After Khamenei, What Now?

 Ihttps://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/03/iran-war-khamenei-trump/686208/

Iranians want democracy. Trump wants a brief conflict. Neither seems likely.

What seems to provoke the most poetic language from Trump is the prospect of the Iranian people rising up to take power from their despotic leaders. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach,” he said when he announced the strikes, and on Sunday repeated his hope: “That is going to happen,” he told The Atlantic. “You are seeing that, and I think it’s gonna happen.”

But Iran currently lacks a major organized democratic opposition. And that’s the key issue, according to the pro-democracy Iranian writer and Atlantic contributor Arash Azizi. There is no credible ready alternative to the current regime.

Like yesterday, he suggested that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should surrender their weapons to the people. And when he announced the war, he said, Now is time to seize control of your destiny. What do you make of all that?

And it’s the same question about the people should take over. I mean, okay, the people should take over, but what should they do? They’re still facing more than a million people under arms who are defending the regime. There’s still a part of the population—I heard an estimate of about 20 percent; maybe it’s lower—who support the regime, and we saw some of them came out and demonstrated today, as well. So the mechanisms by which this should be done aren’t clear. And I mean, there are people outside the country who have plans. There’s the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has described himself as a potential leader and a potential unifier.

Now, as for the president, he has said very different things over the last 24 hours. So yes, he said he had three candidates. Then he said in another interview that he had a few candidates, but they had all been killed. At some point, he said a Venezuela-style transition would be the best thing, which suggests he doesn’t really want to change the regime.