-out vehicles inside a car shop damaged by a strike, Tehran, March 2026

Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

If Iran’s pragmatists or reformists do manage to gain power, the country’s future could look much different from its past. Its new leaders would likely focus on improving the economy and broadening the government’s base of support, a task that would force them to search for ways out of perpetual conflict with Washington. They might therefore pursue either a grand settlement with the United States or a series of compromises that together produce concessions on the nuclear and military fronts in exchange for sanctions relief. Doing so would give Iran’s people a reason for hope and, by extension, less desire to rebel.

The United States should try to help empower these more pragmatic elements in ways beyond simply killing their hard-line competitors. Washington should, for example, engage diplomatically with whoever is willing to talk. Having a direct line to Washington would by itself give pragmatic elements more potential influence inside the system. The United States should also proactively offer measured inducements to Iran, such as targeted sanctions relief, in exchange for its willingness to compromise on key areas. Even the more moderate Iranian leaders are unlikely to accept maximalist demands from Washington, but they could agree to incremental steps that initially focus on the nuclear issue and later expand to the military and foreign policy. U.S. officials could also push Iran to allow for greater social freedoms and to end the persecution of religious minorities—steps that would reduce anti-regime sentiment within Iranian society.

Such measures would not be a panacea. The regime’s pragmatists are hardly advocates of democracy; even though it was the hard-liners who drove Iran into the ground, the country’s moderates were fully complicit. But despite all the bombings, the regime remains intact, and there is no viable alternative that is ready to replace it. As a result, the most effective way to transform Tehran for the better is to work with insiders who support change. They know how the system works and how to work the system. And after decades of dominance by ultraconservatives, Iran’s tumult means these moderates finally have a shot at enacting change.