A Resistance Is Deepening in Iran

Dr. Nasr is a scholar of Iranian politics and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

After shifting among different explanations for waging war on Iran, the Trump administration appears to have settled on the goal of regime change. Its strategy seems to be to first turn Iran into a failed state — or, as President Trump has put it, “go in and clean out everything.” At the end of all this, he said, he wants Iran to have good leaders. And he wants to decide who they should be.

What’s capturing the president’s imagination as a model for Iran seems to be not the U.S.-imposed change of leadership in Venezuela but the one in Syria. Perhaps he is envisaging skipping over Syria’s long civil war to get straight to state collapse and an Iranian version of Ahmed al-Shara, the onetime leader of an Al Qaeda-allied group who metamorphosed into Syria’s America-friendly president.

But Iran is not about to surrender to the president’s plans. On Sunday, Iran chose Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the new supreme leader. It was a clear signal that Tehran is determined to resist. Mr. Trump had warned Iran against choosing him, a leader who symbolizes defiance and someone best placed to lead Iran in continued resistance to the United States. Mr. Khamenei is a man of the regime, closely associated with its core values and institutions and his father’s legacy. He has been selected not to break with all that but to preserve it.

Mr. Khamenei is the choice of the hard men at the forefront of the war. Before becoming a cleric, he served during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and has since remained closely tied to the force. Hossein Taeb, a former intelligence chief of the Guards infamous for his brutality in cracking down on political dissent, was Mr. Khamenei’s wartime comrade and remains a political ally. The new supreme leader was believed to be his father’s principal adviser for much of the past three decades, deeply involved in his management of the country and the ties that bind the various nodes of power in the Islamic republic. Despite all that, Iranians know very little about him; he has exercised influence behind the scenes.

The selection of Mr. Khamenei makes one thing clear: Rather than compelling Iran to change course, Mr. Trump’s war plan is pushing the country to dig in. Surrender is not an option for the Islamic republic. It knows how to resist and to thrive in resistance; that has been its credo since its founding nearly 47 years ago. The Islamic republic was shaped by the bruising Iran-Iraq war; defying U.S. plans in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria; facing economic sanctions; and confronting Israel.

Iran has been designed to endure, with authority dispersed among many nodes of power and exercised through a web of relations among clerical, military and bureaucratic institutions and power brokers inside and outside the government. The supreme leader is the ultimate arbiter in this system, but the multilayered state can function during a crisis. This resiliency is now the target of U.S. and Israeli bombing campaigns.

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