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Speaker A: If you’ve been following the war in Iran, it’s been a confusing week. The United States goals are up in the air, which means it’s also unclear how this war might end. That uncertainty has made oil prices skyrocket and left President Trump seeming to look for a way out. Maybe in one 24 hour period, the president told a reporter at CBS that the fighting was, quote, very complete. Then he held a press conference where he said the US had not won enough and that will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated. Finally, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned that the U. S. Israeli air campaign was reaching its most intense phase yet. Meanwhile, inside Iran, where the Supreme Leader was killed just a few days back, clerics gathered to elect his replacement. The Supreme Leader is a unique figure in charge of Iran, both spiritually and militarily. And if Washington’s goals seem uncertain, Tehran’s goals do not.

Speaker B: The Iranian leadership for a long time has been very clear about certain points. And the most important of those points are its undying enmity toward Israel and toward the United States. So that is a real consistency of message that goes way back.

Speaker A: Graham Wood writes for the Atlantic. I got him on the phone to help explain who Iran’s new Supreme Leader is.

Speaker B: The new guy is named Mojtabak Khamenei and he is the son of the previous Supreme Leader, ali Khamenei. He’s 56 years old. He does have some religious education, but nowhere near the distinction that he’s supposed to have. What he does have is a long record in the shadows of being close to the circles of power in the Islamic Republic as a result of being his father’s son, first of all, and then playing nicely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Speaker A: It’s interesting. You’re saying, I think, that the new Supreme Leader, he may have the most followers, but not necessarily the most religious followers.

Speaker B: Yeah, he has basically zero religious followers.

Speaker A: If he doesn’t understand religion or he’s not been adjudicating religion, where does his power come from?

Speaker B: His power comes from the fact that he’s been sitting right there at the right hand of his father for decades. And there are others who have been complaining about this, quietly saying, you know, Mujtaba, we don’t really understand why he would be the person who occupies this power, but his power is growing and we understand that if you want to get things done, you sometimes have to go through him. That was a complaint that was made 20 years ago when he was a spring chicken of 36. So by now he’s been right there where decisions are made. And I think he was chosen in part because he, he represents a kind of status quo for this regime, unpopular as it is.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, Donald Trump has said he wanted regime change in this war. It does not sound like that’s what we got here.

Speaker B: No, regime change is, of course, a tall order. There’s a lot of appetite for change. The possibility that the state would be able to strangle those aspirations in perpetuity, I think is a real possibility right now. I mean, it’s. You look at a state like Cuba or North Korea, plenty of Cubans want something different. You can tell because they vote with their feet.

Speaker A: But it shows how long stagnation can last.

Speaker B: Exactly. Stagnation can last for decades if you don’t have some kind of rather specific way of changing things.

Speaker A: Today on the show, the US And Israel killed Iran’s last supreme leader. But. But is the new one any different? I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next? Stick around. So before we talk a little bit more about who the new supreme leader is, I’m wondering if you can explain briefly what Iran’s governing structure looks like and what the role is for someone with the title of supreme leader.

Speaker B: Yeah. Iran’s governing structure is unique in the world. It’s a fascinating system that it started off in 1979, and in a nutshell, what Iran tried to do was overthrow a secular monarchy and replace it with a authoritarian religious order. And at the top of that order would be the Shiite cleric who had the most distinction as a religious scholar. And that person would be the head of the state and everything, all power would flow through that. So the guy who was originally chosen, famously, was the Ayatollah Khomeini. And this is a man who spent his entire life doing religious study, sitting around with books and with students. And suddenly he’s in charge of a modern military, of modern diplomacy. Of all the things that a modern state has are in the hands of this old guy who was just months before answering questions about whether a menstruating woman is considered clean under the following circumstances. So he was not dealing with ordinary day to day stuff, let alone whether you should pursue an atom bomb.

Speaker A: But it’s a signal of where the power is. Right. It’s saying, yeah, you may have a president in Iran, but the person who’s in charge of the military which controls movement of the populace, that’s a religious figure.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the religious figure is nominally at the top of everything and in fact, actually at the top of everything. But it is still a modern state, which means that there are generals, there are elected officials, there are all sorts of people who, who occupy in a day to day capacity, important administrative and political roles. But everybody has known since the beginning of the Islamic Republic that the buck finally stops with the Supreme Leader, who is supposed to be this religious scholar par excellence.

Speaker A: It’s worth talking too, about how the Supreme Leader is chosen, because when I was reading about it, it reminded me of how like a pope is chosen. Right. There’s this assembly of experts, 88 senior Shiite clerics who. They’re elected themselves, but they choose who the supreme Leader is, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. It’s supposed to be very conclave, like where you get the scholars together and they discuss which of them is the scholar of scholars, and then that person, for until the rest of his life is finished, it runs the country.

Speaker A: You say it’s supposed to be like that. Is it not actually like that?

Speaker B: Well, even when the first turnover happened, when the first Ayatollah died, it didn’t turn out that way. The guy who was probably by consensus considered the greatest scholar after Khomeini was this guy named Hossein Ali Montezeri. And Montessori had broken with the regime, and so there was no way that he was going to be the guy who was chosen next. And so they elevated a man out of nowhere named Ali Khamenei, who was not a senior scholar by any means. And they said, you’re the guy, you’re the one we trust, because you’ve been part of the revolution from the beginning. And let’s just forget that whole criterion about your being the Supreme Jurist of the revolution. You’re just going to be its leader. And that’s been how it has been ever since.

Speaker A: Yeah. And now we have Mushaba Khamenei, who’s the son of Ali Khamenei. And it sounds like from your description, it’s kind of a similar selection process this time where it’s again, a sort of less religious person, but certainly someone who people may think can consolidate power. Is that fair?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the fact that he is not a supremely qualified religious person, everybody can tell that’s the case. There’s no, there’s no pretense that he’s such a thing. What he is is someone who’s connected with powerful people in the regime and who’s probably acceptable for a lot of people who you do need to please.

Speaker A: And what I’m talking about Here are the people with the guns, the irgc, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Speaker B: Yes. They are the physical guardians of the revolution. They’re the ones who are fighting and being destroyed right now by American palms. So they have been close to Mojtabakhamenei for some time. And that’s, of course, why he’s the supreme leader, is because he plays well with them, rather than because he’s well known for making the best advice about Islamic law.

Speaker A: I can see why the selection makes a kind of sense, the way you’re framing it right now. But doesn’t it undermine the whole idea of the revolution itself, which was about an Islamic state?

Speaker B: Very much so. I think it doesn’t take a very perceptive person to notice, and Iranians certainly do, that there’s hypocrisy here. You know, when the Islamic revolution happened in 1979, they said this is an insane system, the monarchy, that the son of the current guy is the person who’s going to rule until he dies. Nonsense. What we’re looking for is the best of the best and specifically the. The best of the Shiite religious scholars. And now what’s happened, you’ve turned over the leadership of the Islamic Revolution. The supreme leader is Ta Da, the hereditary son of the previous supreme leader. And so I think Iranians, when they see Mojitabahenei taking over for his father, they see hypocrisy, first of all, and also just something that doesn’t quite sit right because sons don’t take over for fathers in religious roles.

Speaker A: But it does sound like Mujtaba Khamenei has been kind of laying the groundwork for this kind of move for some time. He got involved in the presidential elections back in 2005 and 2009. Do you want to explain that a little bit, how he came to prominence and became clearly a political figure?

Speaker B: Yeah. Muchtaba has been involved in politics for about 20 years, but mostly in the shadows. The president who was elected in 2005, like all presidents in the Islamic Republic, they’re not really elected in a free election. The Guardian Council decides who’s allowed to run. And Mujtaba Khamenei was said to be involved in the selection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardliner, very conservative. And that’s how he became president of Iran in 2005 and later reelected.

Speaker A: And this is the end of a reform movement.

Speaker B: Yeah, there had been this president named Khatami, who was well known for trying to change the revolution and maybe make it so it was not. Didn’t have undying enmity for the United States. And so Mujtaba was involved in putting an end to that with the presidency, Ahmadinejad. What we really see, though, is you start having this guy who nobody’s ever heard of before, certainly nobody had ever elected before, named Mujshtaba Khamenei, who’s putting his finger on the scale even as a 36 year old back then. So the first thing anybody knows of him is that he wields power in the shadows and go 20 years ahead. That’s still really the only thing people know about him. He doesn’t give speeches. People don’t have a lot of experience of seeing him in public. And now he’s the supreme Leader of Iran.

Speaker A: Hmm. You talked to one source that was so striking to me in your reporting in the Atlantic, who told you Mujtaba Khamenei was the most dangerous man in the world. Why did he say that?

Speaker B: This was a guy who had actually studied with Mujtab al Khamenei when they were students together. There’s this city called Qom in central Iran where if you’re a person in power, you might spend some time kind of like continuing ed, doing religious stuff. And his memory of studying with Mojtaba was that the guy was laser focused on the end of the world apocalyptic questions. And he thought that Iran had kind of a mission from God of bringing about the end of the world. There were signposts on the way to these apocalyptic events that had been foretold. And he even said that Mujtaba, in his dwelling in the city in an area called Chamkaran, had a corkboard with some of those signposts marked out. And, you know, you put a checkbox as you get closer to the end times. And this millenarian impulse to be thinking that the end of the world is coming and you might be part of it is actually something that the Islamic Republic had kind of tamped down on a bit. They found it embarrassing, but much of a kind of on the side, he said, you know, this is, according to my source, this is something we should be thinking about as future leaders of the Islamic Republic. And my source remembers vividly that much. Thaba was totally besotted with it. And he said, yeah, you don’t want someone who has that view in control of a threshold nuclear state.

Speaker A: Yeah, because they don’t care. They’re focused on something very different than making friends.

Speaker B: Oh, right. I mean, it might even be exactly the opposite. And so this guy said, then you don’t want someone like that in power. He also said just that Mujtabo is a very shrewd, intelligent guy. And I think he thought that having someone who is both Machiavellian and who thought the end of the world was coming and who thought that he could help that happen by creating a condition of extreme violence, that makes him extremely dangerous. He said mujtaba personally is as dangerous as 50 atomic bombs.

Speaker A: We’ll be right back. Okay, so now that he’s the new supreme leader, what is Mujtaba’s vision for Iran? Do we even know yet?

Speaker B: We don’t really know what his vision is. We can guess, and we can make some pretty educated guesses. But his taking over is. It’s kind of like when the new North Korean leader took over Kim Jong Un. Everybody’s scrambling to find any fact about the guy, finding out where he studied what he said and not finding out very much at all and really grasping at small shreds of detail. Now, there’s ample evidence that he’s not interested in some kind of big modernization project. He’s definitely. There’s no sign that he’s interested in transforming the Islamic Republic into something else, into something that’s maybe friendly towards secular states, the United States, toward Israel.

Speaker A: Funny you say that, because I feel like there’s some disagreement about that. Like, there’s this politician who’s close to Mr. Khamenei, who’s been doing interviews. His name is Abdolreza Davari. And he’s said, oh, maybe Mujtaba is going to end up being like Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, where he’s interested in some kind of liberalization to society. We can debate how liberal things really are in Saudi Arabia or what that really means, but it does seem like there are some people who are saying, oh, maybe there are some strains of reformism here.

Speaker B: You know, I’ve heard people suggest that Mujtaba would be like Mohammed bin Salman. And I think the chances of that are slim to none. And I’ll tell you why. Mohammed bin Salman took over a quasi medieval state in Saudi Arabia, and he pretty much just said, we want to turn this state into one that’s more like a normal state where people can show up, come and go, invest, people can go to the movies, things like that. That was an impulse that we’ve seen no evidence for publicly from anyone, certainly not from Mujtaba himself, not also for anyone from the Supreme Leader’s office. From the many years that Mojaba has been associated with it. So if that’s what he’s wanted to do, there’s been no sign of any action of that type during the time when he’s been wielding power in the shadows. I think what we have is kind of a dangled promise that maybe give this guy some time, maybe relax and see what he’s going to do. And the buying of time is something the Iranians have done very well. They’re excellent at saying, give us a little time and we’ll see whether things might change. The evidence that there’s an appetite for that change among the Iranian people is very strong. The evidence for a desire for that change from Mujtabenei or his associates, there’s no evidence for that whatsoever.

Speaker A: Well, I hear that kind of thing too, and I think it feels like it’s information being dangled for the White House potentially, because Donald Trump has said these sort of confusing things about what he wants in Iran. I want regime change, but also I kind of want. He gave a press conference this week where he said, I prefer someone internal to someone external.

Speaker B: I would like to see people that are inside now. They talk about the son of the Shah, they talk about other people, but, you know, hasn’t been there in many, many years. We have a formula that’s been very good so far.

Speaker A: And I think it’ll so clearly saying, I want someone who’s been within the power structure to now take over sort of the way Delsey Rodriguez has in Venezuela. And so you can see maybe in this positioning by this person who knows the new Supreme Leader, maybe there’s some Dulce ism here.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think you’re exactly right. And in that sense, what we’re really hearing is Donald Trump the pragmatist, or maybe just Donald Trump the extremely lazy guy. He’s looking for someone on the inside who’s already sitting at the desk and who can make these changes. Now, I can understand why someone who wants this to be an easy war that ends soon would be looking for such a person. But it matters who that person is behind the desk. If the person is there and that person is extremely resistant to change and represents all the interests that have been fighting against change even before the United States got into this war, then I think that the chances that if you just give that person a shot and that person delivers what you’re hoping for are just slim to none.

Speaker A: Well, I guess the question too is, what is the change you’re talking about here? Are you talking about democratization? Are you Talking about doing business with the United States. What is the goal of the change? And I think different actors here may have different goals.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it’s important to split the aspirations of, say, the Iranian people from the aspirations of Donald Trump. And there’s another split to be made between the aspirations of Donald Trump and the aspirations of Bibi Netanyahu. But look, the basic thing that the Iranian people would like, I think, is to have a country that is not isolated, a country that is normal, a country that doesn’t have an economy where ordinary people suffer, and also that doesn’t have a government that is willing to slaughter 30,000 of its citizens in a couple days because they want something like freedom. That’s the view of the Iranian people. The American kind of cold realist interest might be somewhat different. What the Americans have noticed is that for the last 45, 50 years, Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States. Iran has at all the choke points in the Middle east where oil is supposed to pass through, where things could be easier. They’re made hard by Iran and its proxies. And, and what the United States would really like is not to have a government in power in Iran that’s interested in doing those things. Now, whether that government that succeeds the current government is a democratic one. I think a lot of the people in the Trump administration in particular are willing to be very flexible on that point. But what they don’t want is to be constantly harassed in, have America’s interests constantly undermined and harassed by the Iranians. Now, the last point I’ll say is the Israelis. The Israelis feel existentially threatened by Iran. They always have, or for the last 40 odd years, they have. And they don’t mind if Iran is utterly destroyed as long as the capabilities of threatening the existence of Israel are gone. And I think Netanyahu will feel that this current war has been a total success and worth the pain that it’s caused.

Speaker A: So what do you think is going to happen in the next few days? It’s interesting. Donald Trump clearly not thrilled with this selection. He said that aloud. Also, Israel’s giving interesting messages. When asked directly about it, it sounds like officials have basically said, well, we want to keep you guessing about what we do next. So it’s a little unclear what happens, you anticipating?

Speaker B: Well, I have little doubt that the Israelis and probably the Americans will want to assassinate Muchtab Khamenei. The Israelis have said that unequivocally. Whoever is in that office is a legitimate target. So they’re going to go after him. And they’ve obviously been pretty good at finding the people they want to kill and killing them. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there are efforts made in that regard. But so much of what’s happened in this war has been utterly baffling in the sense that it’s been planned for, for decades. And yet in some ways it seems like it’s not been planned for at all. And so what happens on a day to day basis, there’s enormous swerves in what one should expect for the United States in particular, what should expect the Americans to do, to be satisfied with, as a, as a conclusion to the war. In the meantime, what I think the Americans and the Israelis are kind of united on is the belief that whatever else needs to happen, the Iranian nuclear missile and naval capability needs to be degraded to the point where it can’t threaten Israel and the United States and their allies and interests anymore. So we’re going to see more and more bombing, more and more attacks to bring that capability as close to zero as possible. What actually turns out to be the political outcome, that’s where things are really up in the air. And it’s unclear what the Trump administration would be happy with, what they’ll settle for, and what ultimately they want and expect.

Speaker A: Graham, I’m so grateful for you joining the show. Thanks for coming on.

Speaker B: Oh, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker A: Graham Wood is a staff writer at the Atlantic. He’s also a lecturer in political science at Yale. And that’s our show. What Next is produced by Alana Schwartz, Rob Gunther, Anna Phillips and Madeline Ducharme. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of what Next and what Next tbd. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. And I’m Mary Harris. Go track me down in blue sky. Say hello at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.