🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 Trump regime changed Iran but not in the way he wanted

Mojtaba Khamenei Is Planning for a Long War

Several months into his tenure as supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei is beginning to put his own stamp on Iran’s military and national security establishment. In a sweeping series of appointments, he has effectively recreated Iran’s senior command, reorganizing the institutions responsible for managing both war and diplomacy.

The emerging command structure points toward a broader shift in how Tehran intends to manage the next phase of the conflict: more centralized military command; a greater emphasis on offensive operations and imposing more severe costs to strengthen deterrence; and tighter integration of military, economic, diplomatic, and domestic-security policy.

Yet this does not necessarily mean abandoning negotiations. Rather, the appointments suggest that Tehran is trying to pair diplomacy with a harder conception of deterrence, centered on preserving and strengthening its ability to damage its adversaries so that negotiations produce a durable settlement rather than another pause before renewed conflict.

The clearest expression of that approach may be Khamenei’s choice of Mohsen Rezaei to lead the Supreme National Security Council, the institution charged with coordinating Iran’s military, diplomatic, economic, and security policies. Rezaei is often described simply as a veteran hard-liner or former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). But that understates his significance.

Rezaei has long stood out as a strategic thinker and institution-builder within Iran’s military establishment. During his 16 years commanding the IRGC, he helped transform it into a sprawling military organization, developing its ground, air and naval forces; the Quds Force, responsible for operations abroad; and Khatam al-Anbiya, the central headquarters for coordinating major military operations. His role thus extended beyond helping to direct the Iran-Iraq War to building institutions and capabilities that would shape how Iran wielded military power for decades to come. But his wartime record also reveals the harder edge of that strategic outlook, particularly when it came to determining when Iran had achieved enough to end a conflict on acceptable terms.

The rest of Khamenei’s appointments reinforce this picture. Ali Abdollahi, the new chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, has been tasked with completing the integration of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters into the General Staff, a reorganization that would further centralize wartime command and coordination. His mandate emphasizes preparedness for “conventional, modern, cognitive, and hybrid threats.”

Ahmad Vahidi, meanwhile, has been formally confirmed as IRGC commander and promoted to major general after assuming the post following Mohammed Pakpour’s assassination. Khamenei instructed him to pursue “maximum deterrence” while maintaining readiness for “powerful offensive operations against the enemy.” Iranian commentators have highlighted the latter phrase as an unusually explicit articulation of offensive operations as part of the IRGC commander’s mandate.

Hossein Taeb—the controversial former head of the IRGC’s intelligence arm, closely associated with the repression of dissent— was made the head of the Basij. Taeb has been instructed to strengthen its “public intelligence network,” exploit new technologies, and deepen neighborhood-level organization.

The dominant view in Tehran now holds that this restraint had the opposite effect, reinforcing perceptions in Washington and Israel that Iran was weak and vulnerable, its responses predictable, and the costs of attacking it manageable. The lesson drawn from the wars since June 2025 is therefore not simply that Iran needs greater military capabilities, but also that it must demonstrate the willingness to use them in ways that impose sufficiently severe military and economic costs to discourage its adversaries from escalating again.

🔗 https://archive.ph/IIOgR