Iran’s appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader has been likely since the day US-Israeli air strikes “martyred” his father. It became inevitable the moment Donald Trump said he’d be an “unacceptable” choice for the US, better known to those doing the selecting as The Great Satan.
Trump’s tone-deaf demand was just the latest in an accumulating body of evidence that suggests the US president profoundly misunderstands his opponents in Tehran. That failure to “become your enemy,” as ancient China’s The Art of War advised, may now be threatening the future of the global economy.
Also read: America could be the unexpected economic winner of the Iran war
It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Mojtaba’s ascent turns out to be a good outcome for America’s latest war of choice in the Middle East, or for Iranians. Far from regime change, his selection as supreme leader represents regime consolidation. It makes any transition to a less confrontational Iran — let alone a secular democracy — still less likely than it was before.
Mojtaba Khamenei is a cleric and political hardliner, who has deeper ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps than his father did.
Live EventsBoth his predecessor and the IRGC have vast business empires, and Mojtaba was a major beneficiary, building a huge overseas property portfolio with the proceeds. So, the nexus of ideological glue, military muscle and financial control that has been the secret to this otherwise incompetent regime’s ruthless durability remains intact.
To hear it from Trump, it’s all over bar the shouting. “You know, Iran was supposed to be this big powerful country; we’ve rapped the hell out of them,” he said in remarks to a Republican conference on Monday. “And you know, I don’t know when they cry uncle. They should have cried it two days ago, right? But they don’t have anything left.”
Also read: Mideast crisis: Trump says war against Iran ‘very complete’, claims Tehran has ‘nothing left’
And yet, it seems they do. To “win” this war they now need just to survive it. And to achieve that they must stick together, which they seem to be doing. Their strategy is by now evident: To outlast Trump by inflicting pain on US allies and global energy markets. And from where they stand, they can still win.
Only a fortune teller can say whether the IRGC and other institutions of the Islamic Republic can endure the extraordinary levels of punishment that US and Israeli jets and missiles are meting out, and still be able to fight back, suppress domestic dissent and govern should this continue for weeks or months. Nor can we know how long Mojtaba Khamenei will survive his father, given the way Israel is hunting Iran’s political and security leaders from the sky. But what’s clear is that Trump has failed to understand their rules for the game.
Assuring the rise of the new supreme leader he didn’t want by demanding that the IRGC give him veto power over Mojtaba’s appointment was just Exhibit A. Exhibit B came from Steve Witkoff, Trump’s friend and envoy to everywhere, a week before hostilities opened. He told Fox News that the president was “curious” as to why the Iranians hadn’t caved to his demands, when they could see the sheer scale of the firepower he’d amassed to attack them. On Monday, Trump again seemed surprised they hadn’t yet folded.
Trump knows a lot about leverage. He spent a lifetime assessing when he had enough to prevail in a business deal and, when what’s at stake is money or property, that’s likely all he needed to know. But war is different; in contests between states, leverage can be asymmetric.
Also read: 200 ships present mysteriously? War-time signal jamming near Hormuz creates confusion
This misapprehension can be seen right back to Trump’s infamous White House clash with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy, where he kept repeating that Ukraine had no cards to play in its war with Russia. This is the same country that had already defied a dramatically stronger opponent for three long years and has continued to do so since. Clearly, it had cards. In fact, Trump is now asking Zelenskiy to provide some of them to help shoot down Iranian drones in the Gulf.
This US president is hardly the first to make such a mistake. Others did so in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Hamas remains standing and armed in Gaza, for all Israel’s ruthlessness and military prowess. Russia’s Vladimir Putin made the same error on an epic scale when he sent his troops to take Kyiv in 2022, supplied for just a week, parade uniforms packed.
Asymmetry is a lesson the Iranians themselves learned the hard way, during their 1980-1988 war with Iraq, which at the time was backed by the US. That conflict ended in a stalemate, despite Iran’s near three-to-one advantage in population size. Everything about the way the Islamic Republic developed its security forces since has been based on the conclusion that it must never again fight such a toe-to-toe conventional war.
That’s one reason for lavishing resources on the IRGC and its elite Al-Quds units, rather than on the regular army, known as Artesh. So, too, constructing an arsenal of missiles, rather than an air force to compete with America’s or Israel’s. Likewise, Iran’s early mover status on large-scale attack drone production; the choice to build swarms of tiny speedboats as a naval strike force; the development and arming of proxy militias across the region as a so-called “forward defense” strategy, and of sleeper cells around the world.
You can check our latest coverage on the US-Israel and Iran war here
In other words, Iran has been preparing for this fight since 1988. It expected to be outclassed in the air. It expected decapitation strikes and had succession and decentralization plans in place. Such a regime is unlikely to collapse or split. It is ready for a long war.
Trump needs to decide now if he is, too. Can he stomach the inflationary impact of a $100-plus oil price for months if need be? Or anger from Gulf allies as Iranian drones tear their energy and tourism infrastructure apart? Or attrition in critical munitions stocks that could for several years limit American security choices? If the answer is no, the time to declare victory and find an off-ramp is now. Maybe that’s what he was doing on Monday with his boasting and suggestion that the war was near an end. But he also said the US wouldn’t relent “until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.” That could be a while.
If Trump really is willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the Islamic Republic, he needs know his enemy better and get ready to fight the IRGC on the terrain it prepared, which is everything from small boats to terrorism.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.