Iran’s ‘new’ regime looks much the same, only harsher
By Lauren Kent, CNN
(CNN) — US President Donald Trump said this week that Iran’s new leadership is “less radical and much more reasonable.” Trump and the Pentagon have repeatedly claimed that regime change has happened.
“If you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people,” Trump said earlier this week. “So, I would consider that regime change.”
But what most political scientists and analysts would consider regime change involves an outside power transforming how a country is governed, not merely replacing the people at the top of that system.
By definition, regime change is systemic change – something that has yet to be seen in the Islamic Republic, which remains under the same authoritarian theocracy that has been in place since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
If anything, the war has given more power to the hardline military factions inside the complex system of Iranian governance, as well as bolstered anti-American sentiments.
“This regime is more hardline, less prone to compromise and, frankly, more nakedly tied to the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps),” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’ve seen the decapitation of the reigning leader in Iran at the time, but that has not translated into dramatic change in terms of who holds the power, or their position vis-à-vis the United States.”
Yacoubian cautioned that no analyst has deep insight into the inner workings of Iran’s government at this point. There are a lot of blind spots – which even some US officials have recognized. (It’s an open question whether new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is in good health or is actually leading the nation, given that he has not been seen or pictured since the war began.)
But experts do know that Mojtaba himself has strong ties to the IRGC, who elevated him to this position, and he is therefore more beholden to the Revolutionary Guards than his father.
Other leadership, like Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, remains the same, contrary to Trump’s assertions.
Doubling down on state repression
Analysts also say this hardened regime is expected to double down on the repression of its own citizens.
“When President Trump says he has changed the regime in Iran, he’s right in one sense –he’s changed it to a much more radicalized regime,” said Ali Vaez, Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group. “All of these individuals who are now in place – the new national security advisor, the new head of the IRGC, the speaker of the parliament, who himself was a former commander of Revolutionary Guards – they all have been involved in domestic repression extensively in their past lives.”
Iran brutally crushed nationwide protests in January by shooting thousands of protestors, and the government has carried out at least nine executions in the last month, with some of those connected to the winter protests.
Iran’s new authorities will be on guard against any form of popular uprising, which Trump called for in the early days of the war. They will also be alarmed by the recent series of intelligence failures and leaks.
“Given the degree of regime paranoia, I do believe that the repression is going to be much harsher than was the case in the past,” Vaez told CNN.
While Iran’s military capabilities and naval forces have been damaged by the US and Israeli strikes, the Revolutionary Guards still maintain control over both the “guns and money” needed to suppress internal dissent, according to Yacoubian.
“And they maintain the Basij, which are kind of the foot soldiers of this sort of repressive apparatus,” she added, referring to the paramilitary forces that fall under the IRGC and have played a large role in squashing public dissent. “They have not seen any sort of disintegration or even erosion of regime control, certainly not in any urban areas.”
That’s not to mention that they have not been damaged enough to deter them from prosecuting the war and asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, Iranian authorities’ tight grip on internet access also remains intact. The nationwide internet blackout has been in place for more than a month, according to the internet monitor Netblocks.
‘Nothing to lose’ on nuclear aims
The war is also likely to harden the regime’s resolve to obtain a nuclear weapon, experts say. Former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had issued a fatwa, a legal ruling under Islamic law, banning a nuclear bomb. But that edict died with him, Vaez said.
“For any military, having the ultimate deterrent is a very attractive prospect,” Vaez added. “Now it’s the military that is in charge – a military whose regional deterrence has been weakened, whose conventional deterrence would be significantly degraded at the end of this war – and it still has a shortcut to nuclear weapons,” in the form of more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.
Analysts say the IRGC will be looking toward the example of North Korea, noting that it has not been subject to attacks precisely because it possesses nuclear weapons.
“It’s hard to see how the regime could come to any other conclusion than that its best hope for deterrence is the possession of a nuclear weapon,” Yacoubian told CNN. “At this point, nothing to lose.”
Trump used his White House address on Wednesday night to reiterate his claims that Iran was “right at the doorstep” of a nuclear weapon, which contradicts US and Western intelligence assessments.
And he hammered home his claims of regime change, while also arguing that the US is dismantling that same regime’s “ability to threaten America.”
“Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death,” Trump said.
Other US officials, though, have been careful to speak about Iran’s new leadership less definitively.
“Look, there’s some fractures going on there internally,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with ABC news on Monday.
“The people of Iran are incredible people. The people who lead them, this clerical regime, that is the problem. And if there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future, that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world,” Rubio added. “But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.”
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