With the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the temptation is strong to redraw Iran’s borders or install a friendly despot. The US should resist it.

The US-Israel assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has brought the Islamic Republic of Iran to its most uncertain power transition since the revolution in 1979. Within hours of the announcement, maps began circulating in Washington and on exile channels: a federal Iran with autonomous Kurdish, Arab, Baluch, and Azeri regions; a confederal Iran drifting toward soft partition; even a patchwork of mini‑states carved from the Islamic Republic’s collapse. Now that the succession crisis is real, the temptation to redesign Iran from the outside will only grow. That temptation is exactly what the United States must resist.

With the regime’s command structure shaken and rival factions maneuvering for control, the worst American instinct would be to arrive with a ready‑made constitutional blueprint. A federal Iran here, a confederal union there, a new border for every “problem” region—this is how a strategic opening becomes a generational quagmire. 

Whether Iran becomes a centralized state, a federal union, or something looser must be decided by Iranians in deliberation with each other, not by American lawyers, think‑tank cartographers, or exiled politicians with pre‑drawn maps. A wise US role is to set a few hard red lines and broad preferences, then get out of the business of meddling with the country’s internal wiring.

The first red line should be explicit: the United States must not pursue, endorse, or even flirt with a breakup strategy for Iran. In the charged atmosphere following Khamenei’s killing, any hint of a partition agenda would instantly validate the regime’s long‑standing narrative that the West seeks to dismember Iran. 

It would also invite regional and great powers to treat Iranian peripheries as open hunting grounds: an Arab entity in Khuzestan under Gulf influence, a Kurdish entity under Turkish pressure, a Baluch entity closely watched by Pakistan. That is not a solution; it is an invitation to border wars, proxy contests, and ethnic cleansing on the ruins of the Islamic Republic.

A responsible US policy should plainly state, “We do not seek to redraw Iran’s borders or turn it into a patchwork of statelets.”

The second temptation is the opposite of the first—backing a single “stabilizing” strongman to hold the country together. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ early moves after Khamenei’s killing show how quickly a security apparatus can present itself as the only guarantor of order. But replacing one hyper‑centralized authoritarian system with another would preserve the very logic that helped break Iran in the first place: an overmighty center, regions treated as internal colonies, and a security state loyal to a person rather than to law.

If Washington throws its weight behind a new shah, a new supreme leader, or a new general, it will own that person’s repression and corruption just as surely as it owned the failures of post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan.

Between those two red lines is where a serious US preference can live: a territorially intact, democratic Iran that Iranians design for themselves. That could mean a reformed unitary state with strong devolution, or a genuine federal system in which provinces elect their own governors, control local policing, shape education and language policy, and receive a transparent share of national revenues. The label matters less than the shift in power: from an all‑consuming center to empowered local institutions bound by national rules.

Washington’s bias should tilt toward rational decentralization: real autonomy in the periphery, real checks on the center, one flag, and one foreign policy.

Khamenei’s killing has created a vacuum that neighbors and great powers will try to fill. The US role should not be to design Iran’s internal order, but to guarantee the outer frame in which Iranians negotiate it. That means: deterring regional actors from carving out spheres of influence while Iran is at its weakest; offering economic and technical support for a constituent assembly if one emerges; backing credible monitoring of any referendums or elections; and refusing to prejudge whether the final settlement is “unitary,” “federal,” or something in between

The United States should not be agnostic about outcomes but disciplined about its means. The White House should define what is unacceptable—partition and a new dictatorship—and let Iranians bargain their way to a new center-periphery contract inside those lines.

In this moment of maximum uncertainty, the only responsible American policy is to keep its own mapmakers on a tight leash, draw a few clear red lines, and insist that Iranians—and only Iranians—decide what their country should look like on the inside. When America designs the wiring of someone else’s house, it ends up owning the blackouts.

About the Author: Charbel Antoun

Charbel A. Antoun is a Washington-based journalist and writer specializing in US foreign policy, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He is passionate about global affairs, conflict resolution, human rights, and democratic governance, and explores the world’s complexities through in-depth reporting and analysis.

The post Two Redlines for a Post-Islamic Republic Iran appeared first on The National Interest.