Iran's Islamic Republic has absorbed the full force of America's military campaign - and remains standing. While nearly all of its nuclear facilities, most of its missile arsenal, weapons factories, navy, and much of its command-and-control infrastructure have been destroyed, the regime itself has survived. Tiers of senior military, intelligence, and political leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. There is no sign of a popular uprising.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, writing in Foreign Policy, has called the emerging order "Islamic Republic 2.0" - an IRGC state working in "a corrupt but pragmatic alliance with Iran's business interests," as "Hvylya" reports.
The old theocracy had run out of gas, Ignatius argues. Ali Khamenei had no obvious successor after the death of Ebrahim Raisi in a 2024 helicopter crash. His son Mojtaba, chosen as the new supreme leader last week, has neither the charisma nor the clerical standing of his father. But what he does not lack is motivation: Mojtaba has lost his father, wife, and son in this war.
One senior Gulf official who passionately opposes the regime offered a bleak assessment: "I don't think we are going to break their will. They will rebuild as long as they're alive." The cadres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hide among piles of rubble, Ignatius writes, but they have not been eliminated.
The columnist suggests that a figure similar to the late former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - who held real power during much of the elder Khamenei's reign - could eventually emerge and find a path to Trump. But that, he stresses, is not the future desired by the thousands of brave protesters who were gunned down in January, when Trump said he was coming to their rescue.
Also read: "This Is the Final Battle": Vali Nasr on Why Iran Believes It Can Outlast America.