Removal Without Rotation: Supreme Authority, Foreign Intervention, and Political Reproduction in Modern Iran
The killing of Iran’s longstanding authoritarian ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who led the Islamic Republic for nearly four decades — in a U.S.–Israeli military strike marks an extraordinary rupture in contemporary Iranian politics. A foreign power has directly eliminated Iran’s head of state. Yet viewed in the longer arc of Iran’s modern history, this moment reflects two persistent structural problems: the absence of institutionalized rotation at the apex of executive authority, and the recurring violation of Iranian sovereignty through external intervention.
Rather than representing a decisive break, the present episode exposes unresolved features of Iran’s political development that have persisted across regimes.
A Pattern of Rupture at the Apex of Power
The pattern begins well before the Islamic Republic.
Naser al-Din Shah ruled for nearly fifty years with minimal formal constraint before being assassinated in 1896. His death preceded the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which attempted to institutionalize limits on monarchical authority. Although the constitution retained the monarchy, it sought to subordinate executive power to parliamentary oversight.
Yet instability persisted. Mohammad Ali Shah attempted to reverse constitutional constraints, triggering civil war and eventual abdication. Ahmad Shah remained largely ceremonial before being displaced during the transition to the Pahlavi dynasty. Even when removal was formalized through constitutional language, it was shaped by force rather than routine succession.
Under Reza Shah, executive concentration returned. Parliament became ceremonial as authority centralized in a personalist state. His removal in 1941 came not through domestic institutional mechanisms but through Allied occupation. Foreign powers compelled abdication and shaped succession. Many Iranians celebrated his departure after years of repression, yet the mechanism of removal was again extra-institutional.
Mohammad Reza Shah would later concentrate power in similar fashion. His rule ended not in constitutional rotation but in revolution.
The Islamic Republic abolished monarchy but did not resolve the institutional dilemma of executive concentration. The office of the Supreme Leader formalized powers exceeding those of the constitutional monarch: command over the armed forces, authority over the judiciary, control over supervisory institutions, and ultimate constitutional arbitration.
Ayatollah Khomeini remains the only head of state in modern Iranian history to die in office while retaining both formal authority and personal dominance. Ali Khamenei, selected through the Assembly of Experts, gradually expanded his authority, consolidated control over coercive institutions, and marginalized elite rivals.
Across regimes, Iran has centralized executive power in lifetime positions without enforceable term limits or meaningful accountability. When crisis emerges, removal occurs through rupture rather than institutional rotation.
Continuities in Institutional Crisis
Each rupture at the apex of power has produced periods of elite competition, political opening, mobilization, and instability.
After removal — whether under Allied occupation in 1941 or after the 1979 Revolution — there followed:
Elite reshuffling
Civil society renewal and activism
Contestation over institutional design
Episodes of conflict and uncertainty
These openings created space for collective mobilization. Yet they were often followed by renewed consolidation as new power holders re-centralized authority through both institutional and extra-institutional means.
The current transition may prove even more constrained. Unlike earlier episodes, the removal of the head of state has occurred during an active military assault by foreign powers. Under such conditions, political systems tend to close ranks around security imperatives, limiting the scope of elite fragmentation and societal opening that sometimes accompany moments of leadership rupture.
The recurrence of lifetime executive authority without meaningful accountability has consistently generated crisis at moments of transition. Breaking this cycle would require institutionalized mechanisms for peaceful rotation, enforceable limits on executive power, and durable checks on coercive authority.
The Forty-Year Problem: Tenure and Late-Stage Personalization
One striking continuity across modern Iran is not only how heads of state are removed, but how long they rule before crisis emerges.
Consider the four most recent holders of supreme executive authority:
Ruhollah Khomeini: approximately 11 years (1979–1989), died in office during the formative phase of the revolutionary state.
Reza Shah: roughly 16 years (1925–1941), forced to abdicate under foreign occupation.
Mohammad Reza Shah: 37 years (1941–1979), overthrown by revolution.
Ali Khamenei: approximately 36–37 years (1989–2026), killed during wartime.
The two longest-serving rulers — Mohammad Reza Shah and Khamenei — each governed for nearly four decades. Both presided over increasingly centralized, security-dominated systems in which executive authority expanded relative to other institutions. In both cases, removal came through rupture rather than institutionalized succession.
This pattern is not uniquely Iranian. Other long-serving authoritarian leaders toppled during the Arab uprisings governed for comparable durations:
Muammar Gaddafi: 42 years
Hosni Mubarak: 30 years
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali: 23 years
Long tenure does not mechanically produce collapse. But prolonged rule without rotation tends to generate structural dynamics:
Institutional hollowing — formal institutions become subordinate to personal networks.
Elite narrowing — independent factions are purged or sidelined.
Succession opacity — credible and legitimate transition mechanisms fail to develop.
Accumulated grievances — generational, economic, and social pressures compound without systemic adaptation.
Over time, the regime becomes both durable and brittle: durable because coercive institutions are consolidated; brittle because political adjustment is constrained.
The convergence between Mohammad Reza Shah’s tenure and Khamenei’s reflects a structural tendency: lifetime executive authority extended across decades increases the likelihood that removal will occur under crisis rather than orderly rotation.
Foreign Intervention as Structural Condition
The fact that Khamenei’s death occurred at the hands of U.S. and Israeli military force highlights another structural feature of Iranian history: the persistent impact of imperialism and external coercion on Iran’s sovereignty.
The killing was carried out during what global leaders described as a joint strike by U.S. and Israeli forces aimed at dismantling Iran’s regime leadership. The action violates international legal norms governing state sovereignty and the protection of heads of state.
Iran’s vulnerability to foreign coercive intervention is not new. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Iran experienced:
Loss of territories to Russia in the early 1800s
British and Russian incursions during World War I despite declared neutrality
Allied occupation and forced abdication of Reza Shah in 1320/1941
The 1953 Anglo-American coup removing Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh
The Iraq invasion (1980–1988)
Prolonged sanctions and external pressure in the post-revolutionary era
Imperial coercion has thus been a recurring structural condition shaping Iran’s political development across radically different regimes.
There is a fundamental asymmetry here. For Iran, the recurring security dilemma has been how to prevent invasion, occupation, coercion, and subordination by stronger powers. Its modern political development has repeatedly unfolded under the shadow of external aggression.
For the United States and Israel, by contrast, the pattern has been one of outward aggression. Both states have repeatedly used military force beyond their borders — through invasions, targeted assassinations, regime-change operations, and sustained air campaigns — normalizing violations of other states’ sovereignty as instruments of policy.
Iran’s historical predicament has been vulnerability to aggression. The United States and Israel’s pattern has been the exercise of it.
Successive Iranian governments attempted to address this dilemma in different ways: Qajar accommodation, Pahlavi military modernization and alliance, and the Islamic Republic’s anti-imperial mobilization and regional projection. Yet across these distinct strategies, the underlying vulnerability persisted. Sovereignty has repeatedly been breached.
The unresolved tension between sovereignty, security, and political autonomy therefore remains central to Iran’s political trajectory — and continues to shape the conditions under which domestic political development unfolds.
From Loss to Legitimacy: The Politics of Martyrdom
One of the most consequential political projects of the Islamic Republic has been the institutionalization of martyrdom. Since the Iran–Iraq War, the regime has built a dense bureaucratic and symbolic apparatus that converts loss into legitimacy. Martyrdom became not only remembrance but governance — embedded in foundations, media, education, and public ritual.
As Saber Khani and I show in our research on war commemoration, these practices transform security costs into political capital. Defeat is recoded as sacrifice; vulnerability becomes moral authority.
Ali Khamenei was not merely a beneficiary of this system — he expanded and supervised it. Under his leadership, the infrastructure of martyrdom deepened and became central to regime reproduction.
Now he is being absorbed into the very machinery he helped consolidate.
While U.S. and Israeli leaders publicly declare success in eliminating Iranian commanders and political leadership, they appear to overlook a structural dynamic: such killings do not necessarily weaken the Islamic Republic as a project. They provide it with new blood. Each targeted death can be reframed as sacred sacrifice, renewing cohesion among supporters and feeding the commemorative apparatus the regime has spent decades institutionalizing.
At the same time, this narrative does not resonate uniformly. Iranian society remains deeply divided — some mourn him as a martyr, others celebrate the death of an authoritarian ruler. The politics of martyrdom is powerful, but not universal.
The irony is stark: the leader who institutionalized martyrdom as a mechanism of endurance now becomes one of its most potent symbols.
Conclusion
Khamenei’s killing brings into focus two unresolved problems at the core of Iran’s modern political development: the crisis of executive rotation and the crisis of sovereignty.
Across regimes, executive authority has remained personalized and largely unaccountable. Heads of state have ruled without enforceable term limits or robust supervision, and removal has repeatedly occurred through rupture rather than institutional succession. The 1906 Constitutional Revolution sought to restrain this pattern by subjecting the executive to law and representation. That constitutional project remains incomplete.
At the same time, Iran’s sovereignty has repeatedly been violated by imperial intervention. From nineteenth-century territorial losses to the 1941 occupation, the 1953 coup, the Iraq war, and now direct military aggression, external coercion has been a persistent structural condition.
These two issues are linked. A political system that lacks institutionalized rotation remains prone to crisis at moments of transition; a country unable to secure its sovereignty remains vulnerable to external force. More than a century after 1906, constitutional accountability and secure independence remain unfinished tasks. Learning from the experiences of all political regimes is essential if Iran is to move beyond this recurring cycle.