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Fierce hardliners are grabbing power in Iran

The regime has attacked American military bases in Qatar and Iraq

Photograph: AFP

Photograph: AFP

ON JUNE 23rd Iran’s regime ignored President Donald Trump’s warnings and attacked American military bases in Qatar and Iraq. Missiles could be seen over skyscrapers in Doha, Qatar’s capital. While the damage and casualties appear minimal, the war has reached the Gulf, whose glimmering cities offer an alternative vision of the Middle East and whose energy the world needs. The strikes outside of Iran come alongside a sudden, ominous power shift inside it. Military hardliners are grabbing power from clerics. That could mean they try to extricate themselves from the war now in order to fight another day. But in the medium term it could signal that the regime becomes more extreme, not more pragmatic, under the pressure of a devastating military campaign.

One reason for this shift is that Iran’s elite fears it is in a struggle to preserve the country’s political system. Mr Trump has signalled he might approve the overthrow of the clerical-military order. “Why wouldn’t there be a regime change,” he asked on June 22nd. Strikes against non-nuclear targets have galvanised elements of an outraged Iranian public behind the regime. But most important of all, there has been a shift in who holds power at the top as a result of the war. The military men have gained ascendance over the religious clerics for the first time since Iran’s revolution in 1979. And they are not moderate.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 86, and for years there has been speculation about succession, although who might gain the upper hand has been far from clear. The war is changing that, turbo-charging a power shift to the regime’s military arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In the first days of the fighting Mr Khamenei, ageing and isolated for his own safety, disappeared from the scene like the Shias’ hidden Imam. He delegated decision-making to a new council, or shura, dominated by the IRGC. “The country is in effect under martial law,” says an observer.

As the IRGC gains control its elite is being transformed at speed by Israel’s assassinations. Gone are the veteran commanders who for years pursued “strategic patience”, limiting their fire when their totemic leader, Qassem Soleimani, was assassinated in 2020, and holding it when Israel battered their proxies, Hamas and Hizbullah, in 2024. Now a new generation, impatient and more dogmatic, has taken their place and is bent on redeeming national pride. “The maximalist position has been strengthened,” says an academic close to the reformist camp. He claims the decision-makers in place before the war were debating whether to ditch their anti-Israel stance. But “everyone is now a hardliner”.

Compounding the generational shift is a newfound cohesion in a military-industrial complex renowned for paranoia and scheming. A year ago the regime was rocked by infighting. Businessmen, military professionals and ideologues battled for supremacy inside the IRGC. Hardliners chased pragmatists from state institutions. Rival factions blamed each other for the death of the country’s president in a mysterious helicopter crash in 2024. Now they appear to be coalescing against a common foreign enemy.

How much public support does this emerging new power configuration enjoy? Many Iranians rue the billions of dollars their generals squandered on two decades of pointless proxy wars and even now some in Iran are describing the Israeli-American strikes as chemotherapy to remove cancerous cells. Increasingly, Israeli bombardments seem designed to tap into this seam of dissent and destabilise the country. Recent targets in Tehran include the police headquarters and the entrance to Evin, Iran’s jail for its most prominent political prisoners.

Yet in parallel the war has triggered a nationalist surge and narrowed the gap between ruler and ruled. No one has responded to calls from Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, or Reza Pahlavi, the royalist pretender, for a popular uprising. Early admiration for Israel’s military prowess has turned to outrage as its targets have widened and the death toll has mounted. Scorn for the IRGC’s haplessness has turned to pride at the speed with which it has reconstituted. Iranians who fled the capital are coming back. Those who once championed Israel are now handing over suspected Israeli agents to the police. Female political prisoners, the mothers of executed protesters and exiled Iranian pop stars have all issued calls to rally to Iran’s defence. “It’s backfired on Bibi,” says a former official turned dissident, using the nickname of Mr Netanyahu.

The shift at the top could dramatically alter decision-making in Iran. Hardliners have always been against talks with America. They remember Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, who surrendered weapons of mass destruction in exchange for a lifting of sanctions, and Saddam Hussein, who granted UN monitors unfettered access to Iraq. Both were toppled by Western interventions. Now even moderates feel burned: the last round of talks with America, set for June 15th, fooled them into lowering their guard just as Israel attacked.

More could be to come. Within hours of America’s strike, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, warned of “everlasting consequences”. Iran’s parliament has voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which 30% of maritime oil supplies flow (its vote is not binding). It is also considering a bill requiring Iran to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and cut co-operation with the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The big question is whether the regime now pauses or pursues something worse. Some had sought to downplay the fallout from America’s bunker-busting strikes on Fordow and two other sites, perhaps to buy time and a greater margin of manoeuvre in firing back. While Donald Trump celebrated the “monumental” obliteration of Iran’s main nuclear sites, Iran’s leaders initially pointed to the absence of radiation and questioned their efficacy. America’s bombs were only twice as big as those used by Israel to hit the bunker of Hizbullah’s leader in Beirut last year, and Fordow’s chambers lay 25 times deeper than that.

But without a trusted mediator and no obvious off-ramp the more sober-minded appear to have been pushed aside. Many generals are eager to maintain their strikes on Israel which, they argue, have punctured its aura of invincibility. Israel’s destruction of half their missile launchers has slowed the rate, they admit. But more advanced systems, perhaps launched from the sea, are to come, says Mohsen Rezaei, a former IRGC commander.

A growing caucus advocates dashing for a bomb. In the run-up to the American attack, Iran removed stockpiles of enriched uranium, and perhaps centrifuges from the targeted sites, claims an insider. Satellite imagery from June 20th shows a queue of trucks at Fordow’s gate. Some are suggesting detonating a nuclear device to prove Iran’s capability. Others advocate dropping a warhead coated in weapons-grade uranium on Tel Aviv. “Sure as anything they will be going for a nuke. It’s absolutely disastrous,” laments a Gulf mediator.

The shift from religious to military authority has some advantages. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the original leader of Iran’s revolution, warned against allowing the IRGC into politics, fearful they might dispense with his theocracy. With the clerics confined to their seminaries, there might be an easing of the regime’s religious strictures. In recent days state television has shown women with hair poking out from their headscarves. But the prospect of Iran being ruled by its new shura indefinitely has other consequences, not least a defiant and even more militarised state hellbent on defiance and reprisals, and more ruthless in tamping down internal dissent. The outside world has often assumed that Iran’s regime exhibits reckless risk-taking and belligerence because it has been run by religious men. The danger is the military men are worse.

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Source: The Economist

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