Iran, three scenarios, two of which are worse than now
Posted on: 12 March 2026
Twelve days ago Trump declared that the attack had been so successful it had eliminated most of the candidates for succession. "It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead." It was a quip. It was also an accurate description of the structural problem Washington created without a plan for the day after.
The Assembly of Experts, the eighty-eight-member clerical body constitutionally tasked with electing the new Supreme Leader, held a first online session on 3 March. The IRGC applied pressure on members to vote for Mojtaba Khamenei, the late leader's son. Iran International's accounts describe an atmosphere characterised as "unnatural": those who raised objections were given "limited time" to speak, discussion was cut off before the vote. A second session was scheduled for 5 March. Eight members boycotted it, citing "heavy pressure" from the Revolutionary Guards. By 6 March, with two candidates still in contention and both described as "reluctant to accept the position", the Expediency Discernment Council suspended the Assembly and shifted authority to the interim leadership council provided for by the constitution during vacancies in supreme power.
What we are observing is not a succession process. It is a process of internal negotiation under bombardment, with actors trying not to expose themselves while the military situation remains unresolved. Three structural scenarios emerge from this configuration. Two of the three are worse than the current situation.
The first scenario is the one the IRGC is pushing: Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader, with the Revolutionary Guards as the real arbiter of power behind a clerical-constitutional facade. The appeal of this scenario for the IRGC is precise. Mojtaba has decades of relationships with the Guard's senior command, he was the informal channel between his father and military leadership, and he can invoke dynastic continuity at a moment when continuity is the only political argument that works internally. Stanford's Abbas Milani captured the institutional logic accurately: the IRGC is not ideologically committed to velayat-e faqih, it is a corporate entity protecting its economic and military territory. Mojtaba is the choice that minimises internal uncertainty in the short term.
The structural problem with this scenario is temporal. An Islamic Republic founded on the overthrow of the Shah's monarchy, now introducing father-to-son hereditary succession, faces a legitimacy crisis that IRGC pressure on clerics cannot resolve. The relevant parallel is not with military regimes where force is sufficient: it is with systems that require a genuine theocratic consent base to function. A Supreme Leader without authentic religious legitimacy is a fragile institution that holds as long as the IRGC holds. That is the mechanism that transforms an acute crisis into a chronic one.
The second scenario is the one Trump says he wants but for which he has prepared no architecture: regime collapse and transition toward something different. The narrative appeal is real. The celebrations at Khamenei's death in some Iranian squares, the January protests that left more than seven thousand dead according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the depth of the legitimacy deficit accumulated over four decades of repression. But Robin Wright of the New Yorker identified the structural problem precisely: "The Iranians have many young Nelson Mandelas, but they don't have the kind of African National Congress that had years to form an infrastructure, to define what the alternative might look like, and who would be its leadership. Iran doesn't have any of that."
Regime collapse without an organised alternative produces fragmentation, not transition. It produces competition between IRGC factions for resource control, proliferation of local militias, destabilisation of ethnic minorities along borders, and a power vacuum that regional actors fill according to their own interests. Turkey is already positioned to do so. The risk for Iranian Kurdish groups, already described as on standby for cross-border operations, becomes immediate for Ankara. This scenario is worse than the current one because it replaces a predictable adversary with unpredictable instability across an energy-critical theatre. British readers will recognise the pattern: it is the logic that produced the post-2003 Iraq dynamic, applied to a larger country with more complex ethnic geography and a functioning nuclear programme at some stage of dismantlement.
The third scenario is the one no one is naming publicly but which some European foreign ministries are beginning to calculate privately: an accelerated negotiation with whoever emerges at the Iranian apex, driven by the need to reopen Hormuz before the economic damage becomes irreversible. The political mechanism that could make it possible exists. Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the Islamic Republic's founder, was considered by senior IRGC figures as a moderate candidate before the strikes, commands respect among the clerics of Qom, and holds a public position that combines revolutionary continuity with diplomatic openness. In May 2025 he said: "Sometimes dignity is born through war, and sometimes through holding firm in the field of negotiation." He is not a westernised reformist. He is someone to whom the IRGC might yield in exchange for guarantees of institutional survival.
This scenario is the least probable because it requires three things simultaneously that are difficult to coordinate: Trump accepting a halt before the total regime change he has declared as an objective; the IRGC choosing survival over martyrdom; and European chancelleries applying diplomatic pressure on Washington with a coherence they have not demonstrated over the past eleven days. Three independent variables that must align within a window of days.
The paradox structuring all three scenarios is a single one. The United States eliminated Iranian leadership without a plan for the day after, and now finds itself in the position of having to influence a succession process in an adversary country under its own bombardment. Trump told Iranians to "take over your government, it's yours to take." The invitation presupposes that an alternative structure exists. It does not. What exists is the IRGC, with its property portfolio, its oil contracts, its internal protection networks. The IRGC did not wait for Khamenei each morning to know what to do. It already knew. It still does.
The clinical question is not who the next Supreme Leader will be. It is which of the three mechanisms activates first, and whether the window for the third scenario closes before anyone decides to hold it open.