It has been a long, precarious month since the Apr. 8 ceasefire in the war between the United States and Iran. Although reports in recent days have once again hinted at movement toward a possible deal, negotiations over a durable end to the conflict have repeatedly faltered over differences between the two countries on a range of issues, from Iran’s nuclear program to control over the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, this week, the Trump Administration and Iranian officials have continued to issue contradictory and briskly changing statements about the state of war and peace talks, adding opacity and uncertainty to a picture that is already obtuse.
Yet over the details hangs an even more fundamental question: who, exactly, is running Iran?
After all, American and Israeli strikes have killed not just the former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but also Ali Larijani, the chief of Iran’s highest national security body, as well as many senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Iranian army. The result, according to U.S. President Donald Trump, is that the Iranians are “all messed up.” “They have no idea who their leader is,” he remarked during a recent call with MS NOW.
For some, this state of affairs means driving home the U.S. advantage by continuing to target leaders opposed to a negotiated settlement, the apparent assumption being that sustained economic and military pressure will ultimately deepen divisions in Tehran and force a more favorable outcome in bilateral talks.
It is a seductive view, but one that overlooks another fact, clear to me from years of research into the Iranian establishment: the war may have removed multiple Iranian leaders from the stage, but it has not paralysed the Iranian state. Despite the conflict, Iranian command structures have been reconstituted, decisions continue to be made, and Iran has adapted to sustained pressure.
All of which reveals the answer to the question posed above: in the post-Ali Khamenei reality, power in Tehran has not reorganized around a single, dominant leader. Yes, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, formally holds the position at the apex of authority. But he is not his father; power previously concentrated in the Supreme Leader’s office is now distributed among a narrow circle of military, security, and political figures whose portfolios and responsibilities increasingly overlap.
Put another way, amid the war, what has emerged in Iran is a different architecture of leadership, where power is exercised through institutions and networks that have reconfigured themselves to meet the demands of war and prolonged confrontation.
The once supreme leader
So where does Khamenei Jr. fit into this new architecture of power? To be sure, Mojtaba, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war and has a vast network among security and military actors, is at the center of this new architecture of power. He matters because he represents absolute continuity at a time of profound crises when the Islamic Republic cannot afford ambiguity over its ideological center.
But his role and his power is not comparable to that of his father, Ali Khamenei, who accumulated authority over decades through a combination of religious stature, institutional control, and personal familiarity with every major faction of the Islamic Republic.
For most of his life, Mojtaba was not regarded as a religious scholar of significant theological authority or scholarly distinction. It was only in 2022, as conversations about the succession of his ageing and ailing father grew more urgent, that he was conferred the title of ayatollah, a prerequisite for the position of Supreme Leader. Mojtaba’s public profile has been shaped less by formal office than by his influence within his father’s inner circle and his relationships with the country’s security networks. His elevation provides continuity for the system, but it does not offer a singular, commanding leader.
The practical management of power, however, has moved toward a constellation of figures whose authority is drawn from different institutions and whose roles are more complementary than competitive. The system has effectively assembled a wartime coalition of military, security, and political leaders around Mojtaba. Many of those leaders are from the generation forged by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the early consolidation of the IRGC.
Pillars of power
With the Supreme Leader no longer the sole authority, the man acting as a bridge between the military and political spheres of this revamped architecture of decision-making in Iran is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has repeatedly adapted his public identity to the needs of the moment. He has served in almost every major institution in the Islamic Republic: an IRGC commander during the Iran-Iraq war, chief of the Iranian police, Mayor of Tehran for 12 years, a presidential candidate, and the speaker of the Parliament since 2020.
With his long and deep experience, Ghalibaf understands how to translate the priorities of the security establishment into political language and how to operate inside institutions without appearing as a purely military figure, qualities that are immensely valuable during a time of war as the Islamic Republic needs a figure who can speak to multiple constituencies at once—from military commanders to lawmakers, bureaucrats to diplomatic negotiators to leaders of the judiciary.
Ghalibaf is ambitious, and his professional journey shows that he has long sought higher office. Contrary to what many outside the country—and some Iranians as well—might imagine, his importance in the current structure does not come from his ability to dominate others. He is valuable because of his ability to make the different parts of the system work together. He can engage more pragmatic elements inside the state, while remaining credible to the security establishment—a critical constituency in Iran.
Another critical voice in that establishment as Iran navigates this war is Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, the acting commander-in-chief of the IRGC. A hardliner, Vahidi has held senior intelligence and operational posts within the military branch. He was the founding commander of the Quds Force, the powerful, elite branch of the IRGC responsible for covert operations across the Middle East. He also served as Iran’s minister of defense and interior.
After the 12-Day War of June 2025 inflicted significant losses on the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made changes to the IRGC leadership and appointed Mohammad Pakpour as its commander in chief, with Vahidi as the deputy commander, a position he held until Pakpour’s killing in an Israeli airstrike on Feb. 28. Now at the helm, Vahidi represents another facet of the new power structure in Iran. Unlike Ghalibaf, he has never sought to soften or obscure his identity as a man of the security establishment.
But Vahidi’s influence has its limits. He carries serious weight among the more hardline factions of the IRGC and the broader security establishment, yet he is not a figure who can easily command the full loyalty of the establishment as a whole, let alone Artesh, the regular army, or the civilian bureaucracy. He must, therefore, work alongside Ghalibaf. Vahidi supplies the command structure with military resolve; Ghalibaf offers it political integration. Their roles are not interchangeable, but under wartime conditions, each makes the other more useful.
Steering Iran
Beyond the individual personalities, the most important institution coordinating Iran’s security and foreign policy priorities amid the war is the Supreme National Security Council. The council used to be led by Ali Larijani, the formidable political operator and confidant of Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an Israeli strike in March. His replacement, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, personifies another shift in the Iranian system’s center of gravity, away from political management and toward security-bureaucratic coordination.
Zolghadr is a veteran of the Revolutionary Guards, with deep ties to the Ramazan Headquarters, a covert IRGC operational unit whose networks later helped give shape to the Quds Force. Over the course of his career, he served as deputy commander of the IRGC, held security portfolios within the Interior Ministry, worked inside the judiciary, and eventually became secretary of the Expediency Council, the advisory body tasked with mediating disputes between Iran's parliament and the civilian administration.
His trajectory has been less about battlefield command than about something arguably more durable: embedding security logic into the institutions of the state. In the current configuration, that is precisely his value. Zolghadr is the connective tissue of the system, a figure whose role is to ensure that the political, judicial, military, and security arms of the Islamic Republic remain in alignment with one another.
When it comes to the execution of Iran’s response to the U.S., the country’s strategy of asymmetric warfare is tied to inflicting punitive costs on the global economy by restricting the flow of oil and Liquified Natural Gas through the Strait of Hormuz and attacking energy infrastructure and U.S. military bases in the Gulf countries.
One of the men who helped develop this strategy is Ali Akbar Ahmadian. He served as a naval commander in the IRGC, commanded the organization’s strategic center for years, and served as the chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. After the 12-Day War, the Islamic Republic established a Defense Council to institutionalize war planning—a body which Ahmadian serves as acting secretary. He represents the doctrinal layer of the system and plays a more strategic role.
Two weapons have proved singularly important to the execution of Iran’s military strategy throughout the war: drones and missiles. The Aerospace Force of the IRGC has wielded these weapons to impose costs on the Gulf Arab states, American military bases across the region, and Israel. The Aerospace Force has emerged as the most consequential branch of the IRGC, and its commander, Majid Mousavi, has risen through the power networks of the Islamic Republic as a central figure. Mousavi and his Aerospace Force are now crucial to Iran’s projection of deterrence. Within Iran, he is regarded as more willing than his predecessors to expand the use of missiles beyond strictly military targets. More than any other figure, his influence shapes the military tempo and the scope of escalation.
Meanwhile, wars demand complex machinery. The organization responsible for coordinating and managing operations between the IRGC and the regular Iranian army in wartime is known as the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters. The man who runs it, and who completes the operational layer of this command structure, is Ali Abdollahi, an officer whose career spans the IRGC, the national police, the Interior Ministry, and the logistics and operational coordination bureaucracies that hold a wartime state together. He does not make strategy. He makes strategy work.
What emerges from this arrangement is a structure in which no single figure needs to do everything. Each commander operates within a defined set of roles that are distinct but complementary, allowing the system to function without relying on a single center of authority. Differences exist among them, and those differences may become more visible once the war ends. For now, however, they operate inside a shared framework held together by the imperative for survival, institutional cohesion, and the preservation of the Islamic Republic’s military core.
Why the center holds
Ensuring that the security framework is fit for purpose also means keeping a lid on domestic opposition amid the war—a job that now falls to Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of the country’s judiciary. To achieve his goals, he has been using Iran’s sprawling, politically weaponized legal system to prosecute protesters and dissidents, issue warnings against dissent, threaten harsher wartime punishments, and increasingly execute prisoners.
A further and final layer in Iran’s new system of wartime leadership, albeit one that defies easy characterization, is provided by a clutch of former IRGC commanders whose relevance defies easy characterization. Mohsen Rezaei, Yahya Rahim Safavi, and Mohammad Ali Jafari are not well known outside Iran, nor are they directing daily operations. Yet they collectively personify something more durable: institutional memory, personal networks cultivated over decades, and a credibility among older IRGC cadres that no formal appointment can manufacture or rescind.
It’s clear to me that they are being consulted regularly by the current leadership, which once again helps explain why authority in the Islamic Republic does not solely depend on formal office. In a system where senior commanders have been killed in targeted strikes and certain positions have been left deliberately ambiguous, influence can still flow through relationships built over decades.
Which brings us back to where we started: the questionable logic behind the prevailing emphasis on leadership decapitation. Removing a commander may disrupt a specific chain of command, but it does not necessarily weaken the system’s broader capacity to absorb the blow and adapt, at least not for now.
Indeed, over the past several months, the Islamic Republic has responded to pressure not by simplifying its structure of authority, but by multiplying and obscuring the channels through which authority is exercised. Some positions have been filled quickly; others have been left formally vacant, their functions quietly redistributed; and new or revived wartime bodies have assumed an importance that their low visibility belies. The purpose has been to preserve institutional continuity while reducing the vulnerability that comes with concentrating power in any single node.
The result is a more thoroughly militarized system, but not a military junta in any conventional sense. Civilian institutions still matter. The parliament, the presidency, the judiciary, and the national security council remain part of the architecture. But the logic that now organizes all of these institutions is increasingly shaped by security commanders and battlefield veterans whose formative experiences are defined not by negotiation but by confrontation. The state has not abandoned its formal structures. It has bent them, without announcement, toward the requirements of prolonged conflict.
This is why internal differences within the system do not amount to paralysis. But under wartime conditions, these distinctions are contained by a fundamental consensus: the system must survive, the IRGC must remain cohesive, and the war must not end in a way that invites another round of attacks. Disagreements may sharpen after the war, especially over the distribution of political and economic power among different factions. For now, however, they operate within a shared framework rather than against it.
The generational question remains the most important unresolved issue in Iranian politics. The current order in Iran is dominated by men shaped by the Iran-Iraq War and the early decades of the IRGC. They have an almost cellular understanding of both the necessity and the limits of force. Younger officers, shaped by different wars and different expectations, may see their elders as overly cautious and too protective of their own networks. After the war, Mojtaba Khamenei may try to strengthen his own position by cultivating that younger cohort. But that contest belongs to the future.
For now, Iran is not being governed by a single man susceptible to pressure, isolation, or removal. It is being run by a hardened network that has made itself less visible, more collective in its decision-making, and more difficult to coerce. The architecture is the point. Understanding it matters more than counting the names at the top.
