What Kind of Change Is Coming to Iran?

KANISHK THAROOR

Karim, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

KARIM SADJADPOUR

Wonderful to be with you.

KANISHK THAROOR

When we scheduled this conversation it was to discuss your magnificent essay in Foreign Affairs from October, which was titled “The Autumn of the Ayatollahs.” And in that essay you sketched the various possible futures ahead for Iran as its very beleaguered regime under the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tries to cling to power.

We will get to that piece, but it seems that the future may be coming a little quicker than we expected. Since the end of December protests have spread across Iran. They now seem to be in all 31 provinces of the country. The government suspended the internet on January 8, and there’s been a fairly stern crackdown since. We’re getting reports of hundreds of people killed. But demonstrators are still taking to the streets. And we’ve seen much of this before. In 2022 and in 2009 there were massive mass protests that provoked a very severe government crackdown that eventually quelled them. But there also seems to be now, at the top levels of the Islamic Republic and among certain elites, a kind of panic and alarm that was not as acute in 2022 and 2009. This time seems genuinely different. And why is it so different?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

Well it’s a great question, Kanishk, and I do think that these protests have felt existential for the regime in that they’ve been happening in every single one of Iran’s provinces nationwide. And the slogans of the protestors are quite ferocious. People are essentially done with the regime, they’re calling for regime change. Including in places that we would’ve traditionally thought of as regime strongholds: the cities of Qom and Mashhad, which are Shiite strongholders, the birthplace of Ayatollah Khomeini, the town of Khomeyn, you saw widespread protests. So in the past sometimes it was easy to dismiss protests in Iran as oh, these are just the elites of northern Tehran. But these protests are nationwide, and they transcend socioeconomic divides. They transcend ethnic divides. So not just Iranian Persians but Kurds and Azeris and others. And there’s women and men, young and old.

And the thing about the Islamic Republic of Iran is that it’s authoritarian in several ways. It’s not only politically authoritarian, but it’s also economically and socially authoritarian. So there’s profound political, economic, and social grievances. And one thing we may have talked about before, Kanishk, is that when you are a theocracy ruling from a moral pedestal—you have pretensions of being morally superior, representing God’s will on earth—but you are elbow deep in repression and corruption, that is even more offensive to your population than if you’re just a run-of-the-mill dictatorship. [Russian President] Vladimir Putin doesn’t have any pretensions of carrying out God’s will on Earth.

And so for that reason, I think you can see it in the protests that people are just really fed up with a regime which has been so politically brutal but has also profoundly mismanaged the country’s economy. There’s chronic water shortages, chronic power outages. And even then, they want to micromanage people’s lives. At least in [Nicolás] Maduro’s Venezuela, they weren’t trying to police what you’re wearing, whether or not you’re showing too much hair, or whether or not you’re drinking alcohol.

And so I think for that reason the Islamic Republic is a regime which from, I would say, upwards of 80 percent of Iranians it has no redeeming qualities. And I now describe it as a zombie regime. It’s a regime whose ideology is dying, its legitimacy is dying, its economy is dying, its supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is dying, 86 years old. But just like zombies, it still has the capacity for lethal force and that’s what keeps it in power.

KANISHK THAROOR

You mentioned the parlous state of the Iranian economy. Inflation is something like 50 percent, maybe 70 percent for food prices. Tehran is so starved of water that officials have been even considering relocating the capitol in the coming decades. And Masoud Pezeshkian, the ostensibly more moderate president of Iran, has sort of very publicly acknowledged some of the economic grievances of the protestors and suggested that there might be some coming economic overhaul. But do you think it’s too late now for these sorts of technocratic measures to have any effect? Have the protests very much mushroomed beyond their material and economic causes?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

So one thing I want to emphasize is that the 1979 revolution, it commenced in January of 1978. It culminated in January of 1979. So that process took 12 months until [Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi] left Iran, and then Khomeini returned a couple weeks later. And so these protests in Iran, even if they are crushed in the near term, which is a possibility, my sense is that the anger, the political, economic, social grievances fueling them, will not have gone away. And any attempts by the regime to address these underlying grievances are likely to be insufficient. Because I think the reality is that a majority of people have realized that Iran will never fulfill its enormous potential as a nation as long as its organizing principle is “death to America” and “death to Israel,” rather than “long live Iran.” One of the slogans you commonly hear from protestors is they say, “Forget about Lebanon, forget about Gaza, think about us.“

And so for the last decades, it’s been a government which is, in the perception of many people, has used the country’s national wealth to fund Arab militias, which has only isolated the country. And then a lot of the big national projects which the Islamic Republic tried to mobilize support for, namely the nuclear program—that nuclear program of Iran probably cost the country upwards of half a trillion dollars when you consider not just the sunk costs but also the opportunity costs and the sanctions and isolation, the lost oil revenue. For a nuclear program which wasn’t producing any oil and nor did it end up being a deterrent because both Israel and then the United States bombed it.

And so I think there’s just been one failure after the other for this Iranian regime. And I’m skeptical that they can rehabilitate themselves. Now, what I also believe is that violence can delay their funeral. That’s possible. It can allow Ayatollah Khamenei to die as supreme leader rather than be killed or deposed. That’s possible. But I don’t think that this status quo is sustainable for that much longer.

KANISHK THAROOR

You described the opposition in your October essay as “too fractured to unite but too persistent to simply vanish.” Would you stand by that description today, and are the protests revealing any new dimensions to the nature of opposition in Iran?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

So I think what’s different now as opposed to when I first wrote that in September was, if you remember you saw the much longer first draft version of it, and I had seven scenarios instead of five. And one of the scenarios was looking at the role of Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran. And I entitled that section “Iran as Spain.” Could Iran transition to some type of a constitutional monarchy like Spain? And so the role of Reza Pahlavi in these protests has been elevated. Because whereas in the aftermath or even during the 12-day war last June he was also inciting people to go to the streets and there wasn’t a single protest. This time around his name is being chanted in many parts of Iran. And not just north Tehran; even, as I said, in very traditional cities, ostensibly traditional cities like Mashhad and Qom, people calling his name and saying, “Pahlavi will return, long live the king, Javid Shah.”

And I think because of the fact that, to the extent there’s like a overarching ideology of these protests, I do think it’s nationalism. It’s this idea of a national reclamation: our country has not been Iran the last five decades. It’s been the Islamic Republic. Our national interests haven’t been prioritized. This is not a government that has been advancing the security and well-being of Iranians. It’s been trying to destroy Israel.

And so I think for many people Pahlavi embodies, frankly by default, that idea of kind of a nationalist leader because the regime is so effective at killing and decapitating effective leadership. And so he’s been outside the country for five decades, and through some of the prominent satellite television channels he’s now been able to communicate effectively, especially with younger generation Iranians. And you know, Kanishk, this is a society in which three quarters of Iranians were born after the 1979 revolution. So they have no recollection of how things were. And frankly, that has been helpful because there’s a nostalgia about a period that they didn’t experience. So obviously things weren’t perfect before 1979, otherwise a revolution wouldn’t have happened. But when they see the images and they hear the stories of pre-1979, there’s a great deal of nostalgia about the country’s economy, its place in the world, its social freedoms. And I think to the extent that people are yearning for that normal life again, he is the inspirational leader for many of them. Now Jack Goldstone, the great author of a book on revolution, says that every revolution needs two kinds of leadership. You need both inspirational and organizational leadership. And that’s been, I think, one of the things that’s been lacking is organizational leadership on the ground.

KANISHK THAROOR

We’ll get to Pahlavi a little bit later but I wanted to ask you first about the regime that’s still in place. How would you describe the sort of key components of the Islamic Republic, the groups and the elites that are holding it together? And who benefits the most from the persistence of Khamenei’s rule?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

At this point my shortcut for understanding Iran is to just think about a pyramid. And Ayatollah Khamenei is at the very top of that pyramid, but the most important rungs below him are military people, Revolutionary Guardsmen. So in theory we still call this a clerical regime, but in my view it’s become more of a military regime in clerical garb. The institution of the Revolutionary Guards are the most powerful political and economic institution in Iran, they’ve long eclipsed the institution of the clergy. And they have become kind of a military-industrial complex. They run major businesses, they run the country’s ports. Friends of mine who have done business in Iran say that you can’t really become prominent in business without having to work with the Revolutionary Guards.

Khamenei has been a skillful commander of the Revolutionary Guards in that he very meticulously appoints their top few tiers of leadership and he shuffles them with some frequency every few years. So none of them can get too comfortable in their role and feel like they have an independent power base. And the relationship between Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards I would describe as symbiotic. It’s been politically expedient for Khamenei; it’s been economically expedient for the Revolutionary Guards. And he relies on them. And so if you see the security forces start to fray or splinter, which we haven’t seen at all, that would really probably be the end of Ayatollah Khamenei’s rule.

KANISHK THAROOR

How important at this point is the role of ideology in providing a kind of cohesiveness to the regime? I think you quoted elsewhere the line that at the start of the revolution the regime was composed of 80 percent ideologues and 20 percent charlatans, and now it’s the reverse: 20 percent ideologues and 80 percent charlatans. So what role does ideology still play? And if it plays a minimal one, or an increasingly minimal one, then is it merely expedience and the bottom line that allows the elites to adhere to the husk of the clerical establishment?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

That’s a great question. And I love that quote from a friend of mine who was a professor in Tehran who indeed said that at the beginning of the revolution the regime was 80 percent ideologues, true believers, and then 20 percent charlatans who didn’t really believe but it was politically and financially expedient for them. And now it’s the exact opposite. There are only probably 20 percent, at most, kind of true believers left in the regime and 80 percent are just charlatans who go along for the ride. And many of my friends who’ve studied the Soviet Union would say the same thing about Moscow in 1985, that there were few really true believing communists left at that point.

What’s relevant here is that in my view the supreme leader still is a true believer. He still believes in revolutionary ideology. And what’s key to understanding Khamenei is that he also believes that if you deviate from revolutionary ideals, meaning if you try to reform the system, that’s not going to prolong your shelf life; that’s going to accelerate your collapse. And for Khamenei, the experience of [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev and the Soviet Union was very formative. And he cited this before, that the Soviet Union collapsed when Gorbachev tried to reform it. And I think that’s probably the view of Vladimir Putin. And frankly, Kanishk, this is an observation pointed out by some of the great political philosophers like Tocqueville and Machiavelli—that the most dangerous moment for any bad government is when it tries to reform itself.

So we commonly refer to people like Ayatollah Khamenei and their ilk as hard-liners. They refer to themselves as usulgara, principalists. And what that means is that they’re loyal to the principles of the revolution. And in my view there’s kind of three grand principles left: death to America, death to Israel, and the mandatory hijab, which Ayatollah Khamenei called the flag of the Islamic Revolution. And it’s notable, Kanishk, that even though—I’m told now in the city of Tehran more women than not are no longer even wearing the hijab, and that’s throughout the country as well—even though the Berlin Wall of the hijab has fallen, Khamenei has still not lifted the ban on it because he believes that once you start to cede your principles and abandon your principles, that’s like taking a sledgehammer to the pillars of a building. The whole thing will collapse on top of their head.

KANISHK THAROOR

Yes. He’s sort of terrified of the idea of the Islamic Republic’s glasnost, basically, right?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

Absolutely.

KANISHK THAROOR

Just sticking with Khamenei, he’s 86 years old now. Let’s put aside for a second any sort of drastic kind of foreign intervention. What do you see as his current playbook? Is it merely repression, as we saw in the wake of 2022 and 2009? Or are there other measures that he might endorse to quell the protests, whether it’s engineering some kind of overt succession or transition to his son, Mojtaba? If you were a fly on the wall in his bunker, what kinds of conversations do you think he’s having right now?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

So I think in the immediate term the conversation is, “We need to restore order at all costs, even if that means killing a lot of people”—which they have done—“that’s what we’re going to do.” And you never take a step back when your population is rising up. There was a iconic moment in the 1979 revolution in late 1978—I believe November 1978—when the protests against the Shah were mushrooming, the Shah went on state television and he apologized to people. And he very famously said, “I’ve heard the voice of your revolution.”

And one of my first projects at the Carnegie Endowment was a monograph I did on Ayatollah Khamenei two decades ago. And I found a speech from Khamenei in which he said, “The Shah thought by going on television and apologizing to us that we were going to accept his apology and it was going to pacify the protesters, and we were going to go home and the revolution would stop. And just the opposite happened. That’s when we, the protesters, the revolutionaries, saw how weak and vulnerable the Shah appeared. We smelled blood and we pounced.” And for that reason, his mentality now is do everything to restore order, including shoot and kill.

Once you get beyond that, I do think that he will allow his diplomats to try to send out feelers. His public voice is always going to remain defiant, defiant both toward protesters internally and defiant toward the United States. That’s not going to change. You’re not going to hear conciliatory gestures from Khamenei. But he may allow [Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas] Araghchi to go send out feelers to [U.S. Special Envoy] Steve Witkoff, as we’ve read about in the last couple days, or to go try to talk to the Europeans.

But for me, the best and perhaps only indication to really understand Iran’s conduct is to listen to the statements of Ayatollah Khamenei and his senior Revolutionary Guard commanders. Now what happens when and if they restore order, and they now feel that, okay, they can make a decision about the future? The challenge he’s going to face, Khamenei, is that there was really only two people in the conversation for succession to him that we know of. One was the former president, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a plane crash two years ago. And the other person is his son, Mojtaba. And the profound challenge Khamenei faces is that Khamenei came to power opposing hereditary leadership of the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini issued this fatwa saying hereditary leadership is un-Islamic. And so him bequeathing power to his son is not going to have any legitimacy, the son, Mojtaba. Khamenei himself had been president for eight years before he inherited power from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. But I would say if he tries to bequeath power to his son, or any like-minded hard-line official, a hard-line cleric, in my view it’s not going to be sustainable. And I don’t want to get ahead of the conversation, but that is one of the scenarios we looked at, which I described as Iran as North Korea.

KANISHK THAROOR

You described the pyramid with Khamenei at the top and security services beneath him. What would it take for those security forces, or even just elements within those security forces, the Islamic Guards especially, to abandon him? How could the opposition encourage defection among their ranks, or is that a real long shot at this point?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

Up until now, the security services, the Revolutionary Guards, and Khamenei have seen their fate intertwined. They basically have seen themselves as stuck at the hip. They live together, they go down together. Now, what we saw during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 is that when protests against the leader of Tunisia, [Zine el-Abidine] Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, when they began to proliferate and endure, at some point the militaries in those countries, in particular Egypt, said, “We’re going to have to cut loose the dictator in order to preserve our own power and authority.” And we see now in Egypt 15 years later, [Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi] rules probably with much greater authority than Hosni Mubarak did 15 years ago.

That is the big question inside Iran. Could the Revolutionary Guards, if protests persist, at some point could we see a scenario whereby they decide to cut loose Ayatollah Khamenei to try to preserve their own economic and political power? Absolutely. I think because at the end of the day, human beings are self-interested. And so if they see that the ship is sinking, they may try to eliminate the 86-year-old man and try to maintain power for themselves. The question is, it’s rare in history that that works. Because when protests have gotten to that point, they usually reach a tipping point whereby any last-ditch efforts a regime tries to make are unsuccessful. And so that’s why we call it the tipping point. And so I’m also skeptical that that can be kind of a sustainable new equilibrium of senior Revolutionary Guard commanders who have been espousing hard-line revolutionary ideology for two, three decades suddenly becoming secular autocrats overnight.

KANISHK THAROOR

I want to talk a bit about the specter of foreign intervention. The regime has predictably been swift, as it has long done, to blame the protests on U.S. and Israeli interference. But the events of the past few years have shown just how immensely penetrated the country is by Israeli and U.S. intelligence and that the regime is in many ways truly compromised. Thanks to the United States and Israel, Iran no longer has dominance over its own skies. Have the reverses that Iran has suffered, notably in the June war but before then in Israel’s campaigns against Iranian proxy groups in the Middle East in the last few years, has that played any role in galvanizing the protests or encouraging Iranians to think of the regime as much weaker than it was before?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

I think absolutely, given the regime’s regional humiliations by Israel, Israel having decimated a lot of Iran’s regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the June war in which Iranians woke up one day and they read the news that almost two dozen senior Revolutionary Guard commanders were just eliminated overnight in their bedrooms and in their bunker. And so that was deeply humiliating for the regime. And I do remember at the time, Kanishk, in the immediate aftermath of the June war, there came to be a conventional wisdom among many analysts of Iran that there was a rallying-around-the-flag effect. In my view this was only going to be a short-term, temporary sugar high for the Islamic Republic because what we’ve seen throughout history is that when nascent revolutionary governments have—or there’s an external military intervention, it oftentimes can help them consolidate power. That’s what happened to [Cuban leader Fidel Castro] in the Bay of Pigs invasion. It happened to the Islamic Republic in 1980 when [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] invaded. It helped Khomeini and the revolutionaries consolidate power.

But when you have a late-stage military dictatorship which is engaged in what I would describe as an elective war, a war of choice—death to Israel, a war with Israel is an elective war for the Islamic Republic. It’s an ideological war. Those types of military humiliations for late-stage dictatorships can actually serve to accelerate their demise. The Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan is a good example of that, the humiliation of Argentina in the Falkland Islands, as well. So I do think that the Islamic Republic’s global, regional domestic military humiliation has certainly played a role in the view of its people that this regime is incompetent and it’s much weaker than we thought.

KANISHK THAROOR

[U.S. President Donald Trump] is reportedly weighing his options, and the last time he weighed his options he bombed Iran in June. Now, to be clear, there’s no immediate sense—and we’re talking on the morning of Monday, January 12—that American strikes are imminent. But what do you see as the potential benefits of some kind of U.S. or indeed Israeli military action in Iran at this point?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

Well I really look at historic precedent. What are the precedents of external military invasions against a brutal autocrat repressing its population where that’s ended well? And unfortunately there are not many examples of that throughout history. I think for probably many Americans, obviously there’s the Iraq war and Afghanistan, but perhaps more recently for many people Libya, right? The NATO operation against [Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi], which on one hand I think potentially did prevent the mass violence of Qaddafi, but it hasn’t in hindsight been viewed as a success. The operation against [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic I think would be considered more of a success. But I guess in my view, Kanishk, if I were thinking about this in the U.S. government, one of the things that I would’ve already started doing, or at least started thinking about, are offensive cyber operations to try to tear down Iran’s digital iron wall.

Because what this regime has been doing—and they’ve telegraphed this, they’ve done it so many times so we knew to expect it—is that they essentially throttle the internet and they throttle satellite dishes and cellular networks in order to kill people in the dark. And the country has had for the last four or five days one percent connectivity, so the people in Iran can’t communicate with the outside world, they can’t communicate with one another. None of the images or videos are coming out, with the exception of some people who have access to Starlink terminals. We don’t know what’s happening in Iran.

And so I do think that would be—whether it’s the U.S. government or the Israeli government or anyone else, anyone that can restore Iran’s connectivity to the world, that’s going to be hugely, hugely appreciated and will actually make a difference for protestors. But I don’t think that there is—there’s unfortunately no kind of surgical operation in which you can just eliminate Ayatollah Khamenei and bring about quick change inside Iran, because you have 150,000 Revolutionary Guardsmen. And the trick for any Iranian opposition is how do you flip those people? How do you flip the mentality of those people to think that they’re actually better off jumping off from the regime than staying with it? And that’s a task which the United States can be partly influential, but also it has a lot to do with how people anticipate the day after is going to be in Iran.

KANISHK THAROOR

So you would—at this point you would dissuade anybody in the United States or Israel indeed from thinking that some kind of targeted campaign of assassinations or bombings will truly help the Iranian protestors?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

You know I would, before I would comment definitively on that, I would just like to see—I don’t want to pretend I’m a military expert—but look at what are the options that are before them. What is being discussed? I think one of the challenges in this current Trump administration is that it’s an administration which I haven’t—it’s not deliberative. I don’t know—you know, I’ve been in D.C. for 25 years. If you were to ask me in every other administration, “Who do you talk to understand Iran strategy at the Pentagon or State Department or White House,” I’d be able to tell you. With this administration it’s not clear who is thinking really hard, strategically, deliberatively about these issues. More often it’s statements that the president will make off the cuff, and then the bureaucracy tries to mobilize to provide options. But that is—you can’t change regimes just with Truth Social posts.

KANISHK THAROOR

But you’re also suggesting that you can’t change regimes just through targeted strikes.

KARIM SADJADPOUR

So I think what’s critical here is to not think about just, to quote Tom Friedman, not just the day after, but the day after the day after. So does the United States or does Israel have the capacity to eliminate Ayatollah Khamenei? I suspect that they do. Will eliminating Ayatollah Khamenei lead to a transformation of the Islamic Republic? I’m skeptical of that. It could, this is totally unpredictable. He is at the top of the power pyramid, but there are people below him, too. It’s not just kind of eliminating Saddam Hussein or eliminating Qaddafi. And again, for officials who may think that it’s either kill or be killed, they’re going to continue to kill.

KANISHK THAROOR

So regime change via Starlink, not Truth Social. You mentioned that there was this sugar high after the 12-day war of Iranians sort of rallying around the flag after the U.S. and Israeli bombing. Are you worried that any sort of overt intervention or military intervention by those powers could indeed, even if it’s just a sugar high, have the effect of dampening the momentum of the protests?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

It’s possible. What I’ve found in Iran is that outside action, or the threats of outside action, they oftentimes just accentuate existing political polarization. So if you’re a supporter of the government—and I suspect that the regime has maybe 15, at most 20 percent of popular support—any outside intervention is just going to further amplify those supporters and they’re going to further entrench and dig in and be willing to kill a lot of people to stay in power.

But at the same time I think that for the opponents of the regime, I don’t think outside intervention gets them to change teams. And this was my argument during the June war. I don’t think that disgruntled Iranians for political, economic, and social reasons after the June war said, “You know what? We’re now going to support the Islamic Republic.” And I think that was borne out with these protests.

KANISHK THAROOR

To what extent could outside powers help prop up the regime? So do China and Russia have the will or even indeed the capability to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

So I think China already has—obviously, it’s Iran’s almost lone economic partner now. Ninety percent of Iran’s oil exports go to China, although China demands a deep discount. But China, in my view, is more important to the Islamic Republic of Iran than the United States was to the Shah’s Iran. And it also provides Iran surveillance technologies which it uses.

Russia is different in that Russia and Iran have competitive economies. Both of them are energy producers. But Russia has definitely provided Iran aid and guidance to do what Putin does, which is to repress and stay in power. And here let me just take a quick detour, Kanishk, to say that I believe that China and Russia actually have very different interests vis-a-vis Iran. Because Russia benefits from the Islamic Republic being in power. They benefit from an isolated Iran which doesn’t compete with Russia and European gas markets because it doesn’t have LNG technology, it isn’t able to exploit its vast gas reserves. It is punching way below its weight as an oil producer. There was a time that Iran was producing six million barrels per day before the revolution. Now those numbers are less than half of that. And so Russia doesn’t want to see Iran compete with them in Iran’s historic sphere of influence, central Asia. So for so many reasons which I can cite, I think Russia continues to benefit from and wants an isolated Iranian regime.

China, on the other hand, in my view, would actually benefit from an Iran which fulfills its enormous potential as an energy superpower. If Iran were producing six million barrels per day of oil, if it exploits its vast gas reserves, in my view that’s positive for China. If Iran starts to play a role in the Middle East that is not destabilizing, which increases the risking of energy prices but stabilizing, in my view China wants a stable Middle East. And Iran is a closed market right now. It’s, in my view, and I think I wrote this in the essay, it’s probably the largest population of people in the world that has for decades been closed off from the global economic and political system. Ninety-two million people have basically not been part of the global economy. And an Iran which is opened up to global commerce and finance, in my view that’s net positive for China. So I do think that Russia is going to do everything in their power, and I’m sure they’ve been doing it already behind the scenes, to make sure that the Islamic Republic doesn’t fall.

The other relevant factor here are some of the regional militias, the Shiite militias. There’s been a lot of reports that Iran has been bringing in Iraqi Shiite militias to help them to repress the protests, potentially Lebanese Hezbollah as well. And that commonly becomes a theme among Iranians, which just amplifies their dislike of the regime, because they’ll say, “This is almost an occupying regime. They’re using foreign mercenaries, Arab mercenaries, to repress this Iranian desire for self-determination.”

KANISHK THAROOR

Are there any reasons to fear the collapse of the regime and whatever order it still provides? Are there scenarios that you worry about in terms of turmoil in the country? Or is the end of the regime something that everybody should want just as a matter of course?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

One of the additional scenarios, Kanishk, I wrote about, which wound up on the cutting room floor, we alluded to it briefly, but it was Iran as Yugoslavia. And that is a scenario which I know some people worry about, that could you have actually the country being torn apart into different ethnic enclaves? And that’s frankly something that the regime commonly evokes, that après moi le déluge, right? If the Islamic Republic falls, Iran will no longer be and the country is just going to be torn apart.

And I think that is a very low risk probability for a couple reasons. Number one, Iran has 2,500 years of history as a nation-state. So it’s not a twentieth-century post-Ottoman creation. There is this cohesive Iranian national identity, which Iran’s disparate ethnic groups, I think, feel part of. About 50 percent of Iranians are Persian, about a quarter are Azeri, but distinguishing Azeris and Persians is kind of like saying Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans. The Azeris—Ayatollah Khamenei is Azeri, the Tehran bazaar is dominated by Azeris. So they speak Turkish but all of them speak—or they speak Azeri, a Turkic language—but Persian is the lingua franca of the nation. Now you do also have ethnic groups on the periphery, which have suffered tremendously under the Islamic Republic, the largest being the Kurds, Iranian Kurds. But even Iranian Kurds, if you speak to them, they will say Kurds culturally, linguistically are much closer to Iranians, to Persians, than they are to Turks or to Arabs. So they feel part of the fabric of Iranian society even though they’ve suffered great repression.

Now you also have some minorities like Arabs, who are in oil-rich regions, and Balochis that are on the border with Pakistan, that are not only ethnic minorities but also in some cases religious minorities—they’re Sunni, not Shiite. And they’ve also felt totally repressed and abused and disenfranchised, deeply disgruntled. But they’re not large enough in size to really break off and to form another nation. So I do think that there is certainly a possibility that when and if political change happens in Iran, you’ll start to see agitations on the periphery of the country among ethnic minority groups. But I don’t think that any of them have kind of a viable plan B to secede from Iran, or that that is the hope of many of them. I think that, for the vast majority of them, they just want to live with far greater dignity and economic possibilities. And hopefully that whatever leadership comes next in Iran will have a much more inclusive view and, as I said, prioritize Iran’s national and economic interests before revolutionary ideology.

KANISHK THAROOR

I would really urge listeners of this podcast to read the essay in the magazine in which you go through a number of different scenarios that could follow the end of Khamenei’s rule. And I’ll just do a brief rundown here. You say that Iran could follow the path of post-Soviet Russia, in which an ideological regime gives way to the rule of a strong man who fixates on grievance-driven nationalism. It could go the way of post-Mao China, in which an authoritarian regime bends to accommodate some practical reform. And even Vali Nasr echoed that idea when he wrote in December that Iranians want their own Deng Xiaoping.

Worse perhaps, and I think you mentioned this earlier, Iran could become more like North Korea—more ideological, more isolated, more brutal, perhaps with the persistence of some form of clerical regime. Then you suggested Iran could be like Pakistan, in effect entirely run by the military. And lastly I think, and maybe this was slightly more implausible, Iran could resemble Turkey under President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, a kind of populist authoritarian regime with a facade of democracy. As events have unfolded in recent months and indeed in recent weeks, do you think any of these possibilities are more or less likely?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

It’s a great question, and I’ve thought about this a lot. And if I were to be rewriting the essay now, I’m not sure I would’ve changed any of these scenarios. Perhaps I would’ve fought with you guys to include those additional scenarios from Spain and Yugoslavia, just because Reza Pahlavi’s name is being chanted.

But let me say from the outset that for me in the aftermath of the June war when I was doing research, one of the statistics that jumped out at me in my research is that from World War II to the present, only one in five authoritarian transitions lead to democracy. More often, four out of five times, authoritarian transitions lead to another form of authoritarian regime. And one of the tasks that all of us have, Kanishk, in this world of writing about foreign affairs and geopolitics is to be careful not to conflate our hopes and our analysis, right? Because I would’ve loved to have written a piece about how Iran is going to become like Denmark and Sweden and Norway. And I actually believe that Iranian society is ripe and mature enough for representative government, for representative democracy. But I also think that leadership is totally critical. And absent a cohesive democratic opposition, it’s not going to go to democracy on its own.

So in the North Korea scenario that I laid out, my argument was that if Iran chooses to bequeath power from Ayatollah Khamenei to his son, Mojtaba, it’s essentially the country becoming like a North Korea–style hereditary ideological dictatorship—or even if Khamenei tries to bequeath power to a like-minded hardline cleric—meaning that that scenario is only sustainable with overwhelming brutality and isolation like North Korea. Because otherwise there’s virtually no constituency in Iran to be North Korea. In fact, what I always argue, it’s a regime which in some ways resembles North Korea but it’s a society that aspires to be like South Korea.

And so my view is that if they try to bequeath power to Mojtaba Khamenei, that’s not going to be a stable equilibrium. And there’s a wonderful Iranian intellectual whom I quoted, a guy called Ahmad Kasravi, who lived during the 1940s. And Kasravi himself came from a religious background. And he had this quote in which he said—he said this in the 1930s, I believe—he said that, “Iran owes one government to the mullahs so they can essentially expose their incompetence.” And my argument was that that debt has been settled. After five decades now people have gotten that out of their system. And in my view, if we look ahead five years from now and there’s another strong man ruling Iran, one prediction I would feel fairly confident making is that that strong man will not be wearing a turban. It’s going to be someone who is not a cleric, much more likely to be someone who’s a product of the intelligence or security services.

KANISHK THAROOR

Do you see at the moment any likely candidates to play that role?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

There are individuals who are auditioning for that role almost in real time. One example is the current speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. He is a former senior Revolutionary Guard commander. He was a pilot. He is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War. He was very close to [IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani]. He became mayor of Tehran. He’s run for president several times, I think he finished second each time, and he’s been speaker of parliament the last years. He’s someone who publicly likes to portray himself as both a fire breathing revolutionary but also as this technocrat who can get things done. When he first came on the political scene, he once described himself as a Hezbollahi Reza Shah [Pahlavi]. So Reza Shah is kind of the [Kemal Ataturk] of modern Iran, the first kind of secular autocrat. And there’s a great deal of reverence for Reza Shah among many Iranians because he’s viewed as the guy who built modern Iran. Even among supporters of the Islamic Republic, there’s a certain kind of admiration for what Reza Shah was able to do in his years in power.

And so people are kind of auditioning in that role. And I suspect, Kanishk, that what happens is that after Ayatollah Khamenei leaves the scene—however he leaves the scene, whether it’s he dies naturally or he’s deposed or he’s killed—I think the winning argument inside Iran, if you’re an aspiring politician or an aspiring strongman, is not going to be revolutionary ideology. It’s not going to be “death to America.” It’s not going to be “death to Israel.” It’s going to be “long live Iran, let’s make Iran great again,” a certain kind of national populism. And I do think economic populism will likely play well in Iran because this is a nation which, in my view, should be a G-20 nation. It has the human resources and natural resources to be a G20 nation and instead it’s a global pariah. So populism, economic populism—and this can oftentimes lead you in very bad places, as we saw with [Hugo] Chávez in Venezuela—but someone who comes and says, "I’m going to put the oil money on your dinner tables," that I think will resonate.

Now the last thing I want to say here in relation to aspiring strong man—what we’ve also seen historically is that oftentimes leaders emerge in the aftermath of an authoritarian collapse, like a Vladimir Putin, who were mid-ranking figures. They were not senior enough to be associated with the collapsing regime, but they understood power well enough to know how to accumulate it in the successor regime. And so Putin was a mid-ranking KGB official. And after the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, he was able to benefit from that and come and kind of fill that power vacuum, substituting communism with grievance-driven Russian nationalism. And so I do think it’s quite possible that the next powerful leader of Iran is not someone that any of us even know, because anyone senior enough like a Ghalibaf to be associated with the Islamic Republic is likely to be tarnished. But someone who is kind of a mid-ranking figure in security or intelligence forces may not have a tarnished national reputation but may understand how to navigate power in a way that they could come to power themselves.

KANISHK THAROOR

So then am I right in thinking that you’re suggesting that the sort of nationalism that’s animating these protests could become the ethos of a future authoritarian dispensation in the country?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

Yes, I think that’s a good way to put it. And there’s a wonderful essay that George Orwell wrote many decades ago, which is just entitled “[Notes On Nationalism],” and he talks about the different kinds of nationalism. The best kind of nationalism we could describe as patriotism. It’s love of one’s country but not hatred of others, an inclusive positive nationalism. Then you do have fascism. This kind of extreme nationalism that can lead you to self-destruction, as we saw in Germany and in Japan. And I think—I don’t know if this quote is from Orwell, or it’s only apocryphal—but he said, “Patriots are proud of their country for what it does, and nationalists are proud of their country no matter what it does.” And I do worry that, on one hand, I understand the desire for a national renaissance among Iranians, that after five decades of revolutionary ideology the antidote to that for many people is Iranian nationalism. But that can be manifested in destructive ways as well, whether it’s kind of a ethnic nationalism, Persians against others, or it’s a form of fascism against Arabs or against neighboring countries. So calibrating that nationalism in a positive way is going to be a difficult task.

KANISHK THAROOR

One option we could not discuss in your essay because it had not happened yet was Iran as Venezuela. That is, its immediate leaders removed but the rest of the regime somehow intact and now potentially hewing to a U.S. line. Do you see that as any kind of possibility?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

I’m skeptical that it can be a possibility. But I’ve spoken to a few people who are either in the current Trump administration or served in Trump’s first administration who have told me—and this was as of ten days ago, their views may have changed—but they told me that that is a deal that this administration would welcome. If they can get rid of Khamenei—I’m very skeptical they can pluck Khamenei out of Tehran the way that they captured Maduro out of Caracas—but if somehow senior officials in the regime or senior Revolutionary Guard commanders got rid of Khamenei and were willing to do a deal with the United States, I think that’s something that the Trump administration would welcome.

And this is the challenging thing about, if you’re both a foreign ally of the United States under Trump and a foreign adversary, is that this is a president who he has shown himself capable of wanting to do deals with Iran and dropping bombs on Iran. And the previous military campaign against Iran last June, that commenced two days before negotiations were meant to begin between the United States and Iran. So even though Trump is, as of as recently as yesterday, I heard him express support for doing a deal with Iran, he’s also threatened that the United States is locked and loaded and prepared to take military action against Iran. So this certainly is keeping the Iranian regime on its toes.

KANISHK THAROOR

I have to confess that I’m a little surprised about all the talk about Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah, who is in the United States, and his potential role in the future of the country either returning or shepherding some kind of transformation. Do you think he has a significant constituency in Iran? You did mention that a lot of young Iranians have no recollection or no memory of the era of the Shah. Or do you think the role he’ll play is a symbolic one or from the outside? How do you see Pahlavi affecting events in the coming weeks and months?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

So he’s been very open and clear about saying that his role is to be a transitional figure in Iran, to help the country transition to democracy. And if people decide that they want to restore constitutional monarchy he would be willing to play that role, but his goal is not to become an absolute monarch like his father or his grandfather. And when he speaks directly to the Iranian public on satellite TV channels and social media, his message I think resonates with a population which is just totally cynical about the prospect of their regime reforming and doesn’t have any other alternative opposition figures inside the country, given how repressive and effective the regime is in decapitating alternative leaders.

So given this, as I said, this combination of nostalgia for how life was before the revolution, economically much more prosperous, socially free, and Iran had a dignified place in the world rather than being a global pariah. And I do think, Kanishk, that the last two decades of events in the Middle East are relevant here because whereas 15, 20 years ago, I think there was probably more folks in the Iranian opposition using the word democracy, after the United States’ failures to try to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and just the diminishment of democratic countries everywhere, democracy has lost its luster. That’s impacted itself in Iran. And also for many Iranians one reference point is the United Arab Emirates and Dubai, which people go to frequently. Well that’s not a democracy, but people seem to be doing well and are happy there. And so [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman is another example for people, someone who’s leading a social transformation in Saudi Arabia.

So as I wrote about in the piece, there’s the yearning for what they say in Persian is zendegi normal, normal life. A normal life in which we have economic opportunities. It’s not necessarily democratic, but it’s also not politically oppressive the same way the Islamic Republic is, but socially free. So they want to be able to watch what they want, have free access to media, to be able to go out with their boyfriend, their girlfriend, to drink alcohol, to have a normal life, I think, is the yearning. And for many people, Reza Pahlavi is kind of the person around whom they’ve coalesced to help lead them to that destination. Now, he has an enormous challenge in that he’s been outside the country for 47 years. And if you ask him about the leaders whom he admires, he will cite people like [Martin Luther King, Jr.] and [Vaclav] Havel and Gandhi. And if you ask many of his most passionate supporters whom they admire, they will say Reza Shah, his grandfather, who was an absolute autocrat. So there’s a tension there between Reza Pahlavi’s aspirations for Iran and some of the aspirations of his supporters who want to see him come to power and hang all the mullahs and all of the existing leadership of the Islamic Republic. And that tension, I think, has inhibited his ability to do what needs to be done to bring down the regime, which is you have to flip some of the discontented political elites of the Islamic Republic, including the security forces. And to kind of flip them, you have to reassure them that they’re not going to be hung in Iran’s tomorrow. And so that is a task which I think any opposition leadership in Iran faces.

KANISHK THAROOR

You discuss in the piece what some have called the paranoid style of Iranian politics and a deep political culture of mistrust. That’s mistrust of outsiders, but also of insiders and institutions. Is that sort of mistrust here to stay? And if so, how does it shape the future possibilities of politics and political arrangements in Iran? And indeed, what conditions would allow for the erosion of that mistrust and the creation of a, maybe in your mind, healthier political culture that might eventually see the emergence of a stronger form of representative government?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

I’m skeptical, Kanishk, that that mistrust can reverse itself anytime soon. That’s a political culture which has been shaped over centuries, and you can’t just start with a blank slate after Khamenei dies. And there’s kind of good reason for mistrust if you’ve been a country in which outside powers have been engaged in conspiracies. There was periods in which Russia and the United Kingdom divided Iran into spheres of influence. The country has experienced outside coups. So it’s not without reason that there is a culture of paranoia. And in fact probably to this day one of the most beloved novels and TV shows in Iran is called Daei Jan Napoleon, My Uncle Napoleon, about a highly conspiratorial family patriarch. So I don’t think that that culture of mistrust is going to go away anytime soon.

And what happens when you have this culture of profound mistrust is that it inhibits collaboration, political collaboration, in the formation of effective political parties. And when you don’t have political collaboration and effective political parties, advancing democracy and representative government become that much more difficult. And then more often what happens is that the people who have the most coercive capacity are able to assert themselves and maintain power. So that’s why I said earlier that only 20 percent of authoritarian transitions lead to democracy. At the end of the day, I always return to the issue of leadership and the individual. And this is an observation which Kissinger once made. He said before he went into government, when he was a professor at Harvard, he thought that history is driven by impersonal forces. That regardless of who’s in power, nations will follow their inexorable interests. And after he served in government he reached the opposite conclusion, that the individual matters profoundly in history. And the last book that Kissinger wrote before dying was about leadership. And so I think that if ever there’s going to be a transition to democracy in Iran, and a political culture which is not dominated by paranoia and polarization, it’s going to require very wise enlightened leadership, which sometimes does not emerge from nations that have been ruled by brutal dictatorships for decades.

KANISHK THAROOR

And lastly let me ask you, as you’re watching events unfold, do you feel more hope or more fear?

KARIM SADJADPOUR

I definitely have fear in the immediate term that the Islamic Republic is going to be willing to kill many thousands of people in order to stay in power. I feel hope in the medium and longer term that this is a country, Iran, which as I said, it has the potential to be a G-20 nation. It has the natural and human resources to do so. And I think the last 47 years of the Islamic Republic have been an aberration, have been totally unnatural. That Iran has been a global pariah at odds with the United States, partnered with Russia, none of that is consistent with Iran’s history. But again, I’ve just come around to the idea that nations don’t just kind of naturally evolve. It also requires a great deal of enlightened leadership to help take them to that destination. And so I’ll be watching to see what kind of leaders emerge inside Iran.

KANISHK THAROOR

Karim, thanks so much for your time and again for the wonderful essay you wrote, “The Autumn of the Ayatollahs,” that we published last year. And we look forward to exploring these ideas with you again in the future.

KARIM SADJADPOUR

It’s my great pleasure. Thank you so much, Kanishk.