Donald Trump “expect[ed] to be bombing” Iran on Wednedsay.
That’s what he told CNBC yesterday, just hours before announcing an indefinite extension to the tenuous ceasefire which expired early this week.
“You know, their leaders are gone,” Trump said, during the same chat with Joe Kernen. “The whole thing is gone.”
He’s right. And as it turns out, that’s the problem. Their leaders are gone, and now no one’s in charge.
Iran’s a de facto military junta, but by every appearance there are differences of opinion between the two active-duty officers running the armed forces (Ahmad Vahidi and Ali Abdollahi) and Bagher Ghalibaf, the IRGC veteran, former Tehran mayor and current parliament speaker, who’s acting head of state.
It’s also possible Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr — who Foreign Policy last week called “the man who represents post-clerical Iran” — has a hand in things.
I realized it’s impossible for the average person to keep track of all these characters. For what it’s worth, I did profile Zolghadr here on March 24. A 30-year IRGC veteran and former secretary of the Supreme Leader’s advisory panel, Zolghadr was named security chief late last month following the assassination of Ali Larijani.
Before the Revolution, Zolghadr was an Islamist guerrilla. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics, was a middle-ranking bureaucrat in the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration and for a time held a supervisory role related to the Basij.
There’s a fine line between decentralized power and confusion. Ali Khamenei famously set the regime up such that it could survive waves of what we now call “decapitation strikes.” But I doubt he envisioned a scenario where Iran would be quite this far down the proverbial bench. There’s no obvious pecking order between people like Vahidi, Abdollahi, Zolghadr and Ghalibaf.
By definition, military juntas seize power. This one was in effect imposed on Iran by the US. But Israel, in its zeal to eliminate regime figures deemed too dangerous to remain among the living, has made it difficult for the military-security establishment to coalesce into a coherent governing committee.
I don’t think it’s as much about a “power struggle,” per se, between the likes of Vahidi, Abdollahi, Zolghadr, Ghalibaf and Ali Fadavi (there’s another name you should probably know — he preceded Alireza Tangsiri, who Israel killed on March 26, as IRGC Navy chief), as much as it is difficulty agreeing on an overarching narrative for Iran.
Put as a question: What is Iran now? I don’t think anyone seriously believes Mojtaba Khamenei’s in control. If you read the statements attributed to him, it’s far from obvious he’s among the living, let alone the conscious, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
This is a post-clerical, military government. That much is clear. Nothing else is, though, and the situation’s complicated immeasurably by the fact that no faction of the military-security establishment wants to admit the theocracy’s dead. There are banners and posters of Mojtaba plastered on billboards and overpasses all over the country.
On Wednesday, the UK’s shipping monitor said at least two vessels were fired on while trying to navigate in and around the Strait of Hormuz. One was attacked by an IRGC gunboat.
Later, the IRGC said it commandeered two cargo vessels, the Epaminondas and MSC Francesca, for trying to operate “without the required permission.” Both ships were being directed to Iran’s blockaded coast.
Again, this is a giant self own on ours and the IDF’s part. You can’t implement regime change if you kill all of the people who are supposed to take over. Instead, we’ve left Iran in chaos, you can’t negotiate with chaos and you also can’t predict what it might do next. This reflects the incompetence of the United States military in its current state which was purposefully implemented through elections and confirmation hearings.
This is what the people wanted, now we all have to deal with it.
They should’ve left Larijani alive. That’s one thing I got wrong. I thought Ghalibaf had roughly the same cachet or, more accurately, that he’d assume the same cachet once enough people were dead. In hindsight, Larijani was the key to this going any semblance of smooth. In the IDF’s defense, that’s really not a call it was possible to make from the outside. You would’ve needed to be in those rooms in Tehran, physically, not just via a mole or via a nanorobotic Mossad fly, to feel the on-the-ground vibe, read the body language, the voice intonations, see who interrupts who during high-level meetings and so on, to be able to definitively say, “Ok, he’s definitely got something like universal, cross-departmental buy-in. We can’t kill him, much as we hate him, because if we do, then there won’t be a tie that binds.” Now we’re looking at a junta committee with no chairman. It’s just four or five generals trying to work out what to do next, and you gotta feel for ’em a little: This isn’t some tiny backwater. They’re trying to game out a plan for a country of 92 million people with the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, a collapsed currency and a pissed off populace. They’ve got two of the world’s three most powerful militaries after them, no outside help and two enormously consequential questions to answer: What do we tell the people about Mojtaba and what do we do with the 10-bombs-worth of enriched uranium buried under one of our mountains? I’m surprised one of them hasn’t just said “You know what? You guys figure it out. I’m cashin’ in my Swiss bank account and goin’ to Moscow. Good luck.”
My comment wasn’t a criticism of you or your writing. You know more about the leadership or deceased leadership of Iran than anyone in the US or Israel leadership does. You’re not issuing orders or pulling triggers, they are. It comes down to a base understanding of how a society is organized and led. You can’t kill off every single person who can execute the leadership of 90M people and expect this to end well. It’s as idiotic as blowing up a school to do what they did with this regime.
I don’t think this is fixable, Iran is going to devolve into military tribes that happen to have wealth and means to create chaos internally and externally in the Gulf.
Trump and Netanyahu did this and the voters empowered them to be able to do this.
I, for one, feel very fortunate to benefit from your insights, both geopolitical and for financial markets. Please keep doing the hard work of making all this understandable and actionable to us lucky few.
Trump seemed to be more worried about the fabulous walls and ceiling of the torn down Fed building than Iran.
Wasn’t civil war in Iran seen as an “acceptable outcome” by Israel planning? How does this state of affairs “not work” for them? The problem is for Trump and the rest of the oil depending world, no? I mean you have mentioned in the past the proclivity of Israel for bombing the people participating in negotiations to short circuit the negotiations. So, making it difficult to negotiations to proceed, isn’t that part and parcel and an “A-OK” situation from current Israel’s leadership perspective?
First, I never said this outcome isn’t ok with, or at least acceptable to, Israel. You read that into the passage you’re quoting, but I didn’t say it. Second, let me know when you find a war where the narrative’s internally consistent from start to finish. (These things have a habit of getting messy, being wars.)
Sure. As much as saying “No person that took the treatment developed any symptoms for the disease” doesn’t say anything about “No person that did NOT take the treatment developed any symptoms for the disease EITHER”. But you sure did suggest that reading with your wording, as omitting the second sentence would do for suggesting a reading for the efficacy of the treatment.
I’m not sure what you want from me here. It seems like you’re just trying to argue with someone about something. Maybe another reader will bite, but I won’t. Not today.
I’ll side with you on this one. (I know that’s a horrific thought!) My understanding is that Israel would be quite happy to leave Iran as a failed state, much like Syria or Lebanon. Our other dear Middle East ally, Saudi, probably share this hope. I’m not sure that the US shares that hope. That said, there is a thin tail possibility that I am wrong on this.
Does it go something like this: the more [less] power the not-Ghalibafs have, the less [more] likelihood of successful negotiation, the more [less] likelihood of resumed fighting, the more [less] likelihood of extended or increased disruption to energy and petrochem supply, the more [less] likelihood of US economic pain, the more [less] likelihood of a bad midterm elections result for GOP, and the more [less] likelihood of headwinds for big partisan GOP priorities post-2026?
Sorry, I am always trying to find the simplistic casual chains.
hi John, some thoughts:
– One can draw at least 2 or more ‘probable’ (>30% chance) scenario “branches” from each of the causal links in your chain, so basically, really, we don’t know anything about what’s to happen (sorry).
– However, re-examining some of the assumptions (taken as given) may help prep us for some surprising turn of events ahead.
– For example, it seems like the nature, or even the purpose, of the negotiation is very, very different from that of the JCPOA negotiation. We still think it’s about Iran getting nuclear weapon. I would speculate it is not, at least at the core of Trump’s calculation. Nuclear is just a pretext, for what (Riviera in the mid east? Nobel peace prize? Another billion for World Liberty Financial, whatever) i don’t know.
– Another, it sounds entirely justifiable for a country at war to suspend elections during wartime, no? Or overhaul how the elections are held for national security reasons? Just recall how far he went after the 2020 election…
A somewhat tangential inquiry: I am curious as to why, with all the discussions of a supposed enriched uraniam supply, I have seen nothing about Iran’s nuke path by way of plutonium from the Bushehr plant. Likewise, little mention of the Trump obsession with Iranian nukes and disinterest of late in the NK nukes.
My sense is that not only is non-proliferation history, but so is actual nuclear use as a weapon of war. Drones, cybernetics and economics have proven to be cheaper alternative for the projection of power —-so long as one has the threat of a few nukes in the closet.
Once again the warriors, and the defense industries that supply them, have been caught fighting the last war (or “good idea” of the next war).
Seems like the IRGC is giving Ghalibaf the boot and Isreal is locked and loaded.
Here you go: https://heisenbergreport.com/2026/04/23/spoiler-alert/