The group now running Iran regards Ali Khamenei as a moderate who did not retaliate hard enough - and historian Niall Ferguson says the West badly underestimates how radical the new leadership has become.
Ferguson drew the comparison in a Free Press interview, arguing that the war has pushed the regime further toward extremism rather than weakening it, as reported by "Hvylya".
"President Trump would love you to believe that this is somehow a more reasonable regime than the one of Ali Khamenei. But I don't think that's right," Ferguson said. "The group of people now running Iran, with Mojtaba Khamenei as the figurehead, is a tightly knit group of revolutionaries deeply committed to the project of the 1979 revolution, who regarded Ali Khamenei as too soft."
Ferguson compared the dynamic to the French Revolution, where external military pressure radicalized the regime rather than toppling it. "Think of the Jacobins as being now in power. That's a frightening thought, because of course these people are also capable, as they've shown, of brutal repression of their own population," he said.
Trump has claimed the war produced regime change in Iran, and Ferguson agreed - but not in the direction Washington intended. The president achieved regime change, except it produced a more radical government, not a more compliant one. The new leadership views the conflict through a revolutionary lens, treating military losses as acceptable costs in a broader ideological struggle.
Ferguson identified this radicalization as one of the war's most significant unintended consequences and the element most absent from US and European analysis. The regime that now sits across the negotiation table from Vice President Vance is more fanatical, more ideologically motivated, and less inclined to compromise than the one Washington went to war against.