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Three-minute read<\/span><\/i><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Factional conflict inside the <\/span>Iranian regime<\/span> once functioned like a pressure valve: when the system felt existential risk, elites muted their quarrels and rallied to survival. That reflex is gone. Under acute stress, they are fighting in public\u2014and not over policy so much as over who survives a post-Khamenei order. The result is rupture, not reconsolidation.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We saw it plainly this week. Ali Larijani, now secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, warned that \u201csome of the country\u2019s political elders still do not grasp the sensitivity and gravity of the current moment\u201d and are \u201ceasily brawling with each other,\u201d urging them<\/a> to \u201ccross differences and strengthen national cohesion.\u201d The appeal reads less like arbitration than alarm: a veteran insider telling the class that the house is on fire and they\u2019re arguing over furniture. <\/span><\/p>\n The struggle is not about a new economic line or foreign-policy doctrine; it is about succession. As Khamenei ages, no agreed path or consensus successor is visible. That vacuum pulls every argument into the gravity well of who will speak for the state after him\u2014and who will be silenced now.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A retrospective look into the #history<\/a> of Khamenei's power-grabbing and the ferocious process of adsorption and desorption that enabled his position in #Iran<\/a>'s politics. https:\/\/t.co\/WZ6tJu2lo8<\/a><\/p>\n — NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) May 5, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n