As the US-Israeli war on Iran enters its sixth month, Washington appears to be betting that sustained military pressure will fracture Tehran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently suggested that members of the Iranian government had contacted the Trump administration, presenting this as evidence of divisions between officials seeking an agreement and more hardline forces.

Those divisions exist, but Washington may be misreading how war affects them. For now, external attack has compressed disagreement rather than produced an open rupture. When the fighting subsides, a struggle is likely to emerge over Iran’s recovery. Security institutions can argue that the country endured because it retained the capacity to retaliate and must now restore deterrence. The government is more likely to push for prioritising trade, oil revenues, reconstruction and diplomacy.

Mojtaba Khamenei’s first major test will be whether he can turn these rival visions of Iran’s future into a binding post-war strategy that the country’s different centres of power are prepared to follow.

Iran’s political system disperses decision-making across elected and unelected institutions while concentrating final authority over security and foreign policy in the supreme leader. Ali Khamenei’s role was to decide when the argument had ended. His powers included approving national security decisions, appointing senior commanders and resolving disputes among the branches of government.

His killing has left the machinery of policy formation intact but weakened the point at which competing preferences are converted into a binding state position. The appointment of his son Mojtaba as his successor has preserved this formal centre of authority, but it has not automatically reproduced the political weight, institutional relationships or symbolic credibility accumulated by Ali Khamenei over decades.

That has allowed rivalries to deepen. On one side is the security establishment, which includes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its........

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