As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran enters its third week, the question of whether Iran's new supreme leader can survive — physically and politically — has become one of the conflict's defining puzzles. Hamilton Lugar School Distinguished Professor Jamsheed Choksy took up that question in a wide-ranging interview with Rediff.com, one of India's largest and longest-running English-language news platforms, which reaches tens of millions of readers across South Asia and its global diaspora.
Choksy explained the dynastic logic behind elevating Mojtaba Khamenei — son of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — to the position of supreme leader, a choice that superficially conflicts with the Islamic Republic's founding principles. While the first supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, deliberately avoided passing leadership to his own sons, Choksy noted that hereditary clerical lineages are common in Twelver Shia Islam and that Mojtaba had spent decades systematically building the institutional power to make his ascension nearly inevitable — cultivating loyalty within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, controlling the Basij paramilitary, and overseeing repeated crackdowns on civilian dissent, including the most recent wave of repression in late 2025 and early 2026.
Yet Choksy was clear-eyed about the new leader's limitations. "Raw power aside, as a cleric, however, Mojtaba has none of the charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini nor the political savvy of his father Ayatollah Khamenei," he told Rediff. It remains uncertain, he argued, whether repression alone can hold the regime together — particularly given competing economic interests among IRGC commanders who may quietly prefer an accommodation with Washington over continued war.
Choksy also raised an intriguing strategic interpretation of the succession: that other senior clerics may have supported Mojtaba's elevation precisely because it makes him — rather than them — the primary target for U.S. and Israeli forces. If Mojtaba is removed, more moderate figures such as Ali Larijani or President Masoud Pezeshkian might gain the flexibility to negotiate. However, Choksy cautioned that both men are now associated with the regime's brutal crackdowns, which may render them unacceptable to ordinary Iranians regardless of any willingness to deal with the West.
On the broader question of regime change, Choksy was measured. "One can be certain that Mojtaba is being hunted down by foreign powers and internal foes," he said, while noting that a swift leadership transition of the kind seen in Venezuela is not on the horizon. Whether the war will "decapitate the Iranian regime sufficiently and diminish its weapons supplies adequately so that it is compelled to surrender or becomes weak to the point that the people can overthrow the theocracy remains unclear."
Choksy is one of the country's foremost authorities on Iran, with decades of fieldwork across the Middle East and South Asia. He has published extensively on Iranian history, politics, and religion — including multiple analyses in Foreign Affairs — and his recent work has consistently examined the structural fragility of the Islamic Republic and the forces that may ultimately bring it down. He is a member of the Hamilton Lugar School's Department of Central Eurasian Studies and director of IU's Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center.