US President Donald Trump said this week that Iran’s new leadership is “less extreme and much more rational.” President Trump and the Pentagon have repeatedly maintained that a change of government has occurred.
President Trump said earlier this week, “Because one administration was destroyed and destroyed. They’re all dead. The next administration is mostly dead. And the third administration is dealing with a different group of people than we’ve ever dealt with before. It’s a completely different group of people.” “Therefore, I will consider a change of government.”
However, most political scientists and analysts would think that regime change involves an outside force changing the way a country is governed, rather than simply replacing the people at the top of the system.
By definition, regime change is systemic change, something that has not yet been seen in the Islamic Republic, which remains an authoritarian theocracy that has existed since Iran’s 1979 revolution.
Rather, the war has given more power to the hardline military within Iran’s complex governance system and heightened anti-American sentiment.
“This regime is more assertive, less inclined to compromise, and frankly more openly tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” said Mona Yakubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’ve seen the beheadings of the leaders who were reigning in Iran at the time, but we haven’t seen any dramatic changes in terms of who’s in power or Iran’s position vis-à-vis the United States.”
Yacoubian cautioned that no analyst currently has deep insight into the inner workings of the Iranian government. Blind spots abound, something even some U.S. officials acknowledge. (It is an open question whether new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is in good health or whether he is actually leading the country, given that he has not been seen or photographed since the war began.)
But experts know that Mojtaba himself has strong ties to the Revolutionary Guards, and that he is more indebted to them than his father, as they helped propel him to this position.
Contrary to President Trump’s claims, other leaders, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, have not changed.
Analysts also say they expect the hardened regime to double down on its crackdown on its own people.
“In some ways, it’s true that President Trump has changed the regime in Iran. He has transformed Iran into a more radicalized regime,” said Ali Baez, director of the International Crisis Group’s Iran project. “The new national security adviser, the new head of the Revolutionary Guards, the speaker of parliament, himself a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, all have had extensive involvement in domestic repression in their past lives.”
Iran brutally suppressed nationwide protests in January by shooting thousands of protesters, and the government has carried out at least nine executions in the last month, including those related to winter protests.
Iran’s new authorities will be wary of any form of popular uprising that President Trump called for early in the war. They will also be alarmed by a series of recent intelligence failures and leaks.
“Given the level of paranoia of the regime, I am confident that the crackdown will be much more severe than in the past,” Baez told CNN.
“This is a wounded administration, and if it survives, it is not going to give an inch to its people, at least not for the time being,” Baez said.
Ali Baez, Iran Project Director, International Crisis Group
Yacoubian said Iran’s military and naval capabilities have been damaged by U.S. and Israeli attacks, but the Revolutionary Guards continue to control both “the guns and the money” needed to crush domestic opposition.
“And they maintain the Basij, which are like the foot soldiers of this kind of repression apparatus,” she added, referring to the paramilitary groups that are affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards and have played a major role in quashing public dissent. “They have not seen any kind of collapse or even erosion of regime control in any urban areas.”
Needless to say, it has not suffered enough damage to deter it from waging war and asserting control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, Iranian authorities’ tight control over internet access remains in place. According to internet monitoring company Netblocks, the nationwide internet outage has been going on for more than a month.
Experts also say the war is likely to solidify the regime’s determination to acquire nuclear weapons. Former supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa, a legal ruling based on Islamic law, banning nuclear bombs. But that edict died with him, Baez said.
“Having the ultimate deterrent capability is a very attractive prospect for any military,” Baez added. “Right now, it is the military that is in charge. It is the military whose regional deterrence is weakened and whose conventional deterrence will be significantly reduced once this war ends. And the military still has a shortcut to nuclear weapons” in the form of more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.
Analysts note that the Revolutionary Guards are not being attacked precisely because they have nuclear weapons, pointing to the example of North Korea.
“It’s hard to see how the administration could come to any conclusion other than that its best hope for deterrence is to have nuclear weapons,” Yacoubian told CNN. “At this point, we have nothing to lose.”
In a speech at the White House on Wednesday night, President Trump reiterated his claim that Iran is “on the doorstep” of nuclear weapons, a claim that contradicts U.S. and Western intelligence assessments.
And while he strongly advocated regime change, he also argued that the United States was dismantling the same administration’s “capacity to threaten the United States.”
“Regime change was never our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change occurred with the death of all the original leaders,” Trump said.
But other U.S. officials are cautious about speaking too clearly about Iran’s new leadership.
“Look, there are internal rifts,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with ABC News on Monday.
“The Iranian people are great people. The people who lead them, this clerical regime, that’s the problem. And if we have a new leader with a more rational vision for the future, that will be good news for us, for them, and for the whole world,” Rubio added. “But we also have to be prepared for the possibility that it’s not, maybe that’s the case.”
