The helicopter crash deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and seven others caught the world by surprise Monday morning, bringing abrupt changes to Iran’s domestic and diplomatic leadership at a time when the Middle East is a boiling kettle of toil and trouble.
The death of Iran’s head of leadership won’t fundamentally change Iran’s stripes, for a number of reasons.
The change in leadership comes while Iran and its proxy groups are taking advantage of Netanyahu’s invasion of Gaza, launching a retaliatory attack on Israel earlier this month and increasing support for Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. A fish rots at the head, the proverb goes. But the death of Iran’s head of leadership won’t fundamentally change Iran’s stripes, for a number of reasons. The Islamic Republic of Iran is still a regime that believes its survival depends on standing up to Israeli, Saudi and American interests throughout the region.
Raisi himself was no reformer. He rose up the ranks in Iran’s dual theocratic and electoral system as a prosecutor closely allied with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ultimate arbiter of all policy decisions. Elected in 2021, while Iran was in a deep economic depression and struggling to access Covid vaccines, Raisi doubled down on hard-line identity politics, tightening the nation’s morality laws and ordering violent crackdowns on the millions who protested the police killing of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman taken into custody for showing her hair in public, and whose death after being detained by Iranian police sparked an ongoing movement against the repressive regime.
Under Raisi and Amirabdollahian, Iran’s diplomacy took a more bellicose turn with negotiators openly using then-President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the U.S.'s war in Afghanistan to sow the narrative that the United States cannot be a trusted partner. Shortly after Raisi’s election, Iran ramped up its violations with its Parliament passing laws requiring the violation of the deal’s limits. As a result, Iran now has surpassed the limits of stockpiled, enriched uranium.
Iran is a sophisticated regime and the succession plan is already in motion. Under the nation’s Constitution, the vice president steps up and elections must be held in 50 days. Two men close to the theocratic leader Khamenei have already been appointed and sworn in, with Mohammad Mokhber as acting president and nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani as the head diplomat, so we can expect continuity on Iran’s strategic and rhetoric presentation on the world stage. A change in president is not going to change the fact that Iran considers U.S. influence to be the No. 1 threat to its national identity and security.
The greater challenge is for Khamenei himself and the future of the theocracy. He has been in power since 1989, overseeing a period of dramatic economic hardship, isolation and technological advancement for his people. Khamenei’s persona and power have shaped everything about modern life in Iran. But he is 85 years old and was grooming Raisi as a potential successor. While as a puppet master the ayatollah can manipulate the secular operation to maintain stability, Khamenei’s own succession — and the future grip of the theocracy — is the real target of opportunity for ambitious clerics, human rights activists and world leaders looking to change the course of Iran’s future.
