On July 5, 2017, the Washington Post published a report regarding a U.S. Congressional hearing in which U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson discussed the situation in post-Khamenei Iran, in the event of the death of the aging Iranian leader (born 1939). The report, titled “It\u2019s Time to Prepare for an Iranian Political Collapse,” builds on the hypothesis that “the transition of power could accelerate a complete collapse of the political system.” The report suggests a trend in Washington to avoid repeating what happened on March 5, 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower, following the death of Joseph Stalin, called a meeting of the U.S. administration to build on government studies aimed at exploiting the succession crisis of the Soviet leader (born 1879) in the Kremlin; Eisenhower discovered that “there was no plan,” despite a U.S. government order to prepare for such an event since 1946.<\/p>\n
In Moscow, the post-Stalin transition did not lead to a collapse of authority despite the struggles between the reformist wing led by the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, and the conservative Stalinist wing (Beria, “the intelligence chief executed in December 1953”; Malenkov, the Prime Minister; and Molotov, the Foreign Minister). Despite the unrest in Poland and Hungary in 1956, Malenkov and Molotov were removed from the Party\u2019s Politburo in July 1957 after being stripped of their government posts in February 1955. This facilitated Khrushchev\u2019s critique of Stalinism during the 20th Party Congress in February 1956.<\/p>\n
The collapse of the Soviet system was not possible despite Kremlin turmoil and unrest in the “backyard” due to a strong economy and foreign policy gains (the Soviet-Chinese alliance since the Communist victory in Beijing in 1949; the Communist victory over the French in Vietnam in 1954; and Nasser\u2019s eastward shift toward Moscow since the Czech arms deal in September 1955). Khrushchev was eventually ousted by the remnants of the Stalinists led by the trio (Brezhnev\u2013Kosygin\u2013Podgorny) in October 1964, after the Soviet leader suffered a retreat against Washington two years prior when he was forced by President John F. Kennedy to withdraw Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev\u2019s position was further exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet-Chinese alliance in June 1960 and the U.S. attack on North Vietnamese Communists following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, which initiated the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n
In this framework, Leonid Brezhnev\u2019s experience was similar to that of Ali Khamenei since he took power in Tehran following Khomeini’s death on June 4, 1989: a strong Soviet economy (Soviet industry was 75% the size of the American industry in 1970) allowed for internal hardlining away from Khrushchev-era reforms in the realm of individual freedoms. Furthermore, the U.S. entanglement in the Vietnam War provided the Kremlin the space to crack down on the Czechoslovakian unrest in the summer of 1968, when Soviet tanks ousted the reformist Communist leader in Prague, Alexander Dub\u010dek. Washington’s struggle in Vietnam was the key to American flexibility with the Soviets, leading to the SALT I agreement in 1972 to limit strategic arms, which was considered Leonid Brezhnev\u2019s primary victory.<\/p>\n
The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam following the 1973 Paris Accords coincided with the Watergate scandal in Washington and the decline of the dollar, paving the way for victories by Kremlin allies in 1975 in Vietnam, Angola (1976), Ethiopia (1977), Afghanistan (1978), and Nicaragua (1979), while the Americans received a major blow in Tehran on February 11, 1979, with the fall of the Shah\u2019s regime. U.S. President Jimmy Carter offered Brezhnev major concessions in strategic arms in the SALT II agreement in Vienna on June 18, 1979. Most likely, Brezhnev\u2019s reading of American weakness was what drove him on December 27, 1979, to invade Afghanistan as a passage toward warm waters, despite the opposition of Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB. Soviet foreign policy successes in the late seventies were accompanied by the calcification of the Soviet system’s structure, the steady erosion of its internal social base, the onset of economic weakness, and the beginning of a global right-wing wave (Pope John Paul II \u2013 Khomeini \u2013 the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood \u2013 Margaret Thatcher \u2013 Ronald Reagan), signaling the recession of the Marxist-Leninist left that had begun in October 1917. The response to the Polish unrest led by the Solidarity union in 1980-1981 was weaker than the response to the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia in 1968.<\/p>\n
In the stage following Brezhnev\u2019s death on November 10, 1982, the weak Soviet economy and the fragility of the ruling Communist Party\u2019s internal social base were the decisive factors in the process of the Soviet system’s collapse\u2014first globally in 1987, regionally in 1989, and as an internal structure in 1991. This occurred after President Reagan\u2019s “Star Wars” initiative in March 1983 nullified the foundation of the Cold War: nuclear parity between the two giants. Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s Perestroika in 1985 was an expression of Soviet surrender, as the Soviet economy was unable to enter the Star Wars arms race. Effectively, Gorbachev surrendered at the Washington Summit with Reagan (December 1987) after his initiative to trade the withdrawal of Soviet SS strategic missiles targeting Western capitals for the withdrawal of the “Star Wars” project failed. After the Washington Summit\u2014which signified a Soviet resignation from superpower status\u2014translated into the withdrawal from Afghanistan in early 1989, we saw how Moscow lost its regional influence in East and Central Europe with the collapse of regimes in Warsaw Pact countries through internal revolutions in the autumn of 1989. This was followed by the disintegration of the Soviet interior in 1991 after the loss of the Kremlin’s global and regional influence.<\/p>\n
Khamenei resembles Brezhnev, as he came to power after a military defeat against Baghdad similar to Khrushchev\u2019s defeat in Cuba. The strong Iranian economy in the nineties allowed him space for internal hardlining and the foiling of President Mohammad Khatami\u2019s reformist movement (1997\u20132005). Furthermore, the successes of Iranian foreign policy following the U.S. ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003 made Iran the “major regional power,” according to a statement by Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. These foreign policy successes allowed Khamenei to crush the “Green Revolution” in June 2009, which had revealed the weakness of the regime’s social base in Tehran, especially as it coincided with the start of secret talks the previous month in Muscat to forge a U.S.-Iranian agreement on the nuclear file. Barack Obama was like Jimmy Carter, who wanted to soothe and restrict Brezhnev\u2019s expansionist appetite through concessions in strategic arms but ended up achieving the opposite.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump, in his focus on Tehran during his first term (2017\u20132021) and his second term since 2025, resembles what Ronald Reagan was to Moscow between 1981 and 1989. In Trump\u2019s view\u2014hardline toward Tehran in his first term\u2014foreign policy successes countered by a weak domestic economy and a weak social base for the ruling regime are a recipe for a latent collapse that can be turned into an actual one through external military or economic pressure. This drove him to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had struck with Khamenei and to impose maximum economic sanctions on Iran in 2018. Anyone who has visited Iran notices that Iranian youth are among the least religious in the Middle East. Furthermore, the 2009 protests and the preceding elections showed that major cities (Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, Tabriz) voted for Hossein Mousavi against Ahmadinejad, and that the wealthy, middle-class, and educated urban sectors are on the other side of Ali Khamenei\u2019s authority, not to mention the potentially explosive ethnic composition of Iran: (Persians 51%, Azeris 24%, Kurds 7%, Arabs 3%, etc.), World Almanac, New York 2010, p. 791.<\/p>\n
In the protests of autumn 2022, and subsequently the protests of early 2026\u2014the latter coinciding with the decline of Iranian regional influence following the Gaza wars (2023\u20132025), the Lebanon war in the autumn of 2024, and the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime\u2014there is a situation opposite to that of 2009. Back then, Khamenei suppressed the Green Revolution while in a state of great regional strength and at the beginning of nuclear negotiations with Obama. Currently, Iran is witnessing a significant decline in its regional power and an extremely weak economic situation. It can be said that the U.S. intelligence report in the first month of 2026 stating that “the Iranian authority is at its weakest since 1979” is consistent with reality. However, it is clear that internal protests do not have sufficient momentum to topple the regime as occurred in 1979 when the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah.<\/p>\n
Here, it can be said that the economic and military pressure Trump is currently exerting on Khamenei aims to push for major Iranian concessions in the three areas the Americans declare and desire: (concessions in the nuclear and missile programs and in Iranian regional policy). According to their statements, they do not seem to want to topple the Iranian regime\u2014and here the Americans differ from the Israelis\u2014but rather to push the Tehran of Khamenei and post-Khamenei to generate an Iranian Gorbachev as a result of those concessions following the shift in the regional balance against Iran\u2019s favor in a post-October 7, 2023, Middle East. If Khamenei and his regime do not read the new balance of power and concede, Trump\u2019s bet remains that military strikes and economic strangulation will produce an Iranian leader or leaders from within the current ruling structure who will offer the required concessions after reading the new realities following those strikes and economic pressure\u2014just as Moscow, from Brezhnev and beyond, was led to generate a Soviet Gorbachev.<\/p>\n
It is likely that Khamenei\u2019s Tehran now in 2026 is like Brezhnev\u2019s Moscow in 1980, when this prophecy about the Soviet fate was published in The Economist on December 27, 1980, page 15: “If developments continued at their current social and economic momentum\u2014which should be monitored by any apparatus with enough intelligence to be terrified\u2014the entire rotten Soviet system could face a 1789-style revolution before 1989.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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