The week-long state funeral for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is being viewed across the world as the end of an era. Yet the greater significance lies not in the passing of a man, but in the emergence of a different political order in Iran. Those expecting the death of the Islamic Republic’s most enduring leader to trigger institutional collapse may have misread the nature of the Iranian state.

What has unfolded instead is a rapid transfer of power to a younger leadership that appears less bound by revolutionary nostalgia and more driven by strategic calculation. The temptation in the West is to interpret every upheaval in Iran through the prism of regime change. That assumption has repeatedly proved misleading. Iran’s clerical establishment, the Revolutionary Guard and the country’s security architecture have demonstrated precisely a capacity for continuity. The question now is not whether the regime survives, but what kind of regime emerges from the trauma of war. The new leadership inherits a country scarred by conflict, economic sanctions and domestic discontent.

Yet it also inherits a strategic lesson. Military confrontation with the United........

© The Statesman