Less than two weeks after the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, the war is a success and a failure. Militarily, the campaign has effectively undermined the Islamic Republic’s heating capacity. But politically, so far, it has only strengthened the unity of the administration.
President Trump may have hoped that the ouster of the Islamic Republic’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would produce Iran’s Delcy Rodríguez—an insider who would yield to American pressure—but instead it has produced a rising Iranian Kim Jong Un. Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, will succeed his father, making the Islamic Republic a hereditary dictatorship that is poised to double down on ideology and repression.
Mojtaba inherits one of the toughest jobs in the world. Reportedly wounded and in hiding, he will lead a government that at the same time is waging a full-scale war against the United States and Israel and against the majority of its population. He survived the missile attack that killed his father, wife and mother only because he was in the next room. The attack that nearly killed him catapulted him to power, as the Islamic Republic, fighting for its own survival, closed ranks around a son devoted to his father’s revolutionary principles—choosing continuity over competence and knowledge over sudden change.
Mojtaba’s problem is not only physical. The ideology of the founder of the revolution gives him precious little justification for the role he is about to assume. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution that abolished the hereditary monarchy to establish a theocracy, called hereditary succession “a corrupt system of government” that “has no place in Islam.” Like a pig inside Animal Farmthe leaders of the Islamic Republic have become the ruling class of the dynasty that manages a system of privilege and oppression worse than the one they overthrew.
Mojtaba’s name is familiar to the Iranian public, but his face and voice are unknown. He has been touted as a potential successor for more than a decade, but the only video of him online is a short news clip about seminary affairs. A source in Tehran who has known him for more than four decades described him to me as “sharper” but “less capable” than his father.
Elder Khamenei was a true revolutionary. He spent many years in prison under the shah and rose to power on the strength of his speech. His son grew up as a princess in his father’s shadow, he did not experience any of the hardships that caused his father’s power. Those who know Mojtaba well say he is a poor speaker and has the stunted skills of a dictator’s son. “When people hear his first speech as leader,” my source told me, “they will notice his absence.”
The second eldest of Khamenei’s four sons, all of whom became clerics, Mojtaba was reportedly a weak student. Although his father was an avid reader, including Western novels, Mojtaba has primarily read Islamic texts and the poetry of Hafez. His travels abroad have only been to Saudi Arabia, for pilgrimage, and England, for medical treatment. Contrary to government propaganda, the same source said, he does not speak English. His father was not a warm presence, but Mojtaba is considered dry even in comparison.
Tough men fill Mojtaba’s inner circle. They include people such as Hossein Taeb, former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence unit; Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former IRGC commander and current speaker of Parliament; and Hossein Fadaei, the chief domestic enforcer of the late Ali Khamenei. These figures together have spent more than a century in the service of oppression. Their aggressive looks reflect George Orwell’s observation that by the age of 50, every man has the look he deserves.
Taeb and the younger Khamenei go back to the 1980s, when Mojtaba served in the Iran-Iraq War and Taeb was his commander. Although the clerics and the IRGC are commonly seen as separate pillars of the Islamic Republic, Taeb, as a cleric and an IRGC officer, serves as a bridge between the two centers of power. One of Iran’s most feared and hated figures, he is thought to have aided the legacy of the engineer Mojtaba through his influence over the Council of Experts, a council of senior clerics responsible for choosing the supreme leader.
Siamak Namazi, an American citizen, is an Iranian businessman and analyst who was held hostage for nearly eight years by the IRGC spy agency when it was under Taeb’s leadership. Namazi described Taeb to me as “the most extreme line of extremists” and “one of the most evil people in the Islamic Republic.” The administration has long taken dual citizens and foreign nationals to use as tools of foreign policy or financial extortion. Namazi believes that Taeb, with Mojtaba’s blessing, is behind most of these incidents and that the behavior cannot end as long as all men remain alive and in power.
When the country is in a state of crisis, Mojtaba will need to rely on Ali Larijani for the expertise of domestic and foreign policies. Larjani is one of the few remaining government loyalists with extensive experience in both domestic and international arenas. In a recent interview with state television, recorded in what appeared to be a bedroom, a calm Larijani said that Iran had been “raped” by outside powers, and tried to rally not only the government’s base but the wider public behind the imperative to block foreign structures. Trump’s words—the US president said that he would choose the next leader of Iran, and that he did not know whether the map of Iran would look the same at the end of the war—have proven important propaganda tools for the Islamic Republic.
For the foreseeable future, Mojtaba will try to rule in hiding as he tries to avoid Israeli slaughter. His goal will not be to rule the country but to stay alive. Whether Mojtaba has the stamina for this life is an open question. His father endured years of revolutionary hardship—prison, torture, underground life—before coming to power and reportedly amassed a war chest in excess of $100 billion, built in part from assets seized from religious minorities fleeing persecution.
Mojtaba has skipped the difficulty part of the series entirely. A Bloomberg reports suggest that, through middlemen, he has already amassed an overseas fortune in excess of $150 million—the rights of a privileged acolyte, not the fortunes of a revolutionary. As social theorist Eric Hoffer once said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
One of Iran’s most prominent religious scholars of the 20th century, Ahmad Kasravi, observed that Iran “owes the clerics one government,” just so that the people can witness the incompetence of the clerics. That debt has been fully settled by five decades of theocratic tyranny and economic crisis. In a tragic turn of history, Kasravi was assassinated in 1946 by a radical Muslim named Mojtaba Navab Safavi, who wanted to establish an Islamic state in Iran. Safavi was assassinated by the shah a decade later, when Ali Khamenei was a teenager. Khamenei once said that Safavi “lit the fire of revolutionary Islam first in my heart.” It was in his honor that Khamenei named his second son.
Trump is not very interested in this history. He wants a deal and leaves. But can he afford to end a costly and chaotic war by leaving Iran in the hands of the hardline Khamenei, 30 years younger than the man he killed?
In Tehran, the only men who currently have the legitimacy to end the war are now doubly committed to the Islamic Republic’s character. Chief among them is the new supreme leader, who at the best of times has neither the worldview nor the disposition to meet Trump’s public demands for unconditional surrender. “They just killed his family,” a source in Tehran said. “Now he’s thirsty for blood.”
