The war with the United States and Israel is accelerating a transformation that has been underway inside Iran for decades: the military is taking the upper hand, and the clerics are being shoved aside. Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution, calls this emerging order the "Third Islamic Republic."
In an interview with Foreign Affairs, Maloney traced the regime through three distinct phases. The first began not with the 1979 revolution but later, when clerics seized control within a diverse revolutionary coalition and imposed their vision of an Islamic state. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the towering figure, building "a state in which his word was law" while maintaining institutions that resembled a normal government, "Hvylya" reports.
The second Islamic Republic began with Khomeini's death in June 1989 and the rise of Ali Khamenei as supreme leader. Khamenei's nearly 37 years in power produced "the deep institutionalization of the role of the supreme leader" and vastly expanded the authority of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which became "deeply entrenched in the political establishment but also in Iran's economy," Maloney said.
The third phase is now emerging from the wreckage of the war. "What we're seeing now, I think, in this third Islamic Republic is going to be one in which Khamenei's project is brought to fruition, in which the military takes the upper hand," Maloney said. The clerics maintain a "symbiotic relationship" with the military, but the system's center of gravity has shifted decisively toward the Revolutionary Guard.
The question of who actually runs Iran today remains opaque: Khamenei was killed alongside family members in a strike on his home, and his son Mojtaba, named as successor, "may be injured" or "incapacitated entirely." Yet the system kept operating without visible disruption, Maloney said. The most likely interlocutor for U.S. negotiations is Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the parliament speaker and longtime Revolutionary Guard figure who controlled both its military and economic wings.
Maloney described the emerging state as "a corrupt state, one in which the political elite continues to control all elements of society as well as the economy and one that they believe will be strengthened by this war." The regime's ability to maintain command and control despite weeks of devastating strikes left even close observers surprised. "I also am surprised at the extent to which things seem to be running in a relatively smooth way," Maloney said.
Earlier, "Hvylya" examined how local fractures across the Middle East fueled the rise of armed groups independently of Tehran.