“Let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the death of kings:/How some have been deposed, some slain in war,/Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.” Though Iran is an Islamic republic, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is an absolute monarch in all but name, with his divine right to rule enshrined in the Iranian constitution, and he is a stranger to none of the hazards cited by Shakespeare’s Richard II.
Khamenei sought refuge in a fortified bunker during the war in June with Israel and the United States, in the course of which many of his senior commanders, including the head of the Revolutionary Guard and the chief of the general staff, were assassinated. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the Shah, whom the young Khamenei helped overthrow in the 1979 revolution, has made it his mission to destroy him. Now to the terrors besetting Richard may be added the one that beset Lear: age.
Khamenei is a frail eighty-six-year-old. In August, for the first time in a decade and a half, he failed to attend Arba’in, one of the most important religious ceremonies in the Shia Muslim year, at his residential compound in Tehran. Regime insiders and officials have briefed the Western media about his plans for the succession. According to The New York Times, Khamenei has selected three senior mullahs, whom it did not name, as candidates for the supreme leadership. Reuters named Khamenei’s son Mojtaba and Hassan Khomeini, a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on a short list of two.
Whatever the credibility of such briefings and whenever “the day of God forbid,” in the Persian phrase, actually comes, it would be surprising if the mood among the fissiparous court of clerics, generals, and sanctions-busting businessmen over which Khamenei presides—men who invoke his name as a talisman, come to him for redress, and even ascribe to him miraculous healing powers—were not one of dread. For all the speed with which the martyred military commanders were replaced during the war, and despite the message of continuity that was conveyed by the subsequent appointment of the experienced loyalist Ali Larijani as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, with responsibility for restoring Iran’s frayed overseas networks, Khamenei is the regime’s most important unifying force, and he looks likely to exit the scene when the Islamic Republic is at its most vulnerable.
For years before the war Israel had been disrupting Iran’s nuclear program by launching cyberattacks on its centrifuge cascades and assassinating its scientists. Following the October 7 attacks Israel severely damaged the “axis of resistance”: the regional proxies and clients that Iran had built up and used against the Jewish state and its American sponsors. But the United States had restrained its ally from carrying out a direct assault on the Islamic Republic, fearing that it would be dragged into the fighting and that a vengeful Iran would exact an unacceptably heavy price on the casualty-averse and oil-dependent West.
As recently as April, Donald Trump expressed a keen interest in doing a deal with the Islamic Republic that would solve the nuclear standoff, remove the threat to Israel, and allow Iran, in his words, to become a “wonderful, great, happy country.” Steve Witkoff, his diplomatic envoy, held five rounds of talks with Iran’s foreign minister aimed at limiting its nuclear capability in return for sanctions relief. Then, on June 13, with negotiations snagged on the American insistence that the Islamic Republic stop enriching uranium altogether and its refusal to do so, Israel attacked.
The war lasted twelve days and left some 1,060 Iranians dead, Iran’s nuclear facilities badly damaged, its air defenses destroyed, and its intelligence services humiliated by Israel’s knowledge of its leaders’ whereabouts, even the location of a meeting attended by the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, which was targeted by six missiles, injuring him slightly. On June 22 the US joined the fray, dropping huge bunker-buster bombs on nuclear sites at Natanz and Fordow and Tomahawk missiles on one at Isfahan, but no American lives were lost when Iran struck a US military base in Qatar the following day, in large part because the Iranians had given Washington advance warning of the attack.
Indifferent to the urgings of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Reza Pahlavi that they take advantage of the war to topple their leaders, Iranians rallied around the flag. Social media showed people giving out slices of watermelon to motorists lining up for rationed gasoline in the brutal summer heat while rural residents opened their homes to fleeing urbanites. In Tehran a rich man who usually bought sheets of sangak bread by the dozen for his family was seen distributing them to the poor. Government officials and dissidents alike condemned Israel’s air strike on Tehran’s Evin Prison on June 23, in which at least eighty people were killed.
Iran’s military weakness and fear of escalation meant that it did not carry out its long-standing threat to block the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes. Roughly thirty people were killed in its retaliatory missile and drone strikes on Israel. Once a cease-fire came into effect on June 24, oil prices, which had surged, dropped below pre-war levels.
Having broken the taboo on attacking Iran and paid a low price, the US has shown no appetite for resuming negotiations, while Iran has demanded reparations for war damage and threatened to resume uranium enrichment, though whether it still has the centrifuges with which to do so is unclear. Trump has left no doubt as to how he would react to such defiance. “We wiped out their nuclear possibilities,” he said on July 28. “They can start again. If they do, we’ll wipe it out faster than you can wave your finger at it.”
With Iran’s nuclear capabilities damaged but not completely destroyed and mystery shrouding the whereabouts of its stockpile of some four hundred kilograms of uranium enriched almost to weapons grade, there is a strong likelihood of further attacks. On August 17 one of Khamenei’s military advisers, a former head of the Revolutionary Guard, warned that the country remained “at war.”
As long as the nuclear issue remains unresolved, the sanctions relief that Iran’s economy desperately needs will not materialize. Aside from bilateral US sanctions, which will remain in place in any event, Britain, France, and Germany announced on August 28 that they would reinstate globally binding UN sanctions that had been lifted as part of an earlier nuclear agreement unless Iran makes significant progress toward a diplomatic solution within thirty days. This “snapback,” as it is known, would further retard the integration of Iran with the rest of the world that its population overwhelmingly desires.
If the definition of a bad king is one who brings his country to the brink of destruction, Khamenei will be counted among the worst. In the words of Mostafa Tajzadeh, a prominent member of the country’s reformist faction and a prisoner in Evin, Iran will soon no longer have a functioning state. According to a recent joint statement by seventeen dissidents, including the Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi, “Our people and our homeland stand at the most critical juncture in their modern history…. We are acutely worried for the fate of Iran.” A declaration issued on August 17 by an umbrella organization representing reformist groups supportive of President Pezeshkian lamented that “rampant inflation, stagnant production, currency devaluation and capital flight” have brought the country almost to “paralysis.”
The government that possesses the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves and vast oil wealth cannot keep the lights on or the stoves running. Electricity and gas outages have shuttered industrial sites and blighted the lives of ordinary people. According to the newspaper Shargh, “Small businesses have suffered the most: bakeries that cannot produce bread; shops whose frozen produce defrosts; hairdressers that accept appointments only for the power to fail.”
Iran is also running out of water. Five years of drought have reduced some of the country’s biggest reservoirs to shallow ponds, while beneath fields and orchards the water table has dropped because of the excessive use of wells. The inhabitants of privileged Tehran must endure a few hours each day without water; in parts of the far south of the country, where temperatures broke 122 degrees Fahrenheit in July, the taps have been dry for weeks. “If we do not take urgent action now,” Pezeshkian declared on July 20 in reference to measures designed to curb consumption and scale back water-intensive industries, “we will face a situation in the future for which no remedy can be found.”
The water crisis has become a foreign policy issue. In an address on August 12 to the Iranian people, Netanyahu declared:
The moment your country is free, Israel’s top water experts will flood into every Iranian city bringing cutting-edge technology and know-how. We will help Iran recycle water; we’ll help Iran desalinate water.
Pezeshkian retorted on X, “A regime that has denied water and food to the people of Gaza wants to provide water for the Iranian people? What an illusion!”
One sector of the Iranian state that seems to be working well is its security apparatus. Since the war at least ten people, including one nuclear scientist, have been executed for spying for Israel, part of a broad campaign of arrests and military deployments, particularly in the restive Kurdish region. Over the past two months Iran has also expelled hundreds of thousands from an underclass of six million Afghan immigrants, many of whom work unofficially and for a pittance, often as caretakers, as road sweepers, and in bakeries. According to the UN and the Red Cross, by the end of this year the number of Afghans repatriated to a homeland that is suffering from a drought of its own could reach 2.5 million.
The moment of national unity that the war occasioned has passed. Localized protests are once again widespread on issues ranging from inadequate pensions to factory closures due to power cuts. A series of unexplained fires and explosions after the war ended heightened Iranians’ concern that they remain under attack. So pervasive is the suspicion that Mossad has penetrated all aspects of government that one post on X declared, “Call the Tehran gas company right now and someone picks up saying ‘Shalom, how can I help you?’”
Ever since the early 2000s, when the country’s first reformist president and parliament ended up suppressed by unelected bodies answerable to Khamenei, more and more Iranians have concluded that the Islamic Republic is beyond reform. Over the thirty-six years since the supreme leader succeeded his mentor Khomeini, and especially since the death in 2017 of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the only politician capable of tempering his visceral hatred of the West, Khamenei and the regime have become one and the same.
Amid the analysis of bunker-buster bombs and uranium enrichment, it is easy to miss the human tragedy that is playing out on the Persian plateau. Even at this moment of weakness, through a combination of ideological rigidity and strategic myopia, Khamenei continues to insist on a nuclear orthodoxy that risks immiserating Iran until it resembles Iraq during the final years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, in all its cruelty, dysfunction, and decrepitude. Notwithstanding the efforts of Ali Larijani, who in August went to Beirut to reiterate Iran’s support for Hezbollah in its struggle for survival against Israel, the United States, and its opponents in the Lebanese government, the axis of resistance remains enfeebled. Meanwhile, as part of an accord that Trump brokered in August between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the US won the right to develop a strategically placed corridor near Iran’s northwestern border.
According to the newspaper Entekhab, in the first decade of this century the number of Iranians studying abroad roughly doubled. Since 2021 it has doubled again, and this year the number was over 100,000. Only one percent of them return to Iran. The current scramble for the exits is due in part to the failure of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which was sparked by the police killing of a young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, in September 2022, following her arrest for violating the Islamic dress code. The nationwide protests that ensued lasted several months and were put down at a cost of hundreds of lives.
Seizing on a pervasive sense of crisis both at home and abroad, critics of the status quo have proposed alternative visions. From his cell in Evin, Mostafa Tajzadeh has demanded that Iran unilaterally abandon enrichment, while the statement by the seventeen dissidents included a call for a referendum to “allow the people to determine their own destiny” and the formation of a constituent assembly to oversee a “transition to democracy.” Hassan Rouhani, a former president known for his loyalty to the regime, began a recent video address by praising Khamenei’s wartime leadership but went on to advocate the dismantling of the oligarchy on which he relies.
The referendum that is now being demanded would be the most consequential since Iranians voted for an Islamic republic following the 1979 revolution and would probably result in the abolition of the arcane and unaccountable position, known as the guardianship of the jurist, that Khamenei occupies. The reformists’ statement of August 17 called for “an end to internal and external conflict” and “a return to the principle of popular sovereignty”—proposals that the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, whose editor is appointed by Khamenei, criticized as “consonant with the Western plan to eradicate the Islamic system and partition Iran.”
That view is shared by commanders of the Revolutionary Guard, which monopolizes critical sectors of the economy and stands to lose much power if Iran democratizes and opens to the world. Here lies the problem with the blueprints for the future that are being propounded with unprecedented gusto by opponents of the status quo: it’s the proponents of the status quo who have the guns.
However premature the opposition manifestos may be, for all its efforts the Islamic Republic has failed to eradicate a strong tradition of irreverent and independent thinking. The country’s struggle for parliamentary democracy goes back to the nineteenth century, and even now, despite the effects of mass migration and the merciless smashing of movement after movement of largely nonviolent protest, the nation’s pride swells at the achievements, against fearsome odds, of its young people—for example, the team of young Iranians that won last month’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad in Mumbai. All the while, back home, the country is changing.
An Iranian friend of mine, one of his country’s most perceptive observers, recently drew my attention to the cultural and identitarian resurgence that has taken place over the past few years, with a dramatic rise in unauthorized workshops, poetry classes, and concerts, a video of the most famous of which, by a young Iranian singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, got an estimated 18 million views and led to her being charged with staging an unauthorized concert and violating the dress code. Referring to the protesters hugging strangers, regardless of their sex, in collective shows of affection during Woman, Life, Freedom, my friend emphasized the radical nature of such gestures in a society formed over centuries on ideas of segregation and decorum that are now falling away.
A recent social media post shows a woman in late middle age walking down a busy street in Rasht, a town in northern Iran. To the strains of a song in Gilaki, the local dialect, in praise of the charms of a woman called Rana, the woman begins to dance as she walks, first with a twirl of her hand, then with more expansive hand movements, and finally with a swing of her hips, a flourish of her skirt, and the broadest of smiles. She accedes gracefully to the request of the man filming her that he be allowed to post the film online, where it has garnered millions of views.
In “For,” the unofficial anthem of Woman, Life, Freedom, Shervin Hajipour, a honey-voiced singer from the north of the country, expresses a yearning for a “normal life,” one free of “rusted minds,” “empty slogans,” and a “fear of kissing” the people one loves. The movement smashed the obligation to wear the hijab, and now millions of women go without the mandatory head covering. In a Tehran street a woman of my acquaintance was recently accosted by a fierce-looking man on a motorbike. Expecting to be rebuked harshly or even beaten for not wearing the hijab, she was relieved when he smiled broadly and said, “Madam! I wish to thank you for beautifying our city!”
The partisans of the prince across the water have made a film showing Iran after the Pahlavi restoration—an Iran whose young, wholesome people enjoy the prosperity that follows the lifting of sanctions and a flood of foreign investment, all under a fluttering flag of imperial Persia. “Thy deathbed is no lesser than thy land,” Richard II’s uncle John of Gaunt tells him bitterly, “wherein thou liest in reputation sick.” So it goes with Ali Khamenei, at a cost to his nation that is hard to predict.
—September 10, 2025
English (US) · 