For the first time in 47 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran is leaderless.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the regime’s 86-year-old supreme dictator — is gone. Eliminated following sustained American and Israeli strikes, his death has shattered the central pillar of Tehran’s theocracy.
The regime hurriedly announced an “Interim Leadership Council” composed of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Guardian Council cleric Ayatollah Alireza Arafi. But there is no such thing as collective supreme leadership in the Islamic Republic.
The Supreme Leader is not ceremonial. He is the system. Under Iran’s constitution, he controls the armed forces, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the Guardian Council, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He sets ideology, arbitrates factional warfare, and guarantees regime survival.
You cannot divide that authority among three men and expect stability. What you get instead is rivalry, paralysis, and fear.
And fear is spreading rapidly in Tehran.
For years, rumors circulated that Khamenei intended to install his radical son, Mojtaba, as successor — a dynastic maneuver that would have formalized what many believed was already happening behind the scenes.
That does not simplify succession. It makes it far more volatile.
There is no obvious clerical heavyweight waiting in the wings. No consensus candidate. No undisputed center of gravity. The Assembly of Experts — the 88-member body responsible for selecting the next Supreme Leader — now faces a vacuum unprecedented in the Islamic Republic’s history.
When clerics cannot agree, power does not disappear. It shifts.
The most likely beneficiary of sustained instability is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC already controls major sectors of Iran’s economy, its missile forces, its intelligence networks, and its regional proxy militias. With the clerical hierarchy fractured and no dynastic successor available, the Guards may conclude that preserving the revolution requires sidelining the robes entirely. What began as a theocracy could harden into an overt military dictatorship.
That is why the strategic imperative is clear. If the objective is lasting change rather than temporary disruption, the pressure cannot stop with symbolic decapitation. The United States and Israel must continue dismantling the IRGC’s command structure — not just eliminating those at the top, but degrading leadership layers down the chain of command. Authoritarian systems regenerate from their mid-levels. If that layer survives intact, the regime reconstitutes.
In short, decapitation without systemic degradation is a pause button, not an outcome.
At the same time, a smarter strategy recognizes that not every official inside the Iranian state is a hardened ideologue with blood on his hands. Iran’s bureaucracy is vast. It includes technocrats and administrators who served the system but did not design its crimes.
There is an alternative path.
Preserve those who are not irredeemably compromised. Keep parts of the state machinery intact. Under sustained American and allied pressure, compel them to cooperate with credible Iranian opposition figures — including Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah — to usher in a transition toward a more democratic and representative government. The terms would be simple: you can keep your life and you can keep your money — but only if you facilitate a peaceful transition and stand down from repression. Play ball, or face consequences.
Transitions succeed when they split regimes. They fail when they force everyone inside the system to fight to the death.
This is not Iraq in 2003. But we must also learn from Iraq in 2003. We cannot repeat the mistake of sweeping de-Baathification that stripped hundreds of thousands of Iraqis of their livelihoods overnight and drove many into the insurgency that bloodied Americans and Iraqis for years. A maximalist purge in Iran would risk creating the very instability we seek to prevent.
Totalitarian systems do not reform themselves. They either fracture from within or harden into something worse. As long as the Islamic Republic’s governing architecture survives intact — whether led by a cleric or a general — its core objectives will remain nuclear capability, ballistic missile expansion, regional terror sponsorship, and violent repression at home.
What makes this moment different is that the succession mechanism itself is cracking. The aura of inevitability is gone. Iranians have already taken to the streets celebrating Khamenei’s death. The regime looks vulnerable in a way it has not since 1979.
History has opened a narrow window in Iran.
It could close with the consolidation of a military junta. Or it could open into something transformative.
Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ben Cohen is a research fellow.
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