The Economist reports:

On June 23rd Iran’s regime ignored President Donald Trump’s warnings and attacked American military bases in Qatar and Iraq. Missiles could be seen over skyscrapers in Doha, Qatar’s capital. While the damage and casualties appear minimal, the war has reached the Gulf, whose glimmering cities offer an alternative vision of the Middle East and whose energy the world needs. The strikes outside Iran come alongside a sudden, ominous power shift inside it. Military hardliners are grabbing power from clerics. That could mean they try to extricate themselves from the war now in order to fight another day. But in the medium term it could signal that the regime becomes more extreme, not more pragmatic, under the pressure of a devastating military campaign.

One reason for this shift is that Iran’s elite fears it is in a struggle to preserve the country’s political system. Mr Trump has signalled he might approve the overthrow of the clerical-military order. “Why wouldn’t there be a regime change,” he asked on June 22nd. Strikes against non-nuclear targets have galvanised elements of an outraged Iranian public behind the regime. But most important of all, there has been a shift in who holds power at the top as a result of the war. The military men have gained ascendance over the religious clerics for the first time since Iran’s revolution in 1979. And they are not moderate.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 86, and for years there has been speculation about succession, although who might gain the upper hand has been far from clear. The war is changing that, turbo-charging a power shift to the regime’s military arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In the first days of the fighting Mr Khamenei, ageing and isolated for his own safety, disappeared from the scene like the Shias’ hidden Imam. He delegated decision-making to a new council, or shura, dominated by the IRGC. “The country is in effect under martial law,” says an observer.

As the IRGC gains control its elite is being transformed at speed by Israel’s assassinations. Gone are the veteran commanders who for years pursued “strategic patience”, limiting their fire when their totemic leader, Qassem Soleimani, was assassinated in 2020, and holding it when Israel battered their proxies, Hamas and Hizbullah, in 2024. Now a new generation, impatient and more dogmatic, has taken their place and is bent on redeeming national pride. “The maximalist position has been strengthened,” says an academic close to the reformist camp. He claims the decision-makers in place before the war were debating whether to ditch their anti-Israel stance. But “everyone is now a hardliner”. [Continue reading…]