Who will shape post-war Iran?

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.

Dispersal of power

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.

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.

The divide is not simply between the government and the IRGC. Different institutions control different parts of the same decision, and different actors have diverging interests and goals.

Mojtaba’s advantage is that he does not start as an outsider, but his ties may also constrain him. A leader whose authority depends heavily on one part of the system can find it harder to arbitrate when the presidency, parliament, army and the IRGC pull in different directions.

Competing narratives

For now, tensions are not boiling over because the war has offered a unifying narrative in the short term.

The various camps have come together around the narrative that this is “Trump’s war”, the culmination of a policy that abandoned the nuclear agreement, escalated coercion and ultimately imposed the costs of conflict on Iran. The destruction of bridges, transport routes and energy infrastructure enables them to frame the war as a struggle for national survival.

The security establishment can present deterrence as the defence of the country while the government can cast negotiation and sanctions relief as necessary to protect reconstruction. That common language lowers the political cost of compromise without removing the rivalry beneath it.

The limits of the narrative are equally important. Domestic solidarity against foreign attack does not erase anger over the human and economic costs of the war. Nor does it settle disagreements over how the war should be fought or negotiations conducted.

Once the war is over or enters some form of more permanent lull, the internal friction in Tehran is likely to come to the fore.

The question of reconstruction will inevitably become a struggle over political authority. In principle, the government – which is negotiating the terms of ceasefires and peace frameworks – should have control over the process. What is more, as an elected body, it is accountable to the public. In reality, it does not wield the power to determine fully either economic or security outcomes.

The IRGC already has extensive influence in energy, construction and strategic infrastructure. Its deployment around the Strait of Hormuz gives it operational influence over a critical chokepoint.

Pezeshkian and his team would likely argue that recovery should focus on the economy. Reopening trade, restoring oil revenues and reducing pressure on households should be priorities.

The security establishment, on the other hand, would press for a recovery that prioritises preparation for another attack. Its main argument would be that military preparedness and extensive regional networks helped the country survive the war. On this reading, reconstruction should restore deterrence rather than reconsider the strategic model that preceded the conflict.

A recovery dominated by IRGC-linked organisations would shape the direction of the post-war state, not just the distribution of contracts. It would force choices over what is rebuilt first, how scarce resources are allocated, which foreign partners are brought in and whether economic opening is treated as a strategic asset or a security risk. If the IRGC and its affiliated networks dominate those choices, recovery could reinforce the same structures that expanded under sanctions and war, giving security institutions greater influence over energy, infrastructure and the terms of Iran’s external economic relations.

If Mojtaba cannot impose a common political direction, security institutions may continue to measure success through endurance and the costs imposed on adversaries while the government remains answerable for inflation, damaged infrastructure, negotiations and declining living standards.

The result would probably not be a formal military takeover. The presidency, parliament and the Supreme National Security Council would continue to function, but their freedom of action could narrow as security priorities increasingly shape the terms of diplomacy, investment and reconstruction. Mojtaba would remain the constitutional centre of the system, yet his current dependence on the security establishment could become a lasting feature of his rule.

For now, war allows the new supreme leader to borrow authority from the language of resistance. After the fighting, he will have to decide what is rebuilt first, how much economic pain Iranians should continue to bear and what compromises are acceptable. If security institutions settle those questions before he does, the succession will have transferred the office of supreme leader without transferring the power to determine Iran’s direction.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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