Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is no more. Killed in an Israeli bombardment of his headquarters in Tehran on Saturday, he leaves behind a weakened regime and a country in ruins – the stark and sombre legacy of his 37 years in power.
Mr Khamenei assumed leadership in 1989 under circumstances unusually favorable for a revolutionary state entering middle age. A decade after the revolution, the regime had consolidated its authority and stabilised the country. Iran had endured eight years of devastating war with Iraq without losing territory, and a war-weary population longed for economic recovery as well as political and social reform – a return to normalcy after years of upheaval.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 further reshaped the regional landscape, enabling then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to begin repairing relations with Arab neighbours alienated during the republic’s first revolutionary decade.
Yet Mr Khamenei, the self-proclaimed guardian of the legacy of the republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, regarded the revolution not as a concluded chapter but as an unfinished project. Suspicious of reform at home and reconciliation abroad, he repeatedly obstructed initiatives that might have brought the regime into a more peaceful accommodation with both its own people and the wider world.
Mr Rafsanjani sought to merge the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with the regular military, an effort Mr Khamenei vetoed, preserving the IRGC as a parallel force ultimately loyal to him. Inspired by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, Mr Rafsanjani also attempted to liberalise Iran’s largely state-controlled economy. Mr Khamenei, wary of the political consequences of an empowered private sector, instead steered resources toward the IRGC and other revolutionary institutions that occupied the gray zone between the public and private sectors.
The election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 seemed to signal a turning point. With a winning smile, sophisticated vocabulary and a promise of political freedom, Mr Khatami embodied the aspirations of a society eager to open a new chapter. Mr Khamenei, however, feared that the public had chosen a figure akin to Mikhail Gorbachev – one whose reforms might unleash forces beyond the regime’s control. He therefore allowed the IRGC, the Basij militia, and allied pressure groups to undermine Mr Khatami’s agenda in the name of preserving the revolution. It was also Khamenei who effectively barred Khatami from meeting US president Bill Clinton, foreclosing a rare opportunity for detente between Tehran and Washington.
To be sure, Mr Khamenei faced genuine external pressures. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq placed American forces on Iran’s borders, and president George W Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the so-called Axis of Evil hardened attitudes in Tehran despite Iran’s assistance against the Taliban. Yet Mr Khamenei’s own rhetoric – above all his repeated denunciations of Israel and predictions of its eventual disappearance – together with president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s incendiary statements and Iran’s advancing nuclear programme, furnished Israel with ample cause to resist and undermine any durable accommodation between Tehran and Washington.
All the hard work of President Hassan Rouhani and his capable foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to secure the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was lost in an atmosphere of deepening mistrust and mounting hostility, reinforced by Israeli pressure and Mr Khamenei’s defiant posture, when US President Donald Trump chose to withdraw unilaterally from the nuclear agreement – shattering one of the last fragile hopes for stabilising Iran’s relations with the West.
In 2024, Mr Khamenei permitted the relatively independent-minded Masoud Pezeshkian – a heart surgeon by training – to run for president, but the state’s afflictions were far beyond Mr Pezeshkian’s capacity to cure. In September that year, Israel effectively neutralised Hezbollah, whose missile arsenal had long deterred Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Then, in December, Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria – crucial for maintaining Iran’s overland supply corridor to Hezbollah – collapsed and was replaced by a government hostile to Tehran.
Yet by squandering opportunities for reconciliation with the US under president Joseph Biden – and, for that matter, during Mr Trump’s second term – while waging an unrelenting struggle against Iran’s middle class, the regime only weakened itself. As impoverished citizens paid the price of Mr Khamenei’s obstinacy and poured into the streets in protest, each wave of unrest grew larger and more violent. The latest, which began on December 28, claimed between 3,100 lives, according to government figures, and as many as 36,000 Iranians, according to opposition sources.
Toward the end of his life, Mr Khamenei – aging and increasingly removed from day-to-day decision-making due to the risk of Israeli assassination – came to be widely perceived as personally responsible for the regime’s failures. As a result, he grew ever more isolated. In his place, an informal leadership council emerged, resembling the arrangement that governed Iran during Mr Khomeini’s incapacitation, composed of the president, the speaker of parliament, and the head of the judiciary, alongside representatives of the IRGC and the regular army.
Despite new rounds of negotiations with the US, this collective leadership proved incapable of reaching an agreement, paving the way for the joint Israeli and US bombardments of Saturday, which struck targets across Iran, including the supreme leader’s office, killing Mr Khamenei. It remains uncertain whether this collective leadership can preserve the Islamic Republic itself, let alone Iran’s territorial integrity, in the face of mounting armed insurgencies among ethnic minority groups.
In the end, Mr Khamenei fell victim to his own resistance to political, economic and social reforms that might have bridged the widening gap between state and society. He was also undone by the very project intended to guarantee the regime’s survival: the nuclear programme, whose advance brought Iran to the threshold of nuclear weapons capability but also invited devastating Israeli and American attacks. He leaves behind a country in ruins.
