Die Dritte Islamische Republik: Die unbeabsichtigten Folgen eines Krieges – für den Iran, den Nahen Osten und die Weltordnung

[Excerpt from essay by Suzanne Maloney, Vice President of the Brookings Institution and Director of its Foreign Policy program. She served as an external adviser to the U.S. State Department’s Undersecretary for Political Affairs in the Obama administration and as a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff in the George W. Bush administration.]

More broadly, what Iran’s leaders want is to push their country’s revolutionary project forward, ushering in what might be described as the Third Islamic Republic of Iran. The first republic, helmed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was a revolutionary experiment that sought to impose religious rule at home and destabilize its neighbors. Ali Khamenei’s rule launched the second republic, which institutionalized the dominance of the supreme leader’s office and empowered the military through its role in reconstruction after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

In engineering Mojtaba’s rise, the regime is seeking to establish the third republic: an explicitly praetorian state, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the wider security apparatus firmly in control of decision-making over all aspects of governance, society, and foreign policy.