Every political order eventually reveals what it fears most.
Democratic governments, however imperfectly, derive much of their stability from institutions, law, public consent and the possibility of peaceful political change. Authoritarian regimes face a different problem. As legitimacy weakens, institutions gradually cease to exist primarily for the protection of the state but rather for the protection of those who control it. The distinction between national security and regime security becomes blurred. The army, intelligence services, police and ideological institutions are judged less by their ability to protect the country than by their reliability in protecting the ruling order.
The latter is the basis for the military hierarchy currently taking shape under Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
At first glance, Tehran’s recent appointments can be explained as a consequence of war. Senior commanders were killed, positions became vacant, and the Islamic Republic had to reconstruct parts of its chain of command. But the nature of political systems is revealed not simply by the offices they fill, but by the people they trust to fill them.
Khamenei has not promoted a conspicuously younger generation of military professionals or modernizers. He has repeatedly turned to veterans of the revolutionary security establishment: Men shaped by the 1979 revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, intelligence and counterintelligence operations, ideological enforcement, confrontation with Israel and the United States, and the suppression of dissent at home. Thus, these appointments reveal something larger than administrative succession. They show how the new leadership understands power.
Ali Abdollahi, the new chief of the General Staff, belongs to that old revolutionary-security generation. He joined the Islamic Revolutionary Committees after the 1979 revolution and soon entered the newly created Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Kiumars Heydari, now deputy chief of the General Staff, represents an even more troubling development. In 2021, Heydari publicly described the Army Ground Forces’ participation in suppressing the November 2019 protests as one of its “proud” missions. During the 2022 uprising, he referred to protesters as “flies.”
The significance of this goes beyond offensive rhetoric. The Artesh, Iran’s regular military, has traditionally been distinguished from the more ideological IRGC. When a senior regular army commander regards suppressing domestic unrest as an honorable military function, the boundary between defending Iran and defending the Islamic Republic begins to disappear.
That distinction is fundamental. A state and a regime are not the same thing. Governments can change, leaders can leave office, policies can be abandoned and political parties can disappear without the nation disappearing with them. Authoritarian rulers resist this separation because they increasingly identify their own survival with national survival. Criticism becomes subversion, opposition becomes conspiracy, protest becomes a security threat and political change is presented as a national catastrophe. Coercion then ceases to be merely one instrument available to government and becomes an organizing principle of political life.
The appointments of Ahmad Vahidi and Hossein Taeb demonstrate two aspects of this mentality.
Vahidi’s career runs through the intelligence and external operations history of the Islamic Republic. He served in intelligence affairs under then-IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaei and later became associated with the external operations apparatus that developed into the Quds Force.
Argentine prosecutors accuse Vahidi of involvement in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed, and Interpol issued a Red Notice concerning him in connection with the case. His elevation to command the IRGC places a veteran of intelligence, asymmetric warfare and extraterritorial operations at the center of Iran’s most powerful revolutionary military institution.
Taeb represents the other side of the equation: the regime’s fear of danger from within. His career has passed through the IRGC, the Ministry of Intelligence, counterintelligence and senior positions in the security establishment. The United States sanctioned him in 2010 for serious human rights abuses, while the European Union later imposed restrictive measures on him over serious violations of Iranian citizens’ rights.
The Islamic Republic is turning to the custodians of its violent past.
Taeb’s return to command the Basij is especially revealing. The Basij is not merely a reserve military force; it is embedded throughout Iranian society and functions as an instrument of ideological mobilization, surveillance, intimidation, manpower generation and suppression of unrest. Putting an experienced intelligence operator at its head suggests that Tehran is preparing not only for enemies beyond Iran’s borders, but for instability inside them.
Taken together, these choices suggest that the regime increasingly sees the foreign battlefield and the domestic political arena as parts of the same security problem. Military setbacks can undermine the mythology of strength on which authoritarian systems depend. Intelligence penetration can expose elite divisions. Economic deterioration can turn private frustration into public protest. Domestic unrest can weaken the regime while external pressure intensifies paranoia within it. Under such conditions, national security undergoes a dangerous transformation: It ceases to mean primarily the security of the nation and increasingly means the security of the political order governing it.
This is also why the Islamic Republic’s resilience should be interpreted carefully.
The regime has absorbed serious military and intelligence shocks without disintegrating. Commanders have been killed and replaced, institutions have continued functioning, and the chain of command has survived. This organizational resilience should not be underestimated.
Yet the identities of the replacements expose another reality: Nearly half a century after the revolution, Tehran repeatedly reaches back into the same aging revolutionary-security generation for figures it considers experienced, ideologically reliable and personally trustworthy. The regime can replace commanders, but its pool of trusted guardians appears increasingly narrow. Continuity is therefore simultaneously evidence of strength and a symptom of exhaustion.
This creates a deeper problem of political legitimacy. Every state requires some capacity for coercion, but a government that increasingly relies upon coercion to compensate for declining legitimacy enters a destructive cycle. The more it fears society, the more it expands surveillance and control; the more intrusive those mechanisms become, the wider the distance between rulers and citizens; and the wider that distance becomes, the more society itself is perceived as a potential threat. Repression may produce obedience, but obedience is not legitimacy. Fear can preserve a political system for a long time, but it cannot manufacture genuine consent.
For Israel, these appointments offer little reason to interpret succession in Tehran as an ideological transformation. The men now entrusted with military and security power were formed inside institutions that spent decades defining Israel and the United States as external enemies while treating Iranian dissent as an internal security threat. Personnel may change, and a new supreme leader may occupy the apex of the system, but the institutional worldview beneath him remains remarkably durable.
For Iranians, the issue is more tragic. Iran possesses an ancient civilization, a highly educated population, immense human and economic potential, a global diaspora and generations seeking prosperity, dignity, political normality and a constructive relationship with the outside world. Yet when the country most needs institutional modernization, economic recovery and political reconciliation, its rulers continue to place their trust in institutions and personalities shaped by intelligence operations, ideological warfare, surveillance, repression and revolutionary confrontation.
This may ultimately be the defining distinction between a state confident in its citizens and a regime frightened of them. The former asks how institutions can protect society; the latter asks how institutions can protect the rulers from society. Mojtaba Khamenei appears to be choosing the second path. Instead of responding to vulnerability with a political opening, his emerging order is responding with fortification. Instead of separating the interests of Iran from the survival of the Islamic Republic, it is binding them closer together.
Therein lies the deeper tragedy of the age of killers and criminals in Iran. Nearly half a century after promising to construct a revolutionary future, the Islamic Republic is again turning to the custodians of its violent past. Iran needs a state secure enough to trust its people. The regime appears determined to build one powerful enough to control them.
