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Since the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran, questions have grown about Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is 86 years old. During the conflict, he was a potential Israeli target. NPR international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam looks at who or what could replace Khamenei upon his death.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: There has only been one previous time when Iran went through a process of naming a new supreme leader. That was in 1989 when Ayatollah Khamenei was chosen to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, the towering figurehead behind the Islamic Revolution. Now, nearly four decades on, that process is once again unfolding.
VALI NASR: Everything in Iran in the past four or five years has really been about succession.
NORTHAM: Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, says Khamenei has periodically handed names of potential successors to the so-called Council of Experts, a group of roughly 80 clerics who decide the next leader. Nasr says after the recent war with Israel and the U.S. bombing of key Iranian nuclear sites, the selection has become more urgent.
NASR: I think in the interest of preservation of the state and ensuring its continuity, he created contingency plans to make a transfer of power much more smooth and quick.
NORTHAM: Speculation who may succeed Khamenei veers from his son, Mojtaba, to a grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini and to past reform-minded presidents. Afshon Ostovar, an Iran expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, says Khamenei has good reasons not to tip his hand as to who will succeed him.
AFSHON OSTOVAR: One, Khamenei is going to lose status because he's going to have a successor. But also, that successor is going to be a target for political attacks by his opponents, right? And so the longer that successor is known, the longer opponents are going to have to sort of tarnish his brand.
NORTHAM: Ostovar says a successor will have to be a cleric.
OSTOVAR: If you didn't have a cleric succeeding Khamenei, you would no longer have an Islamic revolution. You'd no longer have an Islamic republic. I mean, it would be a completely different system.
NORTHAM: But Ali Vaez, who heads up the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, disagrees. He says Iran has suffered deep setbacks under Khamenei. The economy is battered. There's serious discontent in society. It's lost key proxies in the region, and its military was decimated by Israel. Vaez says the revolutionary guards may see this as an opportunity for change.
ALI VAEZ: It is quite possible that Ayatollah Khamenei was the last supreme leader of Iran, that going forward, it is hard to imagine that the military, the Revolutionary Guards, which has paid the highest price for Ayatollah Khamenei's strategic mistakes, would continue seeing the clerical establishment as an asset and not as a liability.
NORTHAM: Whoever that successor is, the question becomes, what kind of leader? What qualifications and character does he - and it undoubtedly will be a he - have to have? Ostovar says he will likely be seen as weak.
OSTOVAR: Weak because none of the institutions of power within the Islamic Republic already are going to want to just hand over the kingdom to somebody who's going to become a dictator, right? So the more powerful a person is, the more influence they have. The weaker a person is, the more influence that all the factions can potentially exercise over that person.
NORTHAM: Khamenei himself was seen as weak when he was named supreme leader. Johns Hopkins' Nasr says he was also cunning and aligned himself with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a dominant multipronged military force. Nasr says, for all practical purposes, the Revolutionary Guards are already running the country.
NASR: They are in the government, they control media, they control vast areas of the economy. They are in decision-making circles. In a way, they are operating the way the Egyptian or the Pakistani military operate, behind a civilian facade.
NORTHAM: But Nasr says there's a realization among many power brokers that things have to change, that Iran's virulent anti-West stance has hit its limit.
NASR: And there is powerful voices that are not saying we should tomorrow morning become absolute friends of the West, but basically, they're saying we should end the war with the West. We should go down the path of de-escalation, and after de-escalation will come normalization.
NORTHAM: But how Khamenei dies could also affect the decision about who next runs Iran. If he dies naturally, Nasr says a moderate could be supreme leader. If Khamenei is assassinated, most likely a hard-line cleric will take control.
Jackie Northam, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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