Is Iran’s Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf the New Delcy Rodriguez?

President Donald Trump’s January 3, 2026, snatch-and-grab of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was high-risk but set a new standard for regime change. While critics say Trump shoots from the hip and acts on the fly, that was not the case with his Venezuela operation. Not only did U.S. intelligence keep a close eye on Maduro over months, but trusted Trump intermediaries negotiated with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez’s brother Jorge Rodríguez, head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, through Qatar. When Trump snatched Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez was primed and ready to step in to ensure no vacuum developed. While the Rodriguez family has been leftist royalty in Venezuela and dirty for decades, Trump gambled—so far, correctly—that Jorge and Delcy would trade principle for power.

President George W. Bush fused regime change with nation building, exponentially increasing both the blood and treasure Americans paid. President Barack Obama embraced the other extreme: bombing but taking a laissez-faire attitude toward what came next. Here, Libya is a case in point. For Trump, the Venezuela strategy threaded the needle: It did not install democracy, but it did prevent disintegration on the cheap.

Under such circumstances, it is natural Trump would try to replicate his Venezuela success in Iran.

Now, it appears he has found his Delcy Rodriguez in the guise of former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the current parliamentary speaker and an unrepentant hardliner. Ghalibaf, like Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani, has a Curriculum Vitae that spans both military and politics. The 65-year-old Ghalibaf is a war veteran, former Tehran mayor, and four-time presidential candidate. In his different capacities, he has been central to the regime’s counter-protest strategy since university students took to the streets in 1999 to protest newspaper censorship and closures. Many Iranians despise Ghalibaf; diplomats see him as pragmatic.

Those diplomats confuse pragmatism with opportunism. Ghalibaf is a survivor. He sees in Trump someone who can help him achieve what late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei denied him: the presidency or some equivalent interim leadership role.

Two strains of evidence point to this conclusion: First, despite numerous bombing waves targeting senior officials and Revolutionary Guardsmen, Ghalibaf appears untargeted, a curious omission for a man with significant blood on his hands. Second is his absence as a target of the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program.

On March 13, 2026, the program offered $10 million for information on the whereabouts of Iranian terror leaders.

Among those who now have bounties on their heads: Mojtaba Khamenei (who may be dead already); Yahya Rahim-Safavi, a former Revolutionary Guard chief-turned-Khamenei advisor (to whose unrepentant daughter left-wing Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese bizarrely gave permanent residency); and Larijani, to whose daughter the Biden administration granted a green card. Missing, however, is Ghalibaf.

The question now is, why? Even within a much-shrunken national security bureaucracy, dozens of people would chop on both the targeting lists and the Rewards for Justice bounties. Ghalibaf has immunized himself, likely because he has established contact with U.S. intelligence and because Trump believes Ghalibaf’s promises that he can deliver security. In effect, Ghalibaf is now auditioning to become Iran’s new military dictator.

What remains uncertain, however, is whether he has any intention of abandoning his principles like Delcy did, or if he believes he can play footsie with the White House until Trump is gone and then resume the ideological component of the Islamic Republic. Alternately, while Ghalibaf may not now merit a bounty in Washington, he soon may have quite a price on his head from Larijani, Safavi, and the other gatekeepers of the current regime whom the evidence increasingly suggests Ghalibaf intends to sell out.