There are no such regime forces inside Iran that would have led it to a brighter day if only the West hadn’t killed them first.
There are no such regime forces inside Iran that would have led it to a brighter day if only the West hadn’t killed them first.
A li Larijani — one of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foremost repressors, the architect of the slaughter of perhaps tens of thousands of anti-regime protesters, Iran’s “de facto” wartime leader, and a figure who the U.S. government alleged “plans, organizes, and executes terrorism around the world” — was, according to CNN, “a pragmatist rather than an ideological hardliner.”
If he was hostile to U.S. interests, it was only because he was “committed to the survival of the Islamic Republic as Iran’s nezam — or system of government.” In fact, as CNN’s Christiane Amanpour contends, Larijani was once America and Israel’s “most favored transitional candidate” to lead a post-Islamic Republic Iran (how that comports with his unfailing commitment to the “nezam,” only the “experts” know). It was only when Larijani ordered the mass slaughter of protesters and “assumed a key role” in executing Iran’s omnidirectional attacks on its neighbors that he fell out of Washington and Jerusalem’s favor.
The conclusion you should draw from this reporting, now that Larijani is dead, is that the United States and Israel are sloppily neutralizing Iranian regime figures even at the risk of their own wartime strategy. Perhaps Larijani wasn’t one of the good guys. But he was a figure with whom the Americans and Israelis could seek accommodation. If Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu weren’t firing from the hip, they’d be in a better position today — even with the unreconstructed elements of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Islamic Republic still in power.
Longtime New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is so convinced:
I fear @vali_nasr is right. When I met Ali Larijani I found him an absolute insider kingpin of the Iranian regime — but also the kind of strong and pragmatic leader who just might be able to hammer out a peace deal. Not sure, but I wonder if the war will now be harder to end. https://t.co/qSC2QSqoBy
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 17, 2026
The rest of us might struggle to reconcile Kristof’s faith in Larijani’s willingness to negotiate with the United States and Larijani’s emphatic March 1 statement: “We will not negotiate with the United States.”
Readers of the Washington Post will encounter similar apologetics for the Islamic Republic as well as warnings about the horrors that America and Israel may be unwittingly unleashing.
“Despite more than two weeks of relentless airstrikes, U.S. intelligence assessments say, Iran’s regime likely will remain in place for now, weakened but more hard-line,” the Post’s report began, “with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps security forces exerting greater control.”
The Post’s sources insist that they warned Trump in “very sobering briefings” that a “more entrenched IRGC” would be likely to emerge from this war. “It wasn’t just predictable,” one unnamed person “familiar with the assessments” said. “It was predicted. He was told in advance.”
The proposition to which the Post wants us to subscribe is that it would be in the West’s interest to find a figure within the existing Iranian leadership who might guide America’s hapless leaders to an offramp — de-escalating a conflict its reporters and sources clearly see as disastrous and unwinnable. In short, we should not want a post-Islamic Republic Iran. Rather, we should be content with the devils we know.
It was probably inevitable that the legend of the elusive “moderate mullahs” would find its way back into the discourse. How many times have Americans been asked to put their faith in the notion that, somewhere in Iran, there exists a moderate religious fanatic? It is a faith-based proposition, one that is impervious to a litany of contradictory evidence.
“The maintenance of clerical power in Iran is a sacred mission,” Foundation for the Defense of Democracies senior fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote almost 20 years ago. “It is what separates the revolutionaries from the detested traditional clergy, who wanted to hold government to high ethical standards but also to keep their distance from the corrupting institutions and exercise of power.”
Many Iranian political figures have provided naïve Westerners with hope that a new day had dawned inside the Islamic Republic. Onetime Iranian president Mohammad Khatami once played that role, despite his part in handing down death sentences to thousands of Iranian political prisoners. Their hopes were dashed when, in October 2001, Khatami himself put down with brutal force the worst anti-regime riots Iran had experienced to that point.
For some reason, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the leaders of the 1979 revolution, also sparked hopes that reform was in the offing. It wasn’t. As the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney contended, “his shrewd, ruthless pragmatism enabled the Islamic Republic to weather intense crises, but could not overcome the fundamental impasse between the state’s ideological imperatives and the expectations of its citizenry and the world.” That’s one way of putting it. Another would be to note that Rafsanjani himself mused about using nuclear weapons to eradicate Israel, bragged about his role in Iran’s attacks on Americans, and was as committed as any prominent figure within the Iranian clerisy to the Islamic Republic’s raison d’être: “Death to America.”
In 2009, when it seemed likely that onetime Iranian Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi might oust Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a plebiscite, the regime engineered a landslide reelection victory for Ahmadinejad — a scandal that ignited the “Green Revolution” protests. But even if Mousavi was a reformer, he was no moderate. “Previously, he was revolutionary, because everyone inside the system was a revolutionary,” Mousavi’s advisor, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, wrote at the time. “Now he knows Gandhi — before he knew only Che Guevara.” From 2011 on, Mousavi languished in permanent state of house arrest.
That’s the thing: the products of 47 years of indoctrination into the millenarian creed that prevails inside the Islamic Republic are not interested in moderation.
From our vantage point, it seems mostly likely that the combat phase of this war will end in some accommodation with the remnants of this regime. That will also be the point at which the campaign against the Islamic Republic pivots to empowering the Iranian people to take control of their own destinies.
And who knows how that process will play out? A little over 18 months elapsed between the end of combat operations over the skies of Kosovo and the fall of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević. French forces initiated airstrikes on Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya on March 19, 2011, but his regime did not collapse until October 20. And we heard so much about how Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last June produced a rally-around-the-flag effect, only for the regime to experience an existential crisis at the hands of its own citizens just six months later. A reprieve in the fighting may not provide the Iranian regime with much in the way of relief.
Regime collapse is the only outcome that will ultimately ensure the security of U.S. interests in the Middle East. Creating the conditions that could produce that very sequence of events is what the U.S. and Israel are working toward.
The Iranian regime is irredeemable. There are no moderate forces inside the Islamic Republic that, if only the West hadn’t killed them first, would have led Iran to a brighter day. That is an enduring myth. With luck and steadfast dedication, the Islamic Republic itself will prove less durable.