How Iran’s new regime is very different to what came before

Trump likes to say that he has achieved regime change in Iran. Governor Nasr also disagrees but says this is to Tehran’s advantage.

“A completely new generation has taken over,” he says. “They have a very clear agenda. They managed the war, now they will manage the peace.”

Nasr says the new leadership consists not of what Washington is accustomed to calling “woolly-brained apocalyptic ideologues” but of post-revolutionary leaders who are generally ruthlessly focused on preserving the state and willing to act more decisively than their predecessors.

At 56, the country’s new religious leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is 30 years younger than his father, Ali Khamenei, who was believed to be in poor physical condition when he was killed at the beginning of the war.

President Masoud Pezeshkian is 71 years old, but the generation that carried out the 1979 revolution is all gone.

The two key figures, parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf and Revolutionary Guard commander-in-chief Ahmed Vahidi, are in their 60s.

Like the new supreme leader, both have close ties to the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

“They are the children of the revolution,” says Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Chatham House think tank in London.

“An 86-year-old man is no longer steering the ship of the Islamic Republic. The biggest handbrake in the evolution of the system was Ali Khamenei.”

For decades, cautious Khamenei has pursued a strategy sometimes referred to as “no war, no peace.” His successors acted more boldly, launching attacks on US military bases in the region and, a few weeks later, apparently willing to sit down and negotiate an end to the war on terms that were far from humiliating for Tehran.

“They showed that they were willing to go into battle much more aggressively than the previous generation,” Nasr says.

When Trump ordered the airstrike that killed former Revolutionary Guard commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020, Iran deliberately telegraphed its intention to retaliate before launching 12 ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq. No US service personnel were killed.