‘A nation may endure fools and their ambitions, but it cannot endure betrayal from within. The enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and raises his standard openly. A traitor within the gates moves freely among the defenders, and his insidious whispers spread easily everywhere. The traitor does not appear as such; he speaks in familiar tones to his victims, and his countenance resembles that of others among the defenders, so that his baseness and falsehoods penetrate their hearts. He destroys the spirit of a nation and, in secret, loosens the firm pillars of the polity; he rots the body of the nation from within until it can no longer stand.’

– Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman philosopher, ‘The Enemy Within’

 

 

1. Introduction

The prospective death of ‘al-Sayyid[1] Ali Khamenei’ constitutes not merely the passing of an individual office-holder but a structural rupture within the governing architecture of the Islamic regime.

 

As the regime’s Supreme Leader and ultimate arbiter of institutional power, he embodies the juridical and ideological core of the doctrine of Velāyat-e Faqīh (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist). His disappearance, whether already effected or imminently anticipated, would therefore expose latent rivalries, recalibrate relations between clerical and military elites, and intensify the struggle over succession within an already brittle political order.

 

This article proceeds from the premise that moments of elite transition in authoritarian systems generate acute vulnerability. In the Iranian case, that vulnerability is compounded by economic contraction, generational alienation, factional fragmentation, and sustained external pressure. The circulation of reports concerning Khamenei’s death has thus acquired significance beyond rumour. It has become a diagnostic lens through which to interrogate regime resilience, elite cohesion, and the strategic calculations of domestic and international actors.

 

The study does not treat the question of his mortality as a matter of biography, but as a catalyst for examining three interlocking dynamics of the regime. First, the internal contest between conservative and reformist factions, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), each positioned to exploit a succession vacuum. Second, the geopolitical interests of external powers whose preferences range from managed transition to territorial fragmentation. Third, the structural risks confronting Iran as a sovereign polity at a moment when elite manoeuvre may outpace civic agency.

 

By situating the issue of succession within broader patterns of institutional decay and geopolitical contestation, the article argues that the regime’s crisis is neither episodic nor accidental. It represents the culmination of long-term contradictions embedded in the post-1979 political settlement. Whether this conjuncture yields managed reconfiguration, systemic rupture, or territorial disintegration will depend less upon the biological fact of Khamenei’s death than upon the strategic conduct of those who seek to inherit, reshape, or dismantle the order he presided over.

 

 

2. Concealment, Succession and Strategic Timing: The Politics of Khamenei’s Imminent Death

Over the past two weeks, following the circulation of reports concerning the death of ‘al-Sayyid Ali Khamenei’, which have gained prominence amid the accelerated elevation of his son, al-Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei, to the rank of ‘Ayatollah’, Catherine Perez-Shakdam has announced that he remains alive, though bedridden and drawing his final breaths (Henry Jackson Society, 2022). That Khamenei has survived even to the present moment is, in itself, remarkable, given that in 2015 physicians declared that his prostate cancer had entered stage four (advanced), had metastasised to other parts of his body, and estimated that he would survive for no more than two further years (Ahmari, 2015). Yet, in a manner portrayed as extraordinary, and to the detriment of the Iranian nation, his lifespan has been extended not by two but by seven years. Shakdam’s assertion must therefore be credited, insofar as she is said to have maintained her channels of communication and intelligence access to senior regime officials and continues to receive reports from within its internal structures.

 

By way of clarification, Catherine Perez-Shakdam is a French Jewish intelligence asset who allegedly utilised sexual relationships as instruments of infiltration, is reported to have converted to Islam and to Shi‘ism, and to have engaged in intimate relations with more than one hundred senior governmental, military, intelligence, and media officials of the Islamic regime (News Founded, no date). She is currently affiliated with the Henry Jackson Society in London (Henry Jackson, n.d.), where she serves as a researcher specialising in West Asian affairs, with particular emphasis on Iran. The Henry Jackson Society is characterised as an Atlanticist security think tank [2], which over the past two decades has allegedly supported the cultivation of various Arab militant formations within Iran as part of a wider project of territorial fragmentation, notably the detachment of gas- and oil-producing provinces, including Khuzestan.

 

If, in fact, Khamenei has already died and Shakdam refrains from disclosing the matter, such restraint must be understood as consonant with the policies attributed to American-British and Israeli war advocates, a contention to be examined in the ensuing lines.

 

In any case, whether Khamenei has already died or is to die within the next one or two days, the regime will defer the announcement of his death according to three temporal scenarios. The first concerns the day of the Islamic month of Arba’in (16–17 September); the second, the period following the removal of Ebrahim Raisi; and the third, the moment of the regime’s expiration, anticipated to occur through war initiated by the United States.

 

The first temporal scenario derives from the superstitious climate described as prevailing in Iran and is directed towards the manipulation of religious adherents characterised as credulous. The regime’s leadership will endeavour to fuse and align the date of his death with Arba’in in order to confer upon him a sacralised dimension. Within this framework, Mojtaba must seek to secure comprehensive backing from the IRGC and other coercive organs of the regime for his own claim to the office of the Guardianship of the Jurist. A significant obstacle confronting him, however, lies in the assertion that many regime forces, particularly elements within the IRGC, are loyal to his deceased father, not to him, but instead pursue an alternative objective of appropriating power and the regime in their own name. Consequently, at the moment the news of his death is released, an event which could culminate in a national uprising, it is conceivable that the IRGC, in order to avert further reputational damage, may refrain from repressing the populace.

 

In this context, should his death become public and be disseminated through the media prior to the day of Arba’in, the regime will deploy its cyber forces across social media platforms. These networks, operating under the designation of opposition, and many of whose operatives have been projected beyond Iran’s borders in the role of expatriate dissidents, some having cultivated followings of their own, will be mobilised to obscure the fact of his death by whatever means prove effective, including the dismissal of such reports as mere rumour. The objective will be to prevent the populace from rising and to forestall the expansion of nationwide uprisings culminating in the overthrow of the regime.

 

The second scenario consists in withholding any announcement of his death until the physical elimination of Ebrahim Raisi. Raisi has been informally designated as Khamenei’s successor, and were the report of his death to be made public, Ebrahim Raisi would be declared Guardian Jurist without delay, leaving Mojtaba to carry to the grave his aspiration of occupying his father’s position.

 

The third scenario entails an accord between the regime’s leadership and the IRGC to preserve the news of his death in strict confidentiality. The rationale is twofold. First, Iran at this juncture is portrayed as pregnant with another uprising, and any pretext may ignite its outbreak; the sudden announcement of his death would impel opponents to rise against the regime. Second, the disclosure of his death would be deferred to a moment deemed opportune, so that he might be accorded the title of martyr. At such a juncture, his death would be transfigured into assassination and attributed to the United States or to Israel. In this manner, not only would the event furnish material for the superstitious strata, but hostility towards the United States and Israel would be intensified. What remains beyond dispute, according to this account, is that the countdown to the regime’s overthrow has commenced. In the absence of a genuine opposition capable of guiding the Iranian nation towards the dismantling of the regime, it is therefore considered probable that the regime will ultimately collapse in the aftermath of a war with the United States. At such a moment, through the proclamation of his martyrdom and the deliberate generation of tension between Shi‘a communities of the region and the United States, regime change would be rendered a nightmare for Americans.

 

In any event, Khamenei cannot simply disappear from public view. The regime must therefore choreograph appearances sufficient to repudiate reports of his death as fabrications. In this connection, the deployment of a body double would serve the requisite purpose. For more than one or two years, rumours have circulated alleging that the figure present at certain tightly managed regime spectacles was not Khamenei himself but a double, a claim reinforced by reference to the incapacitating progression of his cancer. Such a stand-in could continue to perform this role until the appointed political moment arrives. Concurrently, the regime would be expected to employ supplementary mechanisms of obfuscation in order to prevent the circulation of news concerning Khamenei’s death, notably through the instrumental use of ‘synthetic media’ technologies deployed within the cinematic arts and across social media platforms, including ‘deepfake’, image synthesis, audio synthesis, and related digital applications.

 

These scenarios, however, are contingent upon reformist elements under the leadership of the Rafsanjani family refraining from mounting a counterstroke against the principlists and precipitating a crisis prior to the formal announcement of his death. Under such conditions, one should anticipate that Mojtaba and Raisi would abstain from declaring his death on Arba’in and instead defer the disclosure to one of the two alternative dates previously identified.

 

In any case, with Khamenei’s death, the trigger for the physical elimination of Ebrahim Raisi, under various pretexts and at Mojtaba’s instigation, will likewise have been set in motion. One must therefore await the manner of his removal. At the same time, Khamenei’s death will create a structural vacuum within the regime’s architecture of power, a void into which all ‘jackals and vultures’, both domestic and external, are portrayed as already descending upon one another. Should the Iranian nation, particularly the younger generation, fail in the coming days, weeks, and months to act with vigilance and deliberation, and should they neglect to reckon with the consequences of their conduct, they will, by their own inattention, expose Iran to grave upheavals and severe crises that could culminate in its disintegration and ‘Iranistanisation’. This danger is compounded by the fact that groups such as Farashgard are, from this moment, endeavouring to normalise among Iranians the conviction that the salvation of Iran is predicated upon a comprehensive foreign military assault against the country.

 

 

3. Iran as Prey in a Struggle of Predatory Powers

‘In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.’

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

More than a year ago, I anticipated that the available evidence suggested that, for a range of reasons, Saudi Arabia would relinquish its position to the present clerical-fascist republic governing Iran as the principal ‘rogue regime’ in the region. This assessment was sharpened by the prospect of Iran emerging as an economic and military partner of China, and by the proposed construction of the port of Chabahar by India, together with its prospective rail linkage to Moscow, a development deemed capable of inflicting substantial damage upon Western strategic interests.

 

Accordingly, in the view of the present author, the countdown has commenced and the regime has entered its terminal phase; it will have been overthrown before 2030. Although Joe Biden is described as seeking to dismantle the Islamic regime in Iran, which his party is said to have brought to power in 1979 on the basis of Bernard Lewis’s plan (Suren-Pahlav, 2018b), and to replace it with another republican order outwardly civilised, pacific, and democratic, yet aligned in substance with American geopolitical interests in the region, he confronts two principal obstacles. The first lies in his own indecision; the second in the opposition of the Republicans and AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in the United States. The Republicans, portrayed as largely subordinate to Israeli policy preferences, are said to favour the ‘Iranistanisation’ of Iran. A second republic, even one partially dependent upon the United States, would not satisfy Israeli war advocates intent upon fragmenting Iran, unless such a republic were wholly subservient to Israeli interests. Only under such conditions, it is argued, could Israel appropriate Iran’s national, natural, and human resources in pursuit of its longstanding, albeit illusory, aspiration to construct a ‘Greater Israel’.

 

It must nonetheless be acknowledged that reformist elements, should news of Khamenei’s death be disseminated on the day of Arba’in, would, owing to their close relations with the Democratic Party, particularly the circle surrounding Hillary Clinton, seek to court Joe Biden. They would endeavour to persuade him to refrain from regime change and instead assist them in re-presenting the regime, cosmetically refashioned, in a new guise. In this manner, Americans would advance their strategic objectives, while these actors would seek to avoid future accountability before national courts for the crimes and betrayals attributed to them over the past fifty years. In any case, upon the announcement of Khamenei’s death, the United States would attempt to impose another iteration of the nuclear agreement upon the regime, or, more precisely, upon the Iranian nation, so that, just as Obama is alleged to have appropriated forty billion dollars of Iran’s frozen assets, they too might secure several additional billions of the nation’s wealth under alternative designations.

 

Given the multiplicity of internal and external ‘jackals and vultures’, portrayed as rival architects and claimants to Iran’s future, each having prepared a blueprint for such a moment, two principal scenarios are said to confront the country. Either a further ‘republican regime’ aligned with the West and Israel will emerge, or Iran will be reduced to ‘Iranistan’. A third scenario may be envisaged, namely the seizure of power by constitutional monarchists. Its probability, however, is deemed minimal, not only because monarchist forces are characterised as lacking cohesion, organisation, programme, and managerial capacity, but also because foreign actors are portrayed as opposing the restoration of monarchy in Iran. The argument advanced is that only a constitutional monarchy possesses the capacity to reconstruct, strengthen, and advance Iran, whereas external powers are said to prefer a weakened and subjugated Iran.

 

In any event, these ‘jackals and vultures’, who upon Khamenei’s death will turn upon one another while simultaneously striving to secure their respective interests, will converge in concealing his death. Their identification, and the roles they are expected to perform, will be delineated in what follows.

 

 

3.1 Internal Predatory Factions: Contestation Within the Regime

3.1.1 The Principlists Camp

Contrary to widespread assumption and to the media narratives aligned with the regime, the principlist faction does not constitute a unified front. For several years, a concealed struggle has been underway between the Khamenei circle and the circle surrounding Ebrahim Raisi.

 

Ebrahim Raisi, who benefits from the financial and clerical-military backing of his father-in-law, al-Sayyid Ahmad Alamolhoda, regards the office of the Guardian Jurist as his rightful entitlement. To such an extent is this claim asserted that, according to Shakdam’s disclosure, he openly threatened Khamenei in 2017, warning that should his succession to the Guardianship of the Jurist be obstructed, he would resort to a military coup.

 

Conversely, as indicated above, one of the principal reasons advanced for concealing Khamenei’s death lies in Mojtaba’s efforts not only to neutralise and eliminate Raisi, but also to secure the endorsement of the IRGC for his own claim to the office of Guardian Jurist prior to the outbreak of a popular uprising. An additional motive attributed to him is apprehension of a coup orchestrated by the IRGC.

 

3.1.2 The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)

The IRGC is depicted not merely as a military and repressive force, but as an economic mafia that controls the commanding heights of Iran’s economy. For many years, it is said to have entertained designs upon direct control of the regime and to have raised the prospect of replacing the Guardian Jurist with a military leader. Evidence is cited to suggest that certain senior commanders have awaited Khamenei’s death in order to seize power through a military coup. Among them was Qassem Soleimani, who, it is alleged, was eliminated in Iraq within the framework of a coordinated arrangement between the clerical regime and the Trump administration. Accordingly, the formal announcement of Khamenei’s death would carry with it the risk of a military coup initiated by the IRGC.

 

3.1.3 The ‘Transformation-Seekers’

The faction styled as ‘Transformation-Seekers’ portrays itself as the bearer of structural renewal. Such a designation, however, obscures its institutional provenance. It represents the latest reconfiguration of an intra-regime current whose formative experience was not opposition, but adaptation. Its political trajectory is closely intertwined with networks consolidated around the Rafsanjani clan. These actors did not arise from outside the Islamic regime; they were formed within its bureaucratic and ideological apparatus, internalised its modalities of power, and adjusted their posture as the post-revolutionary consensus began to erode.

 

They have frequently been characterised by their critics as a composite formation, at once Islamist and residually indebted to strands of 1970s revolutionary leftism, and as having played a significant role in facilitating the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy and the consolidation of the Islamic regime in 1979. Whether such portrayals overstate their coherence is secondary. What bears emphasis is that they continue to designate 1979 as a ‘popular revolution’ and to regard its foundational moment as a source of enduring legitimacy. In this respect, their project remains internal to the very order it claims to recalibrate.

 

Reconstituted from the reformist current and now presenting themselves as secular modernisers, they advance their programme under the rubric of ‘transformation’ (Suren-Pahlav, 2011). Their discourse is carefully calibrated. They disclaim regime change, reject revolutionary overthrow, and advocate incremental structural modification. Simultaneously, they call for the primacy of civil law over religious jurisprudence in governance. This dual positioning is deliberate. By repudiating rupture, they seek to reassure entrenched interests; by invoking civil legality, they appeal to constituencies fatigued by ideological rigidity. Critics, however, discern continuity where the faction proclaims change. Hardline principlists construe their republican idiom as a latent challenge to clerical supremacy. Conventional reformists view them as opportunistic, distancing themselves from prior reformist disappointments while seeking to supersede gradualist strategies. Exilic opposition movements regard them as compromised insiders intent upon stabilising rather than dismantling a system structured by impunity. Analysts have described them as politically protean, adept in the language of ‘transition’ yet conspicuously reticent regarding accountability for repression and systemic economic extraction sustained over four decades.

 

Their external orientation has reinforced scepticism. Networks associated with this current cultivated discreet channels with figures in Washington aligned with the Democratic Party, particularly those linked to Hillary Clinton. Such engagement was presented as technocratic pragmatism, premised upon the expectation that détente would widen domestic manoeuvring space. Critics interpret this differently, suggesting that foreign policy openings were instrumentalised to consolidate factional leverage within the existing constitutional framework, rather than to revise its foundations.

 

The impending succession to Ali Khamenei heightens the stakes. For the principlists, the perceived risk lies in displacement by a rival elite conversant in republican vocabulary and institutional procedure. For Iran more broadly, the concern articulated here is structural. A transfer of authority to actors committed to preserving the normative authority of 1979 while moderating its juridical form may perpetuate the very impunity they profess to mitigate. ‘Transformation’ absent reckoning risks entrenching the logic it claims to transcend. The promise advanced is transition without rupture and reform without overthrow. Within a polity whose crisis is grounded in the absence of accountability, such a formula signifies managed continuity rather than substantive change. The lexicon of reform is invoked, yet the architecture of power remains undisturbed.

 

Accordingly, this faction could exploit the concealment of Khamenei’s death in order to mount a counterstroke against its rivals and to propel the regime into a critical phase, a development to be examined in due course.

 

 

3.2 External Predatory Configurations: International Stakeholders in Iran’s Future

External actors, long depicted as invested in the maintenance of a weakened and strategically compliant Iran, may be analytically divided into three broad constellations.

 

• The first centres upon Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
• The second encompasses conservative, Republican and wider transatlantic interventionist networks within the United States and Europe.
• The third comprises Israeli state actors and advocates of global Zionism.

 

3.2.1 The Democratic Strategy: Managed Transition under the Banner of Rights

Among the recurrent instruments employed by American and European powers in processes of regime reconfiguration is the language of human rights, mobilised as a moral framework for political displacement. This discursive strategy was deployed in 1979 against the Pahlavi monarchy and is expected to be redeployed against the clerical order. The present conjuncture differs, however, in one decisive respect. Whereas earlier campaigns required the construction and amplification of allegations through intelligence and policy networks, the Islamic regime’s own record furnishes, in this account, an extensive archive of documented abuses.

 

Under such conditions, it would suffice to isolate a single incident from the ongoing pattern of repression, magnify it through sustained media concentration, and activate global communicative channels to generate international indignation. This approach would not only intensify domestic unrest but would also confer symbolic legitimacy upon internal challengers, potentially accelerating mobilisation towards systemic rupture and transition. Within this framework, transformation-seekers would be positioned to exploit the resulting instability and displace conservative dominance.

 

This tendency, drawing support from constituencies variously described as religious, left-leaning, or apprehensive of monarchical restoration, and retaining organisational footholds within the country, would foreground episodes of lethal repression by state security forces, including police institutions whose formation they are alleged to have shaped. A sympathetic American administration could then facilitate the international amplification of such events, framing them as evidence of structural criminality.

 

In this scenario, the rivalry among Mojtaba, Ebrahim Raisi and IRGC would be instrumentalised to deepen fissures within the ruling camp, potentially forcing a transfer or restructuring of authority. If the regime were to respond with indiscriminate violence, it would incur heightened exposure while preserving, for its leading cadres, avenues of exit and exile.

 

The transformationist current itself is portrayed as having emerged in 1979 in opposition to modernisation, civic freedoms and secular political order, synthesising the doctrine of ‘umma and imamate’ articulated by Ali Shariati with Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s critique of ‘Westoxication’. That ideological fusion is said to have subordinated national sovereignty to supra-national constructs and to have inaugurated decades of social and economic erosion.

 

The central question thus posed is whether political actors bearing such a legacy command sufficient trust to be re-empowered at another decisive historical juncture. The caution against repeating an experiment whose consequences remain visible is thereby reasserted.

 

At the same time, the Democratic camp and its affiliated transformationists confront resistance from the second external configuration, to which the analysis now turns.

 

 

3.2.2 Conservative and Republican Interventionism: Fragmentation through Conflict

The second external configuration comprises American conservative circles, including liberal currents inflected by evangelical Christianity, alongside Republican actors long associated with the geopolitical doctrines attributed to Bernard Lewis. As with their Democratic counterparts, they are presented as committed to the operationalisation of the Lewis framework, particularly the disaggregation of Iran into a series of weaker territorial entities under the rubric of ‘Iranistan’. Their strategic calculus, however, does not rest upon managed transition. Rather, as participants in, or beneficiaries of, the global defence industry, they are characterised as structurally predisposed towards the perpetuation of regional instability.

 

In this reading, the prospective dismantling of the existing regime under Joe Biden would not mark closure but opportunity. Such actors could seek to catalyse internal armed confrontation within Iran, thereby reproducing trajectories analogous to those observed in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The implications for Iran’s territorial cohesion and sovereign continuity are framed as existential. It follows that no citizen committed to national integrity can afford to trivialise this risk or permit, through political miscalculation, the opening of fissures that could lead to state fragmentation.

 

The question then arises: through what mechanisms might such a conflict be induced? Recent historical precedents are invoked to identify three principal avenues.

 

The first entails encouraging sectors of the population to resort to arms and engage in direct violent confrontation with the state. Just as the aftereffects of communist governance are said to remain visible in parts of Eastern Europe decades after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, so the ideological and social imprint of the Islamic regime is described as deeply embedded within generations socialised since the 1970s. According to this argument, meaningful cultural and socio-psychological reconstitution would require sustained effort over many decades. Added to this is the persistence of political narratives, including the portrayal of the monarchy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as authoritarian and dependent upon the United States (Suren-Pahlav, 2009), which are interpreted as further distortions within the national historical consciousness.

 

Despite these structural conditions, a considerable segment of Iran’s younger generations is portrayed as intellectually vigilant, analytically engaged and resistant to militarised confrontation, conscious that recourse to arms would endanger the country’s survival. Their refusal to adopt armed tactics during the uprisings of 2017 and 2019 is adduced as evidence of this restraint. By contrast, elements within the diaspora are depicted as deficient in political judgement and strategic foresight, having, during earlier protest cycles, promoted armed struggle through digital platforms. Reference is made to public figures based in Los Angeles who, from positions of safety abroad, urged citizens within Iran to face live ammunition. It is further alleged that certain online advocates of militarisation are in fact separatist or foreign operatives, including individuals with prior involvement in Afghanistan, proficient in Persian and presenting themselves as sympathetic compatriots.

 

The central danger, within this analysis, lies in the possibility that even a small number of individuals might be persuaded to take up arms. Such a development would substantially increase the likelihood of internal armed conflict.

 

The second method involves the activation of separatist formations said to have received military training and logistical support from Western and Israeli actors in recent years, particularly in the southern provinces, including Khuzestan, as well as in Sistan and Baluchestan and Kurdistan. Should these groups initiate armed confrontation with regime forces, even under the rubric of self-defence, escalation would be rapid. The clerical establishment and its affiliated militias would respond with intensified coercion, extending beyond armed militants to encompass civilian protestors. The transition from civil unrest to armed fragmentation would, in this view, mark the beginning of state disintegration.

 

At that stage, advocates of intervention could seek to confront Joe Biden with an irreversible reality, drawing analogy with developments in Ukraine. By invoking the language of ‘nations’ embedded in the ‘New Atlantic Charter’ concluded between the United States and the United Kingdom in June of the preceding year, Iran could be recast internationally as a composite multinational polity. Under the pretext of safeguarding the purported right of self-determination of oppressed ‘nations’, external powers might then justify military intervention, territorial partition and the recognition of emergent statelets.

 

The third method contemplates the replication of the Syrian precedent through the construction of a so-called ‘Free Army’. In the event of mass repression, selected military personnel, portrayed as responsive to external direction, might publicly defect. Rather than disarming and endorsing civic resistance, they would retain their weapons and engage regime forces militarily under the banner of defending the populace. This process could culminate in the proclamation of a ‘Free Army of Iran’, echoing the trajectory of the Free Syrian Army. The Syrian case is cited as illustrative, with reference to territorial incursions by Israel and the appropriation of substantial Syrian oil resources by the United States, characterised as occurring in violation of international law (Modern Diplomacy, 2022).

 

It is further argued that, although a minority within the present armed forces may retain professional integrity, they are exceptional. The contemporary military establishment of the Islamic regime is distinguished from the former Imperial Iranian Armed Forces, credited with defending national territory during the eight-year war. The current structure is depicted as institutionally integrated into the regime’s coercive architecture, alongside IRGC and the Basij. In the event of renewed uprising, any soldier seeking to align with the populace is therefore urged to relinquish the uniform and lay down arms before joining civilian ranks, so as not to endanger the country’s territorial cohesion.

 

 

3.2.3 Israeli Strategic Calculus and the Zionist Dimension

Beyond the two preceding groups, the role of Israeli actors and advocates of global Zionism must not be overlooked. They are described as having played a significant part in the overthrow of the monarchical order and in the installation of the clerical regime. This current is portrayed, in the first instance, as favouring the continued survival of the Islamic regime for a further period, on the grounds that, absent the Islamic regime, Israel would confront irreparable damage to its already fragile economy and would face constraints upon what are characterised as its expansionist ambitions and its encroachment upon Palestinian territory. Israeli actors, particularly hardline Jewish factions such as Shas, United Torah Judaism, and the Likud Party, are said still to have failed in annexing the Gaza Strip, a matter presented as a source of strategic frustration.

 

In this analogy, just as an infected wound furnishes a milieu conducive to the proliferation of pathogens, so the Islamic regime is depicted not merely as sustaining Israel’s economic viability, but as providing justificatory grounds for policies described as inhumane and expansionist (Suren-Pahlav, 2013). The continued existence of the Islamic regime is therefore construed as furnishing Israel with a pretext for intensified operations against the Palestinians and for the occupation of Gaza. At the same time, it is suggested that the government of Yair Lapid, characterised as moderate and peace-oriented and opposed to what is termed the project, or illusion, of constructing a ‘Greater Israel’, will be displaced by a more hardline Zionist administration. In this regard, speculation concerning the potential return of Benjamin Netanyahu, supported by Jewish hardliners, is said to be intensifying. Should Netanyahu return to power, and in light of the assertion that the Islamic regime has entered its terminal phase, it is argued that the process of consolidating control over Gaza would be accelerated, giving rise to a sequence of developments.

 

First, with the ascent of a war-oriented government in Israel, the Islamic regime would be manoeuvred into providing a pretext for the occupation of Gaza and the perpetration of what is described as genocide. The outcome is predicted to favour Israel, on the grounds that Western states, despite their claims to champion liberty and human rights, would adopt a posture of compliant silence in the face of such actions.

 

Subsequently, Israeli actors, in concert with longstanding allies among American conservatives, Republican policymakers, and Western interventionists adhering to Atlanticist doctrines of unconditional transatlantic support for Israel, would seek to implement one of two scenarios.

 

Israel would endeavour to install in Iran a regime aligned with its interests, most plausibly composed of reformist or even ‘transformationist’ elements, in the form of a second republic. This assessment is linked to the drafting and preparation of a document referred to as the ‘Cyrus Accord’, the contents of which have not been disclosed but are described as constituting an exploitative and colonial programme for Iran. The plan is attributed to Len Khodorkovsky and Victoria Coates, and is characterised as envisaging the transformation of Iran into a client state of Israel (Suren-Pahlav, 2021).

 

Should Israel prove unable to establish such an aligned regime in Iran, it would, with American assistance and in cooperation with Arab states along the southern littoral of the Persian Gulf, particularly the United Arab Emirates, which is described as having participated in a coalition formed for this purpose (Suren-Pahlav, 2021), facilitate the outbreak of war between Iran and the United States. This course would not only precipitate regime change but, through the instrumentalisation of separatist militant organisations, especially those reportedly trained and heavily armed over the past two decades, ignite an internal conflict within Iran. Such a civil war, it is contended, would culminate in the fragmentation of the country. Through this process, Israel would benefit not only from newly generated regional instability but also from the creation of a state designated ‘al-Ahwaz’ [3] upon Iran’s oil- and gas-rich territories, thereby sustaining itself, in the metaphor employed, as a leech upon these resources.

 

 

4. Uprising, Revolution and the Question of Political Form

From the standpoint attributed to American policymakers, regime displacement presents itself as a comparatively uncomplicated enterprise. It requires neither the fabrication of mass mobilisation nor direct orchestration of revolt, but merely the decision not to impede an emergent uprising. Nor is extensive propaganda indispensable; it suffices that acts of repression are no longer obscured or marginalised within international media circuits, as is alleged to have occurred in earlier phases.

 

Within this interpretative schema, the Islamic regime should, it is argued, have collapsed long ago. Its durability is ascribed less to internal legitimacy than to external calculation. The upheaval of 1979 is recast as a managed transformation culminating in Islamic ascendancy and the installation of a regime aligned with Western and Israeli strategic interests. That formation, now depicted as having exhausted its utility, stands at the threshold of replacement.

 

In a polity shaped by four decades of coercion, exclusion and institutionalised repression, renewed uprising is framed as historically foreseeable. Unlike the protest cycles of 2017 and 2019, when Western governments are said to have muted coverage and refrained from foregrounding state violence, a reorientation of international posture is anticipated. Should global media cease to filter or downplay reports of repression, domestic protest could assume revolutionary proportions. The dismantling of the present order would then clear the path for a successor regime, in a pattern analogised to the post-1979 transition.

 

The strategic question, however, concerns how to prevent the consolidation of another externally aligned republic. The first proposition advanced is that republican systems, particularly in the Iranian context, exhibit heightened susceptibility to corruption, foreign penetration and elite betrayal when compared with constitutional monarchies, especially parliamentary or elective forms. Repeated misjudgements in leadership selection, coupled with the presence of actors depicted as indifferent or hostile to national sovereignty, are said to increase the likelihood that presidential institutions become conduits for external influence.

 

A second argument appeals to historical continuity. The republican model is characterised as lacking organic rootedness within Iran’s civilisational trajectory, whereas monarchy is presented as an indigenous and historically embedded institution, interwoven with conceptions of Iranian statehood. In this conception, a parliamentary monarchy would not exercise executive governance but would serve as a stabilising and integrative symbol, preserving territorial unity while remaining outside quotidian political administration.

 

It follows that external powers would be expected to promote the establishment of another republic staffed by actors compliant with their strategic priorities. Within this framework, the prevention of historical repetition becomes a civic imperative. The alternative proposed is the institutionalisation of a parliamentary and elective monarchy as a structural safeguard against renewed dependency.

 

None of these objectives, however, is regarded as achievable in the absence of identifiable leadership. It has consistently been argued that any uprising capable of culminating in regime overthrow and national emancipation requires strategic coordination and authoritative direction (Suren-Pahlav, 1999; 2008). The proposition that ‘the people will find their own leader’ is dismissed as a reiteration of an earlier misjudgement, when authority was vested in a figure deemed unfit for responsible statecraft, with consequences that have structured the ensuing decades. At what is framed as a decisive historical threshold, error is construed not as setback but as irreparable loss. The conduct of individuals and collectives alike is therefore treated as determinative of Iran’s political future.

 

Within this paradigm, Reza Pahlavi is identified as the only figure possessing the requisite historical standing to assume leadership. He is portrayed as unmarked by betrayal and unassociated with acts of bloodshed. The argument advanced holds that, after years characterised as reticence and reluctance to shoulder the responsibilities conferred by dynastic inheritance and the former constitutional framework, he must now assume an explicit leadership role and navigate the nation through the turbulence ahead.

 

Failure to do so, it is contended, would leave Iran exposed to intensified repression, the prospect of internal armed conflict, and either territorial fragmentation or the installation of a second externally aligned republic following confrontation with the United States and Israel. Under such circumstances, the cycle of dependency would remain unbroken.

 

A further caution is advanced. External actors are understood to recognise that the restoration of monarchy would complicate their regional designs. Efforts might therefore be directed towards the political marginalisation or removal of Reza Pahlavi before an alternative republican arrangement is secured. At present, his position within opposition networks is described as reactive rather than institutionally hegemonic, a condition that may afford limited insulation. Yet public elevation absent organisational consolidation could expose him to strategic isolation and effective neutralisation.

 

To mitigate this vulnerability, the establishment of a disciplined political organisation is advanced as an indispensable precondition. Such a formation would comprise nationally oriented figures unassociated either with the present regime or with foreign power centres, and would assume operational responsibility in any process of regime displacement. Within this framework, individuals alleged to have compromised records with respect to national sovereignty, including affiliates of groups such as Farashgard, are to be kept at a distance. Absent a structured and programmatically coherent organisation of the kind previously outlined (Suren-Pahlav, 1999; 2008; 2019), meaningful transition is judged unattainable.

 

Although Catherine Perez-Shakdam has intimated the possible death of Khamenei, the question arises as to why American and Israeli authorities have not amplified such claims. The explanation proposed is strategic timing. Even if his death has occurred, the operational calendar of these actors has not yet reached its decisive phase. Narratives advanced by formations described as aligned with foreign interests, including Farashgard (Suren-Pahlav, 2018a), which insist upon the necessity of external intervention for regime collapse, are interpreted as components of a broader doctrine termed ‘external liberation’ (Suren-Pahlav, 2016; 2017).

 

Within this analytical frame, escalating repression and lethal force against protestors could furnish the requisite pretext for an interventionist coalition, potentially coordinated by the United States with European partners and aligned with Israeli strategic objectives, to engineer outcomes comparable to those observed in Iraq or Libya. Premature confirmation of Khamenei’s death would not advance this design. The preservation of his symbolic presence thus becomes instrumentally useful. It is contended that Western powers require a personalised autocratic adversary to legitimise military action. His name would therefore be retained until such time as intervention could be theatrically concluded with capture or elimination, recalling the precedents of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

 

A final consideration concerns the indicators of impending systemic rupture. Particular attention is directed towards the posture adopted by the United Kingdom in relation to prospective unrest and to the policy direction of Joe Biden.

 

Should the British government, together with the Persian-language service of the BBC, portrayed by Iranians as ‘Ayatollah BBC’ for being the propagandist mouthpiece during the engineered Islamic Revolution to topple the imperial government of Iran and replace it with an Islamic fundamentalist regime as part of the Bernard Lewis Plan in 1979 (Suren-Pahlav, 2010; 2018b), begin to foreground sustained reporting on regime violence and emergent mobilisation, and should London move to sanction senior Iranian officials, freeze assets held within British financial institutions, and designate the IRGC as a terrorist entity, such measures would be read as signalling the withdrawal of tacit support and the authorisation of a coordinated escalation involving the United States and Israel.

 

 

5. Conclusion

The prospective death of Ali Khamenei must be understood not as an episodic event in the biography of a ruler, but as a structural inflection point within a regime whose internal contradictions have accumulated over four decades. Throughout this study, the emphasis has rested upon three interdependent dynamics: elite contestation within the clerical-military order, the strategic calculations of external powers, and the vulnerability of a sovereign polity caught between predatory factions and geopolitical engineering.

 

The central claim advanced is that succession within the Islamic regime does not occur within a neutral constitutional vacuum. It unfolds within a field already saturated by rivalry between principlists, transformation-seekers, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, each seeking not reform but positional advantage. Concealment, strategic timing, and narrative management are not peripheral tactics but intrinsic features of an order in which legitimacy has long since eroded and coercion has replaced consent. The announcement of Khamenei’s death, whenever it occurs, will therefore function less as revelation than as trigger. What it triggers, however, remains contingent.

 

Externally, the Iranian question is embedded in wider contests over regional hegemony, energy corridors, and ideological projection. Competing strategies are discernible: managed transition under the banner of rights; fragmentation through armed conflict and separatist mobilisation; or the installation of a compliant second republic aligned with foreign interests. Each scenario presupposes not the empowerment of Iranian civic agency, but its instrumentalisation. In this sense, Iran risks becoming arena rather than actor.

 

Against this backdrop, the paper has argued that the decisive variable is neither foreign design nor factional manoeuvre alone, but the political form that succeeds the present order. The repetition of 1979, under altered rhetoric yet analogous dependency, would signify not transformation but recurrence. Without institutional architecture capable of preserving territorial integrity, insulating executive authority from foreign penetration, and anchoring legitimacy in historical continuity, regime change may simply inaugurate a new cycle of subordination.

 

The approaching moment is thus one of compression rather than transition. Elite struggle, external intervention, and popular unrest may converge with unusual rapidity. Error at such a juncture is not self-correcting. The disintegration of territorial cohesion, once initiated, cannot readily be reversed. If Iran is to avoid both ‘Iranistanisation’ and the imposition of another externally mediated republic, strategic clarity and organisational preparedness are indispensable.

 

The death of Khamenei, whether imminent or already concealed, will not in itself determine Iran’s fate. It will merely expose the architecture of power to forces long gathering beneath the surface. What follows will depend upon whether national agency can be consolidated before predatory interests, domestic and foreign, convert rupture into fragmentation.

 

 

Footnotes:

1 – Many individuals of Iranian appearance who bear the title ‘Sayyid’ and claim descent from Muhammad, the Arab prophet, and take pride in that lineage are, on this basis, regarded as non-Iranian and Arab. For that reason, when referring to such persons, I have consistently employed their Arabic names, in order to underscore what is presented as their non-Iranian origin and their lack of qualification to be considered Iranian. It should be noted that Khomeini regularly signed his name ‘al-Khomeini’ and ‘al-Mousavi’. In the future, following DNA testing of those in Iran who identify themselves as ‘Sadat’, their Arab or Iranian origin should be established; if confirmed as of Arab descent, they should be barred from state office and positions of authority. The argument advanced is that only an Iranian will love Iran (Suren-Pahlav, 2001).

 

 2 – The Henry Jackson Society is a security think tank affiliated with Western intelligence institutions, particularly the British Intelligence Service and the Central Intelligence Agency, headquartered in London, and in recent years allegedly tasked with advancing the separation of Iran’s oil- and gas-rich territories.

 

3 – ‘Al-Ahwaz’, which must not be conflated with the city of Ahvaz, is presented by certain Arab separatist factions as a putative emirate encompassing the provinces of Khuzestan, Bushehr, Lorestan, Ilam, and Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, together with parts of Kermanshah, Kurdistan, Hamadan, Markazi, Qom, Isfahan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Fars, and Hormozgan. These groups contend that these territories, widely regarded within Iranian historiography as integral to the cradle of Achaemenid civilisation and to the formation of Iranian statehood, once constituted an Arab polity termed ‘al-Ahwaz’, allegedly annexed by Iran under Reza Shah in 1925. It is scarcely coincidental that the borders of this imagined state correspond closely to Iran’s principal oil and gas-bearing regions. Prior to the consolidation of central authority under Reza Shah and the eclipse of the Qajar order, these territories fell within the effective sphere of British influence, operating in practice under conditions of foreign dominance. Critics therefore argue that contemporary agitation around ‘al-Ahwaz’ cannot be disentangled from longer imperial entanglements, nor from residual strategic interests attributed to Britain, which is alleged by some to continue to regard these energy-rich zones as lying within its historic orbit. A number of Arab separatist organisations, self-designated as ‘Ahwazi’ or ‘Ahwazian’, are further accused by their detractors of operating with financial backing from certain Arab states and of receiving military training from Israeli sources.

 

 

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