. WHAT IS NEXT IN IRAN?

 

• The Regime Built on Iran’s Backs—and What Comes After

Khamenei's legacy is not a nation — it is a system designed to survive at any cost to those it rules.

By Wahab Raofi

The death of a dictator is rarely a private event. It is the closing chapter of national suffering — and the opening of a reckoning. When that dictator has held absolute power for nearly four decades, his end does not merely mark a change of leadership. It forces an accounting of everything built in his name, and everything destroyed along the way.

For more than 45 years, the Iranian people have lived under a regime that has treated their ancient civilization as an ideological fortress rather than a nation meant to serve its citizens. The clerics who seized power in 1979 constructed something more durable than an ordinary dictatorship. They built a theocratic military state — one in which revolutionary ideology and institutionalized repression fused into a permanent structure. At its apex stood Ali Khamenei, who over nearly four decades presided over the systematic impoverishment, isolation, and brutalization of one of the Middle East's most sophisticated societies.

The mechanism of that control is worth understanding clearly. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps functions not as a conventional military defending national borders, but as a private army for regime survival. It dominates not only security policy but vast swaths of the Iranian economy — from construction and telecommunications to oil and gas — creating a class of military-bureaucratic elites whose fortunes depend entirely on the system's continuation. Through proxies armed and funded by the IRGC, Iran has projected power into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, exporting revolution rather than building prosperity at home. The regime frames this as resistance to Western imperialism; in practice, it has meant billions spent on foreign conflicts while Iranian families struggle to afford basic necessities.

Those necessities have become increasingly out of reach. The economic record is not one of unfortunate circumstance but of systematic mismanagement and self-dealing. In 1989, when Khamenei assumed the Supreme Leadership, the Iranian rial traded at roughly 120 to the U.S. dollar. By early 2026, it had collapsed to over 1.6 million rials per dollar — a loss of nearly 99 percent of its value. In the final eight years of his rule alone, Iranian purchasing power fell by more than 90 percent. Sanctions have contributed to this, but they do not explain it. A 2013 Reuters investigation uncovered Setad, an organization estimated to control roughly $95 billion in assets, built largely through the systematic seizure of property from ordinary Iranians — religious minorities, political dissidents, anyone deemed disposable. During the Ahmadinejad presidency, approximately $150 billion in oil revenue was unaccounted for. By 2025, Transparency International ranked Iran 153rd out of 180 countries on its Corruption Perceptions Index, with a score of just 23 out of 100. This is not a nation poorly governed. It is a nation governed for someone else's benefit.

When Iranians have taken to the streets to protest these conditions — demanding the freedom, transparency, and accountability that the revolution once promised — they have been met not with dialogue but with force. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and the UN special rapporteur on Iran have documented the regime's systematic violence against its own citizens. Credible estimates from multiple international monitoring groups place those killed and imprisoned over decades of crackdowns in the tens of thousands. These are not the actions of a flawed but legitimate government. They are the actions of a system that long ago abandoned any pretense of serving the people it rules.

There are those who warn that the collapse of this system would plunge Iran into chaos comparable to post-2003 Iraq or post-2011 Libya. That concern deserves a serious answer, not dismissal. Iran is not Iraq. It has a large and well-educated middle class, functioning bureaucratic institutions, a strong sense of national identity that predates the Islamic Republic by millennia, and an extensive diaspora with technical and professional expertise. The risks of transition are real, but they are not unique to Iran — and they are manageable with the right international engagement. None of these advantages guarantee success.

Transition planning is already underway. Opposition figures and exile organizations have developed detailed frameworks for post-regime governance.  One example among others including the Iran Prosperity Project, which outlines steps for continuity of governance, economic stabilization, and a path to democratic elections. These plans deserve scrutiny — including scrutiny of who is proposing them and what interests they represent — but their existence demonstrates that the question is not whether transition is possible, but whether the international community will take it seriously when the moment arrives.

It will arrive. Regimes built on repression and resource extraction do not reform themselves; they exhaust themselves. The Islamic Republic has spent four decades treating the Iranian people as a problem to be managed rather than a citizenry to be served. The currency has collapsed. The educated are leaving. The proxies are bleeding. The gap between the regime's revolutionary self-image and its actual record has become too vast to paper over with slogans.

What comes after will be determined by Iranians — as it should be. A democratic Iran, at peace with its neighbors, engaged in trade rather than proxy warfare, accountable to its citizens rather than to an unelected supreme leader, would transform the Middle East. That future is not guaranteed. But it is not utopian, either. It requires the international community to move beyond managing the Islamic Republic and begin preparing for what comes after it.

The Iranian people have been waiting long enough—and the world should stop pretending the status quo is stability.