STİMSON
How Will Mojtaba Khamenei Rule Iran — and for How Long
The announcement earlier this week that Mojtaba Khamenei had been chosen to succeed his slain father as Iran’s Supreme Leader was in some ways unsurprising. Who better, in this analyst’s view, to step into the role than someone who had been working alongside his father for many years and who, at a time of peril, was already intimately familiar with the military, security, and economic organs of the Islamic Republic?
That said, the choice of the 56-year-old second son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was controversial for a system born from a revolution against hereditary rule. For many Iranians, the elevation of the Supreme Leader’s son looks uncomfortably close to dynastic succession. The selection was also a rebuke to Iranians who risked and lost their lives in massive anti-government protests in January and an act of resistance to President Donald Trump, who had deemed Mojtaba’s succession “unacceptable” and had asserted that he should have a say in picking Iran’s next leader.
As of this writing, Mojtaba has yet to appear in public, perhaps to avoid U.S. or Israeli strikes or because he was seriously injured in the Israeli bombing that began the war on Feb. 28 and that killed his mother, wife, and a child as well as his father and some 40 others. So far, only what appear to be artificial intelligence-augmented videos have appeared on Iranian media, splicing together past sightings of Mojtaba and fake material.
Even before his promotion, Mojtaba was a quintessential regime insider not known for giving speeches; many Iranians have never heard his voice. He does not appear to have a social media presence and has never held appointed or elected office in Iran. Yet his possible succession had been on analysts’ radar long before it became reality this week. In 2019, I wrote an issue brief with an Iraqi colleague on who might succeed Khamenei and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Persian-born cleric who resides in Najaf, Iraq, and is widely venerated among Shi’ite Muslims. Mojtaba was not a candidate for Sistani’s job, but I put him fifth on a list of six clerics who might rule Iran.
With the death in a helicopter crash in 2024 of the man considered most likely to succeed Khamenei for a time — Ebrahim Raisi, then Iran’s judiciary chief and later president — Mojtaba bumped up a notch. As noted in the 2019 brief, “Mojtaba has the necessary connections with the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and the paramilitary Basij, as well as insight into his father’s vast financial resources.” Mojtaba also was known for his close ties to Iranian security and intelligence services and was rumored to have played a major role in helping firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeat a reformist and get elected president in 2005. Mojtaba is also believed to have helped orchestrate Ahmadinejad’s rigged re-election in 2009 and in repressing the Green Movement protests that followed.
In 2023, an Iranian political analyst in Tehran wrote for the Stimson Center’s Middle East Perspectives program that “at present there are only two likely candidates for succession, Raisi, who has lost favor because of his poor performance as president, and Khamenei’s second son, Mojtaba.” The analyst noted the strong support for Mojtaba from the Resistance Front, a group of hardline Iranian political factions, and the fact that right-wing clerics held a majority of seats in the Assembly of Experts, the body charged under the Iranian constitution with choosing and supervising the supreme leader.
Mojtaba, who for several years taught in a seminary in Qom, improved his chances for the top job in 2022 by reportedly somehow acquiring the title, “Ayatollah,” or “sign of God,” a high rank among Shi’ite clerics and one that his father was only given after he was named supreme leader. The fact that Mojtaba, like his father, wears a black turban, signifying his descent from the family of the Prophet Mohammad, was also a plus for a position that has religious as well as temporal significance.
How Mojtaba will govern remains a matter of speculation, particularly as the war continues and his health condition has not been publicly clarified. Given the assassination of so much of his family by Israel, reportedly aided by CIA intelligence, it is unlikely Mojtaba will be predisposed to make any concessions to the governments responsible for those killings and the pummeling of Iranian infrastructure. However, he will need to stabilize the security situation. He will also have to take into account the views of more senior members of the Iranian system. Even his father ruled through consensus rather than fiat. Surviving figures such as two-time Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and former parliament speaker Ali Larijani and current parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf will surely have a say, possibly along with former president Hassan Rouhani. Mojtaba’s authority will also depend heavily on continued backing from the IRGC, whose political and economic influence has expanded dramatically over the past two decades.
Like his father, who ascended to power in 1989 in the wake of a devastating war between Iran and Iraq, Mojtaba, a veteran of that war, will have to address Iran’s urgent reconstruction needs. He will also have to decide what to do with what remains of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, its missile and drone factories, and its relationships with like-minded groups in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. The “Axis of Resistance” that proved so effective at spreading Iranian influence after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq has been ground down by Israeli attacks since Hamas struck Israel in 2023.
Given his age, Mojtaba must be well aware of how alienated most Iranians have become from a regime that repeatedly rejected efforts at internal reform, although at various times tried to improve relations with the West; those efforts failed because of actions on both sides, including President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from a nuclear agreement in 2018 and reimposition of draconian economic sanctions.
Since Trump has now twice attacked Iran during negotiations, it is hard to imagine that Iran would welcome any new U.S. diplomatic outreach in the near or medium term following a ceasefire, which Trump may unilaterally declare once he decides he has battered Iran enough or that might be mediated by Arab states or others. Mojtaba will presumably look toward Russia and China to help Iran recover, both militarily and economically. But to gain popular support, or at least grudging popular acquiescence, he will also have to find a way to begin to repair the chasm between the regime and ordinary Iranians, perhaps by relaxing Islamic behavioral and dress codes that, while widely flouted, remain on the books. Thirty years younger than his late father, Mojtaba could, in theory, rule for decades. But the durability of his leadership will depend less on age than on whether the Islamic Republic can stabilize after war, economic strain, and deep social alienation.
The most optimistic view is that Mojtaba will emulate authoritarian reformers like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who has allowed Saudi society to liberalize while retaining an iron grip on political power and expression. But Mojtaba could also copy Vladimir Putin, a major beneficiary of the current war and its soaring oil prices, by combining repression and corruption at home with foreign aggression, assassinations, and subversion.
Header image: Azadi Tower. By Amir Mehnati
No comments:
Post a Comment