If Vladimir Putin won't help, Ayatollah Khamenei looks sunk

Times

6 hours ago

Iran under siege sent its top diplomat this week to see Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, supposedly the Tehran regime's one true remaining friend. The meeting was a flop and it was clear to all that the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was finished.
The shrewd emissary, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, had worked well with the Russians in an earlier stint as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. More importantly perhaps, he served in Estonia and Finland as ambassador at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. So everyone around the Kremlin table this week understood the moment, the blink of an eyelid that signifies the sudden approach of a fin de régime.
The Russians may have anticipated an Iranian plea to intervene with Donald Trump and persuade the American president not to push for a chaotic handover of power. Or was Iran seeking a safe refuge, if not for the supreme leader then at least for his son Mojtaba? Moscow is already full of Assad clan members, decamped from Damascus to ensure they did not endure the grisly end that befell Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.
In fact, the ambassador merely wanted to clarify the terms of a 20-year strategic partnership signed last January, hinting at mutual support in case of outside attack. Were Russia and Iran still allies? Was the Crink axis — which also includes China and North Korea — still a thing?
We don't know yet if Araghchi got an answer. A cynic would say that neither Russia nor China is going to cross the Trump administration for a dying regime. And that same cynic will have noted that the Putin photographed with Araghchi in the Kremlin looked much younger than his 72 years, resembling one of his team of younger doubles. Who knows? The real president might have had another pressing engagement.
Fresh from seeing his number one Middle East ally fall apart in Syria in a fortnight, Putin has spent the past 12 days watching Iran shift from a clerical autocracy into a form of martial law. Khamenei, hiding in a bombproof (but far from secret) shelter, has delegated authority to a new council, a shura that is dominated by officers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). But the supreme leader's communications have been reduced to a minimum, and not with IRGC commanders, nor with anyone able to inform him about bomb damage or the reeling economy.
Outside the shelter, his world has been collapsing. At least a dozen top generals and nuclear scientists have been assassinated. Commanders are killed and so, within days, are their replacements. Iran has no control over its airspace, the main nuclear installations have been hammered, oil and energy facilities are in flames. The IRGC headquarters in charge of the defence of Tehran has been hit, as has the homeland defence and internal threat department, the information security command, the HQ of the Basij militia, and the nerve-hub of the intelligence and security police. The gates of the notorious Evin high-security prison have been blown open.
Trump, having denied that he was seeking regime change, has started to publicly frame the question of why a system that has so profoundly failed to shield its citizens can still claim legitimacy. You can see why he might have changed his pitch: the opening of Evin is an image comparable to the storming of the Bastille. It helps to establish Trump's credentials as a revolutionary leader. But the administration has to have the residual wisdom to reject the choice of killing — martyring, as he would see it — the supreme leader in his monastic hideaway.
There is more at stake in Iran than uprooting a nasty regime. It is about dealing with an even more dangerous vacuum. The collapse of the Soviet empire seemed like a glorious day in the West; to Putin it marked the start of a long, sweaty nightmare of cascading national uprisings. The 12-day war of Iran has established that one leadership generation of clerico-politicians — that of 86-year-old Khamenei and the veterans of the long 1980s war against Iraq — has lost its natural successors.
Now the political battle may be dominated by a faction of the IRGC, hardline champions of national pride and victimhood, inward-looking, inclined to hunt down traitors and those deemed to be Israeli collaborators. This is a faction closely linked to the military industrial complex, the cash cow of the IRGC; it will try to influence the choice of the next supreme leader.
Pragmatists who advocated cautious modernisation, strategic patience and double-dealing diplomatic manoeuvres to win the lifting of western sanctions are likely to lose out. Whatever comes next will be pumped up by anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment.
The worst, most reckless outcome of this war would be that in the hidden depths of the Fordow plant, its uranium enrichment potential has survived. That a new Iranian regime suspends all access to international inspectors and that it makes common cause with a nuclear rogue state to start up an even more secretive road to the bomb (North Korea, I'm looking at you).
It doesn't have to end quite so apocalyptically and there are ways perhaps that Iran can scramble out of its pariah status. But if Iran is going to enter the modern world then it has to start behaving like a responsible actor. Its false friends in the rogue Crink axis have encouraged the idea that getting hold of the means to blow up the world will somehow make Tehran stronger and more respected in the region. That's just bully-boy thinking and this week, under foreign bombardment, many young Iranians have woken up to the fact they have been led into a geopolitical cul-de-sac by their deluded political class.