Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei just does not get it. Whereas President Donald Trump differs from his predecessors in his willingness to negotiate with anyone, no matter how odious, he also refuses to get tied down by a cynical process whereby negotiators repeatedly seek extensions until the clock runs out. The Iranian regime believed it could bog down talks over such minutiae as the nationalities of the inspectors; Khamenei did not understand Trump was neither President Barack Obama nor President Joe Biden, nor was Secretary of State Marco Rubio as naïve as John Kerry or Antony Blinken. When Trump says end the nuclear program, he means just that. And when he threatens consequences, he does not mean double secret probation.
Khamenei misreads the situation, however, for two reasons: First, he sees both the diplomatic virtue signaling by Western leaders at the United Nations General Assembly condemning Israel and the media acceptance of the genocide calumny as evidence that he has the upper hand. And, second, the fact that Iranians did not rise up convinces him that the Islamic Republic is stronger than it is.
While Khamenei claims a religious and political mandate, the 56-year-old Mojtaba essentially runs the supreme leader’s offices.
With Khamenei doubling down on his nuclear and missile programs, it appears inevitable that Israel or the United States will again attack Iran’s nuclear and military facilities and the regime officials responsible for them. While Trump rejects Khamenei’s filibustering, he remains committed to a nuclear deal and rejects regime change for the pragmatic, even if misguided, reason that he wants Khamenei to sign it. Just as Trump pictures himself receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, he seems to imagine a USS Missouri-style signing ceremony. Many Trump advisors also worry about the vacuum that might develop inside Iran should the United States or Israel kill the supreme leader, or the implications of targeting a religious leader.
The same courtesy should not extend to Khamenei’s second son, Mojtaba. While Khamenei claims a religious and political mandate, the 56-year-old Mojtaba essentially runs the supreme leader’s offices. He controls access to his father and manages the supreme leader’s multibillion-dollar business empire. He has long been Khamenei’s hatchet man to ensure that only loyalists survive. He also handles the day-to-day business of repression, passing messages to hanging judges and ensuring that, behind the scenes, there is no dissent. Any interaction between Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and scientists running Iran’s covert nuclear and missile programs passes through Mojtaba. Khamenei’s second son is also the liaison in the supreme leader’s office for the regime’s support of proxies, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis.
When his increasingly frail, 86-year-old father dies, Mojtaba also will be the key individual seeking regime preservation. He is the node that controls and can contact the various compartmentalized security forces. He might not succeed his father immediately, due to the stigma of hereditary rule—an even older, nonagenarian ayatollah could take the helm as a months-long place-holder—but the regime cannot persist without his buy-in. At the same time, because Mojtaba’s role is more informal than formal, he would not be involved in any formal forfeiture of Iran’s nuclear program.
Accordingly, if Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu want to damage the ability of the Islamic Republic to persist without creating an immediate vacuum, then the United States or Israel should make Mojtaba their top target. Such assassinations are legal under both U.S. and international law.
Too many Western diplomats argue that Iran will never reverse its nuclear ambition, but this ignores history.
Because Mojtaba alone understands the supreme leader’s financial empire and where its offshore accounts lie, eliminating him would make it more difficult to direct the proceeds of the Khamenei family’s embezzlement to the repression of the Iranian people after the supreme leader passes away. Killing Mojtaba also would assert pressure on Khamenei to understand that, despite his delusions, he exists only at the mercy of the men he most despises.
Too many Western diplomats argue that Iran will never reverse its nuclear ambition, but this ignores history. Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, once swore he would neither release the American hostages, short of the United States meeting his extortionate demands, nor end the Iran-Iraq War short of reaching his joint goals of ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and conquering Jerusalem. In both cases, however, the cost of his policies became too great for even an ideologue like Khomeini to bear. As he explained when he accepted a ceasefire to end the Iran-Iraq War, it was like “drinking from a chalice of poison,” but he had no choice if he wanted the Islamic Republic to survive.
Killing Mojtaba will be this decade’s chalice of poison. Regional security and Iran’s future depend upon handing Khamenei that chalice.
