Everyone is talking; some pessimists think that the Islamic extremists will be in control, and the optimists think that someone on the more conservative, non-religious side will end up in charge. It really doesn’t matter as long as on the religious side, it is someone more moderate, quite a bit more, for that matter.
The country is ~90% Shia, believing in a Supreme leader over everything, so I would lean to another religious leader taking charge, but a rather moderate one who would not be the one and only power. This is where the problem of selecting the next leader gets sticky. Can Iran have another Supreme Leader of a moderate style? We will see. All IMO.
Hoping for an end of this war with a result in peace for the Middle East. The time is now to stop this regime. All IMO.
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-the-iranian-regime-blew-it
“When the Islamic Republic came into being in 1979, its leaders looked to remake the Middle East. We can now say that they succeeded, though not in the ways they hoped.
Rather than eliminating Zionism, ejecting the United States, and establishing the hegemony of Tehran, the net result of the post–October 7, 2023 wars is something like the opposite of these objectives ...
So what, exactly, are the consequences of Iran’s miscalculations?
First, there’s the unprecedented closeness of the U.S.-Israel relationship. ...
... at the moment, the shared strategic vision, and most notably the military integration of the United States and Israel, are about as close as two countries are capable of coming. Even as public opinion regarding the relationship between the U.S. and Israel faces turbulence on left and right, their pilots and intelligence officers are fighting effectively shoulder-to-shoulder. What a dramatic change ...
... We are now also witnessing truly unprecedented levels of Israeli-Arab alignment, going beyond even the Jewish state’s partnership with countries like Jordan on missile defense throughout 2024 and 2025.
The basic logic of the Abraham Accords—at its heart a coalition designed to counterbalance Iranian power and revolutionary fervor—now appeals to countries not party to the original agreement. Only days ago, Saudi Arabia barred the use of its airspace for American and Israeli strikes. But Iran did not repay the favor. Not only has the U.S. embassy in Riyadh been hit by Iranian drones, but also targets that can not be construed as American military or diplomatic facilities in any form—for example, the Ras Tanura refinery. Saudi efforts at a rapprochement with Tehran are dead for now. Even Qatar, for which playing both sides of the U.S.-Iran conflict has been the defining feature of its strategy, has absorbed strike after strike in recent days—and has responded militarily, reportedly downing two Iranian jets.
What a world the Islamic Revolution has wrought. While China and Russia offer Iran generally rhetorical support, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that his government—which doesn’t have a lot of resources or time on its hands—may provide countries such as the United Arab Emirates with technical support for air defense. ...
The current geopolitical moment is easy to describe: Iranian isolation in its region and beyond is at something like the realistic maximum, and the regime is fighting for survival.
The future is naturally less clear. Should the regime fall, then in retrospect we will know that this round of violence was indeed the final phase of the post-10/7 wars, the initiation of which will join events like Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union or Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in the annals of strategic idiocy. A weakened or—stranger things have happened in world politics—a more responsible Iran could contribute to greater stability in the region.
An engaged United States would be needed to manage the inevitable tensions of the new order. Turkish power is already filling the vacuum left by the deflating Islamic Republic, and negotiating the collision of Ankara and Jerusalem in places like Syria will be the first task for American strategists in the new Middle East.
Another challenge will be the fact that the entire idea of the Abraham Accords is the balancing of Iranian power by a coalition of the willing. With the taming of that power, the glue that at this moment powerfully and historically aligns the interests of so many Arab states (not to say the Jewish one) will get less sticky, fast. And of course the Trump administration could decide, for any number of reasons, to cease hostilities and leave remaining elements of the Iranian regime in place—weakened but fundamentally unaltered. Whatever the outcome, divine providence has not smiled on the revolutionaries of 1979.”