Editor’s Note: Dr. Arash Reisinezhad is a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics. The author of “The Shah of Iran, the Iraqi Kurds, and the Lebanese Shia” and “Iran and the New Silk Road,” his research focuses on geopolitics, security, and strategic studies, and geoeconomic corridors in the Middle East.
Dr. Arsham Reisinezhad is a Senior Lecturer in Business and Economics at Regent College London and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics, University of Essex. The author of “The Dutch Disease Revisited: Consistency of Theory and Evidence” and “The Corridor War in the Middle East,” his research focuses on political economy, institutional configurations, geoeconomic corridors in the Middle East, and resource-dependent development.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project
Iran’s recent protests brought not collapse, but a dangerous suspension as harsh repression dealt a significant blow to the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. The country has now entered a political limbo in which coercion substitutes for consent. This is not stability but deferral. And history suggests that prolonged deferral in Iran rarely produces gradual change; it ends instead in rupture.
Today’s crisis is defined by economic bottlenecks, sanctions, and the persistent shadow of war. Large segments of Iranian society are experiencing declining living standards and deep uncertainty about the future. Reforms promised over the past three decades have repeatedly failed to deliver tangible results. As a consequence, Iranians have again and again come into the streets — in 2009, 2017, 2019, 2022, and again in late December 2025.
At the heart of the unrest lies a profound institutional blockage within Iran’s political economy. This configuration took shape in the mid-2000s, when Iran’s military overstretch after U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with the rise of hardliners under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and an unprecedented surge in oil revenues, fundamentally altered the logic of economic governance. Survival and control were prioritized over efficiency and long-term growth. Regionally, the empowerment of Tehran’s Shi’ite partners in Iraq after the U.S. overthrew the Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein lured Iran into military overreach and deepened its commitment to the so-called Axis of Resistance.
Within this system, institutions that enhanced transparency, competition, and accountability came to be viewed as political risks, while opaque, hierarchical structures were preferred. The political centralization of the mid-2000s and the marginalization of technocrats made economic policymaking highly subordinate to security and geopolitical considerations. The oil-revenue windfall severed the link between taxation, accountability, and productivity, deepening rentier dynamics.
Since then, this institutional configuration has become entrenched. The role of military and quasi-state institutions in key economic sectors has expanded, competition has weakened, and the boundary between political power and economic activity has blurred. Profits increasingly depend not on innovation or productivity but on institutional access, currency privileges, government contracts, and monopolistic protections. The result is misallocation of resources, weakening of the trade sector, intensified Dutch disease, and the locking of the production structure into low-value activities.
In this context, the economic bureaucracy is not a force for reform but part of the problem. Regulatory complexity and institutional opacity serve both as instruments of political control and as mechanisms for rent production. Even seemingly technical reforms are absorbed by dominant institutions at the implementation stage and converted into “extractive adaptation” — new tools for distributing privilege.
Sanctions and external shocks have intensified this dynamic, benefiting actors embedded within institutional, security, and political networks. Derived from sanctions circumvention, informal trade, and regional channels, these rents produce stakeholders who view ongoing tension not as a threat but as an opportunity for profit. As a result, segments of the economic and bureaucratic elite have become veto players against any agreement or foreign-policy normalization that might threaten their entrenched advantages.
Many who benefit most from this system live abroad, most visibly through the accumulation of financial assets, real estate, and commercial interests in hubs such as the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, taking advantage of open economies while maintaining a closed, corrupt order at home. This architecture deepens material hardship and intensifies feelings of injustice.
Recent, sequential geopolitical shocks have intensified the decay. The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the severe degradation of Hamas, and the weakening of cross-organizational coherence within the Axis of Resistance have undermined the foundations of Iran’s forward defense architecture. The 12-day Iran-Israel war, joined by the U.S. in its final days, accelerated the underlying erosion and brought the system closer to an explosive inflection point in which the gap between Iran’s capabilities and its regional commitments is more exposed than ever before.
Despite all these pressures, the violent suppression of protests, extensive deployment of security forces, and digital surveillance demonstrate that the Islamic Republic retains coercive capacity. Yet stability based primarily on repression is inherently fragile.
In the aftermath of the bloody suppression of the recent protests, many observers believe that the Islamic Republic cannot continue. But a revolutionary system grounded in political Islam does not easily crumble. At the center of its resilience stands the institution of the Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei embodies the will, determination, and coercive capacity of the system; as long as he remains in power, the state appears capable of managing internal unrest.
At the same time, severe economic pressures and growing international isolation have pushed parts of the elite, including reformists, moderates, and even segments of the conservative establishment, to the conclusion that Iran needs a major strategic shift in its foreign policy, including resolving issues with the United States and, to some extent, reducing hostilities with Israel. However, Khamenei is the principal obstacle to such a reorientation. Therefore, he occupies a paradoxical position: On one hand, he is the anchor for internal cohesion, and on the other, the key barrier to strategic transformation.
Khamenei witnessed firsthand how the Shah fell, not because of insufficient force, but because of hesitation. The cardinal lesson of the 1978-1979 revolution, as internalized by today’s leadership, is to never retreat in the face of street pressure. Concessions signal weakness; weakness accelerates collapse. Significantly, Khamenei will not drink from the “goblet of poison” as his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did in 1988 in accepting a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq war. Khamenei internalized that moment as an Achilles’ heel rather than a virtue. Accepting a settlement framed by Trump under the title of “Unconditional Surrender” would symbolically repeat the very act Khamenei has spent decades avoiding. For him, endurance until the final moment is not a tactic; it is the essence of legitimacy.
Beyond this defiant posture lies a more personal calculation. Khamenei fatalistically views the prospect of being killed by American forces not as a strategic defeat but as a final vindication of his lifelong narrative of resistance. Death at the hands of the United States would transform him from a polarizing political leader into a “sanctified martyr” for his followers, overshadowing the economic failures, institutional decay, and the criticisms of his leadership. In this imagined ending, he becomes a latter-day Imam Husayn, standing firm until the final moment and falling on the day of his own Karbala. Such a scenario, in his mind, would secure a decisive moral victory and fundamentally shape Iran’s post-Khamenei political landscape.
Even after Khamenei dies – whether by natural causes or assassination – it is unclear whether Iran can accomplish a meaningful transformation to produce a new unifying leader or a transition toward a liberal democratic order. Crucially, the suppression of the protests was led by security and military institutions. The presidency and civilian apparatus played, at most, a secondary role. The recent arrests of prominent reformists further weaken the reformist president. When order is restored primarily through coercive institutions rather than political mediation, the center of gravity inevitably shifts. This trend is not the result of ideological preference but the product of institutional blockage, state-capacity erosion, and historical memory. Over time, this militarization of crisis management narrows future options. In this context, Iran’s trajectory appears to be moving toward the rise of a strongman, someone capable of centralizing authority, disciplining fractured institutions, and imposing order where politics has failed. Under any political system that emerges afterward, the same structural pressures could easily regenerate the demand for decisive, centralized authority.
Prolonged sanctions, failed negotiations, and survival through coercion did not produce liberalization. Iran’s likely strongman would probably be pragmatic, rather than ideological in the classical revolutionary sense, seeking to reduce tensions with the United States not out of reconciliation, but to stabilize the system. De-escalation and then possible normalization would be the goal.
Iranians look back toward the collapse of the Qajar state in the early 20th century, which preceded the rise of a strongman, Reza Shah. History does not repeat itself, but in Iran, under conditions of institutional decay, it often rhymes. Institutional paralysis closes the path to gradual reform and produces a strongman to implement reforms.
Such a strongman would likely emerge from Iran’s security institutions — the regular army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), or overlapping intelligence structures. He would combine coercive authority with nationalist rhetoric, replacing political Islam with a discourse centered on Iranian patriotism, order, and national survival. He would centralize authority to neutralize and subordinate ideology, impose order on rent-seeking networks, and reorient the system from revolutionary doctrine toward survival through performance. Not surprisingly, he could attract support from technocrats desperate to restore economic functionality.
A strongman may also emerge from outside the military, albeit with substantial backing from it. A figure capable of accommodating, rather than confronting, the security institutions could plausibly perform a strongman function. In this scenario, authority derives from elite reassurance, the acquiescence of the IRGC, and the reframing of power around national consolidation rather than revolutionary mobilization. Governance would rest on a synthesis of symbolic capital, institutional protection, and selective coercion, instead of overt militarization alone, preserving the system while transforming its operating logic, not exporting ideology or sustaining permanent revolution.
The rise of a strongman in Iran is not merely an elite-driven possibility; it is increasingly aligned with the emotional and psychological climate of a society exhausted by repression and fearful of collapse. The unprecedented level of anger generated by the recent killings and mass crackdown, combined with a pervasive sense that Iran stands on the edge of internal civil war, has unintentionally expanded the social demand for order. Exhausted by repression and fearful of collapse, Iranian society appears increasingly attracted by the notion of a “savior” — a figure who presents himself as a restorer of stability, capable of preventing Syria-style disintegration and containing the centrifugal forces unleashed by state violence. This strongman appeal is therefore not a product of ideological conviction, but of the psychology of crisis: When the specter of civil war becomes imaginable, the promise of decisive authority becomes politically persuasive.
This transition may not occur immediately after Khamenei passes from the scene. A short, turbulent interim period is possible, marked by elite competition and institutional flux. But Iran’s structural conditions make prolonged reformist experimentation unlikely despite the demands of civil society for a constitutional referendum.
The identity of the emerging strongman is unknown, but his shadow is already present. In Iran today, one can already hear the distant echo of heavy footsteps.
Iran’s Uncertain Transition: From the Streets to a Strongman
By Arash Reisinezhad • Arsham Reisinezhad
Middle East & North Africa
Editor’s Note: Dr. Arash Reisinezhad is a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics. The author of “The Shah of Iran, the Iraqi Kurds, and the Lebanese Shia” and “Iran and the New Silk Road,” his research focuses on geopolitics, security, and strategic studies, and geoeconomic corridors in the Middle East.
Dr. Arsham Reisinezhad is a Senior Lecturer in Business and Economics at Regent College London and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics, University of Essex. The author of “The Dutch Disease Revisited: Consistency of Theory and Evidence” and “The Corridor War in the Middle East,” his research focuses on political economy, institutional configurations, geoeconomic corridors in the Middle East, and resource-dependent development.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project
Iran’s recent protests brought not collapse, but a dangerous suspension as harsh repression dealt a significant blow to the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. The country has now entered a political limbo in which coercion substitutes for consent. This is not stability but deferral. And history suggests that prolonged deferral in Iran rarely produces gradual change; it ends instead in rupture.
Today’s crisis is defined by economic bottlenecks, sanctions, and the persistent shadow of war. Large segments of Iranian society are experiencing declining living standards and deep uncertainty about the future. Reforms promised over the past three decades have repeatedly failed to deliver tangible results. As a consequence, Iranians have again and again come into the streets — in 2009, 2017, 2019, 2022, and again in late December 2025.
At the heart of the unrest lies a profound institutional blockage within Iran’s political economy. This configuration took shape in the mid-2000s, when Iran’s military overstretch after U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with the rise of hardliners under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and an unprecedented surge in oil revenues, fundamentally altered the logic of economic governance. Survival and control were prioritized over efficiency and long-term growth. Regionally, the empowerment of Tehran’s Shi’ite partners in Iraq after the U.S. overthrew the Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein lured Iran into military overreach and deepened its commitment to the so-called Axis of Resistance.
Within this system, institutions that enhanced transparency, competition, and accountability came to be viewed as political risks, while opaque, hierarchical structures were preferred. The political centralization of the mid-2000s and the marginalization of technocrats made economic policymaking highly subordinate to security and geopolitical considerations. The oil-revenue windfall severed the link between taxation, accountability, and productivity, deepening rentier dynamics.
Since then, this institutional configuration has become entrenched. The role of military and quasi-state institutions in key economic sectors has expanded, competition has weakened, and the boundary between political power and economic activity has blurred. Profits increasingly depend not on innovation or productivity but on institutional access, currency privileges, government contracts, and monopolistic protections. The result is misallocation of resources, weakening of the trade sector, intensified Dutch disease, and the locking of the production structure into low-value activities.
In this context, the economic bureaucracy is not a force for reform but part of the problem. Regulatory complexity and institutional opacity serve both as instruments of political control and as mechanisms for rent production. Even seemingly technical reforms are absorbed by dominant institutions at the implementation stage and converted into “extractive adaptation” — new tools for distributing privilege.
Sanctions and external shocks have intensified this dynamic, benefiting actors embedded within institutional, security, and political networks. Derived from sanctions circumvention, informal trade, and regional channels, these rents produce stakeholders who view ongoing tension not as a threat but as an opportunity for profit. As a result, segments of the economic and bureaucratic elite have become veto players against any agreement or foreign-policy normalization that might threaten their entrenched advantages.
Many who benefit most from this system live abroad, most visibly through the accumulation of financial assets, real estate, and commercial interests in hubs such as the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, taking advantage of open economies while maintaining a closed, corrupt order at home. This architecture deepens material hardship and intensifies feelings of injustice.
Recent, sequential geopolitical shocks have intensified the decay. The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the severe degradation of Hamas, and the weakening of cross-organizational coherence within the Axis of Resistance have undermined the foundations of Iran’s forward defense architecture. The 12-day Iran-Israel war, joined by the U.S. in its final days, accelerated the underlying erosion and brought the system closer to an explosive inflection point in which the gap between Iran’s capabilities and its regional commitments is more exposed than ever before.
Despite all these pressures, the violent suppression of protests, extensive deployment of security forces, and digital surveillance demonstrate that the Islamic Republic retains coercive capacity. Yet stability based primarily on repression is inherently fragile.
In the aftermath of the bloody suppression of the recent protests, many observers believe that the Islamic Republic cannot continue. But a revolutionary system grounded in political Islam does not easily crumble. At the center of its resilience stands the institution of the Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei embodies the will, determination, and coercive capacity of the system; as long as he remains in power, the state appears capable of managing internal unrest.
At the same time, severe economic pressures and growing international isolation have pushed parts of the elite, including reformists, moderates, and even segments of the conservative establishment, to the conclusion that Iran needs a major strategic shift in its foreign policy, including resolving issues with the United States and, to some extent, reducing hostilities with Israel. However, Khamenei is the principal obstacle to such a reorientation. Therefore, he occupies a paradoxical position: On one hand, he is the anchor for internal cohesion, and on the other, the key barrier to strategic transformation.
Khamenei witnessed firsthand how the Shah fell, not because of insufficient force, but because of hesitation. The cardinal lesson of the 1978-1979 revolution, as internalized by today’s leadership, is to never retreat in the face of street pressure. Concessions signal weakness; weakness accelerates collapse. Significantly, Khamenei will not drink from the “goblet of poison” as his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did in 1988 in accepting a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq war. Khamenei internalized that moment as an Achilles’ heel rather than a virtue. Accepting a settlement framed by Trump under the title of “Unconditional Surrender” would symbolically repeat the very act Khamenei has spent decades avoiding. For him, endurance until the final moment is not a tactic; it is the essence of legitimacy.
Beyond this defiant posture lies a more personal calculation. Khamenei fatalistically views the prospect of being killed by American forces not as a strategic defeat but as a final vindication of his lifelong narrative of resistance. Death at the hands of the United States would transform him from a polarizing political leader into a “sanctified martyr” for his followers, overshadowing the economic failures, institutional decay, and the criticisms of his leadership. In this imagined ending, he becomes a latter-day Imam Husayn, standing firm until the final moment and falling on the day of his own Karbala. Such a scenario, in his mind, would secure a decisive moral victory and fundamentally shape Iran’s post-Khamenei political landscape.
Even after Khamenei dies – whether by natural causes or assassination – it is unclear whether Iran can accomplish a meaningful transformation to produce a new unifying leader or a transition toward a liberal democratic order. Crucially, the suppression of the protests was led by security and military institutions. The presidency and civilian apparatus played, at most, a secondary role. The recent arrests of prominent reformists further weaken the reformist president. When order is restored primarily through coercive institutions rather than political mediation, the center of gravity inevitably shifts. This trend is not the result of ideological preference but the product of institutional blockage, state-capacity erosion, and historical memory. Over time, this militarization of crisis management narrows future options. In this context, Iran’s trajectory appears to be moving toward the rise of a strongman, someone capable of centralizing authority, disciplining fractured institutions, and imposing order where politics has failed. Under any political system that emerges afterward, the same structural pressures could easily regenerate the demand for decisive, centralized authority.
Prolonged sanctions, failed negotiations, and survival through coercion did not produce liberalization. Iran’s likely strongman would probably be pragmatic, rather than ideological in the classical revolutionary sense, seeking to reduce tensions with the United States not out of reconciliation, but to stabilize the system. De-escalation and then possible normalization would be the goal.
Iranians look back toward the collapse of the Qajar state in the early 20th century, which preceded the rise of a strongman, Reza Shah. History does not repeat itself, but in Iran, under conditions of institutional decay, it often rhymes. Institutional paralysis closes the path to gradual reform and produces a strongman to implement reforms.
Such a strongman would likely emerge from Iran’s security institutions — the regular army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), or overlapping intelligence structures. He would combine coercive authority with nationalist rhetoric, replacing political Islam with a discourse centered on Iranian patriotism, order, and national survival. He would centralize authority to neutralize and subordinate ideology, impose order on rent-seeking networks, and reorient the system from revolutionary doctrine toward survival through performance. Not surprisingly, he could attract support from technocrats desperate to restore economic functionality.
A strongman may also emerge from outside the military, albeit with substantial backing from it. A figure capable of accommodating, rather than confronting, the security institutions could plausibly perform a strongman function. In this scenario, authority derives from elite reassurance, the acquiescence of the IRGC, and the reframing of power around national consolidation rather than revolutionary mobilization. Governance would rest on a synthesis of symbolic capital, institutional protection, and selective coercion, instead of overt militarization alone, preserving the system while transforming its operating logic, not exporting ideology or sustaining permanent revolution.
The rise of a strongman in Iran is not merely an elite-driven possibility; it is increasingly aligned with the emotional and psychological climate of a society exhausted by repression and fearful of collapse. The unprecedented level of anger generated by the recent killings and mass crackdown, combined with a pervasive sense that Iran stands on the edge of internal civil war, has unintentionally expanded the social demand for order. Exhausted by repression and fearful of collapse, Iranian society appears increasingly attracted by the notion of a “savior” — a figure who presents himself as a restorer of stability, capable of preventing Syria-style disintegration and containing the centrifugal forces unleashed by state violence. This strongman appeal is therefore not a product of ideological conviction, but of the psychology of crisis: When the specter of civil war becomes imaginable, the promise of decisive authority becomes politically persuasive.
This transition may not occur immediately after Khamenei passes from the scene. A short, turbulent interim period is possible, marked by elite competition and institutional flux. But Iran’s structural conditions make prolonged reformist experimentation unlikely despite the demands of civil society for a constitutional referendum.
The identity of the emerging strongman is unknown, but his shadow is already present. In Iran today, one can already hear the distant echo of heavy footsteps.
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