Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Dead. Now What?

The strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader over the weekend has split opinion over whether it speeds a regime collapse, keeps the Islamic Republic intact under a new figurehead, or produces a tougher, security-run version of the same system. 

Israeli officials are projecting confidence that the war is not stopping at the killing of Ali Khamenei and several dozen regime leaders under him. “[US President Donald] Trump intends to go all the way with this move,” one senior official told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. “He wants to replace the regime, and he has no intention of taking his foot off the gas.”

US officials familiar with intelligence assessments have voiced a more cautious view, pointing to serious skepticism that even if Iranians took to the streets, the country’s battered opposition would not have the power to topple the regime.

Publicly, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have framed the war as a moment of political opportunity. “I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment and take back your country,” Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social. Netanyahu struck a similar note, saying Israel would create the conditions for “the brave Iranian people to liberate themselves from the chains of tyranny.”

Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said that the success of the US-Israeli strikes so far would not guarantee the end of the regime. 

“You cannot topple a regime through aerial strikes alone,” he said during a briefing with reporters on Sunday, adding that “millions of Iranians” were needed to do that. 

But after weeks of suppression during last month’s anti-government protests, he said, the Iranian public is “very much traumatized,” and it is hard to imagine mass demonstrations resuming while “missiles and jets are above their heads.” Even if crowds return, he said, a protest movement is still unlikely to succeed as long as the security forces preserve cohesion and the determination to fight.

“The majority of the Iranian people are not organized, have no leaders,” he said, adding that many potential leaders are “in jails and prisons all over Iran.” The security elite, he argued, has every reason to hold the line because many of its members believe that if the regime collapses it will not only destroy their interests but “might actually kill them as well.”

The Islamic Republic “probably enjoys the support of perhaps between 15 to 20 percent” of the population, Zimmt said, adding that that minority is still large enough in a country of roughly 90 million people to sustain a committed base, fill institutions, and provide manpower for coercion.

Zimmt called Khamenei’s death “the end of an era,” describing him as “the last Iranian revolutionary” and, in recent years, a bottleneck blocking real change. 

The larger question, in Zimmt’s view, is whether Iran now moves toward constitutional change – of the kind seen after the death of Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989 – and a different governing model, that might pave the way for some kind of political transition. 

“Perhaps not a regime change as all of us would like to see but perhaps some kind of a change from within the regime,” he said. 

Zimmt said that after the 12-day war with Israel and the US in June, pragmatic voices in Iran argued the regime should adjust strategic objectives and prioritize domestic problems over regional commitments. 

“But at the end of the day, Khamenei made a decision to change almost nothing,” he said.

According to The New York Times, Khamenei made a short list of figures he viewed as acceptable successors in the wake of the June war. It included Ali Asghar Hejazi, his long-serving chief of staff and who Israel said it killed in Saturday’s strike; Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, the head of Iran’s judiciary; and Hassan Khomeini, a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The younger Khomeini is seen as more moderate than Khameinei’s own son and potential successor, Mojtaba. 

Zimmt said that while Mojtaba has support in the security establishment, “a hereditary succession would only deepen the [regime’s] crisis of legitimacy,” because the Islamic Republic was founded against dynastic succession.

Alireza Arafi, a senior cleric who was named to Iran’s interim leadership council after Khamenei’s death, is also in the mix. 

But the identity of Iran’s next supreme leader may matter less, Zimmt argued, than who controls power around him.

He singled out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as “a very, very influential player” not just in security and the military sphere but also in politics and the economy. In that environment, Zimmt suggested, the succession could preserve the appearance of continuity with another senior cleric far weaker than Khamenei as the public face while the IRGC and other security circles are the driving force. 

Former Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff, whose work has focused on strategic policy and arms control, cautioned it was too early to know how events would unfold and said Tehran’s next leadership could yet prove “even more fanatical” than the Khamenei-led one but expressed hope the events of the past few days could reshape the region’s long-term trajectory.

“This is an opportunity for Iran, it’s an opportunity for the region, and above all, it’s a major opportunity for Israel,” Issacharoff told The Algemeiner. 

He added that, in the near term, he expects the military campaign to keep targeting the pillars of Iranian state power, including missile and nuclear infrastructure, as well as core internal-security nodes such as IRGC headquarters, the affiliated Basij milita, and the Interior Ministry.

“At the end of it we could see a very different type of relationship with Iran, with the Iranian people,” he said.