Fittingly for Iran, the news that Mojtaba Khamenei, the ultimate theocratic nepo baby, will be the new supreme leader can be described as both expected and bizarre. The 56-year-old has long been touted as a possible successor to his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I first heard the rumor more than a decade ago from conspiracy-minded cab drivers in Tehran. Now Iranian reality has shown itself to be as strange as any conspiracy theory.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, and the regime he ran will very likely transform. But no one should imagine that its nature or future will come down to a single person.
The country’s 13-man National Security Council essentially sidelined Khamenei after the 12-day war in June. It has effectively run the country since the summer and will likely continue to do so, even after a new supreme leader is appointed.
A wave of protests started by shopkeepers swept through Tehran in December. Iranians have had such a terrible year—facing such a decline in living standards and such a sense of political impasse—that no one was terribly surprised when demonstrations filled the streets.
I asked one Iranian student why she had taken part in the street protests. “Yeah, why should we protest?” she replied sarcastically.
Lynda Ben-Menashe, the president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, expressed an apt sentiment after yesterday’s terror attack at Bondi Beach: She said that she was “horrified and devastated” but, she added, “not shocked.”
Indeed, how could anyone be shocked? The act of terrorism, in which a father-and-son duo targeted Jews celebrating Hanukkah and killed at least 15, was the deadliest in Australia’s history. But events have been working up to it since October 7, 2023.
In early September, Zarah Sultana made a bold announcement. “Labour is dead,” the 31-year-old socialist member of Parliament told a crowd of hundreds gathered in Newcastle. She had left Britain’s ruling party only in July, pledging to “co-lead” a new left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn, a former Labour leader who was expelled last year. More than 700,000 Britons have signed up to the mailing list of the provisionally titled Your Party.
If Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, wins this fall’s election, he will occupy the most powerful executive position of any American socialist. At the moment, the closest contenders are two mayors in California and a county executive in Maryland. No wonder, then, that American socialists have begun to dream big.
America’s Saturday-night attacks on Iran have amplified an ever more open debate in Tehran over the future of the country and whether Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should remain in power.
Sepideh Qolian, a 30-year-old Iranian labor activist, spent two years in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where she wrote two books, one of them a celebrated prison memoir in the form of a baking cookbook. Just last week, Qolian was released—and three days later, Israeli missiles and drones began striking targets inside Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has addressed the Iranian people, telling them that his war can help them free themselves from their oppressive government.
Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei.
For President Donald Trump, last month’s spat at the White House with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was “great television.” To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945.
Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own.
Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again. The retired 76-year-old professor of political science was already serving an 18-month sentence for criticizing the Iranian regime. He came out on medical furlough—only for Tehran’s prosecutor to start investigating him again. Now Zibakalam, one of Iran’s best-known public intellectuals, whose combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X total almost 2 million, is worried he may be sent back to prison.
The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir).
Updated at 7:00 p.m. ET on December 9, 2024
A carnival of joy has erupted in Syria with the fall of the strongman Bashar al-Assad. Syrians have waited a long time and paid a heavy price for this jubilation. Thirteen years ago, the country’s revolution began with peaceful demonstrations; since then, by one estimate, more than 600,000 Syrians have lost their lives.
Passing judgment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never going to be simple for the International Criminal Court. Even harder than acting fairly and impartially would be appearing to have done so, in a conflict that stirs fierce passions the world over.
On top of that, equality before the law is a basic principle of justice, but until this point, the ICC has mainly prosecuted authoritarian and non-Western leaders.
It took 25 days, but in the early hours today, Israel responded to Iran’s salvo of missiles earlier this month. The operation, named “Days of Repentance,” was the most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s. The Iranian regime’s years of waging a shadow war on Israel have finally brought the violence home, something the regime had repeatedly promised its people it would avoid.
The attacks were significant, and likely to cause considerable damage.
A year of conflict in the Middle East has destroyed the foreign-policy approach of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His strategy was always implausible, but its collapse has led Iran to the brink of its first international war since 1988.
What I like to call the Khamenei Doctrine—those close to him have variously dubbed it “strategic patience” or, more to the point, “no peace, no war”—rests on a duality that has remained constant through Khamenei’s 35 years in power.
At the center of current conflicts in the Middle East is a long-running staring contest between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And Netanyahu seems to have calculated that, even if Israel moves ferociously against Khamenei’s so-called Axis of Resistance—the region-wide network of militias arrayed against Israeli and Western interests—Khamenei won’t do much in response.
Iran lobbed hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in April in the hope of changing the rules of engagement: Israel had struck an Iranian consulate in Damascus, and Tehran sought to deter any further such direct actions against its interests. Those hopes were shattered last week when an operation attributed to Israel took out Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief, on Iranian soil. Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of President Masud Pezeshkian.
A specter is haunting Iran’s presidential election—the specter of Donald Trump’s return to office. Although Trump has been out of the White House for more than three years, he seems to come up more than Joe Biden, and more than other foreign politicians, in debates among the six candidates in the lead-up to Iran’s election on June 28.
To understand why, consider the recent history of Iran-U.S.
There’s rarely a dull moment in Iranian affairs. The past few months alone have seen clashes with Israel and Pakistan, and a helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister. But spectacular as these events are, the most important changes often happen gradually, by imperceptible degrees.
Accidents happen everywhere, but not all accidents are equal. Many hours after initial news broke about an “incident” involving a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s state media has still not confirmed whether he is dead or alive. Various state outlets have published contradictory news—Was Raisi seen on video link after the accident? Was he not? Was the National Security Council meeting? Was it not?—signaling chaos and panic.
Updated 11:29 a.m., April 14, 2024
The moment we were all afraid of finally arrived yesterday evening. For me, it was announced by a phone call from a terrified teenage cousin in Iran. Had the war started? she asked me through tears.
Iran had fired hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, hitting much more widely than most of us had anticipated. Only thanks to Israel’s excellent defenses, and the help of its Western and Arab allies, have almost all of these been intercepted.
Iran and the United States have been in a shadow war with each other for years. That the conflict has never spilled into all-out war is only because both countries have kept to certain unwritten red lines and rules of engagement. One such rule, rarely broken in recent years, is: Thou Shall Not Kill an American Soldier. Even in January 2020, when a U.S. strike killed Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most important military figure, the Iranian response didn’t lead to a single U.S. fatality.
The October 7 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are being compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. In fact, with more than 600 Israelis dead at the time of this writing, the proportional death toll is several times higher than that of 9/11, and the factor of surprise is arguably greater than at Pearl Harbor.But 9/11 and Pearl Harbor weren’t just tragic attacks. They were casus belli for seismic wars.