Despite the ceasefire between Tel Aviv and Tehran, Iran’s ruling elite fear that Israel will continue to pursue efforts to foment internal unrest and instability to weaken the regime from within — and perhaps ultimately topple it. These anxieties are particularly acute in anticipation of the upcoming negotiations involving Iran, the US, and European powers. Should these talks falter, the Iranian leadership sees cause for concern.
Indeed, such fears are not unfounded. Israeli hardliners argue that if Tehran fails to comply with Western demands and diplomatic efforts collapse, the regime — under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — will persist in enriching uranium at high levels and restoring its damaged nuclear infrastructure. From this perspective, triggering internal upheaval remains a strategic objective: by destabilising the regime from within or targeting its leadership, particularly Khamenei, Israel hopes to accelerate its disintegration.
Proponents of this view contend that Khamenei’s removal would unleash a domino effect: the regime would unravel, military command structures would descend into disorder, ethnic minorities would rise in rebellion, and Iran’s middle class would take to the streets, waving the banners of Western liberalism — even as air strikes rain down, framed as instruments of liberation.
Yet this narrative, seductive in its neatness, is not merely naïve; it is also dangerously disconnected from Iran’s political, security, historical, and ideological realities. The notion that the fall of a single figure could trigger national collapse underestimates both the entrenched nature of the Islamic Republic and the multifaceted dynamics at play within the country.
For nearly four decades, Khamenei has been a towering figure in Iran’s political and religious life. But to reduce Iran to the person of Khamenei is to ignore the institutions, ideologies, and popular mobilisations that have sustained it since the 1979 Revolution.
Khamenei, both as a figure and mandate, is deeply complex. Yet, he sits at the nexus of a vast, interlocking structure, a system that is bureaucratic, clerical, military, and revolutionary all at once. To imagine that this structure would collapse upon his removal is to misunderstand not only Iran but the very nature of power.
Western media outlets have often portrayed Khamenei, 86, in almost caricature-like terms as a reclusive and paranoid figure who shuns modern communication, secluded in a heavily fortified compound surrounded by trusted advisors and longtime bodyguards.
The trauma from a 1981 assassination attempt when a bomb hidden inside a tape recorder left his right arm paralysed continues to cast a shadow over him. He is also depicted as a symbol of defiance against what he views as morally bankrupt Western powers.
Unlike many world leaders, Khamenei has never visited a Western country and has not travelled abroad since a solitary trip to North Korea in 1989. His foreign engagements remain limited, with a few notable exceptions, such as his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin during Putin’s visits to Iran.
Yet, behind this image lies a man of paradoxes: a lover of poetry, a pipe smoker, and an admirer of French writer Victor Hugo. In a recent audio message, his voice was calm yet unwavering as he declared that Iran “will not surrender,” warning that any American strike would be met with stern retaliation.
As a young man, he was swept up in the anti-Shah and anti-colonial intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s, drawing him to revolutionary ideals.
Few possess as intimate an understanding of Khamenei as Hossein Shariatmadari, editor-in-chief of Kayhan, Iran’s leading newspaper and a trusted interpreter of the Supreme Leader’s views.
In a past conversation with the Al-Ahram Weekly, Shariatmadari stated that Khamenei’s deep mistrust of the West, particularly the US and Britain, predates their overt support for former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, including their complicity in supplying chemical weapons used devastatingly against Iranian forces.
The War, as Khamenei saw it, was the West’s first concerted effort to destabilise Iran’s post-revolutionary order.
According to Shariatmadari, Khamenei’s resentment towards the West goes back even further to the 1953 Anglo-American coup. That infamous plot, which overthrew nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after his move to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, reinstated the Shah and left an indelible scar on the nation’s collective memory, profoundly shaping Khamenei’s worldview.
Remarkably, Mossadegh’s legacy endures today, his portrait still adorning many Iranian homes, particularly among the country’s liberal and middle-class elites.
Four decades: After four decades of leadership, an extraordinary tenure by any measure, Khamenei commands both loyalty and opposition.
Yet, Shariatmadari consistently maintains that in the face of external threats, the Supreme Leader remains the unifying figure around whom most Iranians rally. This perhaps explains the relentless US and Israeli focus on his elimination, operating under the assumption that his absence would leave Iran fractured and leaderless.
But such thinking may well be another Western miscalculation. Iran’s political institutions are not mere administrative bodies; they are ideologically anchored entities. Even within reformist circles, allegiance to the Islamic Republic’s foundational principles runs deep, a testament, in part, to Khamenei’s enduring influence.
Since the turn of the century, a growing cadre of military veterans from both the national army and the Revolutionary Guard has transitioned into politics, contesting elections and securing parliamentary seats.
Among them is Ismail Kowsari, a former Revolutionary Guard commander and current member of the National Security Committee, who revealed in a Tehran interview with the Weekly that heeding Khamenei’s counsel led him to exchange his uniform for a parliamentary seat.
The Supreme Leader’s objective was clear: to ensure the Guard’s perspective resonated within the halls of power. Often caricatured in the West as an inflexible ideologue, Khamenei has demonstrated a shrewd pragmatism. Though deeply sceptical of the West, he endorsed the 2015 nuclear deal when economic pressures and then Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s persuasion convinced him cooperation with the US Obama Administration was viable.
The US withdrawal from the agreement only cemented his belief that Western promises are inherently untrustworthy.
A master of political equilibrium, Khamenei also skillfully balances Iran’s conservative and reformist factions, allocating influence to maintain stability.
Yet, his governance has not always been marked by prudence or equilibrium. He harbours an instinctive wariness toward Iran’s reformist factions. During the 1990s, under the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, Khamenei, relying on the conservative-dominated parliament and security apparatus, curtailed Khatami’s efforts to enact his envisioned reforms.
This pattern of restraint has turned to repression in moments of upheaval. Amid the Green Movement of 2009, when vast protests erupted in Iran over allegations of electoral fraud in the contested race between the hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, Khamenei sanctioned the suppression of dissent.
The same uncompromising stance resurfaced years later, when nationwide demonstrations erupted in 2022 following the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained and later dying for her allegedly improper hijab.
Misjudgement: Yet, the West’s fixation on Khamenei as the singular obstacle to reshaping Iran may be a profound misjudgement. The structures he embodies are far more resilient and the nation far more cohesive than his adversaries presume.
Following Israel’s shock-and-awe campaign of targeted assassinations against senior commanders within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces, replacements were swiftly appointed to every key leadership position within 24 hours.
What Western strategists also fail to grasp is that succession in Iran is neither opaque nor unprepared. The system, despite its rigidities, is built with contingencies in mind. The Assembly of Experts, tasked with appointing a new Supreme Leader, has been vetting possible successors.
In response to mounting threats against his life, Khamenei activated a contingency plan anticipating his assassination. He named three potential successors and established protocols for promptly filling leadership vacancies within the Revolutionary Guard should new commanders also be targeted.
Khamenei’s influential son Mojtaba Khamenei was conspicuously absent from the shortlist, a decision widely seen as an effort to deflect allegations of nepotism and ensure broader acceptance of the succession process.
Moreover, the Revolutionary Guard, judiciary, Basij paramilitaries, and clerical establishment are not idle spectators but active players in a system that prizes continuity. A transition, though potentially contested, would not necessarily mean collapse. It could even produce a reinvigorated leadership that is more disciplined, more unified, and perhaps more radical.
While the Islamic Republic faces critics and Iranian society is marked by dynamism, dissent, and diversity, a widespread resistance to foreign imposition remains. Assassinating a religious and political figure, especially one titled “rahbar” (leader), would be seen not as liberation but as violation.
The memory of the 1953 CIA-led coup against Mossadegh still burns in the Iranian consciousness. Moreover, Khamenei’s influence extends beyond state functions; he is a religious guide, source of emulation (marja’), and spiritual authority whose impact reaches far beyond Iran’s borders.
To imagine the death of a leader triggering ethnic rebellion or class revolution is another misreading born of Orientalist assumptions. Iran is indeed a mosaic of identities, Persian, Azeri, Kurdish, Arab, and Baluch, and it has a spectrum of ideologies. But unity against external threats has historically been a powerful force.
Nearly five decades after the Revolution, fatigue runs deep, worn down by economic hardship, crushing sanctions, and political upheaval. Many may be weary of regime slogans, but not of Iranian nationalism.
“What the West often misses,” said Nahid, a Tehran-based publisher, to the Weekly “is just how fiercely that identity endures, woven through every thread of Iran’s rich ethnic, sectarian, and linguistic tapestry.”
So, the obsession with Khamenei’s elimination reflects a desperate attempt to reduce a complex geopolitical adversary to a single, ageing figure and to personalise and thereby simplify a fundamentally structural challenge.
It would be a mirage and no solution.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 June, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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