Israel’s killings of Ali Larijani and Kamal Kharazi were meant to do more than remove two senior figures from the Islamic Republic’s political landscape. Within Tehran’s political and analytical circles, they were interpreted as an attempt to erase something less visible but more consequential: the regime’s ability to speak the language of compromise. They were also part of a broader pattern: the disappearance of the men who once helped Tehran speak to the outside world.
Larijani had long served as a translator between Iran’s hard power and the diplomatic idiom required to manage it abroad. Kharazi, a former foreign minister with decades of experience, acted as a gatekeeper of strategic signalling. Both men had, for years, served as top foreign policy advisors to the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Their killing, at first glance, appeared to confirm a shift toward a narrower, more rigid order, one in which diplomacy would be eclipsed by the logic of the battlefield.
And yet the regime did not break. Decision-making did not stall. The war continued, but so did indirect channels, signalling, and the careful calibration that has long defined Iranian statecraft. The immediate aftermath revealed something essential about the Islamic Republic: its resilience is institutional, not personal. Authority resides not in any single individual, however prominent, but in a layered structure designed to absorb precisely this kind of shock.
The Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and the broader security-political nexus remain the core engines of strategy. The assassinations of Larijani and Kharazi might, in time, alter the tone and presentation of policy. It did not fundamentally redirect it.
Consolidation not transformation
This is where the current moment risks being misread. It is easy to mistake wartime toughness for ideological transformation. The optics are stark: a new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, with far less independent authority than his late father—a condition likely to persist as he attempts to fill his father’s role. A political class thinned of its most experienced political and military figures.
Security institutions, such as the Revolutionary Guards, are more influential in decision-making and are likely more assertive. Public messaging of the regime is more disciplined, less forgiving of ambiguity or concession to outside powers. It is tempting to interpret this constellation as evidence of ideological hardening: a regime becoming more Islamist in its self-definition, more repressive at home, more uncompromisingly anti-Western and anti-Israeli.
But the evidence, so far, does not fully support that conclusion. What it points to more clearly is consolidation under pressure. The war and the succession have strengthened the institutions most capable of ensuring continuity—the Revolutionary Guards, the intelligence services, and those political figures aligned with them. This has produced a narrower governing environment, in which fewer actors can openly articulate alternative approaches. The language of compromise has not disappeared. It has been compressed, controlled, and, above all, depersonalised.
Whatever the validity of Donald Trump’s claim of “regime change” in Tehran, the distinction matters because the ideological core of the Islamic Republic has not undergone a transformation. Its defining elements—resistance to Western dominance, hostility toward Israel, and a conception of sovereignty rooted in an Islamist order—were firmly in place long before the current war and continue to be.
Embedded principles
These are not new doctrines emerging from the crucible of conflict. They are inherited principles, embedded in the system since 1979 and reinforced over decades of confrontation and adaptation. What may be changing is not the content of that ideology, but the conditions under which it is expressed—and under which the regime is willing to make compromises, both at home and in the face of foreign pressure. Today, Iran’s reliance on controlling the Strait of Hormuz leverage, its cyber pressure, and asymmetric military escalation reflects the tools of a state at war—not necessarily a shift in its ideological core.
The rise of Mojtaba Khamenei illustrates this shift. Unlike his father, whose long tenure endowed him with unmatched authority across factions, Mojtaba is far more dependent on the Revolutionary Guards and closely tied to the security establishment that facilitated his ascent.
This does not make him inherently more ideological. But it does mean that the articulation of ideology is now more closely tied to institutions whose identity has so far been rooted in messaging discipline, population control, and resistance to external adversaries. In such an environment, flexibility becomes harder to display, even if it still exists in practice.
