“We have, really, a regime change,” US President Donald Trump said earlier this week in regards to Iran. “You know, this is a change in the regime, because the leaders are all very different than the ones we started off with that created all these problems.”
Then came the line that matters even more: “We’re actually talking to the right people, and they want to make a deal so badly, you have no idea how badly they want to make a deal.”
Iran has not undergone regime change. It has undergone a routine process of succession. Those are not the same things. To describe the current rulers in Tehran as “the right people” is not just a problematic message in the middle of wartime negotiations, but an insult to the people of Iran who were massacred in the streets by the ideology of these “right people.”
That isn’t to say that the United States should never negotiate.
The Jerusalem Post understands that it is up to Israel and the US to decide if and when to continue military pressure, seek a ceasefire, or test diplomacy. But they should do so in full awareness of whom they are dealing with. This is not a post-regime Iran. It is the same extremist regime, damaged but intact, speaking in a somewhat different voice because circumstances have forced it to.
Israel has seen this movie before with Iran’s proxies. Killing Hassan Nasrallah did not produce a regime change in Hezbollah. Eliminating Yahya Sinwar or Ismail Haniyeh did not transform Hamas into something fundamentally different. Leadership losses can disrupt, weaken, and disorient terrorist organizations and authoritarian systems. They do not automatically change the ideology, the structure, or the worldview underneath. That is as true in Tehran as it is in Beirut or Gaza.
The reality is that the Islamic Republic is still in the hands of the same ideological camp that dragged the region into war and brutalized Iranians for decades. Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran’s former supreme leader, is not a break from the old system. He is its dynastic continuation, a hardline figure whose power is rooted in the clerical-security establishment and whose rise points toward more repression, isolation, and Islamist extremism, not less.
Alongside him is parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, one of the most important operational figures in Tehran, who is now “practically leading Iran.” Ghalibaf is not some transitional technocrat or compromise figure. He is a fanatic who has been with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps since its inception. As far as the remaining Iranian leadership goes, it doesn’t get much more old guard than him.
Power in Iran remains with IRGC, security apparatus
That is the core problem with Trump’s phrase “the right people.” Right for whom? Right to provide an off-ramp from the war on a technicality, maybe. But not right in any meaningful moral or political sense. Not right for the Iranian people who have been jailed, shot, tortured, and disappeared by this regime and its enforcers. Not right if the phrase is meant to imply that Washington and Jerusalem are suddenly dealing with a better class of rulers than the ones who started this war.
Much of the real power in Iran still lies where it has long lain, with the IRGC and the wider security apparatus.
And it is worth remembering what that system – apparently now comprised of “better people” – did only weeks ago. As many as 30,000 people may have been killed during the January 8-9 crackdown alone, according to two senior Iranian Health Ministry officials and hospital data shared with Time magazine.
These numbers – while almost impossible to verify in the middle of an Internet blackout and when dealing with an oppressive regime with a stronghold on media – have been deemed plausible and even likely by intelligence officials, sources, and even Trump himself.
In what world can anyone who took part in a system that brutally murdered tens of thousands of its own people simply for protesting be exonerated of its crimes just because he wasn’t in the captain’s chair when they took place?
Deal or no deal, ceasefire or no ceasefire, it is an insult to the people of Iran, the people protesting for freedom and dying for it, to pretend that the current leadership is somehow new or much better than the previous one. The names may be different. The regime is not.