Unless they’re the equivalent of an alien organism out of a science fiction film, not subject to any of the normal limitations of government, economics, or military might, the death of a leader in power for almost forty years and a trillion in damage will have an effect.
As we continue to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, or at least I do, the Founders had a deep understanding of systems of government, the nature of humanity, and the intersection between them. In their view, the government wasn’t a machine that could run automatically and smoothly, staying on the proper course and performing its proper functions on its own. Instead, it was a network that needed to be administered by people and people had always been fallible, either selfish, corrupt, incompetent, or simply naive, at times untrustworthy in addition to any other flaws. Therefore, they designed their government so that the actions of one or a few contrary to the spirit and goals of the new Republic would be limited in their effect, unable to spread through the system either via a tyrant taking total control or some other sort of collapse. As James Madison, the Father of the Constitution put it in Federalist 51, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Moreover, this is true of any form of government, not just our own. An autocracy might well prosper under a benevolent dictator – indeed many in the United Arab Emirates right now would say they preferred their far more totalitarian system than ours – only to collapse under a cruel or incompetent one.
As a result, whenever one evaluates the state of a country, one must look at both the system of the government and the current leaders of that government. While this should be obvious to anyone with the slightest understanding of politics and human nature, this sort of analysis is strangely lacking when it comes to evaluating Iran, both in terms of their position relative to the United States and the world, and their potential to future as the latest ceasefire appears to be collapsing and the future seems murkier than even last week. To hear many tell it, so many that we may call it the conventional wisdom, Iran survived a war with the United States with the regime in tact, virtually unchanged if not stronger than ever, but rarely, are they asked the obvious question: How can that possibly be when their Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the conflict and his replacement hasn’t been seen in public since? In this case, they – most of whom are detractors of the war effort – are focusing exclusively on the fact that Iran’s systems of government – the various departments, the army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, and more – remain even as their leader and many others do not. This, however, doesn’t provide anything resembling a complete picture, like insisting a room is the same because the chairs are in the same place even though the people sitting in them are entirely different. If you doubt this, consider if they would extend this sort of thinking to the United States. Is there anyone alive who believes the country is the same under President Donald Trump as it was or would be under President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or thankfully in my opinion, a hypothetical Kamala Harris?
Whatever they may claim, a figure like the former Ayatollah Khamenei isn’t easily replaceable, and cannot simply be swapped out for his son. For starters, Khamenei was a fixture in Iran since the revolution of 1979, a part of every key event, even the target of an assassination attempt that left his right arm paralyzed shortly after the Islamicists took power. Beginning in 1981, he served as only the third President of the country, developing close relationships with the IRGC and helping to lead it through a devastating war with Iraq before being selected as Supreme Leader following the death of Ruhollah Khamenei in 1989. In fact, he was so popular at the time that he didn’t technically qualify to be the Supreme Leader in the first place, having by his own admission only been a middling cleric, and therefore failing to meet the constitutional requirement of marja. To elevate him, the Assembly amended the constitution, removed the requirement, and reconfirmed his leadership a second time. After he became Supreme Leader, Khamenei proceeded to reorganize the country, privatizing state-owned industries with the goal of making Iran an energy superpower while seeking to export the Islamic revolution to the region and the world. It was he who reshaped the IRGC, expanded its influence across the Middle East and leveraged Iran’s growing economic power to fund a web of terror proxies. By revitalizing Iran’s economy and reorganizing its military, Khamenei was able to insert the newly radicalized country into almost every major foreign policy issue since his ascension. Under his leadership, Iran supported the Axis of Resistance in the Syrian civil war, displacing millions, the War in Iraq where his involvement led directly to the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Americans, the Yemeni civil war, the Gaza war, even the war in Ukraine. A dedicated foe of Israel, he was a driving force behind Hamas and Hezbollah, and even managed to insert himself into the Western Hemisphere by allying with Venezuela.
The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies’ Vali Nasr described the transformation of Iran under Khamenei’s leadership this way. He took “many of the powers of the presidency with him and [turned] the office of the Supreme Leader into the omnipotent overseer of Iran’s political scene.” As a result, he was an “unusual sort of dictator” who put in place officials that would transform “the parliament, the presidency, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the military, the intelligence services, the police agencies, the clerical elite, the Friday prayer leaders and much of the media,” as well as various “nongovernmental foundations, organizations, councils, seminaries and business groups.” In other words, there wasn’t an institution, either public or private, in Iran that the Ayatollah didn’t influence and ultimately gain control over, making the country what it is today in a sense that the average American necessarily has a hard time understanding under our system of government. Though we are fond of referring to George Washington as the “Father of the Country,” he led the United States for only eight years and while his influence was essential in setting the foundation for our future success – indeed many, myself included have referred to him as the indispensable man – imagine if he’d been there for close to 40 to get some sense of the importance of the Ayatollah to Iran.
If leadership matters in the least – and only someone who’s never worked for an incompetent boss would argue that it doesn’t – his absence will be keenly felt and in the aftermath of his assassination, there will necessarily be a void that results in two things. First, the various factions that Khamenei controlled and united during his decades in power will necessarily compete for power in his absence. Though the new Supreme Leader, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, has been named in principle, he hasn’t so much as been seen in public and as far as I can tell, no one truly believes he’s running the country. In that case, who is? As far as we know, the once unified leadership has fractured into at least three factions, if not more. The President, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Speaker of the Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and Ahmad Vahidi, the Commander in Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom we can assume have at least some competing interests along with varying views on the future of the country. Second, whether or not those interests are completely at odds with one another doesn’t matter because there will necessarily be alterations in policies and plans, whether outright changes or simply slow downs due to confusion in the ranks for lack of leadership, shortages of money or supplies, or other factors. If Khamenei built Iran, who has the power and the will to rebuild it?
Once again, the United States is instructive. Sadly, one of our most revered Presidents, Abraham Lincoln was killed almost immediately after winning the Civil War, putting Andrew Johnson in power. In the aftermath, Lincoln’s plans for rapprochement between the North and the South were left floundering, Congress became far more powerful than it was when Lincoln was in charge, and the United States became embroiled in its first impeachment battle. Because of these and other ramifications of the void Lincoln left behind, it wasn’t until 1867 that true reconstruction acts were passed – over Johnson’s veto – costing two valuable years, and it wasn’t until President Ulysses S. Grant came into power in 1869 when they were properly enacted. Vital civil rights amendments and legislation would also have to wait until 1868 or beyond. Though no one can properly quantify the impact or say clearly what might have been had Lincoln not been assassinated, no one doubts it was huge, if not outright catastrophic. Similarly, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly towards the end of World War II. He presided over D-Day, which ultimately led to the destruction of Nazi Germany, but Japan remained entrenched in the Pacific and no one, not even his Vice President Harry Truman, knew what his plans were to achieve final victory, not even being privy to the Manhattan Project. Truman was equally hampered by having little national political experience, a reputation as a machine politician, and the belief that he was something of a country bumpkin, regularly described as a “rube.” To say the entire free world was concerned that the man who had shepherded everyone through the entire war so far was suddenly gone, barely begins to state the reality. When Truman asked FDR’s widow, Eleanor, if there was anything he could do for her after her husband’s passing, she was said to reply, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.” Jonathan Daniels, FDR’s press secretary, joked, “the first [priority] was to make Truman President… the second was to learn how to spell his name.” Senator J. William Fulbright claimed “Truman is not big enough for the job.”
While he went on to prove himself a decisive and strong willed leader, the hot war ended only for a new Cold War with Joseph Stalin’s Russia reneging on promises made to both FDR and Winston Churchill. Could FDR have prevented that, given his much longer relationship with Stalin and more established presence in global affairs? To be sure, the goal here is not to compare the Ayatollah to some of the greatest American presidents. They were legends. He was a monster, but that doesn’t change the reality that he was Iran’s monster and now that he’s gone, we can expect Iran to be facing similar – if not worse – internal and external challenges. There is also the reality that those challenges aren’t exactly small things. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that no American President has ever taken office under the dire economic and military conditions facing Iran right now, at least all at once though Johnson after the Civil War would certainly be close, if different. After five weeks of strikes, Iran’s ability to project force has been severely limited. They have no air force, no navy, and greatly reduced weapon making capacity. While they remain capable of launching at least some attacks and the media is sure to broadcast every attack as though it were the equivalent of the D-Day invasion, the reality is that they are reduced to firing mere handfuls of missiles and drones, which at times aren’t even armed. If they are going to do the things they claim – savage the US in the region, savage the oil industry in the region, and control the Strait of Hormuz – someone is going to have to rebuild these military assets at a pace not seen since the Nazi build up prior to World War II. Who in Iran is capable of such a thing?
The ability to rapidly rebuild is even more hindered when you consider the state of the Iranian economy. Even if a leader was available with the necessary talent, experience, and gravitas to do so more quickly than in perhaps all of human history, they would also need an extraordinary amount of money – some estimates put it at over a trillion dollars – and limited means to get it. Since the start of the war, inflation has soared 85% overall, up to 130% on some basic necessities like food. Somewhere between one and two million people have lost their jobs, pushing millions into poverty, and even those that are working are earning as little as $95 per month. While they have only reported a slight decline in Gross Domestic Product, Gross Fixed Capital Formation, which combines productive capacity with economic growth contracted at close to 12% while imports were down 16.6% and exports 5%. Mahdi Ghodsi, a senior economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, told Al Jazeera that he believes these trends are reversible – if the conflict actually ends soon, which seems less likely by the day. “In that case, some temporary layoffs in services, retail, transport, construction and small businesses could be reversed relatively quickly, because these activities are highly sensitive to uncertainty and disruptions rather than necessarily destroyed productive capacity,” he said before the latest round of US attacks. Still, some things will necessarily take much longer, for what I would suggest are obvious reasons. “Where factories have lost machinery, inventories, imported inputs, workers, working capital, or access to energy, reopening is not simply a matter of returning to normal,” he said, adding that in some cases, “full recovery may take years and require large investments, including foreign financing” to use Al Jazeera’s phrasing.
Rather than choosing to acknowledge these obvious facts and the underlying reality that Iran is neither the same nor stronger than before the war, President Trump’s critics continue to insist that the country is the equivalent of an alien organism straight out of a science fiction film, not subject to any of the normal limitations of government, economics, or military might. Somehow, we’re supposed to simultaneously believe that the vacuum left by a leader who’d ruled for four decades, doesn’t matter. Whoever is in charge, whether or not he’s even been seen, is now imbued with near magical powers to rebuild their military without the money or the underlying economy to do so and to do so faster than ever before. Further, they will do more than rebuild. They’ll build back better, here I am referring to President Joe Biden’s failed policies intentionally, so good they can do the sorts of things they’ve threatened for years, but lacked the necessary ability. Destroy all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East, as they have claimed? Easy! Control the Strait and charge tolls? No problem! Eject the United States from the entire region while destroying all of our military assets? Piece of cake! They’ll fund it with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and summon the necessary resources into existence by force of will alone. Perhaps needless to say, that’s not how any of this works in the real world and something tells me the detractors know it, but the need to embarrass President Trump at all costs and predict failure around every corner has overwhelmed their reason. In reality, Iran is greatly weakened, reduced to harassing rather than attacking and with a corridor open in the Strait at this point, has been effectively put in a box, where they can be ground down even further if they continue to refuse to comply with the terms of the deal.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 