There are competing narratives in Tehran for its post-war recovery.
GCC News
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.
Regional Impact
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 volunteer paramilitary, the Basij; the regular army, or Artesh, with its ground, air, naval and air-defence forces; and intelligence and internal-security bodies. The IRGC remains the most politically influential part of this architecture, but Iran’s security capacity is distributed across several institutions and chains of command.
Market & Policy
Mojtaba enters office with longstanding ties to figures within the IRGC, giving him an important base of support, but those relationships do not automatically translate into command over the wider military and security system.
Then there is the elected government. President Masoud Pezeshkian controls the ministries that manage the economy, reconstruction and diplomacy, but not the armed forces or the final decisions on war and national security. His government, therefore, carries much of the burden of keeping the country functioning and negotiating abroad while operating within security limits set through the supreme leader and the Supreme National Security Council.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf occupies a different position. He has access to both civilian and military networks. That has made him important in building agreement around sensitive files, including negotiations. His influence comes from being able to move between institutions that do not always share the same priorities and turn military red lines into positions the government can implement.
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