The Iranian Regime Doubles Down

Less than two weeks into the American and Israeli bombardment of Iran, the war is both a success and a failure. Militarily, the campaign has effectively degraded the Islamic Republic’s warmaking capacities. But politically, thus far, it has only strengthened the regime’s cohesion.

President Trump may have hoped the elimination of the Islamic Republic’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would produce an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez—a pragmatic insider who would capitulate to American pressure—but it has instead spawned a budding Iranian Kim Jong Un. Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, will succeed his father, making the Islamic Republic a hereditary dictatorship poised to double down on ideology and repression.

Mojtaba inherits one of the most difficult jobs in the world. Reportedly injured and in hiding, he will lead a government that is simultaneously fighting full-blown wars against the United States and Israel and against much of its own population. He survived the missile strike that killed his father, wife, and mother only because he was in an adjacent room. The attack that nearly killed him catapulted him to power, as the Islamic Republic, fighting for its own survival, closed ranks around a son committed to his father’s revolutionary principles—choosing continuity over competence and familiarity over sudden change.

[Graeme Wood: ‘The most dangerous man in the world’]

Mojtaba’s predicament is not only physical. The revolution’s founding ideology offers him precious little legitimacy for the role he is about to assume. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 revolution that deposed a hereditary monarchy to establish a theocracy, called hereditary succession a “sinister, evil system of government” that “has no place in Islam.” Like the pigs in Animal Farm, the Islamic Republic’s leaders have become a dynastic ruling class presiding over a system of privilege and repression far more egregious than the one they overthrew.

Mojtaba’s name is familiar to the Iranian public, but his face and voice are not. He has been mentioned as a potential successor for more than a decade, but the only video of him online is a short, grainy clip about seminary matters. A source in Tehran who has known him for more than four decades described him to me as “more radical” but “much less capable” than his father.

The elder Khamenei was a genuine revolutionary. He spent years in prison under the shah and rose to power on the force of his oratory. His son grew up a princeling in his father’s shadow, undergoing none of the hardship that forged the father’s authority. Those who know Mojtaba well say he is a poor speaker and has the stunted interpersonal skills of a dictator’s son. “When people hear his maiden speech as leader,” my source told me, “they will see his lack of presence.”

The second-oldest of Khamenei’s four sons, all of whom became clerics, Mojtaba was reportedly a weak student. Whereas his father was a voracious reader, including of Western novels, Mojtaba has primarily read Islamic texts and the poetry of Hafez. His overseas travel has been limited to Saudi Arabia, on pilgrimage, and the United Kingdom, for medical treatment. Contrary to government propaganda, the same source said, he does not speak English. His father was not a warm presence, but Mojtaba is considered dry even by comparison.

Hard men populate Mojtaba’s inner circle. They include figures such as Hossein Taeb, the feared former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence arm; Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC commander and the current speaker of Parliament; and Hossein Fadaei, the late Ali Khamenei’s primary internal enforcer. These figures have collectively spent more than a century in the service of repression. Their coarsened appearances reflect George Orwell’s observation that by age 50, every man has the face that he deserves.

Taeb and the younger Khamenei go back to the 1980s, when Mojtaba served in the Iran-Iraq War and Taeb was his commander. Although the clergy and the IRGC are commonly understood as separate pillars of the Islamic Republic, Taeb, as both a cleric and an IRGC officer, serves as a bridge between the two power centers. One of the most feared and loathed men in Iran, he is thought to have helped engineer Mojtaba’s succession through his influence over the Assembly of Experts, the body of elderly clerics responsible for choosing the supreme leader.

Siamak Namazi, a U.S. citizen, is a businessman and an Iran analyst who was held hostage for nearly eight years by the IRGC intelligence agency when it was under Taeb’s command. Namazi described Taeb to me as “the most hard-line of the hard-line” and “one of the most evil figures in the Islamic Republic.” The regime has long taken dual and foreign nationals hostage to use as tools of foreign policy or financial extortion. Namazi believes that Taeb, with Mojtaba’s blessing, is behind many of these incidents and that the practice is unlikely to end as long as both men remain alive and in power.

While the country is in crisis mode, Mojtaba will need to rely on Ali Larijani for domestic and foreign-policy expertise. Larjani is one of the few remaining regime loyalists with senior experience in both the domestic and the international realms. In a recent state-television interview, filmed in what appears to be a bunker, a relaxed Larijani said that Iran had been “raped” by outside powers, and he tried to rally not just the regime’s base but the broader public behind the imperative to fend off foreign designs. Trump’s words—the U.S. president had said that he would choose Iran’s next leader, and that he didn’t know whether Iran’s map would look the same at the end of the war—have proved invaluable propaganda tools for the Islamic Republic.

For the foreseeable future, Mojtaba will attempt to rule from hiding as he tries to elude Israeli assassination. His focus will be not governing the country but staying alive. Whether Mojtaba has the endurance for this life is an open question. His father was forged by years of revolutionary hardship—prison, persecution, life underground—before coming to power and reportedly amassing a war chest exceeding $100 billion, built in part from properties confiscated from religious minorities who fled persecution.

Mojtaba has skipped the hardship portion of that arc entirely. A Bloomberg report suggests that he has, via middlemen, already amassed a personal overseas fortune exceeding $150 million—the entitlements of a privileged scion, not the spoils of a revolutionary. As the social theorist Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

[Arash Azizi: Meet the nepo-tollah]

One of Iran’s most prominent 20th-century secular intellectuals, Ahmad Kasravi, observed that Iran “owed the clergy one government,” just so that the people could truly witness the clerics’ incompetence. That debt has been settled in full by five decades of theocratic brutality and economic decay. In a dark twist of history, Kasravi was assassinated in 1946 by a radical Islamist named Mojtaba Navab Safavi, who sought to establish an Islamic state in Iran. Safavi was executed by the shah a decade later, when Ali Khamenei was a teenager. Khamenei once declared that Safavi “first kindled the fire of revolutionary Islam in my heart.” It was in his honor that Khamenei named his second-born son.

Trump has little interest in this history. He wants a deal and an exit. But can he afford to end a costly and chaotic war by leaving Iran in the hands of a Khamenei who is just as radical, and 30 years younger, than the man he killed?

In Tehran, the only men who currently have the legitimacy to end the war are now doubly committed to the character of the Islamic Republic. Foremost among them is the new supreme leader, who in the best of times possessed neither the worldview nor the temperament to meet Trump’s public demand for unconditional surrender. “They’ve just killed his family,” the source in Tehran said. “He’s bloodthirsty now.”