The killing of Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by Israel will have profound consequences for the regime and the Iranian people. As supreme leader, Khamenei was Iran’s ultimate authority. He made all the major decisions around the country’s nuclear program—the sharpest point of conflict between it and the rest of the world.
Khamenei’s death and the U.S.-Israeli push for regime change will finally break the floodgates and allow much-needed change in all aspects of Iranian life. But Khamenei’s death does not mean an automatic collapse of the regime and the emergence of a new order that is amenable to regional countries and the global community. The regime’s survival skills, the lack of clear alternatives, and the Iranian opposition’s disunity will make U.S. President Donald Trump’s war against the regime much more complicated than he may have imagined.
The killing of Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by Israel will have profound consequences for the regime and the Iranian people. As supreme leader, Khamenei was Iran’s ultimate authority. He made all the major decisions around the country’s nuclear program—the sharpest point of conflict between it and the rest of the world.
Khamenei’s death and the U.S.-Israeli push for regime change will finally break the floodgates and allow much-needed change in all aspects of Iranian life. But Khamenei’s death does not mean an automatic collapse of the regime and the emergence of a new order that is amenable to regional countries and the global community. The regime’s survival skills, the lack of clear alternatives, and the Iranian opposition’s disunity will make U.S. President Donald Trump’s war against the regime much more complicated than he may have imagined.
In the wake of Khamenei’s death, the regime has appointed a leadership council to manage succession. Ali Larijani, a seasoned regime insider and former parliamentary speaker with deep ties to Iran’s security and clerical establishments, has positioned himself as the key coordinator of the post-Khamenei apparatus. Larijani appears to have moved quickly to help establish the provisional council and frame it as constitutional continuity. In the meantime, he is managing the elite politics behind the scenes to keep rival factions aligned, project institutional control, and buy time for the system to consolidate succession without splintering.
Larijani’s goal is to continue the regime’s strategy of ensuring its own survival while raising the costs for the United States. The Islamic Republic may be at its weakest point since its founding in 1979, but a strategy of just air strikes against its leadership without troops on the ground will make overthrowing the regime quite challenging.
The regime has recently displayed unity and the willingness to use massive violence, as shown by the killing of thousands of Iranians during protests last January. While the regime has been militarily weakened and has completely lost control of the sky, it nevertheless commands the loyalty of a significant part of the population and can mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers and security forces.
Many Iranians celebrated Khamenei’s death, but many also mourned his killing. The Islamic Republic, unlike many other personalist dictatorships, has managed to establish ideological roots in Iranian society that are unlikely to be easily erased by killing its top leaders.
The lack of an organized opposition inside and outside of Iran is also a serious obstacle to overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah, is currently the most prominent opposition figure, thanks in large part to his father and grandfather’s legacy and significant Israeli support. But instead of uniting the opposition around a common vision, Pahlavi and his team have launched an authoritarian campaign against other dissidents and opposition leaders in order to make Pahlavi stand out and appear as the only alternative to the regime.
Pahlavi does not have an organized revolutionary structure inside or outside of Iran. Instead, he spends much of his time attempting to prove that he is the leader of the national revolution to credulous Western audiences. He wants others to do the dirty work of overthrowing the regime so he can claim credit as a leader and become the recipient of Western support, which is the only way that the Pahlavis have historically been able to rule over a large and diverse nation.
The Iranian Kurds are likely the most organized and cohesive of Iran’s opposition groups. The recent announcement of a broad coalition of five Iranian Kurdish groups demonstrated some promise, confirmed by the Pahlavists’ reaction to its formation and their labeling of the Kurdish groups as “separatists”—an insult to Kurdish fighters who have fought against the regime for decades while helping non-Kurdish opponents of the regime escape through Iran’s perilous western mountains.
The only other organized opposition group, the cult-like Mojahedin-e-Khalq organization, does not possess the necessary popular support or numbers to effectively challenge the regime on its own.
If there was ever a critical time for the opposition to unite, it is now. But the Pahlavi movement’s attempts to politically dominate the diaspora will stand as a permanent obstacle to unity against the regime. The United States simply has no alternative force available that would be able to administer Iran if the regime were to collapse.
Such a collapse would undoubtedly make many Iranians and their neighbors happy, but it also could mean a civil war in a large country with loose nuclear materials and the attendant frightening scenarios. The regime’s collapse could also lead to greater food and water insecurity, and the disruption of energy transportation in the Persian Gulf would have a devastating impact on Iranian households, resulting in blackouts and fuel scarcity.
An unstable Iran with nuclear materials will radiate instability across the region and have major consequences for U.S. national security. What should the Trump administration do?
Washington should combine its campaign of regime change in Iran with vigorous outreach toward the Iranian diaspora, especially Iranian Americans, and create an opening for real and sustainable change in Iran, not a Venezuela-style reshuffle in which the regime survives under new labels.
That outreach should be dependent on a process based on transparency and internal accountability. It should aim for an inclusive and representative political structure with a collective leadership that is responsible to its stakeholders, and it should include a credible day-after plan for basic governance, public safety, and control of sensitive nuclear and military sites if the regime collapses.
Any opposition grouping blessed by the Trump administration should be composed of educated and capable professionals, not celebrities and power-hungry attention-seekers.
Killing Khamenei and parading Pahlavi on television are not going to solve the real set of crises. It may be tempting for Washington to think that Khamenei’s death will lead to the end of the 47-year nightmare that Iranians and many others have faced. But the regime’s collapse is likely to exacerbate and lead to even greater crises and dilemmas that the Trump administration cannot even imagine.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.
