In the weeks since Israel’s expansive 12-day war, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has rarely been seen in public.

That absence has inevitably led to speculation over the 86-year-old’s health. But it also left many Middle East observers wondering about the future direction of the republic, and how its leadership will respond to possibly Iran’s biggest challenges since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

The attacks by Israel, and later the U.S., struck hundreds of targets across the country and resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 people, including many of Iran’s top military commanders and nuclear scientists.

But it was all the more stark, for those in Tehran, for how it caught the Islamic Republic by surprise. Indeed, Iran had been engaged in good-faith diplomatic talks with the United States.

It was, in the words of Hassan Rouhani, the former president and potential successor to Khamenei, a “wake-up call to correct our course and rebuild the foundations of governance.”

But will the leader heed that call? As a scholar of Iranian and Middle Eastern political affairs, I believe the conflict has provided the opportunity for the Iranian leadership to reestablish itself with some notion of regeneration that could appease both the traditional conservatives as well as those seeking reform with the domestic status quo.

As Iran civilian and military targets were being hit by repeated Israeli airstrikes, and intelligence operations were picking off senior government and military officials, Khamenei was reportedly commanding from a safe bunker.

Already cognizant of the potential threat to his security before the latest conflict, the supreme leader is known to have considered contingency succession plans and seemingly named potential successors should he perish. These names were not publicly released but were rumored not to have included his son,

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