U.S. President Donald Trump has swung from urging the Iranian people to topple their government to dismissing regime change as unnecessary to claiming Iran’s new leaders are “less radical and much more reasonable” than the old ones.
“This has been, in addition to everything else, Regime Change!” Trump declared in a social media post on Monday.
While the names at the top of the Iranian regime have indeed changed since the Feb. 28 strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior figures and ignited the war, there are no real signs that the men now in charge are any less harsh or uncompromising than the leaders they replaced.
The country’s new leadership is dominated by militaristic hardliners with little desire to make concessions to the U.S., make peace with Israel or give the Iranian people more freedom, according to a range of analysts with expertise in Iran.
‘A regime that is far more hardline’
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is calling the shots in Iran, says Andreas Krieg, an associate professor in the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London— more so than ever before.
“The IRGC is now robustly and solidly in power,” Krieg told CBC News.
“We’re seeing a regime that is far more hardline, far less forgiving and far less pragmatic.”
Confusion continues to surround peace talks between the U.S. and Iran ahead of a looming ceasefire deadline, with both sides exchanging threats if the deal expires.
The IRGC has evolved from its origins as a parallel military supporting Iran’s clerical leadership following the 1979 Islamic revolution into what Krieg describes as an all-encompassing force that controls governance, state power and much of the country’s economy.
The war with the U.S. and Israel has only accelerated this shift “away from a theocratic, religious, ideological regime to one that is more run like a military dictatorship,” he said.
New leadership not open to dissent
The IRGC is playing an even more prominent role in decision-making in Tehran than it did before the war, says Annika Ganzeveld, a Middle East specialist with the Critical Threats Project of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C.
“There is no indication, unfortunately, that the new leadership is any more open to political opposition or dissent from the Iranian population,” Ganzeveld told CBC News.
Analysts say the U.S.-Israel tactics of killing Iran’s top officials and striking hundreds of military targets failed to topple the political structure underpinning the regime.
In the simplest terms: blowing up military assets did not also blow up the system that keeps the regime in power.
The evidence can be seen not only in how the regime has carried out the war so far and its approach to ceasefire negotiations, but also in how it is conducting itself domestically.
There are signs the Islamic regime’s long-running crackdown on political dissent within Iran has only intensified since the U.S. and Israel launched the war. In March alone, the security forces made at least 1,500 arbitrary arrests, according to a report by the New York City-based Center for Human Rights in Iran.
Iran now ‘a military dictatorship,’ says academic
The regime has organized massive pro-government demonstrations, sent pro-regime militias out to patrol the streets as a show of force, and continued to execute dissidents, according to reports from a range of news outlets with sources inside Iran.
The IRGC is controlling the country, but cracking down because it is frightened of its people, says Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.
“I think Iran is now, in every sense of the word, a military dictatorship,” Milani told the Hoover Institution’s GoodFellows podcast last week.
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“The war has tilted the balance of power toward more hardline elements within the Iranian political system,” wrote Daniel Byman, a director of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a commentary.
Analysts also point to Tehran’s move to hit energy production sites in Gulf states during the war, an escalation from its previous focus on targeting Israel.
The new regime has been less restrained in its recent military operations than in the past, according to Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a veteran adviser on Iran to U.S. administrations.
Real power rests with security forces
“The people who are on top in Iran are much more extreme, both given their history of how they’ve handled the people inside Iran, and also the way in which they believe that Iran should wage war,” Nasr told NPR.
While most attention given to Iran’s new leadership has focused on Mojtaba Khamenei and his appointment to replace his late father as supreme leader, analysts say that real power in Iran is being wielded by key figures within the security forces.
The two most important figures are the new head of Iran’s National Security Council, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, and the new commander-in-chief of the IRGC, Ahmad Vahidi.
Zolghadr was a founder of the notorious Quds Force, the branch of the IRGC that trains and funds Iran’s foreign proxy militias.
Vahidi is a former commander of the Quds Force and was implicated by Argentinian prosecutors in a bomb attack that killed 85 people at a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994.
Both men’s biographies make it seem unlikely Iran is headed in the direction of liberal reforms, or toward a rapprochement with its enemies.
Implications for peace talks
The IRGC’s grip on power is made even firmer with Khamenei believed to be in some way incapacitated as a result of the strike that killed his father. He has made no televised appearances since the war began.
All of this has implications for the tenuous peace talks between Iran and the U.S.
“Vahidi and those around him are certainly just as anti-United States, anti-Israel as their predecessors,” said Ganzeveld.
Signs of friction have appeared between those two hardliners and their designated negotiators sent to Islamabad for talks with the U.S. — foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Ghalibaf.
After reportedly showing some willingness during initial peace talks in Islamabad to consider U.S. terms on ending its nuclear enrichment program, and allowing free passage of ships in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s negotiators appear to have been ordered to take a harder line.
“Araghchi and Ghalibaf, at the end of the day, don’t seem to have the authority to independently determine Iran’s negotiating positions and to determine whether Tehran would adhere to or honour any kind of agreement they reach with the U.S.,” said Ganzeveld.
Trump seems to have interpreted this as a sign that Iran’s government is “seriously fractured,” as he said in a social media post on Tuesday, announcing that he’s extending the ceasefire until the regime delivers a new proposal.
The reality, Krieg says, is that Iran’s new leaders have negotiating red lines on which they are not willing to budge, including maintaining the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, such as producing nuclear power or medical isotopes.
“The Americans have to understand that the maximalist positions that they brought to the negotiation table will unlikely bring about a deal,” he said.