After Iran’s battle with Israel, questions return about Khamenei’s potential successors

Within the aftermath of the 12-day battle in June between Israel and Iran, questions have arisen about Iran’s Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He’s 86 years outdated and was a possible Israeli goal through the battle, resulting in hypothesis about who would possibly succeed him.

There has solely been one earlier time when Iran went via a technique of naming a brand new supreme chief — in 1989, when Khamenei was chosen to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the towering figurehead behind the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Now, almost 4 a long time on, that course of is as soon as once more unfolding, says Vali Nasr, an Iran professional at Johns Hopkins College and the creator of Iran’s Grand Technique: A Political Historical past.

“Everything in Iran in the past four or five years has really been about succession,” he says. 

Khamenei has periodically handed names of potential successors to the so-called Meeting of Specialists, a gaggle of roughly 80 clerics who determine the subsequent chief — although, in impact, function a rubber stamp for regardless of the supreme chief needs. Nasr says after the latest battle with Israel and the U.S. bombing of key Iranian nuclear websites, the number of a successor has grow to be extra pressing.

“I think in the interest of preservation of the state and ensuring its continuity, [Khamenei] created contingency plans to make a transfer of power much more smooth and quick,” he says.

Hypothesis over who might succeed Khamenei veers from hardliners like his 55-year-old son Mojtaba Khamenei and 52-year-old Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, to previous reform-minded presidents akin to Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami.

Afshan Ostovar, an Iran professional on the Naval Postgraduate College in Monterey, Calif., says Khamenei has good causes to not tip his hand as to who might succeed him.

“Khamenei is going to lose status because he’s going to have a successor,” he says, including that the successor is probably going going to be a goal for political assaults.  “So, the longer that successor is known, the longer opponents are going to have to sort of tarnish his brand.”

Ostovar says the successor should be a cleric.

“If you didn’t have a cleric succeeding Khamenei, you would no longer have an Islamic revolution. You no longer have an Islamic republic,” he says. “It would be a completely different system.”

However Ali Vaez, who heads the Iran mission on the Worldwide Disaster Group assume tank, says the subsequent chief might not in reality be a non secular determine. He notes that Iran has suffered deep setbacks underneath Khamenei: the economic system is battered, there’s severe discontent in society, it misplaced key proxies akin to Hezbollah within the area and its navy was decimated final month by Israel. Vaez says Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a dominant, multipronged navy pressure — might even see this as a chance for change.

“It is quite possible that Ayatollah Khamenei is the last supreme leader of Iran,” he says. “It is hard to imagine that the military, the Revolutionary Guards, which has paid the highest price for Ayatollah Khamenei’s strategic mistakes, would continue seeing the clerical establishment as an asset and not as a liability.”

Whoever that successor is, the query turns into what sort of chief he will likely be — what {qualifications} and character does he (and it undoubtedly will likely be a he) should have?

Ostovar says he’ll possible be seen as weak by Iran’s powerbrokers, together with clerics, politicians and enterprise leaders.

“None of the institutions of power within the Islamic Republic already are going to want to just hand over the kingdom to somebody who’s going to become a dictator,” he says.  “The weaker a person is, the more influence that all the factions can potentially exercise over that person.”

Khamenei himself was seen as weak when he was named supreme chief. However he was additionally crafty and aligned himself with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, says Nasr. For all sensible functions, he says, the revolutionary guards are already working the nation.

“They are in the government. They control media. They control vast areas of the economy. They are in decision making circles in a way,” he say. “They are operating the way the Egyptian or the Pakistani military operate, behind a civilian facade.”

Nasr says there’s a realization amongst many energy brokers that issues have to vary — that Iran’s virulent anti-West stance has hit its restrict.

“There [are] powerful voices that are not saying we should tomorrow morning become absolute friends of the West,” he says. “But basically, they’re saying we should end the war with the West and we should go down the path of de-escalation.”

Nasr says after de-escalation can come normalization.

However how Khamenei dies might additionally have an effect on the choice about who subsequent runs Iran.

If he dies naturally, Nasr says, a average might grow to be supreme chief. If, nonetheless, Khamenei is assassinated, almost certainly a hardline cleric will take management — to take care of continuity after a violent finish to Khamenei’s rule.