After Khamenei: What Iran, and the World, Face Next
The killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during the military strikes by the United States and Israel on Feb. 28 has triggered the most consequential moment of transition for the Islamic Republic since he came to power in 1989. In the decades since, he showed little tolerance for internal dissent, while transforming Iran into a regional power with an axis of armed, non-state allies and proxies spread across the Middle East. He also built an institutionalized political system.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]In fact, the most striking feature of the immediate aftermath of his death has been continuity: Iranian missiles have continued to fly, senior officials have struck defiant postures, and security forces have moved swiftly to shape the streets before the streets can shape them. That early continuity is not incidental: it reflects Khamenei’s handiwork, namely a political system engineered to absorb shock and continue functioning.
The Islamic Republic was designed to concentrate ultimate authority in the office of the Supreme Leader but under Khamenei it learned long ago to distribute coercive power across overlapping institutions—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the internal security apparatus—to allow the state to not only repress dissent and project its power but also endure during moments of crises and uncertainty. Those architectural decisions have produced a system capable of continuing to fight even as it negotiates internally over who ultimately holds the right to command.
Indeed, the constitution of the Islamic Republic anticipates exactly this moment: it provides for a temporary transfer of the Supreme Leader’s duties to a leadership collective—the president, the head of the judiciary, and a senior cleric from the Guardian Council—while the Assembly of Experts, a body of senior clerics constitutionally mandated to select the Supreme Leader, deliberates and makes its choice.
On Sunday, the Islamic Republic invoked that pathway and appointed President Masoud Pezeshkian, a reform-leaning politician, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a veteran judicial and intelligence official close to the security establishment, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, a Guardian Council member and head of Iran’s seminaries in Qom, to the interim leadership council.
Constitutional procedure and political reality are rarely the same thing. The decisive question is not which body holds formal authority but where power consolidates in practice: among clerical institutions that safeguard the system’s legitimacy, or among security actors that can enforce order while the conflict grinds on.
The architecture of a regime
As the political process unfolds, the persistence of Iranian military operations after the Ayatollah’s death reflects institutional planning shaped by years of anticipating this very scenario.
While Iran moved briskly to follow the constitutional pathway for a temporary transfer of power to its leadership collective, procedure alone does not account for the speed with which the system rallied and stabilized its response.
In practice, authority and power had already gradually gravitated toward the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), the country’s highest national security body and the security establishment surrounding it. The body is run by figures positioned at the intersection of civilian governance and military power, and are best placed to manage wartime decision making, particularly as the killing of the Ayatollah has radically compressed the window for elite bargaining.
Early public messaging has underlined this shift. The man who addressed Iran and the world on television after the death of the Ayatollah was Ali Larijani, the head of the national security council. A former IRGC commander and an experienced politician with a reputation for pragmatism, Larijani has been overseeing nuclear negotiations, regional relations, and suppression of recent protests.
In his televised address, Larijani struck a tone that was at once defiant and carefully calibrated. He spoke of national unity, warned against those who would seek to “fragment the country,” and framed the confrontation not as a crisis of leadership but as an existential struggle for Iran itself. The message projected resolve and defiance toward the U.S. and Israel, while directing an unmistakable warning inward, toward any faction tempted to exploit the moment.
The distribution of operational authority across institutions capable of acting under degraded or uncertain command conditions is defining the opening chapter of the post-Khamenei moment. Consider the missile operations. Their sustained tempo is not incidental; it illustrates how the system functions militarily under stress. Over the past two decades, Iran has invested heavily in creating a decentralized command structure in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Tehran has embraced a mosaic approach in which regional and provincial commanders are empowered to act with significant autonomy should central communications be disrupted or central authority become ambiguous. Retaliation can proceed. Strategic continuity does not require immediate consensus on succession.
Personnel moves have reinforced the strategic direction. Tehran has elevated Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, a hardliner who has served as deputy chief of the Revolutionary Guards and as defense and interior minister, to chief commander of the IRGC following the death of his predecessor. His appointment signals consolidation around actors whose career and authority are defined by military and operational credibility. It shows how authoritarian systems behave during periods of acute pressure and uncertainty. They tend to privilege those who can guarantee control over those who embody legitimacy.
These dynamics explain why the Islamic Republic has not appeared leaderless, despite losing the man who was, for decades, its most powerful figure. The system’s immediate objective is to preserve coherence—buying enough time for elites to negotiate the political future from a position of institutional strength rather than exposed vulnerability. In Tehran, continuity is the strategy.
How to run Iran after the Ayatollah
Despite the co-ordination and planning for this moment, Khamenei’s removal does bring with it uncertainty and critical concerns about the longer term future of the regime, raising one key question in particular: Who inherits authority in a system built around a singular arbiter?
Khamenei’s death removes the figure who balanced competing factions for more than three decades. And the question of who might ultimately succeed him is unfolding against the backdrop of a major conflict. That narrows the space for prolonged internal contestation. The succession process, in other words, will be shaped primarily by elite bargaining conducted under pressure.
On paper, it seems straightforward. The Assembly of Experts has the mandate to select a new Supreme Leader, but the reality is that the outcome will depend on alignment among the various institutions capable of enforcing any decision. That is no easy task. Clerical legitimacy may remain necessary, but coercive capacity has become indispensable. Political and security figures with institutional reach—Larijani or Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament—are positioned to influence the transition because they can translate authority into immediate control.
Wartime conditions favor consensus candidates or collective arrangements that minimize uncertainty over the regime’s immediate trajectory. In the short term, elite cohesion is likely to hold. External confrontation encourages restraint among rival factions, each aware that visible fragmentation could invite escalation from abroad or unrest at home. Larijani underscored it in his speech when he warned competing elites that “today is not the day to settle accounts.” Any such unity is conditional. Once the immediate crisis stabilizes, suppressed rivalries will reemerge around competing visions of governance, economic management, and Iran’s external posture.
Khamenei’s death also reshapes the regime’s political narrative. The leadership can elevate his killing into a unifying symbol for its ideologically committed base, framing retaliation and internal discipline as acts of collective defense. “Martyrdom” has long served as a mobilizing language in the Islamic Republic, capable of reinforcing loyalty among core supporters while justifying tighter social and political control. That dynamic may strengthen hardline actors who argue that compromise invited vulnerability and that deterrence now requires a more assertive posture both domestically and regionally.
Iran faces further uncertainty from regional dynamics on two fronts: the reactions of its axis of resistance across the region and the reactions of the Gulf countries. Khamenei’s religious authority—even if it was less potent than his predecessor—extended beyond Iran’s borders, and his death risks transforming an interstate confrontation into a broader ideological mobilization among allied non-state actors. Shia groups in Iraq and Lebanon that previously calibrated their involvement may now interpret escalation as an obligation tied to the loss of a religious leader.The danger for Tehran lies in managing this momentum: its axis of resistance can open new fronts quickly but their operational autonomy makes escalation harder to contain once it begins.
Moreover, the conflict has significantly hurt Iran’s relations with neighboring Gulf countries that had been pursuing cautious rapprochement with Tehran. Iran’s missile strikes on cities and infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have rattled the Gulf Arab states. They have coordinated their condemnation of the Iranian attacks and could consolidate a regional coalition against Iran.
President Donald Trump has called upon the Iranian people to take over their government but that remains a highly unlikely scenario. Iran could possibly face gradual regime erosion driven by continued economic strain, sustained military pressure, and public discontent. Khamenei’s death removes a powerful symbol of continuity, but mass mobilization by opposition forces and political transformation would require organizational coherence and confidence that the state’s coercive apparatus can no longer enforce order. Iran’s decentralized security networks complicate that calculation.
Iran, therefore, has entered a period of overlapping negotiations: among elites maneuvering over succession, among security actors managing the risks of escalation, and between the state and a restive society contesting the regime’s legitimacy. The final outcome will hinge on whether the coalition that sustains the Islamic Republic can remain cohesive long enough to redefine leadership without unraveling the system it is trying to preserve.
Should Iranian elites manage to convert wartime cohesion into a stable succession, the Islamic Republic may emerge more centralized around its security establishment and more ruthless in suppressing internal dissent. Failure could introduce prolonged uncertainty in which rival factions could compete for leverage, external pressure could mount and domestic tensions could deepen.