Khamenei’s exit seems inevitable, but what follows—managed continuity, secular republic, monarchy, or an unstable hybrid—depends on organization, power balances, and foreign pressure.
The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic has long since lost control of the reins. His leadership began a few months after the mass killings of summer 1367 (1988); now the twilight of his rule has become entwined with the January massacre. From one massacre to another. From one terror to another.
Ali Khamenei is not merely Ruhollah Khomeini’s successor; he is the architect of the post-war Islamic Republic. The system we know today—its institutional design, the balance of forces, security priorities, and even its economic logic—is less Khomeini’s legacy than the product of four decades of Khamenei’s continuous intervention in the smallest nuts and bolts of power. Khamenei built a government not on collective participation, but on security, control, personal loyalty, and rent-based distribution of resources; a regime in which politics was not competition, but the management of threats.
Yet this very meticulous engineering carried the seed of exhaustion within it. A system that ties everything to security inevitably reaches a point where, without violence and massacre, it can no longer protect its own survival. By gradually dissolving politics—elected institutions, social mediators, and even the traditional clergy—Khamenei built a system whose only language is force. Such a system works only as long as its force suffices; and it is precisely at this point that the post–January massacre Islamic Republic hits a dead end.
A Society That Cries Out for the Regime’s Death
The January massacre was not simply one more massacre after years of repression; it was the point at which even the last illusions of coexistence between state and society collapsed. The crime that unfolded in the streets was a conscious decision by a government that knew it had nothing left to lose. When a regime resorts to this level of naked violence, it is in fact admitting that its social capital has been depleted—and that it no longer has any hope of persuading people or managing discontent.
In 1404 (2025–2026), what condition is the Islamic Republic in? A worn-out, ineffective system under an aging leader—one that has lost the cognitive and ideological capacity to rebuild its pillars. The external threat and the shadow of war hang over it. Corruption has gripped it cell by cell, while society, broadly, cries out for its death. The very fact that a political system reaches a point where some people, to be rid of it, even contemplate their own and their country’s being bombed by foreign forces—or else feel indifferent to it—shows the depth of the bankruptcy that has occurred.
Sooner or later, Khamenei’s Leader’s Office will close. What has happened over the past year tells us Khamenei is a candle in the wind—and this is not something only you and I see. From the person in the inner quarters who brings him tea and food to the advisers, assistants, and military men around him, they all know the “king is breathing his last.”
The bad news for the Supreme Leader is that people in his surrounding circle have begun to weigh him on a scale of profit and loss. They ask whether keeping him on the throne of power is worth its terrifying costs. In other words: the costs of keeping the leader in place have risen so high that they may end by threatening the system itself.
A Caricature Prophet and the Merciless Logic of Power
The rational rule is that those who benefit materially and in status from the system—generally the leader’s trusted circle—think about the fate of their livelihood and their business on the day Khamenei is no more. And of course they think about it. It is true that Khamenei always tried to cast himself, for his supporters, in the role of a prophet or a first-rank imam. But even if you are a prophet—even if the Quran has been revealed to you—the world of meaning is still not strong enough to overcome the relations of the material world. The struggle over posts, rank, and increasing one’s share of benefit from the system is woven into the nature of the regime—whether a regime with a real prophet at its head, or a regime with a caricature prophet.
That is why the main political and security forces gathered around the current leader—forces whose actions can matter—think about “the day after Khamenei.” Over the past year, this thinking has certainly grown stronger.
Four Actors, Four Logics
Four forces are decisive in today’s conditions: the people and civil society, foreign power, forces inside the government, and opposition forces. Each has its own story. Their demands overlap in places and clash in others.
The people—meaning that active segment driven to the edge, whose blood stained the streets on 18 and 19 Dey 1404 (January 8 and 9, 2026)—have a clear demand: the end of the nightmare of the Islamic Republic. Anything that ends this half-century series of repression, massacre, and humiliation—and brings even a little calm and a bit of comfort—is desirable. People’s tactics in the streets, both in choosing slogans and in deciding how far to advance or retreat, depend on their assessment of the opposing side and the degree to which change seems feasible.
Iran’s protesting people did not arrive overnight at the station of “overthrowing the Islamic Republic.” Contrary to fantasies that sometimes grip professional political forces, ordinary people determine the form of protest, the target of protest, and the tactics of protest by measuring objective variables and their own material conditions. The people’s priority is always “life,” and the less costly the route to securing life, the more preferable it is.
The people are the same people who once danced for the 1376 election (1997), placed their hopes in the Sixth Parliament, and clung to the arrival of the “Imam’s prime minister”, Mir Hossein Mousavi. They once hoped for “change as far as possible at minimal cost” within the Islamic Republic’s substance and appearance. They are still the same people. If today they are prepared to sacrifice their lives to secure “life,” it is because they have lost hope in the Islamic Republic—and in the possibility of living and enduring under it.
The nightmare of the Islamic Republic has become so terrifying—has dragged life into such misery—that it even grants the previous dead end, the Shah’s rule, the chance to acquit itself.
Peripheral Forces: Government, Opposition, and External Pressure
Beyond the people, forces within the government—from reformists to technocrats, eulogists, IRGC men, and hardliners—are thinking about their placement in power on the day after Khamenei. These forces control the rent-based economic structure and networks of resource distribution; they seek to preserve their economic, political, and status interests in the future.
At the top of their risk list sit several scenarios: Khamenei’s absence; a U.S. and Israeli attack; nationwide protests; a fundamental upending of the system; a coup by one faction against another; the opposition and its political game; and more.
A crucial split runs through the regime’s interior: futureless ideologues who still speak the language of slogans, versus technocrats and security managers who think in the language of cost and benefit. The second group knows that the continuation of the status quo can push the whole system to the brink. That is why, more than preserving Khamenei, they focus on how to pass beyond him at the lowest possible cost.
Outside the regime, opposition forces—linked, in various ways, to the people’s general demand—push forward the program of overthrow. From republican and left groups to constitutional and absolutist monarchists, and exiled reformists, each on its own island seeks to deliver the final blow. Some seek “doping” from regional and extra-regional powers, and even defend a limited military strike. Others place their hopes in the ultimate force of the people and civil society to overcome the shaky order.
External pressure—especially U.S. and Israeli military and security threats—cannot be ignored in accelerating events. Some believe the United States and Israel will carry out regime change, and that the post-change placement of forces will therefore be shaped by them. They store their energy, invest in lobbying Washington and Tel Aviv, and hope that Netanyahu and Trump will do the job. The roots of this belief lie in the shock of 23 Khordad 1404 (June 13, 2025), when senior Islamic Republic commanders were targeted and killed. Their logic is blunt: if the military can be killed, add the politicians too, and the system is finished.
But it is not that simple. U.S. and Israeli security and political analysts will not think with this kind of excitement. Such a scenario is tied to “all-out war,” and what seems evident is that Washington is not seeking a repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan through a ground invasion that would make it an absolute ruler for a time. Certainly Washington’s—and perhaps Tel Aviv’s—role after the fall of the Islamic Republic would be significant. But it is unlikely they would arrange the entire new order down to mid-level actors. The lesson of cases like Venezuela, Syria, and even the Taliban’s return is that what matters is a “desirable and stable output,” not perfect control over the “stage arrangement.”
Step back, then, from daily quarrels over republic versus monarchy and focus on the shared denominator of the four variables—society, regime insiders, the opposition, and foreign power: fundamental change. Three forces (society, the opposition, and foreign power) demand it; one force (the regime’s interior) considers it inevitable. The conflict is over the scope and quality of that change.
Four Plausible Futures After Khamenei
Four political futures are imaginable—none linear, none guaranteed.
First: an Islamic Republic without Khamenei, a system that tries to preserve its security–rentier logic by changing faces and moderating tone. It might reduce tensions briefly, but it would remain extremely fragile because of lost legitimacy and institutional exhaustion.
Second and third: a secular republic, and the restoration of monarchy. Which one comes to pass depends on which force holds the agency of change. A secular republic, without rapid organization and activation of its historical institutional resources, will be pushed to the margins. A monarchy, without an institutional base inside Iran, will be forced into alliances with defecting segments of the Islamic Republic.
Fourth: the full realization of none of these, and the emergence of a contradictory, unstable hybrid—an archipelago of middling political and economic forces stitched together.
What Is the United States Thinking?
The effective foreign force today—the United States—prefers change at the lowest possible cost, along with drawing Iran into its circle of strategic assets. For Washington, reducing the “cost of durable change” is far more urgent than intervening in the rivalry between “king supporters” and “president supporters.” Whatever combination achieves that goal with lower cost and greater stability is preferable.
The present Iranian scene suggests that any future political order—whatever its form—will position itself on the Western front. If all contenders intend to place Iran within America’s orbit, why should Washington absolutely take one side in their internal struggle? U.S. intervention becomes necessary only when internal conflict raises Washington’s costs.
Reza Pahlavi, Father of Modern Iran?
Reza Pahlavi and his circle pursue two paths in parallel: monarchy, and a quasi-monarchical republic—where he is either king or the “father of modern Iran.” They will try to prolong the current emergency so they can achieve their more desired outcome: restoration of monarchy. If that fails, they have a less desired fallback: a republic under the father’s shadow.
Their weakness is the absence of an institutional foothold inside Iran—not in the sense that no one chants his name, or that supporters abroad cannot show force, but in the sense that they lack durable networks—an “institutional power”—in Iran’s civil society and economic and cultural structures.
In both scenarios, they try to compensate by recruiting defectors from the IRGC and intelligence services. A political force can defeat its rival either by relying on its own power or by putting the rival’s elements of power to use. Pahlavi’s camp has chosen the second route. Campaigns like the QR-code mobilization and calls for IRGC and intelligence personnel to join them fit this logic.
Will those forces join him? Not unless they come to see Khamenei’s departure as certain and find no broker for a survival deal other than Pahlavi. If they can negotiate directly over the future order, they will not need him as a mediator. That is why Pahlavi’s advisers fear the possibility of a “direct U.S. deal with the Islamic Republic’s second layer.”
A Network That Wants to Build a Republic
Republican forces in the opposition—highly fragmented, and positioned abroad against Pahlavi—also face a decisive test: what they do now will determine where they stand tomorrow. Traditionally, they have a base in civil society and the middle class. They rely on network-based organization. Horizontal organization works to a point in a period of resistance, but a period of transition requires a degree of vertical organization.
A century-long desire for freedom, and lived experience—constitutionalism, nationalization of oil, the 1979 revolution, resistance to the Islamic Republic—along with a web of institutional values rooted in the middle class, form their historical base. Whether they gain the upper hand depends on how the nightmare ends and how long the emergency lasts. If the agency of change falls outside the will of society and the institutional networks of civil society—women’s, justice-seeking, ethnic, and labor movements and struggles—then republicans may find themselves with no better place than becoming the opposition of the next order.
Their path to success is to activate their networks fast and impose their agency. Will they manage it? It is unclear. The republican “front” bears the name of a front, but so far has shown little evidence of acting like one. Relying on moral-symbolic capital without a clear political program is their Achilles’ heel. Without organization and program, their only hope is that, at the birth of a new order, events and actors—by chance or by their own profit-and-loss calculations—end up serving the republican idea.
Khamenei will go; this is nearly certain. The Islamic Republic is no longer able to reproduce itself in the old way. But the leader’s departure and the system’s erosion do not, by themselves, produce freedom. Freedom is made through organization, institutions, balance of forces, and correct decisions at the correct moment—not merely the collapse of the previous apex of power.
Iran’s riddle is here: change is unavoidable, but “positive and durable change” is neither free nor guaranteed. The force that can, in the moment before and after collapse, move beyond emergency and rebuild politics will not only change the system—it will determine the course of Iran’s history.
