Back when I used to be able to visit Iran, I remember always being surprised by the popularity of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) elite Al-Quds force, who was assassinated on US President Donald Trump’s orders in 2020.
This was true even of Westward-looking Tehranis who loathed the regime and held parties where the alcohol flowed and the skirts were short. Asked why, the answer was always the same. Soleimani kept the foreign threats destabilizing other countries of the Middle East at bay; he fought them abroad so they would not have to be fought at home. The Islamic State, a Sunni-Islamist terrorist organization, could terrorize Shiites in Iraq and their Alawite cousins in Syria, but the streets of Tehran were safe.
Soleimani played on this. He was photographed wearing fatigues out with pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, carefully curating a near mythological image of daring and skill. This resonated, even though he stood at the core of a hated regime, because he seemed to hold the ring for what most Iranians craved: normal lives, safety and a chance at prosperity. They wanted a nuclear reconciliation with the US and Europe, allowing for sanctions to lift and investment to return, for precisely the same reasons.
However, that was then. A 2015 nuclear deal was agreed, but quickly eviscerated by Trump. The IRGC profited from the “maximum pressure” sanctions that followed, taking over much of the domestic economy and trade (which became primarily smuggling). Inflation soared. Private business withered. Living standards plummeted, and the worse things got, the more the IRGC cracked down domestically.
There is no new Soleimani. The very source of his popularity — that he kept the dogs of war from Iranian doors — has become cause to despise his successors. Al-Quds increasingly was in the business of using the proxy network he built to poke the US and Israeli bears.
That obsession backfired spectacularly last month, with Israeli jets bombing Tehran and US B-2s dropping bunker busters on Iranian nuclear facilities. Soleimani would be hated, too, were he alive today, because he was a leading architect of all this hubris. Indeed, attitudes were changing even before he died, but I think his passage from hero to villain is the context in which to see Iran’s next move, now the US and Israel have called off their jets.
Change would come in some form, although likely not one we would all prefer. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei is 86 years old. He rules a youthful nation in which about 70 percent of the population were not even born when the revolution that drives him took place. Having led the country into such a desolate cul-de-sac, his regime would pay a price.
The question is how and at whose expense.
Change can form around Khamenei or by the IRGC replacing or marginalizing him, but there are clear limits; the regime cannot afford to acknowledge that the billions upon billions of dollars it has spent on a nuclear program, and the hundreds of billions more lost due to the sanctions, were all for nothing. It cannot be seen to surrender to “The Great Satan.” Nor can it realistically afford to just carry on as before, pursuing reckless aggression abroad, while ruling by fear alone at home.
A successful popular uprising is unlikely. Khamenei and the IRGC have faced major protests before and repeatedly crushed them. They have about 1 million men under arms, many of them heavily indoctrinated. Urban Iranians are also by now cautious, not just because of that experience, but also because they know theirs is an ethnically fractured country.
They have no interest in becoming the next Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan. This leaves the best plausible outcome as a return to the popular age of Soleimani, so an internal regime recalibration rather than regime change.
As Cameran Ashraf, an Iranian human rights advocate and assistant professor of public policy at the Central European University in Vienna, puts it, we might all be surprised by how things unfold. “The regime has had very strong emphasis on survival from day one,” he said. “So, I think there is a type of flexibility there.”
We saw some of that already in the carefully choreographed response Iran gave to the US bombing of Fordow. In such a scenario, negotiators would return to talks this week in search of ways to relieve pressure on the regime and Iran’s economy, making limited concessions on the nuclear program in exchange. The IRGC would take a more defensive posture abroad. At home, authorities would relent in some areas of needlessly provocative domestic repression — like enforcement of headscarf laws — as they have done at times in the past.
Any such course correction would be tactical. The Islamic Republic would not change its spots, until it is no more. There is no one-and-done when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, neither by diplomacy nor by force. Both sides would be trying to buy time.
The alternative is that Khamenei simply doubles down, concluding that no diplomatic settlement is possible because the US is bent on Iran’s destruction and cannot be trusted.
The focus would be on regime consolidation, rebuilding defenses and acquiring a nuclear deterrent as soon as possible.
So far, most signs point to this uglier outcome. Driven to paranoia by the level of Israeli intelligence penetration that led to the killing of dozens of top military commanders and nuclear scientists, a brutal domestic crackdown is underway. As of Sunday, there was little sign the nuclear negotiations Trump has trailed for this week would in fact take place.
The US and the West as a whole need to play a more subtle game. In the wake of the bombings, keeping Iran from pulling out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and from expelling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors is vital. This should not be sacrificed to the pursuit of an unachievable certainty.
Failure to reach a political settlement would all but guarantee further airstrikes and leave the region more unstable and prone to a nuclear arms race than before Trump’s military intervention.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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