Opinion
Despite being badly bruised by the joint US-Israel air and naval campaign, Iran’s Islamic regime has so far proved to be more resilient and resistant. The Israeli killing of its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with many senior political and military leaders, has not diverted the regime from its conduct of the war, which is now set to intensify.
The US and Israel’s stated goal has been to bring about a positive regime change in Iran. Their aim has been to disable the regime and empower the oppressed Iranian people, as put by President Donald Trump, to overthrow the theocratic system and take over power once the military campaign is finished, for a democratic transformation of Iran.
Khamenei’s assassination last Friday is a serious blow to the regime but not an insurmountable one. Many Iranian leaders have been killed in the past, (albeit nobody of the rank of supreme leader). Yet they have been replaced smoothly. A three-member interim governing council is now established to perform Khamenei’s functions until a permanent supreme leader is appointed by a constitutional body, the Assembly of Experts.
This factionalised cleric-dominated body will decide to appoint someone from its own ranks or from outside after a great deal of horse-trading. If the appointee comes from the hardline factions, he can be expected to follow Khamenei’s path, but if he emerges from the moderate/reformist factions one can anticipate some political and economic reforms to ease theocratic restrictions, improve the dire economic situation and promote conciliatory foreign relations, including with the US.
Khamenei was a polarising, theocratic Shiite Islamic political and spiritual leader. He was opposed by many Iranians, as evidenced by the mass protests crushed by the regime at the cost of thousands of lives early this year. He has also been revered by many, who have mourned his passing, with a call for revenge, inside and outside Iran. As he was killed in an Israeli operation, with US involvement, some of his followers are likely to perceive his assassination as a sign of a Judeo-Christian alliance against Shiite Islam – a historical minority in a predominant Sunni Muslim world, whose cause was championed by Khamenei.
This has already spurred emotional scenes in Iran and protests by the Shiites in several Muslim countries, carrying the potential to give rise to more anti-Western violent extremist groups parallel to such entities as al-Qaeda, Islamic State and the Taliban. The longer the current conflict continues, the more space there will be for such extremist groups to become more active.
For the Islamic regime, this conflict is a matter of survival. It has the necessary coercive means, including an array of advanced short and long-range missiles and drones, to deal with any domestic uprisings and to operate against Israel and the US for quite a while. They include the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the paramilitary Basij forces, the military, religious circles, and a vast body of bureaucrats and administrators whose fortunes are tied to the regime.
They are all now on a war footing and, so far, no major cracks have appeared in their entrenched and institutionalised commitment to fight for preservation of the system. The regime’s survival will become very tenuous only when there are defections from these elements. Iran’s strategic location also favours the regime, which has already choked the Strait of Hormuz, with serious implications for global energy and liquefied gas supply.
On the other hand, the US and Israel have deployed overwhelming firepower to destroy the regime, but without a clear and appropriate strategy for regime change. They started their military campaign with a conviction that within days, they would demolish the regime’s defensive and offensive capability by aerial and naval operations, paving the way for the opposition to put oil-rich Iran on a path of democratic change and development in alliance with the West.
However, it seems that they did not make a full assessment of the nature and tenacity of the Islamic regime. Nor did they see the imperative that regime change requires boots on the ground – something that Trump has not ruled out, but appears unlikely to consider given America’s recent bitter experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and his criticism of US involvement in those wars.
The level of the regime’s resistance has come as a bit of a surprise, prompting Trump now to declare that war may endure for a month or more and to water down his emphasis on regime change. On Monday, he redefined the US mission as to destroy the regime’s nuclear program, despite having declared it as “obliterated” in a US air operation in June 2025, and to eliminate its missile capability as a threat to the United States. This runs contrary to Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of total regime destruction.
As the situation stands, the Islamic regime is likely to survive this crisis. All the parties involved in the conflict find themselves in a tight corner. Ultimately, the future of the regime and Iran has to be decided by the Iranian people, not by outside intervention for geopolitical gains.
Amin Saikal is emeritus professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the ANU, adjunct professor of social sciences at the University of Western Australia, Vice Chancellor’s strategic fellow at Victoria University, and author of Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic (Princeton UP, 2021).
Amin Saikal is emeritus professor of Middle Eastern, Central Asian and Islamic studies at the Australian National University.
